Amit Fulay

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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🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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Grateful for the warm welcome from the teams at Catalyst Brands LLC and their openness to share, learn, and collaborate. One month in, I’m diving into platform modernization -building scalable, resilient, and data-driven capabilities that boost speed, reliability, and customer experience. Strengthening our digital foundation isn’t just about technology — it’s about creating real impact for our customers. Excited for what’s ahead and always happy to connect with others shaping modernization and AI-powered digital transformation — feel free to DM me!

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🌿 A Cup of Yogurt Business grows strongest when it’s built on trust and shared ownership. What Chobani Yogurt Taught Me About Leadership: Hamdi Ulukaya, a Kurdish immigrant to the U.S., bought a defunct yogurt plant in 2005. Within a few years, he built Chobani into America’s #1 Greek yogurt brand, not just through product innovation, but a philosophy of trust and shared prosperity. 🔹 Gave 10% of company shares to employees, recognizing their role in success 🔹 Created jobs for refugees and immigrants, embedding inclusivity in the company’s DNA 🔹 Built a brand around “Better food for more people”, proving that business can serve both profit and purpose He built a movement by giving power away (instead of consolidating control), enabling trust, co-ownership of success, and global appeal. ☕️ Lesson: True entrepreneurship isn’t about hoarding control. It’s about sharing success, building trust, and creating community impact. 🖊 Better Food. Better Leadership. #Leadership #SharedOwnership #TrustFirst #Entrepreneurship #StartupEssential #Moat #Brand

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I recently had the pleasure of hosting a fireside chat with Mamoon Hamid in Glean's SF office. We had an energizing conversation about what it takes to build an enduring company in this era of AI. I asked Glean to summarize the key takeaways with a simple prompt. Glean's retrieval instantly found the transcript in our systems and did an awesome job summarizing the key takeaways. Pasting it below. 1) We are operating in truly unprecedented times for AI—massive opportunity naturally attracts intense competition. The work is chaotic because the moment is big. 2) Externally, Glean is viewed among a small set of AI applications delivering real enterprise value. Internally, we keep our heads down and focus on what’s next. 3) Hypergrowth stresses the org: the toughest challenge is the unnatural pace of hiring and enablement (from ~15 people to hundreds+); investing in onboarding, values, and training is essential. 4) In hypergrowth, the best leaders provide an invisible steady hand—don’t overreact to every competitor move; stay anchored to a clear arc of progress and narrative. 5) For younger employees, experiences gained now are comparable to working through the first internet wave and can be parlayed into decades of career growth. Treat this opportunity as a rare, career-defining window during this unique moment. 6) Our near‑term focus: be the most reliable partner helping customers get more done per employee. The long‑term ambition: become the AI coworker for everything at work. Thank you Mamoon Hamid for everything that you do for Glean! We are lucky to have you in our corner.

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We didn't set out to build a blog product. When Ali Yazdi and I relaunched a2 analytics, LLC 16 months ago as an #AI content company, we had one focus: helping national service brands tell local stories at scale through content that actually drives growth. That led us to our #programmatic geo pages product. Pages grounded in first-party data, local reviews, real pricing data, and third-party insights like weather. Pages with unique, compelling content that deserved to rank. That product works. We're proud of it. But sometime in the second half of last year, a pattern kept showing up in partner conversations. Ali started sketching a new idea over the summer. At the same time, I kept thinking back to my own experience running revenue for a large review site. Even with strong teams and real resources, content creation always hit the same wall. Great content requires a village: writers, editors, #SEO, engineering, legal, brand, design. And even with all of that, teams eventually had to choose: Do we create new content, or maintain what's already working? Both matter. There are just real trade-offs at scale. Over time, content can become Frankenstein's monster. Layers of edits from different eras, different owners, and different priorities. The maintenance cost adds up. So does the opportunity cost. We heard the same frustration from partners. And we saw agencies producing flat blog #content that didn't perform, didn't refresh, and didn't reflect the quality of the brand behind it. The real push came in Q4 last year. A partner came to us needing +15,000 pages of content. A full site build from scratch, including over 300 pieces of blog content alongside a large programmatic rollout. The scope was real. Doing it the traditional way wasn't going to work. Ali had a vision: not AI that writes content, but an AI product that orchestrates content creation. #AIAgents designed to play the roles of the village. Working together and improving over time. We built. We tinkered. We had a break through. That product is called Forge. Forge is custom to each partner: voice, #design, elements, structure. It blends your team’s unique insight with AI workflows so teams can ship faster without lowering the bar. Content that improves over time, not content that decays. It's already powering expanded programs with a few early partners, and we're taking it live with several new teams this quarter. The product will continue to improve, and the early results are encouraging. The internet doesn't need more content. It needs better content. We're trying to help with that.

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This a seductive idea; that organization's context fragments, decision logic gets lost, and an organization is prone to tackle collective amnesia. BUT this comes with a lot of caveats!! - MONOCULTURE: When one system becomes the authoritative interpreter of "why things are the way they are", it will collapse pluralism. An organization actually benefits from various "contested memories". An engineer and sales guy remember different things from a discussion and that helps. Employees can stop arguing with the system not because its correct but its "coherent". - OBSERVER's EFFECT: When people know that the reasoning within systems is being captured, they will change what gets recorded. The negotiations will become "safer" and will contaminate raw signals. - CENTRALIZATION: Interpretation gets centralized upwards. It may appear leadership or executives are gaining synthesis and becoming closer to the ground. But there is no comparison to living through the frictions, not even eclectic summaries. LEADERSHIP MUSCLE NEEDS TO PRACTICE LIVING THROUGH FRICTION OTHERWISE IT WILL TURN SENILE. - BIAS AMPLIFICATION: Model's inbuilt biases can combine with company's cultural quirks resulting in misinterpretations and distortions, worse they get reinforced over time. System will learn how the company thinks and then will optimize for continuity. AMNESIA IS SOMETIME A FEATURE. - SEMANTIC TRUTHS: Unlike objective truths this system will play on subjectivity and will build "causal" relationships that are based on semantics. This over time can form mythical decision norms with no external validity. The real question isn't "CAN IT BE BUILT?". Of course it can be. But "HOW IT SHOULD BE POSITIONSED". #llms #leadership #ai

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Today we announced new capabilities for our Shop Direct and Buy for Me experiences on Amazon, enabling now feeds to facilitate external merchants to list reliably their product listings and reach millions of Amazon customers. Excited on this feature, that is a win/win experience for customers, merchants and brands. Excited to be part of such important project.

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A peak behind the curtain on the product side from our CTO Dan Pettay. Check out our AI reporting, the development process and what we enjoy when it comes to working with our partners.

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