Sam Daoud

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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Today at Rumi Labs, Inc. we launched our Desktop App, running our proprietary SOTA edge VLM optimized for understanding complex multi-modal narratives. This makes Rumi the 1st-ever distributed Vision-Language Model network for Media in production. If you want to help build the Narrative Intelligence Layer for AI, download the Rumi extension at http://rumi.io

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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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Very fascinating summary by Juozas Kaziukėnas - while ChatGPT and other Agentic models have changed our industry, I do think we need to be wary of the narrative that every online behavior will pivot to a chat based user interaction. Ultimately as product and design leaders, it’s even more imperative than ever before that we truly understand our customers, their pain points and develop solutions that solve THEIR actual problems. There are a lot of compelling agentic use-cases, don’t think the way OpenAI executed here was the most compelling. Looking forward to seeing what sticks as we keep iterating and learning from our customers.

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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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Excited to share my conversation with Marc Baselga and Ben Erez on the Supra Insider podcast. We went deep on one of the biggest shifts happening in product leadership right now: why many experienced PMs and product execs are returning to individual contributor (IC) roles in the AI era, and why that’s not a step back, but a strategic leap forward. Other topics we discussed: -- Why the leverage equation has changed—and how managing AI agents now rivals managing people -- The critical importance of hands-on credibility in AI-native companies -- Why great PMs in the future will blend product, design, analytics, and frontend execution -- What it takes to deliver real customer outcomes (not just launch features) -- How to evaluate breakout companies—and what founders often get wrong when hiring product leaders I also shared my thoughts on: -- Joining the right company: mission, trajectory, talent density, and founder courage -- Crushing it as a “super IC”: the power of speed, ownership, and infectious energy -- Transitioning from product leader to GM or founder with the right mindset If you’re navigating your next chapter in product (or just trying to stay sharp in the AI-native world), I hope you’ll find this useful. Episode links: Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gK48PFWK Apple: https://lnkd.in/gmT265BY YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gtr4RAKd Substack: https://lnkd.in/gM38FSWc

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Very soon, Commerce merchants on any e-commerce platform (e.g. BigCommerce) will be able to drive discovery and sell directly across Google's surfaces like Google AI Mode and the Gemini app. Agentic commerce is here and Commerce is perfectly positioned to help merchants sell more on Google's Agentic channels. For years, Feedonomics has been sending quality catalog data to Google Merchant Center, which is a core enabler of UCP. BigCommerce has been at the table with Google providing feedback on the UCP design, sharing the commerce expertise to help drive better discovery and conversion across Google's surfaces. You can see Commerce is becoming the commerce later for the agent economy. Thank you to Samantha Kahn, Aatish Motwani and the Product, Engineering and Marketing teams at Google Shopping for the collaboration and partnership. Commerce is changing. Sharon Gee Tom Arbesser-Rastburg David Chin David Aland Luke Eller Patrick Edelman Kushal Khatri Adam W. Nick Kostohryz Michaela Weber Matt Crawford Keith Karlick

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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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Mark William Lewis from Netalico Commerce lays out the case clearly: Agentic Commerce isn’t a 2027 problem—it’s a 2026 priority. Product data is now the front door for AI discovery, not a backend hygiene task. I couldn’t agree more and why fabric built Product Agent. Great post, Mark.

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