Be curious, not judgmental.
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Joined June 2011
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Pedro Marques retweeted
strong recommend every engineer listens to this from @dhh. he is getting a lot of hate but this will be seen as prophetic.
Pedro Marques retweeted
Today I'm excited to share that @usefootprint has raised a $25M Series B, bringing our total funding to $45M.
Financial institutions are in an arms race with cartels and oligarchs.
The movement of illicit money globally has grown by $1.3 trillion since 2023, now sitting at $4.4 trillion. And bad actors have taken full advantage of AI’s capabilities: generating fake identities and shell companies faster than any team can manually review.
Yet, the work to combat financial crimes is still being done the old way - risk teams sifting through spreadsheets, PDFs, and disconnected tools one case at a time.
AI lets us reimagine this sector.
We're solving for this at @usefootprint by focusing on two things: time and memory.
→ Time: Percy runs your compliance program end-to-end in 1/10th the time, so your institution has extra eyes on every case, and your human analysts dedicate their time to the ones that truly matter.
→ Memory: Trust Fabric makes sure the grey area is removed and learnings are universal so your team (whether 5 or 500 people) catches more true positives and identifies fraud rings before they form.
With this raise, we're doubling down on the thesis that risk operations will be re-envisioned for the AI-native era. As AI increases financial crime in the global economy, we're building the defense system that can expand to meet and defeat it.
We're honored @QEDInvestors doubled down on their conviction, leading our Series B two years after leading our Series A. The same goes for those who have invested since day one: @lererhippeau, @indexventures, @BoxGroup, Operator Partners, Definition, and @animalcapitalco. And for new investors @am_mufg_jp, @commercevc, @lightbank, and @alumniventures.
To the Footprint team: this company would be nowhere without your belief in building a digital world full of trust. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on this journey with us.
To our customers: thank you for trusting us with your most important decisions. Your partnership is helping us build a better future for financial crime compliance.
Full story on our blog: onefootprint.com/learn/serie…
Pedro Marques retweeted
I like to have a few @bot working in the background building me little apps I wish I had.
In this case, Spotify felt heavy for just bg music I need for work. I just want some lo-fi / live radio and nothing else. So they built this little device for me that sits in my menu bar that plays open source radios.
Of course I had to add my daughter dancing as well ❤️
Pedro Marques retweeted
I already had an architect’s design for my son’s bedroom.
I wanted to step inside it.
Astra and I turned it into an editable 3D room with Three.js.
Walk around. Try different wood finishes, furniture and TV sizes.
All in the browser. Here’s what we built ↓
Pedro Marques retweeted
We’re hiring designers who are great at design.
If you want to code too, great. But what we value most is clarity of thinking and your ability to create high-quality experiences.
We have engineers and agents for the code part.
The job market is a tale of two cities right now. The difference I am noticing between the folks who are inundated with eye-watering seven-figure offers and those who have trouble finding a role is simply the ability to keep learning, adapting, and getting better.
It's a brave new world out there. Gone are the days of sticky notes and following the "right process."
Things to start doing :
1. Get comfortable with code. Like, now. If you missed the boat on trad code, plenty of IDEs to play with. Did you start yet? No?? I'm begging you, please. For me.
2. Build personal projects. What are you building in your free time? What is the real you, free from the shitty design systems that bind you, capable of? This also clearly demonstrates a builder's mindset and agency.
3. Work on your visual design and creativity. I think years ago, "complexity in the work" and "product thinking" allowed us to get away with weaker craft, but no more. Get weird, people. Have fun with your site and portfolio. Make something memorable. A great start would be @joshpuckett 's Interface Craft.
4. Get curious. It's a fucking designer's playground right now, there are so many fun tools out there to experiment with!
Pedro Marques retweeted
Today we're announcing our second employee tender offer.
We passed $100m ARR earlier this year and now have more than 40,000 paying customers.
The tender lets our teammates participate in that success at a $2.5B valuation:
linear.app/now/sharing-growt…
Pedro Marques retweeted
First impressions of Grok Bot:
- With Grok Bot you don't juggle threads, you juggle named/personified agents. This seems like a ~fine mental model: hire a team of specialists that can talk among themselves to get work done.
- But this creates some problems when you want to multitask within a single agent. If you give an agent a chunky task that takes a long time, you don't really want to interrupt it or distract it mid-task. I haven't found a way to queue messages. In a thread-first world, you'd just spin up another thread.
(Technically there's a "create thread" button on each message bubble, but it feels intentionally buried and not recommended.)
- I'm biased towards using threads to create "context bubbles" for discrete tasks and prevent context contamination. But every Grok Bot agent uses a single long-running thread, and it's not obvious where discrete tasks get chunked or compacted. If I'm working with sensitive data, this forces me to create copies of the same agent so I can force context bubbles around sensitive tasks.
- I'm not sure if most people will prefer a single omni-agent that juggles threads and projects (Jarvis-style), or if people actually want to build and manage multiple discrete agents that coordinate with each other. Tradeoffs in both directions, and maybe you end up needing both models for different audiences.
- The agents themselves are capable and surprisingly dynamic. They are good at responding quickly, keeping you updated iMessage-style as they make progress on long tasks, and configuring themselves on the fly (or even reacting appropriately if you adjust their configuration manually).
- One of the surprising details that Grok Bot hides is all the thinking steps/tool calls. Almost every other AI agent exposes these, including ours at Notion. When we designed Notion Agent last year, we tried to remove these steps for the sake of simplicity, but our customers demanded we add them back both because they serve as a useful loading indicator (it's entertaining to watch computers magically do work!), and because they can be used to spot the model going off track so you can jump in and pause/steer. But I suspect model progress (speed + quality) in the last year is making both of those points less relevant, so maybe it's okay to hide more of the underlying noise from the transcript. Grok Bot agents are still good about sending mid-task progress update messages (I think this is all Grok 4.6?)
- The idea of starting a new chat with multiple agents (aka a channel? project? workspace?) is pretty nice, but agents are still a bit dumb and they go in loops talking to each other before finally shutting up. Maybe there are some prompt-fu opportunities to make them chill out.
- It's been a great experience delegating agents to work simultaneously across the cloud computer, my local machine, and Cursor cloud coding sessions. The system works really well, and I've been able to throw fun tasks at the agents without any major problems.
- Consolidating skills, MCPs, connectors, and more complex tools behind a single "Plugins" concept feels right. It looks like everyone on the frontier is coming to the same conclusion.
- No model picker feels weird, but only because I'm used to fiddling with models/effort levels per task in all my other coding tools. Presumably Grok Bot agents are doing some routing under the hood? Making this + thinking tokens + tool calls opaque means you really have to have a "model take the wheel" mindset when using this app. Again, probably long-term right, but short-term feels uncomfortable (giving up control).
- The UI is nice. Mobile app is nice. Cursor mobile app is nice for code sessions. It just all feels...nice. Kudos to the design team for nailing the visual polish and small details. The motion design for the agent avatars is s-tier.
- Yet this shape of tool is becoming so common across so many companies (and open source!) that I don't really know how people are going to justify one $200/mo subscription vs. another. I suspect in the short term it'll come down to vibes/tribal affiliation/token subsidization, at least until there is some bigger differentiator at the capability level.
- As an experiment, I told my Grok Bot agents to switch to using a Notion database for the memory layer. They had no objections and I've watched them create ~20-30 pages in my Memory database. This feels really noisy, and I'm not sure what the impact on quality will be, but it's cool that the agents had no problem adapting to work the way I want. Whether they're actually using the database correctly under the hood, I can't tell...the whole system is quite opaque.
- Grok Bot is an odd name for an app that wants you to coordinate work across lots of bots.
- My hunch is most people don't actually have that much stuff they need to automate in their daily life. I'd love to see retention graphs!
Pedro Marques retweeted
Supabase has raised $500M at a $10B valuation
In this round we are giving @supabase employees the opportunity to cash out 25% of their vested options. We have done this in every round since inception.
We do it as a “cashless transaction” so that employees don’t need to front any cash to exercise their options. This is the friendliest way we could design it until we can offer RSUs.
On top of that, we give employees a 10 year exercise window: whether they stay or leave the company. The typical/default window is 3 months. IMO, equity is earned and employees shouldn't be penalized because they don't have the cash to exercise within 3 months of leaving a job (often that's the time they need the cash/certainty the most).
Pedro Marques retweeted
Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.
Pedro Marques retweeted
Opus 4.7 uses more thinking tokens, so we've increased rate limits for all subscribers to make up for it. Enjoy!
Pedro Marques retweeted
Conquistamos o Brasil. Conquistamos a América. Agora, queremos o mundo mais uma vez.
Seremos onze em campo e 45 milhões espalhados por cada canto desse planeta.
Amanhã é dia de fazer história mais uma vez. Foi assim em dezembro de 81. Assim será em dezembro de 25.
VAMOS, FLAMENGO!
Pedro Marques retweeted
Having been an employee at a startup in the past, I found the 90-day option exercise window very unfair. There was rarely guidance on early exercise, or it wasn't allowed, tenders weren't including past employees and there wasn't much transparency on the business overall.
With Linear, I wanted to do better. From the early days, we’ve offered a 10-year extended exercise window, early exercise in the US, and as much transparency as possible about the performance of the business, starting from the moment we present a job offer.
And now, offering liquidity is another important step in giving our employees more flexibility.
More here: linear.app/now/giving-our-te…
Pedro Marques retweeted
hot take: designers often feel like they have to defend every single choice they make, as if they're constantly on trial. that's because design is so visual—anyone can glance at it and throw out opinions, even if those opinions are vague or come from someone without much expertise. for instance, a non-designer might casually say, "this color feels off," without backing it up or offering a real alternative. the bar for giving feedback is incredibly low; you don't need deep knowledge to chime in.
now, compare that to engineering: folks don't usually drop random technical suggestions unless they actually understand the code. instead, they'd point out a specific issue, like "clicking this button triggers an error." it's straightforward and functional, not just a gut reaction like "this code seems weird."
but here's where things get imbalanced: when someone hits a designer with that low-effort feedback, the expectation for the designer's reply is surprisingly high. if someone asks, "why this layout here?" answering "after a few iterations this one felt right" rarely satisfies them—they want a full breakdown of ux laws and design thinking with as many jargons as you can blurt out.
early in your career, or even later, articulating that intuition can be tough and sometimes there isn't any to articulate in the first place. it's built from experience, patterns you've absorbed, and subtle principles of what works visually. don't doubt it; it's likely spot on, even if the words aren't there yet.
this setup can make design feel draining, turning teamwork into a constant justification session rather than pure creation. yet, here's the key: designers don't need a defense for every little element. design isn't something that requires endless justification—it's the bridge that gets a user from point a to point b, all while deeply prioritizing their experience and convenience. trust the process and never let shallow feedback shake your core confidence.
ps: using above as a justification for poor design is definitely a skill issue but you get the gist of it.