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Founder Notes

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  • Curated from X →

    Josh Elman is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He backed Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock and led product at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Robinhood. He posted this as a thread of four tweets, which reads here as one.

    Josh Elman Josh Elman 8h

    Been thinking about “pivots” today.

    Many of the best companies I have been lucky enough to get involved with are pivots.

    Fates Forever (game) -> Discord
    Cicada (education) -> Musical.ly
    Fanbase (sports fans) -> Nextdoor
    Odeo (podcasts) -> Twitter

    These are all great outcomes and durable companies.

    In each case a strong team formed and built something together. It was an interesting and strong product but didn’t catch on.

    Instead of giving up, the teams kept going. Decided to find something new. Follow new threads.

    In the case of each of the pivots, they immediately could sense the difference and the product started engaging users. Communities formed. Retention persisted.

    Because they had done the first, they were better off the second time and knew to lean in

    So if you don’t get it all right in your first product, don’t give up. If you have a great team together, lean in to what you like, what you have learned, and go for something new. You’ll know when you know.

    And I feel lucky to have been part of these journeys

  • Curated from X →

    Ronith Kandallu founded Interface Club in San Francisco. He interned at Apple, where he proposed and prototyped the interactive widgets Apple later shipped and worked on bringing widgets to visionOS, and his first product was Iris, a macOS app for working alongside AI. Buoy is the company's iOS assistant, and what separates it from one that calls APIs is that it drives a full browser and computer underneath, so it works on sites that have no API to call, and it keeps running scheduled tasks with the app closed. Buoy is not new today: it has been on a waitlist handing out TestFlight invites, and it is not on the App Store. What this post adds is the sign-in. An agent that works a site the way you do has to be logged in as you first, and the claim here is that the password reaches neither the agent, the chat nor the logs, on any site and any sign-in pattern. The post shows it working rather than saying how.

    Ronith Kandallu Ronith Kandallu 9h

    We built the most secure, simple way to sign an agent into websites from your phone.

    The agent never receives your password. Not in the chat, not in the logs.

    This works across all sites, and any sign in patterns.

  • Curated from X →

    Shengkun Ye co-founded Monid in San Francisco with Feiyou Guo, after working at Founders Inc, TabaPay and WeChat. OpenRouter gives a developer one account and one key across every AI model; Monid is that for the tools an agent calls rather than the models it thinks with. Its registry lists over 1,700 tools from 55 providers, and an agent asks what is available for a job, picks by fit and price, runs it with no sign-up, and is billed about a tenth of a cent for that one call, out of a single balance. Monid is not new today: it launched in April 2026 and again as 2.0 in May. What this post adds is the raise and the 4 million calls.

    Shengkun Ye Shengkun Ye 14h

    We just killed…everything.

    Introducing Monid, the OpenRouter for agent tools.

    Today we crossed 4M agent transactions. And raised a $2.1M pre-seed to kill every subscription in the world.

    Your agents can now:

    > discover, run, and pay for tools at runtime
    > one connection to 1,800 APIs: SEO, leads, search, ecommerce, stocks, video/image/music/3D gen, private company data
    > all pay per call, 0 subscriptions

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