Higher ed × startups. Cyprus → Arizona.
Scottsdale, AZ
Joined February 2008
- Tweets10K
- Following679
- Followers1.2K
- Likes370
Philippos Savvides retweeted
Today we announce 1Password for Agents platform, building with companies @Muse, SpaceX Super Intelligence Grok @Bot, @AnthropicAI’s @Claudeai, @OpenAI, @TownAI, @Browserbase, @Browser_use, @heydana_ai, Instinct, @usekernel, @Perplexity_ai, @tryramp, @Tomo, and @wajo_ai, with more integrations on the way. 🎉
We've heard from so many of our customers who want to use these new personal AI agents to help them get more done, but want more control over what the agent can access with the same trust and ease of use they get when using 1Password directly.
1Password for Agents gives your agents access without giving up your passwords. When an agent reaches a sign-in form, it requests a credential from your vault. If you approve the request, 1Password directly auto-fills the credential in the destination site so the agent can’t see or take possession of the credentials.
The agent gets the task done, but it doesn’t get your passwords..
You stay in control. 1Password for Agents free and optional for personal and family accounts. Unless you opt-in to an agent connector, agents cannot touch your vault.
➡️Learn more: bit.ly/487da6J
Long story short, AI agents were overwhelmingly underwhelming during a stressful situation.
lnkd.in/p/gsAXqDpw
I brought my kids to Universal Studios this weekend, and the one thing I wish I had were glasses that can take pictures and video. I wish Apple would release their glasses already.
Philippos Savvides retweeted
Moats! Does anyone have one anymore?
Yes. Yes, they do.
But only a small subset of what people call moats create real long-term value and defensibility.
Not actually a moat:
1. Distribution: This does matter more than ever. Building products has gotten easier, but getting them to customers has not. Distribution, however, does not create durable defensibility. It helps create the raw ingredients for one, but it is not itself a moat.
2. Execution: Yes, speed is critical for startups. But a company that has to sprint forever is not a good business. Ultimately, it will misstep, slow down, and competition will catch up. Speed gives a company more shots on goal as it tries to build a great product and a great business, but it must eventually find something more durable.
3. Brand: The idea is that when everyone is building the same thing, the most resonant brand will win. But for startups, brand works more like customer acquisition spend: Put money in, get growth out. It’s not something that will effectively keep others from competing long-term. Brand can become a true moat over time (as with Coke or Nike or Apple), but it just takes too long to really matter for most startups.
What you're looking for is compounding advantages: a self-reinforcing flywheel that gets stronger and stronger over time, ultimately making a company very hard to compete with long-term.
There are only four compounding advantages that really matter. Every major tech company has at least one:
1. Switching costs: The more deeply embedded a product is in the way a customer works, the harder it is for that customer to switch. This increases retention and revenue per customer, which can be reinvested into the product.
2. Network effects: The more users a product has, the better it gets for everyone. This increases engagement and attracts more users.
3. Scale economies: The more volume a company has, the larger and more efficient its operations can be. This lowers unit costs, funding lower prices or a better product at the same price, further driving up volume.
4. Data effects: The more usage a product has, the more data it generates. This data can be used to improve the product and increase usage.
If you can’t see the potential for any in the startup you’re considering joining, that’s a red flag.
In today’s incredible post, @danhockenmaier shares a simple framework you can run in about an hour after getting an offer:
1. Identify a startup’s compounding advantage
2. Gauge how strong it could get
3. Measure whether it’s working
Inside: dozens of real company examples, the specific metrics to track, and benchmarks for what good and great look like.
Read it here: lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-t…
Philippos Savvides retweeted
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
• Proprietary data
• Network effects
• A physical component
Philippos Savvides retweeted
Η σημερινή επέτειος μάς γεμίζει υπερηφάνεια για τα επιτεύγματα του λαού μας, για την αξιοπρέπεια με την οποία πορεύτηκε κάτω από αντίξοες συνθήκες, με θέληση, με σθένος και καρτερικότητα.
Στα 66 χρόνια της ύπαρξής της και παρά τα τραύματα που της προκάλεσε η τουρκική επιθετικότητα και η συνεχιζόμενη κατοχή, η Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία, απέδειξε ότι διαθέτει τις αντοχές να πορευτεί με ασφάλεια και αυτοπεποίθηση.
Σήμερα, ανανεώνουμε την υπόσχεση ότι ποτέ δεν θα συμβιβαστούμε με τα τετελεσμένα της παρανομίας και ότι θα συνεχίσουμε τον αγώνα μέχρι να μπορούμε να κυκλοφορήσουμε ελεύθεροι, σε όλη την επικράτεια της Κυπριακής Δημοκρατίας.
Πάνω απο όλα η Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία 🇨🇾🇪🇺
Philippos Savvides retweeted
A list of surprising and mind-boggling stats from this conversation:
- $1B+ a year in transaction volume (still invite only)
- Growing 10%+ A DAY and has spent zero dollars on marketing
- 40% of users shared a personal credit card with Instinct within 3 weeks
- Compute demand is doubling roughly every week
- At 5 to 8% daily growth over the months it takes to bring new compute online, Instinct would reach about 100 million users
- On Instinct's own A/B tests, it matches Opus 5 performance at a fraction of the cost
- Noah spends about 40% of his time on compute
- Buying compute at the last minute costs 3 to 4x more
- Background work runs on setups that are 3x, 5x and 8x more efficient on the same compute
- 50% of Instinct's transaction volume is travel
- Instinct plans to take a cut of what users buy (take rates, Shopify is~2.5-3%, Amazon ~15%, Apple 30%)
- Noah's personal goal is to keep Instinct free for everyone for life
- Some small businesses run their entire back office on Instinct
- Users who connect at least one piece of sensitive information retain at about 80%
- Some users send more than 90% of their messages to Instinct by voice
- Say an app makes 70% of its money from ads and 30% from actually selling you things. Agents could wipe out the 70%, but Noah thinks the 30% gets much bigger, because people buy more when buying takes zero effort
- Instinct launched to about 200 friends and family
- Invites have sold on eBay for around $300
- More than 50% of Instinct's traffic doesn't run on iMessage
- Instinct has proactively called Noah three times
- The company is less than a year old
- Raised $1B at a $10B valuation, less than a month after raising at $2.5B
- Noah is 23
My conversation with Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn), founder of Instinct.
Noah is building a personal AI assistant. It's still invite only, has spent nothing on marketing, and is growing roughly 10% A DAY.
This is his first long conversation about the company.
We discuss:
- Why Instinct doesn't have an app
- Buying compute months ahead of exponential demand
- How users learn to trust it with a credit card
- Safety and security
- Agents coordinating with other people's agents
- Instinct's business model
- Apps built on consumer inertia
- and more
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:11 What people are using AI agents for
15:07 Rethinking travel, reservations, and the internet
22:43 Trust, privacy, and personal data
27:50 The business model behind Instinct
38:04 How existing businesses will adapt
47:55 Designing a personal assistant people love
53:15 Growth, compute, and competing with Big Tech
1:11:44 What’s next for Instinct and personal AI
lots of noise in this conversation
Economic Impacts AI Infrastructure
Results from @consensusapp
consensus.app/search/economi…
Philippos Savvides retweeted
The exact number of sets you need to grow muscle:
- 10 working sets per muscle group per week is the minimum threshold
- Aim for 15-20 sets per muscle group per week
- Well-trained lifters: 20-25 sets per week
- Split it up: 3 sets of 10 on Mon/Wed/Fri beats cramming it all into one session
- Every set has to be taken to fatigue or near muscular failure
- Intensity drives strength. Volume drives hypertrophy
@DrAndyGalpin on @hubermanlab
Philippos Savvides retweeted
In this study of ~400k people, daytime naps were also linked with larger total brain volume equivalent to being ~3-7 years younger.
Philippos Savvides retweeted
‘Greek finance minister encourages Germany to implement reforms’ ft.trib.al/VWe3gmH
Philippos Savvides retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Philippos Savvides retweeted
I thought bankrupting a casino represented the pinnacle of business incompetence but bankrupting Saudi Arabia is frankly even more impressive
The Saudis confirm the attack on their pipeline came from Iraq. Which means that, from a Saudi perspective:
1. Hormuz - their export route to the North - is closed by a war with Iran that the US-Israel started
2. Their pipeline to the South was taken offline from Iraq, a country the US broke with another war it started
3. They're fighting - and losing - against the Houthis in Yemen, whose war against them restarted because of the US-Israel war with Iran
4. The US is obviously incapable to defend them against these attacks and is now apparently flat-out refusing to intervene in Yemen (axios.com/2026/09/11/houthis…)
5. They are bleeding money at an accelerating rate and, ironically, we may soon see an "inverted petrodollar" situation whereby, instead of recycling oil profits into US Treasuries, they'll be forced to sell them to cover oil losses caused by US wars
All in all, hard to overstate what a complete clusterfuck this represents.
The US is supposedly running "operation economic outcast" on Iran but, very concretely, the Saudis are getting at least as badly "outcasted" as the Iranians in just about every dimension.
And, unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia isn't structurally built to survive this. They bet their country's future on trusting America...
updated with nutrition guidelines. basically eat less workout more
if you use @HevyApp to track your workout programs, use this repo to help you design them github.com/savvides/hevy-evi…
if you use @HevyApp to track your workout programs, use this repo to help you design them github.com/savvides/hevy-evi…
