AI personal assistants would like to eat the world
Tasks versus workflows
One of the best descriptions I’ve heard about the challenge of widespread AI enablement in business is from Jack Soslow who called it “the hardest problem in the economy: bespoke, human, resistant to scale”. I was not at all surprised to see Accenture’s acquisition of Faculty for a super-premium multiple (Daria at 10xHumans had some excellent analysis of this deal) and I feel there is a lot more of this to come in the enablement space.
And so I have been intrigued to watch the development of the AI personal assistant sub-space (e.g. Clawdbot, Mindstone’s Rebel, Anthropic’s Cowork), which you can think of as a wrapper for accessing all the cool features of LLMs that only the people who seem permanently engaged in AI groupchats have the ability to access.
The personal assistant UI will be an interesting test to see if AI acceleration in the workplace (meaning more usage, more frequently) is driven by tasks and workflows. Tasks are once-offs (build me a web app to analyse these expenses) and workflows are permanent (scan my inbox every week and grab my receipts) but the latter is a collection of the former. To that degree, I feel there is a Netflixian question lingering in the air about whether the AI personal assistants (e.g. Clawdbot, Mindstone, Cowork) can become app builders (e.g. Lovable, Replit etc.) faster than the app builders can become AI personal assistants.
The most interesting IPO this year
Assuming a fair wind, we should see some extremely interesting IPOs this year. Although I have some bias (we are an investor), I feel that Discord, which has filed confidentially, is by far the most intriguing of the 2026 IPO class. It remains one of the most underrated consumer platforms certainly for gaming but also vast parts of the Gen Z and Alpha audiences. Although the company has built up an impressive revenue base on their Nitro offering, I think a far bigger opportunity lies with community-driven marketing opportunities. Companies like Wildfire (where we are also an investor) are already enabling this for server owners (Logan spoke to Dean in Gamesbeat about everything he’s seeing on this front). Relative to the size of the Discord audience (~200m MAU), there is a multi-billion dollar set of brand flows waiting to come on-stream.
Other things I’ve enjoyed reading
Joe Ferencz (Gamefam founder) on Billion Dollar Memes in Roblox
A tracker of AI-roll ups by Sahil Patwa
Daria wrote an excellent piece about scaling founder-led sales in AI professional services (although applicable in any enterprise services offering) and how it goes against everything taught by SaaS sales.
The rise and reset of Sweden’s $19b gaming capital machine
A huge underwater archaeology find off the coast of France. So much of our ancient history is being rewritten using technology (scanning, DNA analysis etc.). Relatedly, Erich von Daniken passed away, who was one of the first to popularise the idea (albeit a rather aliens-infused version) that ancient human civilisation was a lot more sophisticated than we gave it credit for.
SuperAwesome, my previous company, acquired Starglow Media to expand into podcasts.