Offir Gutelzon

Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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🧠 Shared insights on The Intersect about how Vibes AI is tackling the "Triple Brain Health Epidemic" - mental health struggles, cognitive decline, and digital overload affecting millions. Building the MANTRA AI model aims to address what traditional systems weren't built for: prevention at scale. 40% of cognitive decline is preventable, yet 70% of workers report cognitive fatigue. Innovation meets impact. 💡 #AI #MentalHealth #BrainHealth #DigitalWellness #Prevention

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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California just handed cities a new enforcement tool to track your Airbnb. SB 346 took effect January 1, 2026. Now any California city can demand that Airbnb and Vrbo turn over detailed information about every listing: addresses, booking nights, and compliance status. This isn't theoretical. Cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have been waiting for exactly this kind of authority. If you operate STRs in California, the compliance conversation starts with your registration. Is it current with each municipality where you operate? Does your listing display the correct permit number? Local occupancy limits vary significantly by city, so what flies in San Diego might get you fined in Santa Monica. Then there's the tax question. Platforms collect state lodging taxes automatically, but many local taxes are still your responsibility to remit. Documentation matters when audits come knocking. The broader trend is clear. 2025 saw more states tighten platform accountability. Louisiana now requires Airbnb and Vrbo to collect and remit sales tax as accommodation intermediaries. New York counties are building registries with detailed booking data requirements. Here's what I'm seeing with STR operators who stay ahead of this: they're using AI to handle the communication burden that compliance creates. Automated guest messaging about local quiet hours, occupancy limits, parking rules. Compliance gets you legal. Automation gets you sane. The operators who survive 2026 won't be the ones who ignored the regulatory shift. They'll be the ones who got compliant and then freed themselves from the operational weight of staying that way. Is your STR portfolio ready for January audits? And more importantly, is your communication system ready to support the guest experience while you focus on the business side? If you're curious what AI-assisted guest communication looks like for STR operators, I'm happy to walk through it. Drop a comment or send me a DM.

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Building a startup is hard. It is especially hard in a country like Nigeria, where the ecosystem is yet to mature, and there are still many challenges to navigate. It is confusing, lonely, and full of uncertain decisions. Founders, especially early-stage founders, need as much support as they can get. Not “inspire to perspire” posts, but practical support on hiring, operations, funding, customer research, and navigating the regulatory landscape. Too many founders are surrounded by noise, surface-level advice, and generic content that does not reflect their current realities. What they need is a community that understands exactly what they are going through and can offer context that is immediately useful. Sierra Collective exists to be that community. A space where founders learn from one another’s live experiences and shorten the painful trial and error that usually defines the early stages of building. At Sierra, we believe that the most valuable support comes from those who are active in the trenches, navigating the same obstacles. If you are an early-stage founder, you should join the Sierra Collective. You do not have to figure everything out alone. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Join Sierra: https://lnkd.in/d-Nzmtkq

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When VCs start encouraging founders to build factories, you know the industry is changing. Fast. In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from multiple VCs who are open to founders building their own factories in the U.S. They believe it will be a real differentiator and a competitive advantage. Just a few years ago, building domestically was a non-starter; China was the default for scale and expertise. Also, multiple startups are building and expanding manufacturing capacity. This is a big shift and the early sign of manufacturing capacity returning to the U.S. But before this becomes reality, operations teams (especially in electronics manufacturing) will face constant geopolitical change. They will need to rebuild their supply chains multiple times in the next few years. Teams will also have to adapt to various strategies of  1) Near-shoring. 2) friend-shoring. 3) On-shoring No matter the strategy, the common theme is change and if your teams are designing and running production planning and operations design in Excel, you are in for a tough ride. One way to adapt quickly is to strengthen your foundations in industrial engineering. Build a clean data platform that runs your day-to-day operations with your contract manufacturing partners. When you own the data and it’s automatically labeled you gain speed, accuracy, and control. Teams that invest in fundamentals will be the ones ready to adapt to the changes. Are your teams preparing for this kind of change as well? I’d love to hear your perspective.

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We at Blitzscaling Ventures are proud to invest in Atrios, an a16z portfolio company where we saw CEO Taylor Offer demo the product at the a16z Speedrun Demo Day. Atrios is an AI-powered network intelligence platform that maps who knows who and makes those relationships actionable for go-to-market teams. How it works: -Tech vendors can post offers and specify the types of roles they want to connect with. -Connectors (often founders, VCs, business development professionals between roles, or highly connected individuals) can peruse the offerings and choose the best fits. -The connectors reach out to their prospects for a mutually agreed-upon introduction. -The tech vendor gets a qualified, warm intro to a lead. The connector gets compensated. The business decision-maker accelerates their decision-making process. -All three parties benefit: the vendor, the connector, and the business decision-maker, which is why the company is cleverly called “A-Trios,” Atrios. And yes, Taylor Offer that's his actual given name, perfect for using AI for modern business development. Link to our post in comments

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