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Overview
Motive Force backs founders who see an invisible truth, and works with them until it is impossible to ignore. First checks in the software work depends on to get done. Click to read Motive Notes, by Oana Olteanu, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
News
Against Usefulness
Every useful company stands on rails that were once somebody's stubbornly useless research. I invest in useful for a living. This essay is about the stage before useful, who works on it, and who pays for it, so that the next generation of useful companies
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The Execution Layer Changed. The Understanding Layer Did Not.
One Wikipedia in print. Companies running agents at scale generate 70 of these per month, roughly 500 years of continuous reading.A company running AI agents at scale generates the equivalent of 70 Wikipedias of text per month. Conversation logs, agent tr
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What I Learned at the First Conference Built for Agentic AI
AI moved from the research lab into production faster than anyone built the engineering layer to support it. The inaugural ACM CAIS conference last week was where the researchers working on that engineering layer compared notes. The questions they were as
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My First Angel Investment Just Sold for $3.6B. Here's What I Saw.
On workflow, responsibility, and why the best software starts with the work itself.
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When Your VC Leaves, You Are Fundraising Again
A founder texted me this morning. His partner had just posted on X about leaving the firm, and he wanted to know how to manage the risk. I remembered a post Hunter Walk wrote in 2019 about exactly this, and if you haven't read it, it's worth finding. He c
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Beautiful software doesn't just help developers write faster. It helps developers think better.
That's one reason I invested in Poolside early, and why I've stayed excited watching them build quietly for years.I knew Jason Warner before Poolside existed, though not personally. I knew him through the products he helped ship, and through what those pr
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Motive Force
Image creditMost people measure brightness.They look for the credentials, the logos, the schools, the fundraising speed. The signal that's easy to perceive. Brightness is fast to evaluate. Brightness fills a slide deck.But brightness is just light reflect
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Robotics Is Not About Robots
Henry Ford's Rouge (source)A robot running at 95% accuracy sounds impressive. In a factory running fifty cycles an hour, that means fifty failures every shift. Each one requires a human to intervene, log the incident, reset the system, and decide what hap
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