CEO WON (https://nitter.gq/t.co/P3tQ7fiM3Q) - Claude Partner - GP + CoFounder https://nitter.gq/t.co/rpCy4rgLIx, CEO https://nitter.gq/t.co/Kj6l7vEvo8 (acquired), CEO BVA (acquired, now Accenture)
Greenville, SC
Joined February 2024
- Tweets1.3K
- Following640
- Followers392
- Likes2.3K
Dylan Whitman retweeted
We are now entering into an era where any product can be created exactly to a consumer's preferences & needs.
I vibe-fabricated a dog door with a wifi-controlled lock, perfectly to the specifications & design of my house.
I know nothing about metal fabrication or electrical engineering.
It's now getting manufactured and delivered in 2 weeks -- for almost the same cost if I bought a mass-produced item off-the-shelf.
Dylan Whitman retweeted
@polar_analytics just got 10x more valuable for consumer brands on @OpenAI.
Anyone who worked in data knows that making decisions comes from handling the details:
- calculating acquisition costs net of $0 orders and gift to influencers
- looking at conversion rate net of bot traffics
- reviewing COGS by elegantly jumping from Shopify to NetSuite
Connectors are great but all of this logic belong in a data warehouse.
This is exactly where Polar fits in: making it easy to ingest, model and store all of brands data inside Snowflake, then safely exposing it to AI via a Semantic Layer MCP.
Now using the Polar MCP, this new @ChatGPT data agent can create accurate visualizations, help answer questions, and overall democratize data for everyone.
Very excited to see this vision of giving any business operator their own team of data scientists continuing to progress.
Now everyone can put data to work.
We’re introducing a new Data agent in ChatGPT Work so you can turn your company’s data into answers, interactive dashboards, and action—just by asking.
Just add the Data Plugin in ChatGPT Work, connect to the data sources and context you already use, and start the conversation. openai.com/index/put-data-to…
Dylan Whitman retweeted
I’ve been fairly consistent: 50k-100k first checks (as close to day 0 as possible), with a goal of building a 500k+ position in the winners between pre-seed and series A.
Dylan Whitman retweeted
i think @vercel could be the default home for agent-made startups within 12 months. if coding agents make shipping reliable enough, the number of apps created could jump fast enough that deployment volume matters way more than how many of those startups survive.
Dylan Whitman retweeted
there are no more moats anymore. moats are dead.
was talking to a friend of mine who's a CEO of a rapidly growing startup (~$1B revenue). we're small investors. He told me that he has only taken one one-week vacation in the last eight years of his startup.
I was like, "Hey this is crazy. You're gonna burn out. This is pretty serious."
he said, "Auren, I don't know what to do. We don't have no moat."
am like, "What are you talking about? The business is going great!"
he said, "We have incredible competitors. We sell AI products and so we're selling to the smartest people in the world. If we don't have the best product that week, they won't buy us. If we don't have the best product for two weeks, our customers will churn. We don't have a moat."
I started thinking about it: who does have a moat?
There are just no moats anymore. Nobody has a moat. Everyone will switch their software providers in a heartbeat for better product or for cheaper product or for faster product. Anyone will switch.
We looked at our 200 companies at Flex Capital and how they're buying software and AI services today. Almost all of their vendors are on month-to-month contracts or on usage-based contracts. That means they can switch immediately. The reason they have everyone on month-to-month is that they have no idea if they're going to be using those tools two months from now. They may not even be using those tools two weeks from now. Everything is changing so fast all the time.
The only moat you have in software is that you have the best product. There are just no other moats.
It used to be back in the day that you have a mediocre product and you'd be using it for years. we just dealt with all these of mediocre software systems, mediocre cloud providers, mediocre data providers, mediocre APIs. we dealt with it because the switching costs are really hard.
Nowadays it's really easy to change software. It's really easy to change APIs. it's really easy to change AI infrastructure. It's super easy. You can change it in a heartbeat and every other vendor will help you switch. Of course, your AI tools will help you switch as well. All these things that used to give very high customer lock-in just don't exist anymore and so they're just no more moats.
Moats are dead. you just need to work insane hours all the time because the only thing you have is your product. goodbye moat, goodbye predictable revenues, goodbye 2010s era.
Dylan Whitman retweeted
Haven’t posted much recently, but the algo seems back to the good ol’ days. Reintroducing myself as an aspiring @superangel, backing the best founders I can find!
$30M invested across 180 companies over 12 years and counting 💥
Dylan Whitman retweeted
Since announcing Jalapeño, our first custom inference chip, we’ve been testing it and the system around it.
The results show a major advance: more intelligence from every watt and faster responses, delivering both higher throughput and lower latency in one architecture without sacrificing efficiency.
Dylan Whitman retweeted
Client roster is full but I’m saving this for later, I’ll retweet this again when I want to take on more work
Dylan Whitman retweeted
For 8 months, my team and I have been building something new. It solves a real problem for every Shopify brand.
Your Shopify store doesn't have a change log.
Think about that for a second.
A price changes. A theme update ships. A discount rule shifts. A collection gets reordered. Conversion dips, and your team burns an afternoon trying to reconstruct what happened.
Your analytics can tell you something changed. They can't tell you what.
So we built one. It's called Shopwatch.
It tracks every change made to your store. Any person, any app, any agent makes a change, Shopwatch logs it the moment it happens, with full context.
It lives right in the Shopify Admin, so you can search and filter the whole history natively. You can also connect it to your agent of choice (Claude, ChatGPT, Sidekick) and just ask what's been happening in your store.
Agents changed the game here. They can now make real changes to your store, and when your metrics move, good or bad, you need to know what changed. Shopwatch is the record.
We've been piloting with MUD\WTR, Our Place, Auri, and House of Spoils over the past 6 months, got approved on the Shopify App Store last month, and have been onboarding new brands ever since.
Over 700,000 changes captured across live stores so far.
The feedback from these brands has been the same: it's a no-brainer.
Sign up for early access in the comments.
Dylan Whitman retweeted
.@DavidSacks @elonmusk
The Chinese models are distilling off American models… my guess is American models can’t legally do this without being sued by Chinese AI companies in American courts .. 🤔.. and distilling a Chinese model is really theft from an American company…
What should American AI and IP policy be here?
If distillation isn’t enforced against, then everyone should be able to distill from everyone else.. otherwise one arm tied behind American models’ backs.
Maybe systems need to get better at preventing distillation techniques, and problem solves itself?
Dylan Whitman retweeted
You won’t catch me speaking on this
My hot take is it's pretty much never a good look for VCs to speak negatively & publicly about specific founders. There’s a lot of that happening today
I really respect (& have adopted) @a16z’s approach on this that founder trash talk is one of their few fireable offenses full stop
It’s very tough to build a company and these articles tend to not include the full story
Phia — the buzzy shopping app co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter, Phoebe — is claiming credit for online sales it didn’t actually drive, a Bloomberg investigation found. Read our exclusive story: bloom.bg/4wErGxe
📷️: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
Dylan Whitman retweeted
Thank you @GeorgesStPierre for joining me on the @startupfest stage today.
One of the greatest fighters who ever lived. And the biggest takeaway had nothing to do with fighting.
The best performers aren't fearless. They've just learned to aim the fear at the work instead of at themselves.
Honoured to call you a friend.
Thank you for the pics @evablue
Dylan Whitman retweeted
Copywriting camp is finally happening...
Sign up to be first in line here:
BottomsUpCopy.com
The first one will be virtual, then next spring, I just got approval to host one at a certain whiskey distillery I frequent.
I want to host a writer's camp for the best copywriters in ecom.
Songwriters do this all the time. They bring their best ideas to a group, flush them out, share what's worked for them in the past, and it results in #1 hit songs.
Why aren't we doing this in marketing?
Who's down?
Dylan Whitman retweeted
Stop taking advice from people who've never built anything. If they haven't put something on the line, their opinion on your risk isn't worth hearing.
The people who judge the attempt are never the ones making one.
