As Amazon blocks AI agents from shopping on its site, Walmart is taking the opposite approach, introducing new technology that lets AI agents make purchases on customers' behalf, with controls over spending and transaction approvals. spr.ly/6019BHXyoW

"company brain" startups that construct information from internal messages and documents when they realize 90% of information only exist in peoples heads: 😭😭😵‍💫😵‍💫

Does anyone still watch Lex Fridman’s podcast in 2026

I thought my investment in ElevenLabs at $5M valuation in the pre-seed was amazing with a 2,504x return but Eric Schmidt's investment in Anthropic must be the best anyone has ever done. His stake is 1% of Anthropic or ~$10bn

they got acquired by cursor earlier this year but they’re still raising series B? that’s like the bacterium that got eaten by another bacterium but didn’t give up and became a chloroplast

The next generation of millionaires won't all be AI founders. They'll be the people buying $50M businesses for $5M and using AI to run them with 90% fewer employees. The biggest AI opportunity right now is buying old companies.

San Francisco is full of European dudes who say they’re here to build startups, but they are actually here to enjoy air conditioning and flirt with your girlfriend.

Would be very funny if Ithaca ends up being a US Bending Spoons equivalent.

The last 10% is 99% of the work

Communicator spotlight: Cristin Culver axios.com/2026/10/08/communi…

Who is Zach Frankel? The question has been circulating around X over the past few days. I wrote the first-ever profile of the secretive Ramp and Cognition investor, who is considered a cofounder of multiple of his portfolio companies -- covering everything from how he meets founders to what his unusually hands-on help consists of. Features interviews with the likes of @eglyman, @alextaubman & @ScottWu46. Some highlights: -- Editing college essays for the siblings of founders -- Air Frankel, the private jet sometimes used by his founders -- "Capitalism with friends" -- More insight into his $185 B + in portfolio companies -- A $70 M Juul dividend -- A passion for pandemics -- Recruiting much of Team USA from the International Olympiad in Informatics Still lots of mystery here, especially how he went from six months of interning at Founders Fund to solo investing in his 20s. theinformation.com/articles/…

Brb gonna go bootstrap a global logistics operation and hire 1.5M people to take on Amazon on the off chance this hypothesis is true and Amazon doesn’t just change their mind while I build a generational company to defeat them.

Amazon banning agents is the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded for a startup to create an Amazon competitor. People will want agents to buy stuff for them. It will be one of the main use cases. And they won't want to use some Amazon-supplied agent to do it.

Today we’re announcing Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard @Meta and @SierraPlatform are developing along with industry partners at @Genesys, @instinct, @RocketOTD, @Shopify, @stripe, and @Walmart. It will help define how personal agents interact with businesses and is open for anyone to implement. Read more: sierra.ai/blog/introducing-p…

👀 Gong metrics from user conf: - $550M+ ARR (+50% YoY) - 125%+ NDR (147% in enterprise) - ~75% Gross Margin despite heavy AI compute - 10x MCP growth & 3x AI credit usage - 15-mo CAC payback - Mid-50s% Rule of 40 (= LSD op margins)

Amazon shutting down consumer agent access (now both Muse and Instinct) is both completely rational and a big mistake They have plausible reasons: 1. Advertising accounts for ~10% of Amazon revenue, but an estimated 50-60% of operating profit because it's so high margin. People purchasing via agents = fewer consumer eyeballs to monetize 2. Amazon knows from experience how dangerous it is to give another platform a lever to ramp up / down your distribution 👀 They've done this to many retailers themselves 3. They are in a very good spot re: near-term defensibility - with ~250M Prime subs (who are habituated to buying on Amazon) + a massive logistics and distribution network that you can't vibe code However, this logic is short-sighted (IMO). Agents are inevitable, especially for the kind of purchases people make on Amazon (low consideration, frequent, fairly urgent or recurring). I don't think Amazon is going to come out with a first-class consumer agent on their own...and in the meantime, why anger your valuable users and make them even consider alternatives? It's almost never a good idea to be on the wrong side of innovation. I'd much rather see them continue to greenlight agent traffic (it's pretty minimal now!) and work on adjusting to an agent-first world in the meantime.