James Smith

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

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Terminal Use (YC W26): Vercel for background agents. Terminal Use is hosting infrastructure for background agents that makes harness engineering easy. https://lnkd.in/gv99wN2t

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Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation

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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

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We signed a new customer yesterday that heavily uses Stripe for billing and has some complex multi-entity and multi-currency challenges. They tried to develop an integration with a couple other accounting solutions and while doing so, asked Claude Code what other systems they should consider. Claude suggested they explore SoftLedger and by the time we got on our first call, he already had a pretty good integration specification. So he got access to his account yesterday. This morning, this is the message received by our customer success team: "This is unbelievable. I would estimate I am 60-70% of the way through what I need to do. Brought in 23,000 journal entries overnight." Something has changed in the buying journey for companies seeking an integrated accounting solution and I love it. Accounting technology should be an API driven solution that conforms to a companies processes. Tools like Claude Code enable companies to build bespoke integrations for their internal processes like never before.

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