Welcome to issue #66 of next big thing.
At the end of Elicit’s board meeting last week, founders Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun said:
One of our goals for the year is to automate the entire company. If we all go on vacation at the end of the year, the company should, in many ways, keep running without us.
What does this mean? Engineering keeps writing code and merging pull requests. Sales keeps prioritizing leads and drafting outreach. Growth keeps running experiments, both paid and product-led, that drive top-of-funnel signups. Finance makes sure vendors and employees are paid, and receivables are collected. The routine workflows within and across every function keep running on their own, without human involvement.
A couple of months ago, I would have thought this goal to be delusional. But in the last couple of weeks, it suddenly feels realistic. That’s emblematic of the rate of progress in AI at the moment, where end-to-end agentic tasks in software engineering, thanks to recent advances in the models, are making those outside of code generation also feel plausible.
Another portfolio company of ours, WindBorne, has AI agents deeply embedded in their work and company communication. Co-founder and CEO John Dean published a post this weekend highlighting some examples: the Growth team runs case studies on their forecasting model by pinging an evaluator agent, the Deep Learning team has agents starting and monitoring all training runs, with bots posting as they debug in Zulip (an open-source Slack equivalent), and the CEO is coding, as he walks through the grocery store, using Zulip as well. One of WindBorne’s senior engineers, Davy, is now fully-focused on building agentic systems for the company.
In the past few weeks, examples such as the ones from our portfolio abound.
Spotify said on their Q4 earnings call that their best developers have not written a single line of code since December, as a result of their integrations between Slack and Claude Code and an internal system called “Honk” which speeds up the writing and deployment of code.
Shopify’s CEO is suddenly shipping a lot more code, and states:
Running a company is just context engineering internally. Now that skill has even more value in the agentic world.
Agents, not engineers, now do the work at a portfolio company of Michael Bloch’s, which has rebuilt how it operates over the past month.
At Speak, every function is abstracting from doing the work directly to directing AI that does the work, and functional boundaries are blurring.
And at Anything, the team is of course building the Anything platform with… Anything ;).
As the capabilities improve, it is inevitable that every company will have the ability to automate most functions. For now, there are levels, and a set of companies are pushing the frontier of what’s possible. Human taste and decision-making will be more important than ever as AI does more of the grunt work. It’s going to be fun to see how far Elicit, WindBorne, Anything, and others in the Footwork portfolio can go this year.
I started next big thing to share unfiltered thoughts. I’d love your feedback, questions, and comments!
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