Sudheesh Nair's post on X, curated on eChai

Why did we name a two-year-old AI-native company, building the bridge between model reasoning and the reality of the web, @Tiny_Fish, a name more fitting for a sushi restaurant?

The web is an ocean, and it has whales. Large digital properties going headless, standing up MCP servers, engineering their way into every place an agent might look for them. They'll be fine, because money always finds a way.

But what about the tour guide in Florence who gives the best walking tour in the city and has never once thought about how her site is structured for a machine to read? Or the restaurant with the best bao in the neighborhood, still running a menu photo from three years ago? They're not behind because the work is worse. They may fall behind because nobody built the web with them in mind.

We've started to notice that the words scraping and crawling actually describe taking something from a place that didn't invite you in. Model builders have taken crawling to a level unimaginable a few years ago. But we also need a web that's open, one that lets everyone thrive. An industry that talks this way has already decided the web is adversarial by default with one side extracting, the other side losing. I don't think we don't HAVE to build inside that assumption. AI gives us the opportunity to build past it.

If we just use this moment to sell more data to model builders, that's good money. Yay capitalism, nothing wrong with it. But AI also gives us the opportunity to do something massively useful for humanity while still building a real company with real revenue and a purpose behind it.

The web we want is one where showing up for AI isn't something you have to be big enough to afford, where the tour guide and the enterprise get the same shot at being seen by the agents about to do a growing share of the world's browsing, booking, and buying.

Everyone loves watching the whales, a lot more than watching the anchovies. But pull the anchovies out of the ocean and the whole chain comes down with them. Maybe they were never the small part of the story.

That's the fish we named the company after. Not the one everyone already sees, but the one the entire ocean quietly depends on to live.