Speaker (Jason M. Lemkin) argues that founders today will build “agent-first” companies, using AI agents as core partners alongside human executives. He gives personal examples from Oracle and Salesforce: his V2 mob/V2 mom process now routinely includes an agent that helps answer competitive, distribution, and ecosystem questions, expanding leaders’ thinking and serving as an important tool for founders.
I'm jealous of all those founders who are starting companies now because they're going to be creating agent first companies. I'm the last generation of CEOs to say, maybe you are too, that we only had human employees. Even now, I work with agents every day to make Salesforce better, and I train my employees to do that too. I created this V2 mob process when I was at Oracle, and I've used that to guide Salesforce for many years. And now for almost three years when I write a V2 mom, one, I always have a Salesforce executive with me, and two, I now have an agent with me as well. Yeah. So that idea that it's the three of us working together and we'll ask that agent really important key questions. For example, hey, how is this competitive against these key competitors? Or is this going to really expand our distribution capacity like we want? Or is this what we want to have happen with our ecosystem? And the answers are surprisingly awakening. That is all of a sudden say, whoa, I didn't think about that. So I like having an AI partner. I think it helps expand my own consciousness. It gives me a little more enlightenment myself. So it's a tool. It's another tool in the tool chest. And I think it's extremely important that founders use that.
