Hearing this week that personal assistants cost $3k-$7k per user per year, depending on scale effects / vertical integration / model selection. Implications/questions: - Consumer subsidies will be a huge factor; people don’t care about privacy, they want utility and they want it for free. - Model costs are deflating, but not fast enough for many startups. The dark horse is that Jev may rapidly deflate computer-use costs 100x. - An interesting counter-position would be building an expensive and narrowly focused agent — perhaps combining proprietary supply (Carbone tables!) with a unique POV (“no one goes there anymore, go to The Grill instead”). - Social is wide open but hinges on a key design challenge: how can agents increase social cohesion and not feel invasive in a group chat? A working social agent would rightly attract an avalanche of capital and be hard for incumbents to replicate. - Finally, there are vertical focus areas like financial services where the LTVs outweigh the subsidy needed and are outside the near-term competitive focus of the incumbents. If it were me, I’d focus here — Credit Karma as an agent >> Credit Karma as an app. Overall, it’s still very, very early, and we may very well be in the MySpace era of social or iPhone 2010. Hang onto your hats and keep building!!

Password reset is completely cooked. Along with every other modern consumer security standard. Once you give an agent access to your inbox, they can reset any of your passwords and get unfettered access to anything. I’m guessing this is the moment Passkeys go mainstream.

1/ Ethos just completed our largest payout cycle ever. We now average $1M/day paid to experts worldwide: tens of millions a month to tens of thousands of people. 2/ Behind every payout is a real person. One expert, 20+ years in enterprise sales and a year without work: "Ethos came at a time when I was really down and not sure if I would work again professionally." 3/ Another put it better than we can: "It made me realise that my experience isn't becoming irrelevant because the world is changing." We're building for a future where human opportunity grows in tandem with AI. 4/ To our team, who worked every weekend to scale operations for tens of thousands of active experts in days: thank you. You did in months what takes most companies years. This is only the beginning.

Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg with Nas, Steve Stoute, and Grandmaster Caz on the Paid in Full Foundation Caz penned rhymes that became Rapper's Delight. Even with his name in them, he got nothing. The Paid in Full foundation honors the people who created hip-hop by making sure they're "paid in full," financially, spiritually, and culturally. As Nas points out, money alone reads as a handout. So the grant comes attached to the honor. Each year at the foundation's Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards, pioneers are celebrated by the artists they inspired. Caz ultimately received a five-year grant, bought a house, and left the projects. In his words: "The thing is the honor. The thing is putting you in the light that you deserve to be in." Ben says he bought Paid in Full (the album) for $10 and got at least $5 million worth of value out of the record, with no way to pay it back. The vision is paying the debt. Felicia Horowitz runs the foundation. She and Ben are matching donations 2.5 to 1, and every dollar goes to the artists. paidinfullfoundation.org 0:00 Intro 1:40 The $10 album that was worth $5M to Ben 3:10 Nas: in hip-hop, you can't just give money 5:05 Why artists thought it was a scam 9:30 Caz wrote Rapper's Delight and got nothing 11:40 Roxanne Shanté: "I wanted the right award" 16:35 Dr. Dre asks to meet Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick 18:50 Why the industry never did this 26:05 Ben: start with what's right, not what's possible 29:10 Inside the room: Grand Puba, George Clinton 32:15 The Quincy Jones Award 37:00 Scarface and Rakim talk writing for the first time 38:45 Caz: the grant got me out of the projects 43:45 What hip-hop did for Adidas, Hilfiger and Sprite 48:00 How Felicia saved Scarface's life 52:10 Quincy Jones stories, and Nas's jazz legend dad @Nas @SteveStoute @GrandmasterCaz @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg

we're opening muse connectors to developers! we have seen so much excitement in the developer community, integrating muse into everything from robots to mood lights and more. plug your API into muse, then people can use your service just by asking for it. every request runs in a secure VM, and muse will ask before anything consequential. come build with us! muse.ai/platform

Instinct 🤝 Muse 1/ I introduced my @Muse agent to my Instinct agent and they now directly partner on tasks and projects for me. Two hours in: 4,700 leads harvested and validated, zero duplicated work, and a work contract they wrote themselves. 🧵 An agentic experiment:

The "permanent underclass" is a dark fantasy Silicon Valley keeps telling itself. @illscience (GP at @a16z) points out that by almost every measure, things have never been better, and the job-loss story hasn’t played out as people thought. Radiologists have been “cooked” for 20 years and demand keeps rising. Open engineering roles are at all-time highs. And unlike the mobile era’s winner-take-all markets, every layer of the AI stack has ~20 strong competitors. We discuss: 🔸 Why you don’t need to be chronically online to keep up 🔸 The "/loop make me happier" opportunity in AI 🔸 Why every company is becoming a series of loops 🔸 Why moats are discovered, not designed 🔸 What's the Birkin bag version of your product? Listen now 👇 piped.video/watch?v=LdIyXiq2…