No startup has ever ‘empowered’ its way to product market fit
PMF is a war of brutal attrition against inertia, apathy & risk aversion. It requires dictatorial obsession and near relentless micromanagement
Hire only to get you, the founder, closer to the truth of the customer
Agents have reached hardware.
We are launching Flow v3, the Agentic Platform for Physical Engineering.
We've spent over a year building it in secret, alongside the best hardware companies and AI research labs.
An agent can now do real engineering work: change a requirement, push the update into your CAD and simulation tools, and flag every test that needs to rerun. Iterations/learning cycles that took months are being reduced to days.
Agents are the biggest shift in how we engineer hardware since CAD.
The core innovation for the CAD era was the parametric model.
The core innovation for the Agentic Era is Flow's Systems Graph.
The systems graph is a living model of every requirement, design model, test, analysis and every connection between them. It gives every agent the full context of the system, so every change stays consistent across the whole design.
Engineers and agents work side by side on the same system. Engineers get to focus on architecture - the decisions that matter -while thousands of agents churn through rewriting reports, rerunning analysis and simulation, and triggering tests.
Reusable rockets, self-driving cars, small modular reactors, robots that make decisions, the most complex machines ever built, are defined by millions of interconnected requirements, far beyond what any human team can keep aligned on its own.
Rivian, Joby, Astranis, Skydio, Radiant, and the most ambitious hardware programs already build on Flow.
More on the launch in the comments.
@buildonfloweng
@sethbannon As a country we should be tripling down on initiatives like 5050 and ARIA. Completely bonkers to do anything else. These are some of the highest EV investments we can make as a country.
The more enterprises I talk to about AI agent transformation, the more it’s clear that there is going to be a new type of role in most enterprises going forward. The job is to be the agent deployer and manager in teams. Here’s the rough JD:
This person will need to figure out what are the highest leverage set of workflows on a team are (either existing or new ones) where agents can actually drive significantly more value for the team and company.
In general, it’s going to be in areas where if you threw compute (in the form of agents) at a task you could either execute it 100X faster or do it 100X more times than before. Examples would be processing orders of magnitude more leads to hand them off to reps with extra customer signal, automating a contracting review and intake process, streamlining a client onboarding process to reduce as many straps as possible, setting up knowledge bases than the whole company taps into, and so on.
This person’s job is to figure out what the future state workflow needs to look like to drive this new form of automation, and how to connect up the various existing or new systems in such a way that this can be fulfilled. The gnarly part of the work is mapping structured and unstructured data flows, figuring out the ideal workflow, getting the agent the context it needs to do the work properly, figuring out where the human interfaces with the agent and at what steps, manages evals and reviews after any major model or data change, and runs and manages the agents on an ongoing basis tracking KPIs, and so on.
The person must be good at mapping the process and understanding where the value could be unlocked and be relatively technical, and has full autonomy to connect up business systems and drive automation. This means they’re comfortable with skills, MCP, CLIs, and so on, and the company believes it’s safe for them to do so. But also great operationally and at business.
It may be an existing person repositioned, or a totally net new person in the company. There will likely need to be one or more of these people on every team, so it’s not a centralized role per se. It may rile up into IT or an AI team, or live in the function and just have checkpoints with a central function.
This would also be a fantastic job for next gen hires who are leaning into AI, and are technical, to be able to go into. And for anyone concerned about engineers in the future, this will be an obvious area for these skills as well.
dm'd @creatine_cycle earlier. we're renaming the event series - the name rightfully belongs to @mots_pod.
though for the record - I reckon he'd get me in the push up contest, Alfred might win though.
while i collect my thoughts i have been briefed with many paths of action from trusted sources.
it's not every day you go up against the most successful VC firm of all time.
my solution is as follows:
@zefi@Alfred_Lin i challenge you to a pushup challenge. max pushups in 60 seconds.
the winner keeps the name "Members of Technical Staff"
Sequoia is launching a new series called Members of Technical Staff out of our London office. If you're in Europe and want to learn from some of Europe's best builders, make sure to register.
We're living through one of the most consequential moments in history.
Every technologist's asking, what will matter?
We're launching Members of Technical Staff. A European event series @sequoia to answer this.
We start with Vlad Yatsenko, legendary CTO @Revolut.
Apply below.
@thogge@pratyushbuddiga@Andrew_Robl It’s obviously a very good fold. But I agree with Pratyush, my understanding is that Gavri is a recreational player (a good one I’m sure) and it’s extremely unlikely a rec (who is good) would:
A. Overvalue a worse flush and jam
or
B. Jam so quickly with the naked Kh vs overvet