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the company brain guy @hyperspell (F25)
Joined June 2020
- Posts 8,469
- Following 3,424
- Followers 9,683
- Likes 14,276
337 Photos and videos
conor brennan-burke reposted
wearing @hyperspellโs hat
touching the grass ๐ฆ
feeling young and beautiful
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i used to think the startup game was simple
build something great and eventually people will notice
looking back, almost every major break came because someone trusted us before there was much to show for it
@mission__ctrl and @joinodf welcomed us into their communities
@AforeVC and @ycombinator took a chance on us
building made us worth betting on
but trust opened every door along the way
i hope we can do the same for someone else
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my cofounder @maebert just turned 40 and spent the last 15 years in AI
his first company had a .ai domain name in 2014
we're so back
The age of the 40-year-old founder is back.
Bryant Chou spent 12 years as CTO of Webflow, which now powers something like 1.5% of the entire internet. He's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI marketing platform, and he describes himself as "a bit of a boomer, double the age of the YC founders." But over 13% of his batch is already using his product, within months of launch.
There is a side of the argument which destroyed one of the main edges young founders have, which was being faster and cheaper at building.... speed is everyones game.
If what's left is knowing what to build this is more likely to come from spending 15 years watching an industry up close, collecting the thousand small frustrations that tell you where the real problem is. Bryant can build an anti-slop website tool because he spent over a decade learning exactly why websites are slop.
So I'm updating. I don't think it's young vs. old. I think AI rewards whoever has the most domain knowledge to point it at, and only sometimes is this younger founders who are thinking outside of the box...
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when we first met in @joinodf, my cofounder @maebert got voted โmost likely to become a cult leaderโ
yesterday our founding engineer suggested we all get number tattoos based on the order we joined @hyperspell
the prophecy may have been onto something
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more than half of the @hyperspell team are immigrants
you will never find anyone more patriotic than an immigrant who chose to leave their whole world behind and become american
happy july 4th ๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ธ๐ฆ
๐ฆ
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this july 4th, iโve been thinking about what AI freedom actually means
a lot of the conversation today is about owning the model layer
thatโs important
but the more customers we talk to, the more i think thatโs only half the story
real AI freedom means youโre never locked into a single model provider
it also means you own everything your organization has learned over years or decades. your institutional memory, your workflows, your decisions, and all the context that makes your organization unique
it means you can switch models whenever a better one comes along
one thing thatโs surprised me is how much this comes up outside the US
we talk to organizations that want their intelligence to stay in europe, india, singapore, or on infrastructure they control themselves
they donโt just want better models
they want the freedom to decide where their intelligence lives
the model is replaceable
your organizationโs accumulated knowledge isnโt
i think every company, university, nonprofit, and government should have the freedom to own its own intelligence
AI shouldnโt make us more dependent
it should make us more free
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growing up, and especially in college, i spent a lot of time around people who genuinely disliked america
for a long time, i shared many of those views
then i lived abroad
for the first time, i understood what was actually unusual about this country
america isnโt remarkable because itโs perfect. it clearly isnโt
itโs remarkable because it assumes people are flawed, gives them an unusual amount of freedom anyway, and builds institutions that channel ambition toward building
youโre free to criticize the country
youโre free to build a company
youโre free to fail and start over
youโre free to reinvent yourself
living abroad made me appreciate just how unusual those things are
happy 250th birthday, america ๐บ๐ธ๐ฆ
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excited to announce i am taking a break from my mental health to focus on social media
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conor brennan-burke reposted
Jul 3
July 4th Afterparty with @UseCorgi, @hyperspell, @uselemma_ai about to have a 10% acceptance rate ๐ญ
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everyone is trying to build a company brain
i think most people are building a retrieval layer
the demo is seductive
connect claude to slack, google drive, github, jira, and salesforce
ask a question
get an answer
it feels like you've built a company brain
i don't think you have
the problem isn't access to information
it's maintaining a shared understanding of what's actually true
companies don't operate on documents
they operate on customers, projects, decisions, commitments, priorities, and risks
the documents are just evidence
โ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ถ๐๐ป'๐ ๐๐๐ฎ๐๐ฒ
every AI system today starts from scratch
it searches slack, reads documents, pulls CRM records, and reconstructs the company
then it throws that understanding away and does it again on the next question
humans don't work like that
neither should agents
โ ๐ผ๐ฏ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป'๐ ๐๐ฟ๐๐๐ต
a meeting isn't truth
a slack message isn't truth
a customer call isn't truth
they're observations
the hard part is deciding what the organization should believe after seeing all of them
โ ๐ฎ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐บ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ป๐ ๐ฏ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐น๐ฑ ๐บ๐ผ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐น
as companies become increasingly agentic, every human and every agent independently reconstructing the organization doesn't scale
they should operate from the same continuously updated model of reality
is your team trying to solve a company brain with just claude connectors?
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conor brennan-burke reposted
Jul 3
Conor (@contextconor) dropped out of school, grew up chasing chickens before class, and racked up hundreds of dollars in library fines from checking out 50 books at a time.
His first job was at Arby's. His boss told him to make small talk with customers.
He had no idea how.
"A light bulb went off. I was like โ wait, you can learn social skills. You don't need to be natively born with them. I made flashcards. This is what a happy face looks like. This is what a sad face looks like. It went from a weakness into a strength."
Conor didn't give up then, and he's not giving up now.
Follow him as he's building out @hyperspell, a brain for your company.
Jun 16
A YC fund built a machine learning model to predict the perfect founder. Right school, right company, right age.
Conor (@contextconor) met zero of the criteria.
That same fund just invested in his round.
Nothing about him pattern-matches. Farm kid from a town of 2,000. Dropped out of school at 12, college at 13. Left a comfy BCG job advising Walmart and Pfizer to fly to SF knowing no one and when money ran low, he sublet his own bedroom and slept in the closet.
@BCG rejected him the first time he applied. So did the hacker house @mission__ctrl. @ycombinator rejected him six times.
He later got into all three.
Since then: 5x'd revenue during the batch. Every customer inbound. A third of them invested in his round. First Fortune 500 closed, a company he used to consult for.
He's building @Hyperspell, one brain for your company, so agents and humans stop losing context scattered across Slack, email, and meetings.
His take: "None of us are lottery tickets. The world has a certain way it's organized, but you can always find a way to make things happen."
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
(00:00) Meeting Connor IRL
(00:49) Mission Control Tour
(03:13) Hacker House Legends
(10:10) Leaving BCG for SF
(13:16) From Agents to Company Brain
(26:17) Unicorn Closet Story
(38:55) Grinding Social Skills
(44:17) YC Acceptance Story
(46:01) Make Customers Hero
(56:12) Agent Teammate Cubert
(01:05:07) Single Until Series B
(01:13:32) Meet Alex, the new closet resident
This is a @Composio "Agents at Work" podcast, where I chat with founders building the next leap of AI.
Follow for more:)
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enterprises need a brain to hold all of their tacit knowledge and unique insights without handing it to the big labs
that's what we're building at @hyperspell
Jul 1
the connective tissue between Alex Karpโs comments on CNBC today and what @satyanadella has been saying recently is
- we need a multitude of companies involved in the frontier ecosystem
- we need a clear path for how companies and countries feel about the value they bring to AI - and not getting eaten by the models.
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you've been chugging celsius, popping zyns, and telling yourself "just one more commit"
it's the 4th of july. claude code can survive one night without you
co-hosting a 4th of july afterparty tonight with @corgi, @lemma (yc f25), and the @hyperspell team
dm me for invite
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