Tokenless

Product market fit

Peter Steinberger: What Happens When 4.7 Million People Let It Cook

Peter Steinberger: What Happens When 4.7 Million People Let It Cook

Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, shares the candid story of building one of the world's largest open-source AI projects. Starting from a personal annoyance, OpenClaw went viral, leading to both immense success and unforeseen challenges, including burnout, security pressures, and feature creep. He offers invaluable lessons on product-market fit, managing hyper-growth in open source, the peril of dependencies, and the philosophy that "fun is velocity" in building impactful technology.

How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Cognition — Jia Wu

How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Cognition — Jia Wu

Cognition's deployed engineering team focuses on measuring customer outcomes, not just token usage, achieving significant productivity gains with their AI agent, Devin. This involves understanding deep business problems, strategically applying Devin's capabilities, and feeding insights back to product development, fundamentally reshaping the role of a deployed engineer.

What Actually Makes A Startup Durable

What Actually Makes A Startup Durable

YC partners discuss how founders should navigate the AI era, emphasizing the rapid decrease in AI costs, the evolving definition of a 'hard problem' for startups, the critical importance of human connection and co-founders, and practical advice on building AI-native loops, pivoting, and achieving distribution in a world where software is easy to build.

Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift

Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift

Encord Co-CEO Eric Landau reflects on his transition from a lucrative quant career to founding an AI startup, driven by a deep belief in AI's paradigm-shifting potential. He discusses Encord's slow, compounding path to product-market fit, the pivotal role of Physical AI, and the importance of embracing the emotional rollercoaster of startup life.

Opencode CEO: Blocked, 20X Growth in 6 Months, Building the Coding Agent for the World

Opencode CEO: Blocked, 20X Growth in 6 Months, Building the Coding Agent for the World

Jay V, founder and CEO of Opencode, shares insights into the explosive growth of his platform, an open-source alternative to proprietary coding agents. He details Opencode's journey to 13 million monthly active users and 7 trillion tokens processed daily, attributing its rapid rise partly to an unexpected controversy with Anthropic and the maturing open-source model ecosystem. The discussion delves into global user adoption, the economic shift in AI token consumption, and how Opencode's strategic product design, rooted in 16 years of entrepreneurial persistence, positions it as a critical marketplace for diverse AI models, serving both individual developers and Fortune 500 companies.

The AI-Native Startup Playbook (Ep. 1008 with Jon Krohn)

The AI-Native Startup Playbook (Ep. 1008 with Jon Krohn)

Anthropic's Founder's Playbook redefines startup building in the AI era, emphasizing that AI has removed traditional bottlenecks, making execution cheap and judgment the scarce resource. The playbook outlines four stages—Idea, MVP, Launch, and Scale—providing practical guidance on sharpening problem statements, using AI as a devil's advocate, combating agentic technical debt, achieving true product-market fit, and building defensible moats against incumbents. The overarching message: prioritize strategic sense-making over effortless building.

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