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Top pick: "The Rise of the Automation Engineer" by Jake Serval, recommended by Aaron Levie
What it argues: In the essay, Serval says building automation is now easy. What's still hard is knowing what to automate and embedding it in a company with "real people, real politics, and real processes." That gap calls for a new role: someone who sits with a team and builds what it needs . His main example is SeatGeek. He says 40% of its IT requests were resolved automatically within three weeks. The staff who used to handle those tickets were moved into Customer Support, Tech Compliance and Legal to build automations there . One caveat: Serval is recruiting for these roles himself, and the essay ends with "my inbox is open" .
Levie's reason: He says most enterprises he talks to are putting internal FDEs (forward-deployed engineers) into their departments. The job takes technical skill, AI knowledge and an understanding of workflows, and "there's no shortcut" to that combination. He sees it as a new function that will create "a ton of new roles." His advice: "If you have software skills and are diving into AI, this is an area to go deep on" .
Patrick O'Shaughnessy: Colossus's profile of David Vélez
O'Shaughnessy called Vélez "one of the best CEOs out there today" and the piece "a great profile about him and the Nubank story" . Gabi Imarques (@gabi_imarques) wrote the profile. She spent time with Vélez in São Paulo and in Miami, where Nubank is starting its push into the US. The piece covers his childhood in Medellín during the war with Pablo Escobar .
Other picks
- "Om Malik, last humanist" by Alexia (@alexia), recommended by Matt Mullenweg. He called it an "Amazing post" honoring Om Malik. He said he hopes it inspires more people to write and that it inspired him, though he's "working through some work stuff first" .
- Financial Audit Bench from the ModusAudit Labs team, recommended by Garry Tan. The release calls it a paper by the Modus team . Tan's takeaway: it's an open-source test of whether AI can do "actual junior-auditor work, not just answer accounting questions." He added that "every job in the world will end up having eval benchmarks like this" .
- A breakdown of Brandon Flowers's "An American Dream" by @SportsGuyRyan, recommended by Scott Belsky. Belsky said he loved the breakdown and called the song Flowers's "new masterpiece," without giving more of a reason . The author reads the song as an allegory for "life as a modern Christian" in a world chasing other things .
- "Ether" by Nas, named by Ben Horowitz. On his VxV episode, Horowitz was asked what lyric he thinks of when he has to keep going at his lowest. He picked "Ether," because Nas released it "at his lowest," after Jay-Z's "Takeover." What he takes from it: "When you think I'm dead, I'm going to come out with ether" .
- Alone, recommended by Guillermo Rauch. At the end of the RE:moat podcast, Rauch said he's "a huge fan" of the survival TV show. He called one recent winner from Slovenia "so cracked" .
- Fei-Fei Li's book, praised on 20VC x SaaStr. While discussing AMD's $8.2B purchase of World Labs, one panelist said: "I love her book if you read it. Very moving book about being an immigrant to the US" . The transcript names neither the speaker nor the book.
- Ben Horowitz names Nas’s “Ether” as the track that comes to mind when he needs to keep going, connecting its “left me for dead” comeback framing to emerging when others think you are finished.
- Horowitz recalls sending recordings of DJ Red Alert and Chuck Shell to a friend who had been blinded in a gun accident, believing hip-hop’s self-affirming attitude could give him a needed lift; he later learned the friend was talking again and focused on hip-hop.
- Brian Chesky recommends YouTube as a resource for learning AI and getting started with tools such as Claude Code; after describing how an employee tutored him when he felt intimidated, he suggests asking someone more knowledgeable or using YouTube, then simply starting.
- Chesky endorses the maxim “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas,” which he attributes tentatively to “maybe” chemist Linus Pauling; his takeaway is to generate ideas through high output and repetition.
A 20VC panelist praised Fei-Fei Li’s book, calling it a moving account of being an immigrant to the U.S.; the book’s title was not stated.
Scott Belsky praised @SportsGuyRyan’s breakdown of Brandon Flowers’s “An American Dream,” calling the song Flowers’s “new masterpiece”; Belsky said he loved the breakdown but gave no more specific reason. The linked essay interprets the song as an allegory about modern Christian life, worldly success and temptation, and hope through faith; it contrasts material success with spiritual peace. Read the breakdown.
In his closing remarks, Guillermo Rauch said he was a “huge fan” of Alone, describing it as a survival TV show; he praised a recent winner from Slovenia as “so cracked.”
@patrick_oshag recommended Colossus’s profile of David Vélez and Nubank, calling Vélez “one of the best CEOs out there today” and the profile “great.” The profile is by Gabi Imarques: David Vélez and Nubank.
Brian Armstrong praised Atelier Missor’s X post as an inspiring example of “unique company culture” . The post announces completion of a Prometheus statue and says the group plans to begin building a new city in a few months .
Jason Lemkin promoted the return of a linked YouTube video with “We’re back!!” and pointed readers to Harry Stebbings’ post: YouTube video and Harry’s post. In the linked post, Harry Stebbings describes a weekly podcast covering major tech news with analysis while leaving politics and ego aside, and calls it the only show listeners need each week.
Jason Lemkin endorsed a linked MTS Live video featuring MongoDB interim CEO @dittycheria discussing hiring, replying “+99.” He says he loves hiring sales reps from the #3 competitor who exceeded quota because they had to work much harder than reps at #1 and #2. MTS Live post.
Garry Tan endorsed Modus’s open-source Financial Audit Bench, which tests whether AI can perform actual junior-auditor work rather than merely answer accounting questions; the release is identified as a paper written by the ModusAudit Labs team. He said every job will eventually have evaluation benchmarks like it and linked to the release announcement.
Jason Lemkin recommended a YouTube episode of 20VC x SaaStr, featuring Benchmark’s @jaltma alongside Harry Stebbings, @rodriscoll, and Lemkin, discussing a turbulent week in venture; the listed takeaways cover investment pace and round sizes, acquisitions, inference and open-weight models, AI task costs, and talent movement. He directed readers to the episode here: YouTube.
Guillermo Rauch praised the e2e agentic-testing framework introduced by @o_kwasniewski, saying its mix of deterministic and agentic tests “looks great”; he called verification engineering—proofs, end-to-end tests, benchmarks and linters—the future. The linked e2e project is described as fully open source and supporting web and mobile apps.
Jason Lemkin promoted a new 20VC x SaaStr item, “Anthropic’s S-1 Leaks...,” linking to the piece. He highlighted $4.6B in revenue, $8B in losses, and $518B in compute deals, then called it a “Wild week” and noted Instinct hit $10B in 33 days.
Aaron Levie shared Jake Serval’s “The Rise of the Automation Engineer” and endorsed its Automation Engineer thesis, advising software-skilled people entering AI to go deep in the area. He highlights that the work combines technical and AI expertise with understanding enterprise workflows, with no shortcut to that combination.
Matt Mullenweg praised Alexia’s post honoring Om Malik, “Om Malik, last humanist” (post), calling it “Amazing.” He hoped it would inspire more people to write and said it inspired him too, though work was keeping him from writing at the time.