Larry Kiss

I had an absolute blast chatting with Tracy Lee and Danny Thompson on the Leadership Exchange Podcast about what it really takes to build intelligent systems in the AI era. We went deep on: 🤖 The shift from single-model thinking to agentic ecosystems 🧭 Why judgment and evaluation matter more than ever 💼 How AI and Product roles are evolving 🧩 Why data quality and governance quietly make or break AI success 🎯 What the rise of the Chief AI Officer tells us about the future of leadership 🔥 Hot take: AI transformation is 20% tech, 80% culture. If you’ve ever wondered how to evolve your teams, systems, or career in this new AI landscape — this one’s for you. 🎧 Watch here → https://lnkd.in/gABmqvTb What’s your biggest challenge in scaling AI beyond prototypes? #AI #Leadership #Innovation #ProductManagement #DataScience #AIAgents #Engineering

33

2 Comments

If you're a startup working with robots, you should figure out how to talk about incremental development, because autonomy is a spectrum. Full blog post: https://lnkd.in/gU9GiTEm

37

1 Comment

Stardew Valley meets Enterprise RAG? 🚜 🤖 One of the hardest challenges in moving Generative AI from prototype to production is authorization. How do you ensure the LLM only retrieves data the specific user is allowed to see? Our friends Sohan Maheshwar at AuthZed and Rohit Ghumare at motia just dropped a fantastic reference architecture solving exactly this. Using a Stardew Valley "harvest logbook" as the use case, they demonstrate how to build a complete, multi-tenant RAG pipeline. The Stack: ⚡ Orchestration: motia (Event-driven workflows) 🧠 Memory: Pinecone (Vector search & storage) 🔒 Security: #SpiceDB (Fine-grained authorization) This is a masterclass in building secure, context-aware AI applications. Check out the full tutorial below. 👇 #GenerativeAI #RAG #VectorDatabase #Pinecone #Authorization #Engineering #KnowledgeableAI

17

2 Comments

Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

71

3 Comments

Venture funding isn't success of course, but it's nearly impossible to win big markets without it. Unlike the AI hype, Ando is very, very real. And unlike others, Ando is here to make lives genuinely better for everyone. (*) #proudinvestor #micdrop #oversubscribed Big thx to Bradford Oberwager and James Kairos, Ben Metcalfe, Andy Mutz, Joseph Chittenden-Veal, Scott Sanders, Massy Ghausi, John Lyman, Thomas Wesley, John Holder… and of course Phoenix Toews and Paul Wellons (to name a few) — (*) Yeah yeah, some pencil-pusher will use AI to over-optimize profits over people, but as American Airlines is learning the hard way (WSJ: https://lnkd.in/ePz_QNzt ), net of competition, "people businesses" don't work that way. You HAVE to care for people or you lose. Ando plays a beautiful collaborative role in that dialogue, helping profit-focused management more clearly see the effects of a motivated labor force. That's why I'm truly #proudinvestor --- Posts co-authored with my LinkedIn secret weapon Dennis Buckley

23

4 Comments

Lynnwood Washington’s IOT startup Elevat gains $12M in Series A funding to accelerate AI software for industrial equipment repair and European expansion

9

A little while ago I posted about Sacramento Labs being interested in acquiring software products and heard from a number of folks I hadn’t talked to in a while. The responses and conversations were genuinely great. (Original post here: https://lnkd.in/g-6hjy6q) After talking it through, Garrett Milster and I decided to formalize something we were already doing informally: we’re offering a $10,000 referral fee for any warm introduction to a company that we end up acquiring. A few notes for clarity: -The introduction needs to be a direct, warm introduction (email or message). -Public listings or cold forwards don’t qualify. -Referral fees are paid after closing and are contingent on a completed acquisition. -There’s no expectation of ongoing involvement unless explicitly discussed. If you come across a software business that feels like it might be a fit for us, feel free to make an intro.

6