non-technical founders: "i'll do the talking with investors and customers. you can just... sit there and look insane"
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for the past few months I've been experimenting with various agent guis after being frustrated switching between Codex/Claude Code/Cursor/{insert frontier lab harness} chasing frontier intelligence + good ux
Opus + the updated Claude app might actually convince me to keep my entire workflow in one ecosystem and cancel everything else
Rob Kim retweeted
Introducing AI agents that do your finances.
Brex is now an AI-native finance platform powered by agents that learn, reason, and act on your behalf. It’s designed to amplify finance, not replace it.
Here’s what our next chapter looks like 👇
Rob Kim retweeted
Q3 ended on Friday at Brex, and it was our biggest quarter ever by a LOT. We have our biggest product release of the year coming tomorrow, and momentum continues to accelerate at scale:
NRR of 120%+, NPS of 60+, all-time low churn. The customer experience is getting better and better every month. 🧵
He's not wrong but it's amusingly the most American/western take on this topic, and it's not at all that obvious for children of immigrants when grappling with two opposing cultural forces in their lives.
Living at home or moving out is one of the most formative and difficult decisions in your early/mid 20s as an immigrant child - in an exaggerated sense, you have to choose between:
1. bending to the will of the system (their house their rules) and losing your independence to do whatever you want, or
2. become fully independent to make it on your own and likely never getting your parents' approval no matter how great the achievement.
The person he's referring to sounds like he's stuck on that decision (as were many of my friends), but my advice would be to pick one and go all in - both can lead to good outcomes and growth as an adult and each are difficult in their own ways, it's just really hard to have your cake and eat it too.
Also I see this a lot
If you live with your parents at 25
Like I know that's acceptable in some cultures, it definitely isn't acceptable in my culture (Dutch), nor is it acceptable to me as a person
You should be leaving your parent's house at 18 and become independent, spread your wings and fly
You'll never learn about the real world if you get pampered by mom and dad with free rent and free food
So the reason you're not successful is, is maybe this, there's absolutely no incentive for you to become succesful, there's no urgency, you're just satisfied being complacent living in your parent's house
Get out and spread your wings IMHO
Rob Kim retweeted
I was founding engineer, like my friend Prem. This is how I think about the founder-employee social contract, now that I’m a founder.
Founders must recognize that financial scales are wildly different between ourselves and employees. For example, when I joined a company as first engineer, I had to pay five figures just to early exercise all my equity. I was a new grad, and any salary bump was game-changing. In contrast, a founder with a few years of career experience typically has more savings and doesn't have to pay to obtain their equity.
In big acquisitions, liquidation for a founder can be the difference between being a billionaire and a very rich millionaire. For an employee it’s the difference in whether their student loans are paid out, whether they can rent a bigger apartment, or whether they can become a homeowner. Founders hold the cards in acquisitions and we should advocate for employees to be paid out.
Employees are a privilege. They are betting their career and wealth on us. We have to honor that and look out for our people.
I’ve joined Cognition to continue to work on the future of software engineering.
I was employee #2 at Windsurf and have worked on AI+code for years. There’s never been a more exciting time and place for it than now at Cognition.
I had a place at Google DeepMind as part of the deal. I won’t go into detail for legal reasons, but I’d like to be transparent about my personal situation.
I was given an offer that would explode same day. I had to forfeit all of my vested shares earned over my 3.5+ years at Windsurf. I was ultimately given a payout of only 1% of what my shares would have been worth at the time of the deal.
In going to Cognition, I’ve chosen a different direction.
For someone who loves software engineering, Cognition feels like home. It reminds me of the energy of the earliest days of Windsurf, where we wrote excessive amounts of code and had excessive amounts of fun.
Really excited to see how we can take the best of Devin and Windsurf to make the world’s best IDE and coding agents.
Rob Kim retweeted
This hits home.
I joined my first startup straight out of school. I spent ~$1K (one-fifth of my life savings) to buy my options before we raised any funding. That $1K became ~$80K after acquisition, some of which I used to buy a portion of my Stripe options.
At Stripe, the founders offered repeated chances to sell equity. That mattered. Our employees could buy homes, pay off debt, early retire.
The founder-employee social contract is everything. Equity will never be perfectly fair — but there must be trust that founders, VCs, and employees are aligned.
Employees don’t get a seat at the acquisition table. Founders do. They need to use that leverage on behalf of their people.
I was founding engineer, like my friend Prem. This is how I think about the founder-employee social contract, now that I’m a founder.
Founders must recognize that financial scales are wildly different between ourselves and employees. For example, when I joined a company as first engineer, I had to pay five figures just to early exercise all my equity. I was a new grad, and any salary bump was game-changing. In contrast, a founder with a few years of career experience typically has more savings and doesn't have to pay to obtain their equity.
In big acquisitions, liquidation for a founder can be the difference between being a billionaire and a very rich millionaire. For an employee it’s the difference in whether their student loans are paid out, whether they can rent a bigger apartment, or whether they can become a homeowner. Founders hold the cards in acquisitions and we should advocate for employees to be paid out.
Employees are a privilege. They are betting their career and wealth on us. We have to honor that and look out for our people.
biggest 🚩s in founders from a former founding engineer:
- shit comp ("the equity will be worth so much in 2 years!")
- obsessed over valuation + investor quality instead of customer value
- thinks they have a perfect recipe for success
so yea, pay your founding engineer
Rob Kim retweeted
🚀 Introducing Brex’s 2025 Summer Release: Speed meets control
You should never have to choose between moving fast and controlling spend. This release breaks the tradeoff with major upgrades across AI, purchasing, and policies. 💪
What this means for you:
🤖 AI-powered automation – Brex AI now works on 400+ custom field suggestions and automates workflows from expense entry to ERP export.
💳 Flexible payments, improved bill pay – Employees request spend, you choose how to pay (p-card, spend limit, or PO). Automate PO creation and invoice matching.
🔐 Smarter policies, more custom roles – A new policy experience, expanded custom roles, and enhanced vendor-level management.
The result? Fewer expenses to review, less busywork, and you get the visibility you need without the friction.
Discover what’s new → bit.ly/4ksxVO6
for the founders out there with ~$3m in seed funding trying to earn yield - going by @jamesreggio's example of losing 30bps, that's:
- 4.4b o3 input tokens
- 9 first class round trip tickets from NYC to SF
- $9k you'll never see again bc you didn't choose @brexHQ banking
"if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat" 🚀
bringing your parents to your office is the most validating feeling as an asian kid because yes 엄마 아빠 my company is doing well and I'm trying to be cracked for a reason. seeing them stealing snacks and taking photos is such an asian parent way of expressing their approval 😂
This is why managed travel matters. At a certain scale you need direct pricing agreements to save money and provide more predictability for your company.
You only get that leverage with airlines when you centralize travel and spend management and can negotiate DPAs with data.
As a manager, you should always hire people on your team who are smarter than you because I could not have cooked up something half as good as this - the attention to detail is *chefs kiss* 🔥
POV: you're helping build something that keeps on winning
Just closed the books for Q1 (April) for Brex:
- 154%+ realized revenue for April (~20 points higher than mid-quarter finance forecast)
- All segments above revenue goals
- 230%+ bookings for April with all segments
- All segments above pipeline generation goals
- 152%+ bookings for Q1 with all segments
- NRR way above plan
- Books closed in 4 business days (Brex runs on Brex) :)
LFG🚀
Rob Kim retweeted
People talk about how AI is going to make design obsolete, and/or make pixel perfect designs not be a thing anymore. I don't think so.
Pixel-perfect design mostly existed in designers’ minds anyway. The mocks might perfect but the final product rarely was. Most of the time, those designs were shipped sloppily because the product organization didn’t have the patience to see the polish through. How many truly pixel-perfect products do you see out there?Especially with growth focused companies. There are exceptions, but not many.
The idea that AI might ruin visual quality feels like a non-issue since wasn’t much quality to ruin in the first place.
I also don't believe AI makes design obsolete but I believe it will raise the floor. That it’ll lift the skill level of product teams, and I hope it will free up time for the kind of polish that usually gets cut. So ideally we continue see more overall better design and the more "handcrafted" polished designs as well.
My general view of AI is that it will just let us do more things, not take away things. We didn't stop writing less when email was invented.
Few aspects:
1. AI as a skill multiplier. LLMs can elevate frontend and design quality for companies that historically couldn’t hire strong talent—or for individuals who haven’t built those muscles yet. In a way that way, it’s not that different from using UI kits, Tailwind, or shadcn.
2. Rethinking design systems. Design systems were a product of the ZIRP era, when teams scaled quickly and you couldn’t trust every person to design and build a decent button. So systems enforced quality through components and rules. But AI flip can this, and Instead of assembling rigid blocks, you can quickly build good scaffolding and refine with AI or by hand. LLMs might even enforce standards even better than design systems because they could be trained to spot inconsistencies and fix visual bugs automatically. The kinds of things that usually get deprioritized.
3. Designing closer to code.
I think AI will allow us to design more in code. I think it’s a good thing if we move away from pixel-perfect Figma files. The way I’ve always designed: Figma is where you design the vibe. Code is where you make it perfect. The real product is the one in production, not the mock. So that’s where polish should happen. Future design tools should make that process easier.
4. Taste still matters. For teams that already care about design, teams like @linear, none of this really changes the hard part. Achieving a polished UI is not that hard if you just have the practice. The hard part is conceptual. It’s figuring out how features fit together, how ideas map across the system. That’s where most of the iteration happens. That’s the part AI still can’t do for you.
So yes, AI will make things faster. It will increase the volume of output, but maybe it will also shift the baseline.
Holistic quality still depends on taste, systems thinking, and the willingness to care about the final experience.
Huge for business travelers and founders trying to get some more serious work done while flying.
Other airlines need to follow suit.
The FAA has approved our first aircraft equipped with the fastest Wi-Fi in the sky. That green light means we expect to install Starlink on 40+ planes a month, with our entire regional fleet being outfitted by the end of year.
The first passenger flight that'll let customers stream, scroll, shop, game and work just like at home or in the office is coming in May. Starlink is FREE for MileagePlus members, so if you haven't already—sign up now: uafly.co/MPSignUp
