What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #489

The Sandwich Model - turning your entire company into an agent factory

Mar 14, 2026

Last week I wrote about what I called the third derivative of AI. The first derivative is obvious: more code. The second is becoming clear: dramatically more code to review, secure, and monitor. But the third derivative is where things get interesting, because that is where the organization itself begins to break.

Velocity is no longer a code problem. It is an organizational design problem.

Ed Sim@edsimThe first derivative of AI coding: more code. The second derivative: more code to review and secure The third derivative? The organization breaks. Engineering ships daily/weekly. GTM/Sales is still learning last week’s release. The new bottleneck is organizational metabolism. 1:25 PM · Mar 7, 2026 · 11.9K Views21 Replies · 9 Reposts · 89 Likes

This was the dominant topic at board meetings this past week. And the answer, IMO, is the sandwich model. Agent red-pilling your company has to come from both ends. The founder/CEO drives from the top, but real ownership only comes from the bottom up, through organic usage. The question is how.

Every company does it differently. In the sandwich model, it has to start with the CEO, then every department head needs to be bought in 100% in thinking how can agents do it first versus hiring someone, each head can appoint one red-pilled worker to automate things or you can appoint on engineer internally to be empowered by you to work with department heads to go after low hanging fruit, and finally the most important is that it has to build from bottom up as well. And if they are resistant to this then they are not long for this world.

If you’re not agent red-pilling your team, then one of your competitors is…especially the agent-native ones…

Ben Lang@benlnA bit over a year later: • Cursor: $2B annualized revenue w/ 300+ people • Lovable: $300M annualized revenue w/ 150+ people • Mercor: $500M annualized revenue w/ 200+ peopleBen Lang @benlnTiny teams are the future: • Cursor: 0 to $100M ARR in 21 months w/ 20 people • Bolt: 0 to $20M ARR in 2 months w/ 15 people • Lovable: 0 to $10M ARR in 2 months w/ 15 people • Mercor: 0 to $50M ARR in 2 years w/ 30 people • ElevenLabs: 0 to $100M ARR in 2 years w/ 50 people4:36 PM · Mar 10, 2026 · 127K Views56 Replies · 33 Reposts · 708 Likes

Gokul nails it here…

Ed Sim@edsim💯 starts with product but then the whole company must also become an agent factory, every single department - only way to keep pace with product speedGokul Rajaram @gokulrBUILD YOUR OWN SOFTWARE FACTORY The best companies in the world are all building their own software factories, using a combination of first party and third party tools. The software factory is a set of background coding agents running in the cloud. Anyone at the company,12:41 PM · Mar 13, 2026 · 4.14K Views2 Replies · 1 Repost · 21 Likes

Many founders who did not have the luxury of building an agent-native startup in the last year think they are fully wired but the reality is most have not gone deep enough infusing AI thinking as a first principle. Given that I’ve had so many discussions in the last month on this topic, here are some other ideas to stir the imagination on how to get organic adoption:

Ed Sim@edsimForget employee of the month. Companies should start doing agent or skill of the week. The hardest part is not the tech. It is helping people see what agents can actually do. Show the skills. Make it visible. That is how organizations change. so many more ideas on how to getEd Sim @edsimThe first derivative of AI coding: more code. The second derivative: more code to review and secure The third derivative? The organization breaks. Engineering ships daily/weekly. GTM/Sales is still learning last week’s release. The new bottleneck is organizational metabolism.1:28 PM · Mar 11, 2026 · 16.1K Views4 Replies · 1 Repost · 9 Likes

Gergely Orosz has a great interview with Uber Director of Engineering Anshu Chada on how they make it happen…

Ed Sim@edsimwant more agentic adoption? "share your wins" works better than top down mandates from @GergelyOrosz - How Uber uses AI for developmentEd Sim @edsimForget employee of the month. Companies should start doing agent or skill of the week. The hardest part is not the tech. It is helping people see what agents can actually do. Show the skills. Make it visible. That is how organizations change. so many more ideas on how to get4:58 PM · Mar 11, 2026 · 14.3K Views8 Reposts · 59 Likes

You can always buy AI employees off the shelf which may work for some orgs, but it’s getting easier and easier for enterprises to just build their own. Here is one of many examples of startups solving this problem in a turnkey way, and then of course, you have startups building much more specialized agents for sales, marketing, and finance.

Junior@hirejuniorsoIntroducing Junior The first AI employee, for any role. A true AI employee: → their own identity → organizational memory → self-driven 10+ teams have been working with Junior every day. Work was never the same since. Starting at $2,000/month. We’ve pre-paid $200 of your 1:13 AM · Mar 13, 2026 · 1.38M Views207 Replies · 82 Reposts · 1.04K Likes

If only if AWS did the same - top down alone never works. It mandated 80% adoption and forced its own dog 🐶 food Kiro.dev instead of what developers wanted…

Paweł Huryn@PawelHurynThe real story is worse. November 2025: Amazon mandates Kiro as their only AI coding tool. Sets an 80% weekly usage target. 1,500 engineers protest internally, saying Claude Code outperforms it. Leadership pushes through anyway. December: Kiro autonomously deletes a production 7:12 AM · Mar 11, 2026 · 442K Views246 Replies · 529 Reposts · 3.4K Likes

Eventually all of your organization’s best practices get encoded into skills…

Ed Sim@edsim🔥 when your whole company becomes a series of agents running on a series of markdown .MD files, this is so needed...collaboartion with agents and humans, also accountable and auditableDan Shipper 📧 @danshipperBREAKING: Proof—a new product from @every It’s a live collaborative document editor where humans and AI agents work together in the same doc. It's fast, free, and open source—available now at https://t.co/1mOcLqExmi. It’s built from the ground up for the kinds of documents4:54 PM · Mar 12, 2026 · 8.69K Views4 Replies · 2 Reposts · 23 Likes

But remember, while Claude is the easy button for enterprise agent adoption, it costs a shit ton of money as those agents burn a ton of tokens. This announcement from Nvidia is going to be huge giving all of us an open source alternative that works jsut like OpenClaw.

Ed Sim@edsimabsolutely huge - while Anthropic is crushing it and adding an enterprise marketplace like AWS, Nvidia offering a roll your own alternative open source platform where you control your data and costs will become even more important in coming years Easy to get hooked on AnthropicWIRED @WIREDAhead of its annual developer conference, Nvidia is readying a new approach to software that embraces AI agents similar to OpenClaw. https://t.co/NyzPh6tioo12:29 PM · Mar 10, 2026 · 5.64K Views1 Reply · 1 Repost · 17 Likes

The sandwich works. But only if you actually make it, top, bottom, and everything in between.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

Scaling Startups

👇🏻 💯 - product thinkers not managers will be needed

signüll@signulllthe most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone10:05 PM · Mar 7, 2026 · 1.33M Views443 Replies · 727 Reposts · 6.3K Likes

this is so SF but also a kernel of truth - you should see what’s on the horizon 🤔

Dylan Patel@dylan522pBeing in SF is like being in Wuhan right before the pandemic Something is happening, it's gonna hit everywhere but so few people know it3:36 AM · Mar 9, 2026 · 1.78M Views300 Replies · 269 Reposts · 5.22K Likes

Inception rounds getting bigger 📈 - yes, that’s a $1B inception seed round 🤯 from Yann Lecun

[AMI Labs@amilabsAdvanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) is building a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe. We’ve raised a $1.03B (~€890M) round from global investors who believe in our vision of universally ![Photographer: Yann LeCun

IC1340 / NGC 6992 / Eastern Veil nebula 20210628-ic1340-rasa-2600mc-lext Scope: Celestron RASA 11" Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Filter: Radian Triad quad narrow band. Subs: 65 @300 seconds.](https://pbs.substack.com/media/HDBlE4tXYAAn2nR.jpg)5:04 AM · Mar 10, 2026 · 4.56M Views341 Replies · 860 Reposts · 8.41K Likes](https://x.com/amilabs/status/2031234832454324639?s=20)

Enterprise Tech

Claude coming for you and not just from an enterprise marketplace

Todd Saunders@toddsaundersClaude will be the biggest software procurement platform in tech. And they aren't even trying to be (i don't think). Every time you use Claude Code, your infrastructure is now implicitly auditing your vendor stack. And unlike your engineering team, it has no vendor loyalty andLiron Shapira @lironThere goes my $200/month DataDog subscription 💸 Claude Code is a savage.1:43 AM · Mar 14, 2026 · 89.4K Views23 Replies · 16 Reposts · 199 Likes

this is absolutely massive for builders - open models, open source for the win - can’t just have one or two ecosystems win…ahving $26B of investment to build the best open weight model is just 🔥 - now just imagine secure NemoClaw bots running around your org built on open weight models hosted on your own infra?

Ed Sim@edsim💪🏻 $26 billion investment for an open weight model is just what we need. Not all compute will go to big model providers. Enterprises need safe and high-performing alternatives for privacy, customization, cost, and more. The easy button is building all your skills and pluginsunusual_whales @unusual_whalesNvidia will spend a total of $26 billion over the next five years building the world's best open source models, per Wired.12:28 PM · Mar 12, 2026 · 1.97K Views2 Reposts · 10 Likes

‘#Aaron nails where we are in the cycle - bottom line if you are creating any software make sure you prioritize building for agents…to thrive, software must evolve to “agent-first” design, prioritizing seamless APIs, CLI access, and automated sign-ups over user interfaces, as agents autonomously evaluate and adopt tools without marketing influence. And a whole new infra will have to be spun up - sound familiar - yes our autonomous enterprise we keep talking about when we launched Fund VII last July

Aaron Levie@leviehttps://t.co/O7OiUYKjbh6:37 PM · Mar 8, 2026 · 493K Views131 Replies · 326 Reposts · 2.45K Likes

from our fund vii announcement last July

The Autonomous Enterprise: A Generational Rewrite

We are in the earliest stages of a platform shift that will surpass both cloud and mobile, and it is already beginning to reshape the enterprise. This next wave is not just about automation. It is AI-native, agent-powered, and autonomous by design.

It will not happen overnight. But over the next decade, humans will do less and less, while software, agents, and machines will think, plan, and act on our behalf.

We are backing the core primitives of this shift:

AI-native infrastructure, orchestration layers, secure identity, optimized compute, and semantic interfaces. But we are not stopping there.

The autonomous enterprise will require entirely new business models, robotic execution layers, and AI-native workflows built without a traditional back office. Crypto and smart contracts will unlock programmable money and permissionless automation , enabling trustless coordination across systems at scale. Systems will run at machine scale, continuously learning, reasoning, and operating in real time.

We have already partnered with teams like Generalist AI and several stealth startups tackling massive real-world problems and rethinking how intelligence moves through the enterprise stack.

An early preview of model capabilities | Generalist This is not about retrofitting SaaS. It is about building the OS for the intelligent enterprise from scratch and securing it from the start. And it will come from founders bold enough to rethink everything.