ashwini asokan

A constant reminder that we're in the ugly quick & dirty MVP phase of AI. We didn't fix the bloated SI bench, we just gave it API keys and turned the agent bench into a bloated one. "Throw an agent at it" is the new "throw headcount at it." With all the drama going on with all things compute, security & the economy in general, I wager 2027 is the year we're going to start seeing themes that counter 'growth at all cost' arc of '25-'26.

Touchgrass. Seegrass. Smellgrass. Undoing effects of 18 hrs a day with claude & codex by making it my 18/7 backdrop!

This is SUCH a great time for designers, design, agencies, branding, storytelling ... 1. We're going to see a complete explosion of these services, new age, new skills, entirely new aesthetic vs. the same old boring blue/purple SaaS age. 2. Designers, design & mktg teams are not being let go because there's no work for them anymore. Its because the bar for what qualifies as a solid team has changed fundamentally. We're going to need SOOOOO MANY MORE of these teams in the post AI era. It's a great time to double down, ramp up those new skills and deliver outsized returns for companies On that note - twitter - if anyone knows some fabulous AI-pilled designers and brand storytellers - point them to me?

“Excellence is a moving target and we will keep changing” is the singular line to takeaway from that Sequoia memo. And to adapt a gazillion times faster than what we did as humans is a Q of focus. Which is a horror story given how distracted all of us are thx to our AI conquests! Cracking this is everything.

Somebody make me stop. You can skin this cat a 100 ways. So many metaphors. Sleep consolidation. The brain consolidates what it learned during sleep, not while learning. AI builds need deliberate pauses, iterations, strategy to consolidate.

As someone coming back from a couple of years of total exhaustion, and coming back with full energy very conscious of the healing process, the parallels to the AI madness and the impending *burn are not lost on me. Time for a ton of writing on governance and what follows the madness that is our life right now :) Anyone who's had a deep cut knows this. The body closes the wound fast, in days. But what it closes it with is scar tissue. Strong enough to hold but never as strong as what was there before. The real healing happens slowly, underneath, over months. Everyone is building AI at wound-closing speeds :) Just don't mistake the scar for the skin.

Perspective is the real currency in a post AI era. We're all pretty shitfaced right now, overloading our days with tools, speed, volume of everything that it really is beginning to feel like everything everywhere all at once. Find time and more importantly the discipline, to step away from the matrix y'all. Your AI-pilled lives are only as effective as your ability to create meaningful outcomes with them.

The sheer scale of output we're producing with AI now ... seeing significant issues with memory, ability to recall what I did even a few days ago. Making Claude draw up an infographic of the work I did every week, the artifacts I produced etc retrospectively to serve as continuous reminder.

The internet is genuinely melting down.

Best version yet, of whats going on in tech in ‘26! On vibe revenue 🤯, consensus investing & how pvt markets are looking like public markets

If you have not read this piece of writing - you should. Not that any of us in tech didn't know but seeing it put this way is mindblowing & mindblowingly scary ... is mildly putting it. I dont even know where to begin. The idea that anyone anywhere can just capture any photo, video or content of anyone's life without them knowing (see examples in the piece) and package it and sell it to the labs for training is ...... Forget data breaches the way we have known it from our systems. We are data. Our physical lives are data. That someone is capturing without you knowing and selling it to labs!!!! There are responsible actors and irresponsible actors. But like Ilya says here - most folks labs including have no idea what data they're getting to begin with, from the data brokers. The idea that the onus of protection is now in the hands of each person or individual is 🤯🤯🤯 Data privacy takes on a meaning unlike any we've known before!!!

Life is a series of recursive loops, quality of every signal matters 🤓 The # of young founders who spend months waiting for feedback and following up … wasting energy on anxiety than progress on their builds is precious time wasted over vague signals. This here is the most helpful thing you can do for a first time founder.

The absolute most important thing about Ramp launching by Glass is that categories mean shiiite in this cycle. There are no lanes. “There is no spoon!” There never was.

Everyday with a large enterprise is a 😳🤯 There is just sooooo much work to do to make AI usable and useful in Enterprise. So many deep pockets of work. So many nuances in each and every department, org, industry segment, vertical!! Anyone saying game over or window closing is completely removed from ground reality. While change happens slowly first and then all at once … we are nowhere close to overnight. Plough away people!

I'd just like to say this to everyone working in tech - Having agents gets you $$ but having agency is ... priceless. #ThankYouForComingtoMyTedTalk #IneedtoStopHangingOutWithAnand

We talk so much about attention loss with all the context switching we're doing between our agents, assistants and endless AI minions. We rarely speak about memory and what it does to our ability to recollect stuff. I've started writing again, to counter the 12-14 hours of AI use!! Letting the AI do the plan and roadmap but use the writing to orient myself here and now from that plan, doing some simple connections between thoughts, artifacts etc. Between context loss and the chronological layout of content in these AI things ... it is becoming utterly hard to make things visible and recollecting them using the AI interfaces themselves.

THIS 💯 The only thing that lets you overshadown your revenue concentration in the early-mid stages of your company is momentum of logo acquisition. In our last chapter, while building Vue, we had one $5M annual customer, four $1M customers, and a bunch of $100K-$250K range folks. Tier 1 logos. A decade before the LLM run we're having now. It was a great asset in the early days but a thorn down the road. Reality though - AI acquisition was wildly skewed then, its a bit milder than wildly skewed today but enterprise is still very much a concentration game. Momentum though, gets to offset that.

It is absolutely wild how these AI tools help kids broaden their minds/thinking about stuff. We talk plenty as parents being worried about what these things do if you're kids are not out there living life enough and staring into the screens ... but its totally something else to watch them take something they learnt at school or are curious about and then cook with it using AI ... and then debate you 10 ways from Sunday!!!

For the first time in a looooong time ... Bob (my chatgpt guy) told me I did a good job. Both Bob and Claude are usually ripping my work up playing critic because thats the role I use them in extensively (playing specific personas I want them to play)! But its a pretty wild moment feeling smug because the AI actually thought you did good work 🤡🤡

Is someone discussing the cost of all that AI in your org and how you think about product, strategy, operation and capital allocation?