Benjamin Forgan

We just rebuilt every startup in @ycombinator's latest demo day batch. Here's what our agentic "founders" pulled off and what it means for the future of startups. Fully useable products at the bottom of the thread below 🤖🧨

Web 1.0 came with new channels: - email, search, link sharing, etc Web 2.0 too: - feeds, creators, viral invites, etc Mobile: - app stores, SMS invites, vertical vid, mobile ads What about AI? I’ve been complaining that AI hasn’t come with much. But we’re seeing a big growth channel opening now: Products that are built as APIs/CLIs that can be pulled into new projects by Codex/Claude on the fly Maybe the “AI-native hotel app” doesn’t mean a mobile booking app with an AI chat panel. It means a CLI that can book a hotel for you, that an AI agent can pull into a bespoke answer or project or into code. Bolting on an AI chat panel is this generation’s weak form of AI. Maybe the full reinvention involves making it agent-first not human-first and once you start looking at it that way, a lot of existing products suddenly feel mis-specified. they’re built as destinations, but agents don’t want destinations. they want capabilities. composable, callable, reliable capabilities. So instead of “go to Expedia” or “open the app,” the future interaction is more like: an agent assembles a workflow on the fly. it pulls a flight search tool, a hotel booking tool, maybe a weather model, maybe even your personal preference graph. none of these are full products in the traditional sense. they’re more like endpoints with taste and state. This flips distribution completely. historically you win by owning the surface area. seo, app store ranking, homepage traffic. in an agent world, you win by being the default callable primitive. the thing that shows up again and again in agent-generated plans because it works, has clean interfaces, and returns structured outputs. distribution shifts from “top of funnel” to “top of call stack.” And the crazy part is this might actually compress product surface area dramatically. the best products might look more like tight, extremely well-designed CLIs with opinionated defaults rather than sprawling UIs. almost like the stripe api moment, but for everything. imagine if every vertical had a “stripe-level” primitive that agents preferentially use. there’s also a weird inversion of brand here. humans used to choose brands. now agents will. so the brand becomes partially machine-legible. reliability, latency, error rates, schema clarity. you can almost imagine “agent seo” where the ranking factors are things like success rate across thousands of agent runs, or how easy your tool is to integrate in a chain-of-thought execution loop. This also suggests a new kind of moat. not just data or network effects, but integration depth with agent ecosystems. if claude or codex or openclaw learns that your tool is the safest way to accomplish X, it gets baked into prompts, templates, maybe even fine-tunes. you become a default. and defaults, historically, are insanely sticky. The contrarian take is that most current “AI features” are a local maximum. chat panels, copilots, assistants. they’re transitional. the real end state might look closer to invisible infrastructure that agents orchestrate. the ui is just a debug layer for humans to peek into what the agents are doing. so maybe the new growth channels for ai look like: - being callable - being composable - being reliable at scale in agent loops - being embedded in agent templates and workflows - being the default primitive in a given domain and if that’s right, then the question for any new product isn’t “what’s the ui” or even “what’s the killer feature.” it’s “what’s the minimal, highest-leverage capability we can expose such that agents will repeatedly choose us when building something new.”

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is backing a company bringing AI to cow herding at a $2 billion valuation bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Pure software is rapidly becoming un-investable.

America is the greatest country in the world. But we need more founders working on real problems. If you are in the early stages of building something that matters, you have to be in El Segundo.🇺🇸 Apply to the Spring Cohort in bio.  Deadline February 20th.

A lot of people quote tweeted this as 1 year anniversary of vibe coding. Some retrospective - I've had a Twitter account for 17 years now (omg) and I still can't predict my tweet engagement basically at all. This was a shower of thoughts throwaway tweet that I just fired off without thinking but somehow it minted a fitting name at the right moment for something that a lot of people were feeling at the same time, so here we are: vibe coding is now mentioned on my Wikipedia as a major memetic "contribution" and even its article is longer. lol The one thing I'd add is that at the time, LLM capability was low enough that you'd mostly use vibe coding for fun throwaway projects, demos and explorations. It was good fun and it almost worked. Today (1 year later), programming via LLM agents is increasingly becoming a default workflow for professionals, except with more oversight and scrutiny. The goal is to claim the leverage from the use of agents but without any compromise on the quality of the software. Many people have tried to come up with a better name for this to differentiate it from vibe coding, personally my current favorite "agentic engineering": - "agentic" because the new default is that you are not writing the code directly 99% of the time, you are orchestrating agents who do and acting as oversight. - "engineering" to emphasize that there is an art & science and expertise to it. It's something you can learn and become better at, with its own depth of a different kind. In 2026, we're likely to see continued improvements on both the model layer and the new agent layer. I feel excited about the product of the two and another year of progress.

As the founder of a space company, I like to think I’m pretty optimistic - but even I underestimated the rate of acceleration we’ve seen over the last few months. Almost four years ago, Neel and I started a company because we were excited about Starship. We saw the opportunity to build much bigger, much higher power satellites that could start humanity down the path towards being a Type 2 Kardashev civilization. We decided to call the company K2, we made our logo a Dyson sphere. Four years later, the Kardashev scale is a mainstream concept - with the ambition to make humanity a K2 civilization being broadcast by one of the greatest engineers in the world. Concepts that I thought were 5 to 10 years out, like orbital data centers - are now foundational capabilities for what could be one of the most significant IPOs ever. We’ve gone from people asking us “why would anyone need a 100kW satellite?” to people taking that number, asking their AI to put it into their orbital data center excel and having the lightbulbs go off. It’s honestly the best time ever to be building in space, we are truly fortunate to be building K2 today. For a big satellite company, we’re a small fish in a big big pond. We may end up being NPCs in a much bigger game - time will tell. All I know is I’m going to have the time of my life building alongside people I admire and respect. So up next, launching the 20kW satellite in two months, learning a ton, continuing designs on the 100kW satellite, scaling up the factory and doing our small part to help progress humanity up the curve. “K2 or you’re not even trying.”

Since we're talking manufacturing this week... I think a lot about the price of cheese vs vehicles per pound

Jevon’s Paradox: 1/ Make something 10x cheaper 2/ Watch demand grow 100x Too many people think we still live in feudal times where an ear of corn consumed is one less for all. Intelligence begets more intelligence, which will create more wealth. The result will be abundance.