Paul Klein IV

one of my favorite talks from navigate! @howietl does a fantastic job taking complex topics and simplifying them so everyone can understand.

Fireflies hit a $1B valuation on $19M raised. So why do they give their core software away for free?

@krishramineni joined me on Navigators to explain what Fireflies charges for instead of traditional SaaS and where the real value is.

00:00 Intro: a unicorn that gives its software away
01:48 Years of failed products
04:25 Why meetings were the data nobody could capture
07:21 "I don't want to say something twice": running Fireflies on Fireflies
08:41 The support agent that handles more tickets than any human
10:37 Why Fireflies won't train on customer data
11:55 Open weight models and an unlimited free tier
13:19 Why app companies need a model router
16:05 "I don't think you can vibe code a CRM"
17:32 SaaS goes free, agentic work gets paid
19:47 Become infrastructure or become a connector
23:20 A unicorn on $19M raised

As always, you can watch the full conversation on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

you can build your own personal AI assistant with the BELL stack (trademark soon)

@browserbase for browsers
@eve from @vercel for harness
@thelinqapp for message infra
@link from @stripe for payments

spin up your own iMessage agent with the repo below

NEW: Stripe Co-Founder John Collison (@collision) says AI agents will completely rewire internet commerce.

@stripe processed $1.9T in 2025, up 34%. Now the company is rebuilding for an internet where AI agents, not humans, increasingly transact.

“Instinct is real, Muse is real. All these things are real.”

“Computer use is the ultimate backwards compatibility layer for the real world.”

I sat down with John at @browserbase Navigate to talk agentic commerce, computer use, cybersecurity, how Stripe is rebuilding for AI & why Stripe considers 2026 the beginning of the “singularity epoch.”

John sees AI already showing up in new company creation. Stripe is seeing its highest rate of new firm creation in recent memory, while its 2026 Atlas cohort is tracking at 5x the revenue of the 2025 class.

We also cover Stripe’s recent acquisitions:
› Bridge + Privy, bringing crypto-native infrastructure & talent
› Metronome, usage-based billing for the AI era
› OpenRouter, routing across multiple AI models as inference spend & model competition explodes

Browserbase is building the infrastructure for this shift, giving AI agents cloud browsers to navigate the existing web & take actions across it.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Stripe’s $1.9T & Rebuilding for AI
(00:31) Why Agents Will Replace Web Forms
(02:20) How AI Rewires Commerce & Product Discovery
(04:40) More Cyberattacks?
(06:49) Why Stripe Says the Singularity Started in 2026
(09:29) Stripe Is Rebuilding Its APIs for AI Agents
(11:38) Why Stripe Bought Bridge, Privy, Metronome & OpenRouter
(15:12) When Stripe Builds vs. Buys
(16:55) How AI Is Changing Stripe Internally
(20:39) How John Keeps Up With AI
(23:28) The Coming 'Good Bot' vs. 'Bad Bot' Problem
(24:53) 17 Years of Lessons Building Stripe

the number of CVEs (vulnerabilities) published per month is growing at an exponential rate.

secrets storage and injection is the #1 feature request we get from our customers.

we’ve been hard at work building the right secrets primitives to work across all of our products, and i’m pumped to see it launch first in functions!

jev is one of the biggest unlocks for fast and cheap browser agents. i'm continually mindblown at how this space can change within the span of weeks.

it seems like agentic commerce is finally solved with stripe link. and we're excited to partner with stripe to enable all agents to transact online.

your agent can now natively make payments on the web using link cli + browserbase.

one shot prompt: docs.browserbase.com/integrations/s…

LangChain's CEO says they built their gateway a year too late, and it's still costing them.

I sat down with Harrison Chase, Co-Founder & CEO of LangChain, to talk about what's changed since LangChain started as a side project in 2022, why sub-agents rarely work the way people expect, and why LangChain now runs its own hiring, content, and coding work through internal agents in Slack.

00:00 Why "I use agents for everything" is a red flag in an interview
01:21 How LangChain started as a fall 2022 side project
05:18 From LangSmith to LangGraph: rebuilding as the ground kept shifting
09:06 The gateway LangChain built a year too late
13:23 Code mode: why agents writing code beats human-style tools
19:04 Should the agent run inside the sandbox, or call it as a tool?
28:31 The agent identity problem: whose credentials does it use?
45:43 Running LangChain's own GTM, content, and coding agents in Slack 48:34 The AI slop problem, and why they built a Slack emoji for it

The full pod is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

this is the most important talk i've given in my time as a founder.

in the next twelve months, we believe that every task that humans do online will be assisted by agent.

watch this if you want to see the future that we're building for @browserbase

yesterday we organized our first conference in @browserbase history.

having our entire team together on that stage was one of the most meaningful moments of our journey so far.

thank you to all who attended and I can't wait for NAVIGATE 2027

our mission summed up in one slide

your portal to another universe opens at 10am in downtown SF.

introducing NAVIGATE by @browserbase - one day of content for the best teams building on the frontier of intelligence.

computer use models become exponentially better when they are able to write code. @kylejeong breaks down how in the post below!

our conference on the state of the agentic web + computer use could not have been better timed!

join us in SF on thursday for a glimpse into the near future: browserbase.com/navigate

we are now approaching the "second order problems" phase of agents browsing the web. ex:

how do we prevent abuse?
who is responsible for this agent's actions?
what access should it have?

thankfully, i believe these are all solvable problems. exciting times ahead!

Founders used to manually log in every day to send and receive payments because their bank had no API.

That changed with Mercury. Founder Immad Akhund (@immad) built the bank he wished existed after hitting that wall himself. What started as banking for startups now includes agentic cards, letting an AI agent hold a virtual card and spend on your behalf.

He joined me on Navigators to break down how Mercury decides what to build next, and where he draws the line on what AI should be trusted to do without a human clicking send.

00:00 Why banks never built the API he needed
02:34 A trillion-dollar category still run by incumbents
05:29 "I don't like jumping on hype trains"
07:34 Agentic cards: letting AI spend on your behalf
09:15 AI as a junior employee you've never met
11:09 Why fintech is 3x harder than software
36:39 The "cosmic cube": Deciding what to build next
37:27 The two-year mistake of waiting on the credit card

Listen to our full conversation on Navigators, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

powered by @browserbase!

The thing I love about @swyx is how he breaks down complex topics like pre-training vs post-training into easy to understand concepts.

Every founder building in AI needs to know how the models are made.

OpenAI's own research says 80% of US GDP could be automated by agents today. So why isn't it?

@swyx joined me on Navigators to break down what's actually holding back the adoption of agents (and it's not the models).

00:41 The three acts of the AI boom, and what act we're in now
05:11 Pre-training, mid-training, post-training, explained
10:12 Agent labs vs model labs: Cursor, Sierra, and domain bets
15:01 Why 80% of GDP could be automated, and what's stopping it
16:40 The chip and memory shortage nobody's talking about
19:11 Why "diffusion is cope" split the AI industry
20:48 What's next after the AI IPOs

Watch the full conversation on Navigators, also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.