eng at Sierra
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2011
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Allen Chen retweeted
Every quarter at Sierra, we celebrate the end of the quarter with Double Denim Day (or, as some like to call it, Canadian Tuxedo Day) 👖. This Q3, we needed a lot of denim to celebrate the most remarkable quarter in Sierra's 2.5 year history.
We added over $150M ARR this quarter, bringing our total ARR beyond $400M. Remarkably, we added more ARR in one quarter than we had all of last year.
The most exciting thing to me is that our pace is accelerating. It took us six months to double from $100M to $200M ARR, and only five months to double from $200M to $400M ARR.
@claybavor and I are grateful to our customers and proud of the entire Sierra team.
Allen Chen retweeted
On Tuesday, Sierra announced Personal Agent Protocol with Meta, Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart. The response has been incredible and today we’re publishing the first draft of the protocol at personalagentprotocol.org and announcing 35 new design partners.
As personal agents take on more, our goal is simple: consumers have choice and control, and companies know when they’re dealing with an agent and who it represents.
This draft is a starting point. We’d love for companies, developers, and personal agent builders to read it, give feedback, and help us build an open standard together.
Allen Chen retweeted
To complement the Personal Agent Protocol, Sierra has developed the Fleming-1 model, which detects when the caller on the other side of a phone call is an AI sierra.ai/blog/caller-id-in-…
Allen Chen retweeted
Today we’re announcing Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard @Meta and @SierraPlatform are developing along with industry partners at @Genesys, @instinct, @RocketOTD, @Shopify, @stripe, and @Walmart. It will help define how personal agents interact with businesses and is open for anyone to implement.
Read more: sierra.ai/blog/introducing-p…
Allen Chen retweeted
I’m Noah, the founder of Instinct.
Instinct is a personal agent that we’ve been building for the past few months. The interface is simple: there are no new interfaces. You can text or call it. It's trained to use a phone and a computer in the same way that humans do. Instinct combines simplicity with extreme capability.
I’m thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct. They’ve told us they’ve planned cross-country road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets, and cancelled hundreds of dollars of subscriptions. Someone’s even planning their wedding with Instinct.
We want to make Instinct the best personal agent for all of you. It’s available in an invite-only beta program while we’re actively bringing up more compute. I’m excited to see what you all do with it.
instinct.co
this is a little unhinged but genuinely a nonzero reason to build your own internal tools.
for example, all new hires get this banner!
it's just fun, and lightens the mood at the company :)
A little easter egg in Pinecone, our internal agent at @SierraPlatform
sierra.ai/blog/pinecone-harn…
Working with @mihai has been one of the highlights of my career. So many lessons learned that have paved the way for how we work at @SierraPlatform!
Allen Chen retweeted
Everyone at Sierra uses an internal agent called Pinecone to automate 90% of our coding, analytics, and busywork. I can't go back to any other way of working.
Pinecone:
* Runs an agentic harness in our internal cloud.
* Talks to all our tools (Slack, Github, Linear, GSuite, Clickhouse, Gong, etc.)
* Lets you pick any model. Especially useful this week!
* Can spin up a local version of all of Sierra to test its work.
* Is accessible over mobile, Slack, Github, and Web and is collaborative.
@neilrahilly and team cooked on this. In this post, they share lessons learned from building and scaling Pinecone to the whole company.
Our Acceleration team at Sierra has been constantly reimagining how work is done at an already AI-native company. Our leader @neilrahilly breaks down some of the lessons here that led us to some of the largest productivity improvements at the company.
More to be shared soon!
Allen Chen retweeted
Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you.
We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction.
Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents.
We think that’s backwards.
The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you.
Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so.
All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time.
Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.
Allen Chen retweeted
AMA! 2 weeks ago, we posted about Sierra's AI-native interview process. Many eng leaders have reached out asking questions and sharing that they're evolving their processes too.
Wanted to answer some of the most common questions we've gotten to help teams evolving their interview. If you have more questions, just drop them in the 🧵
sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native…
