Worklife

The first VC firm designed for the new era of builders & creators. Early investors in Deel, Supabase, and your favorite tools at work. We’re hiring!

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

We’re an early stage venture firm backed by the founders of Twitch, Spotify, Cameo, and YouTube.

We invest in tools that make work more creative, flexible, and human.

Early investors in @deel, @public, @supabase, @HightouchData, and your favorite tools at work.

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

Impressive to see how much companies can immediately save using Merge.

A Worklife Fund I company.

[Shensi Ding @shensi]

We just cut AI spend by 75% across an entire workforce in one click.

Introducing: Merge for Workforce.

Without Merge, your employees are left choosing one of two options:

1. Spend 100x the cost they should be from using frontier models for everything

2. Deliver subpar work from overly restrictive model access

Instead with Merge, IT can connect any identity provider and set model routing policies by team in one click.

Merge pushes them to every machine through a desktop client, overriding the model configs across your team’s AI assistants and coding tools.

Now every task gets the right model for the job.

The result? 75x fewer tokens with faster and better output.

[Public @public]

Public co-founder and co-CEO @leifthunder joined @CNBC as the network took a closer look at Public’s new AI Agents, including how investors can use natural language to create automated portfolio strategies, manage options orders, and set specific trading instructions.

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

Great convo w/ @WorkOS CEO @grinich on why nothing works unless your team is AI-pilled.

[Paul Klein IV @pk_iv]

Is MCP dead? @grinich (CEO of WorkOS) says it's better than ever and become the strongest intent signal in your funnel.

@workos is building the auth, permissions, and registration layer for that world, the same enterprise plumbing it sold to Vercel and Plaid, now sold to AI companies.

I sat down with Michael to talk about it in episode 4 of Navigators.

His argument: your coding agent already picks your vendors, but signup forms are built to block automated traffic, so the agent stalls at the front door and waits for a human to paste in an API key.

We got into:

00:00 "Stripe for enterprise features": what WorkOS actually sells
02:44 How an SSO and SAML company ended up as AI infrastructure
04:13 Why AI companies can't meander up-market the way Slack, Dropbox, and Figma did
06:54 The biggest mistake founders make: staying in the pre-PMF experimentation mindset
09:51 Why nothing works unless the management team is AI pilled first
10:47 "Claude day": pairing engineers with finance, legal, and ops once a month
13:36 auth.md, the missing front door for agents
15:26 Why registration, not tooling, is the next growth channel
16:59 Is MCP dead? The higher-intent signal hiding in MCP connections
19:35 Why SDKs are going away and coding agents write their own
23:09 "The super cycle of all super cycles": AI amplifies labor, it doesn't just disrupt it

Thanks for joining me on the pod @grinich!

Watch the full episode of Navigators here:

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

Our team has been cooking with some help from artists, designers, and creatives using AI to shoot their shot with dream jobs and dream clients.

[Solo Founders @solofounders]

The cost of Co-founder Dating.

[Public @public]

We’ve rebuilt our AI research tools from the ground up. Use the prompt bar on any asset page to explore 30 years of earnings, financials, real-time quotes, and options data.

Ask anything, from broad market trends to deep dives like an asset’s fastest-growing revenue segments.

[Guido Rosso @guidorosso]

We've got Disney and Duolingo animators on the judge panel, you don't want to miss this one.

3 days left!

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

Over 400+ RSVPs for our first builders & creators night w/ @contra & @Replit’s President & Head of AI @pirroh.

Our summer and fall lineup to be announced soon featuring @cursor_ai, @cognition, @floraai, @linear.

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

How do you make product decisions for 60M+ users?

@Replit’s @pirroh on building for non-technical users:

“Six months before that initial [agent] launch, the company was tiny—barely 60 people, almost exclusively technical folks. A few executives, the co-founders, our head of design. The vast majority of us were AI researchers and software engineers.

So one of the first principles I kept repeating was:

We’re not building this for us.

Don't get excited about what we're building because you’d use it daily. Get excited because we're building something for people who've never written a single line of code in their lives—people who are going to have their first "aha" moment when their software runs for the very first time.

As we grew, that became part of the company's DNA. Every designer we hire, every PM, keeps reminding us daily that this is the most important principle we follow. Our ideal customer is the knowledge worker—a group nobody else was really talking about, and it's worked well.

There's a constant tension between design quality and engineering.

Early on I struggled with it myself, because I spent my whole career on the technical side, with a fixation on moving fast and shipping as soon as possible—which the AI space forces on you anyway.

Things move so fast that if you wait even a few days, your product is already deprecated.

But over time I've learned to value the teams that pull the handbrake and say, "No, we need to take our time on user journeys, we need to do the interviews to understand whether this is actually exciting for our customer."

That tension can feel like your startup is slowing down. In reality, it's exactly what keeps you on track.

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

Proud investor x2

[SecurityPal AI @security_pal]

"Some put their customers on a billboard. We put our customers on the summit of Mt. Everest." — Pukar C. Hamal, CEO, SecurityPal AI

Congratulations to Supabase on their $500M Series F and $10B valuation. To mark the moment, we carried their flag to the highest point on Earth — 29,032 feet (8,849 m) up.

Read the full story here: https://t.co/IaIJIszHhf

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

🗽

[Brianne Kimmel @briannekimmel]

I thought Knicks, Juneteenth, and summer Friday would make our event with @contra a little more intimate.

But NYC really turns up.

Live music, sunset drinks, best view of the city, and a convo w/ @pirroh.

Next one coming soon if you didn’t get on the guest list this time.

[SecurityPal AI @security_pal]

From the summit of Mount Everest, congratulations to @supabase

To celebrate their $500M Series F and $10B valuation, we carried the Supabase flag to the highest point on Earth — 29,032 feet (8,849 m) up. 🏔️

Nearly 10 million developers now rely on Supabase, with database launches up 600% in the past year. Proud to celebrate this milestone with one of our incredible customers and cheer them on as they continue to reach new heights.

[Jonathan Bensimon @JonathanB0715]

Hosting a night for builders & creators at the
@contralabs_ai NYC office next week for a special discussion with @briannekimmel , Founder of @WorklifeVC and @pirroh, President & Head of AI of @Replit

Founders, builders, designers, product leaders, developers, creators, and AI folks, this one’s for you

https://t.co/CMklclV7ky

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

The vibes in NYC right now

[Knock @knocklabs]

Last night we hosted our first Marketing Engineer Meetup in NYC with @WorkOS.

500+ signups.
100+ attendees.

Speakers from @profound, @tryramp, @cursor_ai, @WorkOS, @vercel, and Knock.

The takeaway was clear: marketing engineering is becoming a real operating model for modern GTM teams.

Thank you to everyone who came, spoke, and stayed late to talk shop.

More to come.

[dany @danywander]

a reminder that branding matters.

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

As we continue to bring generative AI founders and industry-leading creatives together under one roof, the room was buzzing at our last event in LA.

75 talented creatives from A24, Tim Burton Productions, Lucky Chap, Family Guy, and many of the most iconic TV & film franchises.

Next up, we’re heading to NYC for some East Coast summer energy on June 19.

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

read the full story: https://t.co/522keXs7vb

[Worklife @WorklifeVC]

Architects have adopted AI faster than other creatives thanks to this man…

Resistance to AI within the field exists, but it’s becoming less common.

Some of the architects who three years ago were commenting on his posts — *this is never going to get anywhere close to practicality* — are the same ones now posting about spatial dimensions and asking why a rendered building window details are slightly off. 

The anxiety he encounters most often is about design itself: the part of the job that architects feel is irreducibly theirs. The worry is that using AI for ideation means outsourcing authorship.

Amir's response to that is patient, almost therapeutic.

"If you understand that there needs to be a correct direction—a very personal direction from you as the designer—so that this AI can execute on this project properly, then you understand: this is not AI that is designing the project. It is you."

He pauses, then adds: "I call myself an AI therapist for architects. I'm there to tell them, hey. It's okay. You're not gonna go away."

[Alex Bouaziz @Bouazizalex]

With Deel, a company in NYC can now fund payroll in dollars and their employee in Berlin can receive it in stablecoins within minutes 🤯

On one platform, no workarounds.

Stablecoin salary payouts are available for employees in the EU and US - the UK and LATAM are coming soon.

You choose how to fund it. They choose how to get paid