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🏎️ 🏎️ 🏎️

I'm back at it and it's time to start ramping the team up. We've found exceptional product-market fit with our AI infra (GPU + token factory + managed agents). I need to grow our team of ambitious, technical sellers to meet that demand.

Priority 1 is AEs/SEs in the Bay Area who've sold inference at a startup and want to win as a part of a world-class team. Technical sales motion and technical buyers.

Here's what's different at DigitalOcean:

🟢 600K++ customers already on the platform and a beloved self-serve product. Our AI business is growing 200%+ YoY (Q2 '26).

🟢 XXL deals selling full stack AI: GPUs, managed inference, agent infra, and an entire core cloud under it.

🟢 Career growth: I've helped more than a dozen GTM professionals go on to be CROs, CMOs, COOs, and founders at some of the best companies in the world (Cursor, Modal, OpenAI, et al.)

✉️ DM me. Happy to walk through role, mission, comp, and pipeline.

Want some free AI?
Hypermode ModelRouter is free until the end of May.
hypermode.com/blog/introduci…

New eng intern agent is great-- vibe coding up a workflow to automatically ticket and PR any issues in my Vercel build logs.

Bel might be one of the best eng managers I've ever worked with. Strong rec for joining her team.

If you're at @ReactMiamiConf and want to jump the line for @hypermode Agent Builder come grab me. Here's a quick demo of our agent classifier.

This chat has 3 agents. Depending on the work I'd like to do... the right one responds automatically. Context is shared across agents.

Finally making my way toward @ReactMiamiConf! Super excited to see ya'll.

What if your multi-agent system was a little more friendly?

Hypermode's agent builder public preview coming soon.

Join the wait list: hypermode.typeform.com/agents-waitlis…

Come find me @ReactMiamiConf

We’re launching a new way to build agentic systems: "plain english to agents."

Describe what you need your agent to do in natural language then export your agents and tools as code for production.

Preview drops soon. Come get it.

hypermode.typeform.com/agents-waitlist

I love having a team that can quickly spot a trend and make a fast release to make it happen. If you're curious about DeepSeek, we've got a a free version on Hypermode as well as the option for a paid private instance without concerns of where your prompts and data are going.

Launching a hosted version of @deepseek_ai distilled on our free plan on @hypermodeinc a bit later today. It's WILD watching a model "think."

Will publish some benchmarks against Llama as well!

Great design makes great products.

I saw how the early design team made Vercel as special as it became, @evilrabbit_, @skllcrn, et al.

I really really wanted to make sure we built a strong foundation of design for @hypermodeinc. Derek is that foundation.

First Hypermode Live is live....right now! Come build real-time search and recommendations with @steph_dietz_!

lu.ma/sanjy86t

We'll be open-sourcing @HypermodeAI's "instant vector search" template later this week. In this demo, we run a vector search on a 10k+ item catalog every time the user pauses. p99 response times under 200ms.

Really enjoy getting to work with
@mattjohnsonpint-- he's been such a wonderful teammate and we've iterated through a dozen ideas and pivots.

Too many CEOs get distracted by managing their board of directors. I got great advice when I started working with the BoD at @vercel and picked up more tips after my first year as CEO of @HypermodeAI (and being a part of a few boards myself)....

🧵 1/n

Running a workshop on Wednesday and need a few volunteers for a dry run on Zoom tomorrow.

If you're a developer and want to learn how to "Git push, get AI API" (and get a @hypermodeai shirt), please DM your email and I'll send an invite.

The speaker cards from @aiDotEngineer are way too cool! Thanks folks!

Has anyone solved the "personal CRM" problem? I just take notes in my phone. That can't be state of the art.

"Kevin, can we make sure you don't do the 'executive waterfall of clarification'... where Ryan clarifies what Hank said then you clarify what Ryan said about what Hank said? " - cc: @theHankTaylor

After leading/supporting pricing projects at unicorn devtool companies like @Vercel, @DominoDataLab, and @Neo4j (and now WIP at @HypermodeAI ), I have five rules for pricing:

🛴1. Pricing won’t be perfect. Get over it.

Don’t get stuck just because you can’t get to “perfect.” It’s not as final as you fear. (and fear is the mind killer 🏜️)

At Vercel, we tweaked the pricing in major ways 6+ times in my four years.

🧑‍🔬 2. Save your innovation for the product.

Imagine two gas stations: one is “$3.99 per gallon” and the other is “$0.658 per pound”. Which are you filling up at? Pricing would be so distracting that you can’t evaluate if one is better quality.

Choose metrics that are familiar to your buyer. Pricing is a large part of how buyers understand your product.

When in doubt, just copy.

💔 3. Don’t break PLG.

Pricing is all tradeoffs. You have to gate most of your product with a price, but you remove friction on one important thing:

Netflix doesn’t charge you more for each movie you watch.
Twilio doesn’t charge you for your first texts.
Airbnb doesn’t charge you to list your property

In SaaS, the tradeoff is usually seats vs usage, so do you want buyers to optimize for users or usage? Be thoughtful about what drives your viral loop.

📉 4. Ensure your pricing doesn’t “break” by default

Per the last rule, did removing friction just break your margins?

MoviePass and WeWork are examples of this mistake and are now bankrupt. People love these companies, but their pricing models aren’t viable.

Do your Excel homework and be ready to iterate pricing as your buyers find exploits and edge cases you missed.

💸 5. You can’t scale self-serve to large enterprises.

Big buyers (like Fortune 500s) want RFPs, bake-offs, custom legal terms, procurement processes, and other stuff startups are allergic to. You need a sales team to make this repeatable.

And if your product doesn’t have a tier that starts at $30k per year, you can’t afford a sales team.