Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the Sky Lounge. It’s a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen and we get their stories. If you could like and subscribe, it really helps us get our message out.

Today’s guest in the Sky Lounge, Jeff Hanie. Hey, Jeff. How are you?

Jeff Hanie:

How are you doing, Todd?

Todd Merrill:

Hey, it’s been a long time.

Jeff Hanie:

It’s been a while.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So, Jeff, who are you and what are you working on?

Jeff Hanie:

Who am I? I guess I would describe myself as a serial entrepreneur, a technologist, and an innovator. I’m working on a new company, one of many, but yet another company that I started recently about seven weeks ago. I’m working on this intersection of software intelligent agents or AI agents and human ingenuity and how do you blend those two things together and create a platform, a cloud platform for running and executing these really interesting agents.

Todd Merrill:

Very cool. We’ll definitely get to AI and agents and your thoughts on that. But the first thing you said that was really cool and why I love talking to you is you’re a repeat serial entrepreneur. So, you definitely got that disease, right?

Jeff Hanie:

I do. Yeah, I keep doing it over and over and over. That’s the definition of sanity, I think.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So when I met you, you were getting Appcelerator going, which you were one of the first people to kind of get your mind around JavaScript back when it was really janky and weird and needed some wrangling. You all figured out how to write once and deploy everywhere. You want to tell us a story about Appcelerator? I mean, that was a pretty cool company.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah. Appcelerator was my third venture-backed startup and I started actually in Atlanta. I had a company in Atlanta called Vocalocity. It was a telecom company and we were sort of trying to do web technology for telephony and this thing called VoiceXML and CCXML and things like that. So it was a similar concept. We ended up at that exit. After that exit, me and another engineer wanted to work on mobile-type things and the iPhone hadn’t yet come out. But we were, you know, the technology called AJAX or some kind of a pattern, not really a technology, it was starting to get really big. This is 2006.

And so these kinds of web 2.0 apps now, that’s what they were being called back then, where Gmail had just come out and people were trying to figure out how to do more dynamic applications on the web on the browser. JavaScript was very, like you said, janky. It was only in the browser. It was very light, light stuff. And we started this thing called Appcelerator and created this product called Titanium because we were trying to build an app.

We actually got access to the App Store through a customer, or not the App Store, but the SDK that Apple was going to eventually come out with. We were trying to build an app and we were running into this Objective-C and trying to figure out. And we had done a bunch of C++ and Java. So, we were somewhat familiar, but we were like, you know, this has got to be a web way to do this and could we apply JavaScript? And we came up with this idea that we created this open-source runtime where we could take JavaScript which, up until that time, had been in the browser, and can we bring it to the server and make it a client technology and sort of a client from a mobile browser and then also on the server, which was still… Node hadn’t come out yet, or any of those things hadn’t even become a thing yet. And that’s how it started.

It was like can we leverage all this web technology, all these web developers, millions of web developers in the world, instead of doing C++ and Objective-C and Java and all these things? Can we leverage all that? And it just took us a while, took us a few years to sort of get the technology where we could transpile JavaScript down to native code and then execute it on a small iOS device, Android device, etc. And that’s how Titanium was born, which was an open-source project that became really popular. It was a predecessor to things like React or React Native today, but it was a much longer predecessor.

And through that and through a bunch of things, I eventually moved to Mountain View, California. Right when we started the company from Atlanta, I had gotten very involved in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and a bunch of companies and individuals at that time that were working on a lot of different areas of Node and browser.

We acquired a company called Aptana, and they were doing some stuff on the server side and had a bunch of patents. And so we just had a group of people, and we all just worked on this Titanium thing and built this technology, and it became pretty big. Honestly, it got really, really big. When we sold, I think we were over a million developers in our ecosystem. And I think it was 150-200,000 apps in the App Store that were built on our platform, a billion downloads. So, it was a pretty big footprint. And we learned a lot. We made a lot of mistakes. It’s a 10-year journey, raised quite a lot of money to execute that vision. And today, it’s very normal. This is a very normal ecosystem, TypeScript and JavaScript dominate the world, but that wasn’t clear in 2006-2007.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, I was still thinking about it. I haven’t worked on it. I mean, back then, it was like, Adobe had a thing that you had to build, and there were like Java craplets or applets.

Jeff Hanie:

Applets

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Java, Java, right?

Jeff Hanie:

Java, Java, real Java.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah. Heavyweight. And then none of that was great. And I’m just going, Oh, God, I’m so glad we don’t have to deal with all that stuff now. Yeah. So, standing on the shoulders of giants, who you are right here. It’s a time gone by, but it’s an important work foundationally. And I’ve kept up with that whole lineage. Was it Cordova, PhoneGap, and then Ionic had a run at it for a minute, and then I’m not sure what it is today or where things are going.

Jeff Hanie:

I would say it’s kind of React Native or Swift or Kotlin if you’re kind of still in the native world. I think that’s kind of the sure. I think React Native still is, for most apps, not all apps, you’re building a heavyweight gaming. You’re not going to use a game for the studio product like Unity. But yeah, for most applications, React Native is pretty good, actually. It wasn’t as good as Titanium, in our opinion. Obviously, Titanium had a kind of an end-of-life after we got acquired. They tried for a couple, two or three years to kind of continue it on the company that acquired us, Axway. But like a lot of technologies, the soul of the technology moves on, and the world kind of moves on. And it’s kind of hard to kind of continue to invest.

Todd Merrill:

Remind me, I think you guys were on that moving map in the intro sequence to Silicon Valley at one point. You had your pin.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah, the whole time. The whole time. It’s a funny story. It was the second season. It was when it came out. The first season, it wasn’t there. But the second season, all the way to the finale, I think at the time, we were the only private company on the map, on the opening scene. And we get questions all the time, like, did we pay for that? And it’s like, I tell people, no. I think it’s just someone in our community. I never found out. They never reached out to us. We were involved in a separate series on Bravo called Silicon Valley also. And so we’re not sure. I mean, they’re not related because they’re different producers and writers. But it was a Silicon Valley thing. I’m not sure how it happened. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty cool lore. So, when you go back and watch it.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. And then for you, it’s every day, Hey, we’re grinding. Oh, by the way, you’re on TV. Oh, that’s cool.

Jeff Hanie:

Exactly

Todd Merrill:

Back to grinding. Right?

Jeff Hanie:

Exactly

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. You kind of sometimes don’t appreciate that until you’re out of the mix.

Jeff Hanie:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And then so you’re in Mountain View, like in the thick of it, when a lot of really cool things are coming online. Maybe talk about what’s that like? Tell us the story, Grandpa, about raising money in the heyday of Silicon Valley when the web was getting going. And what is that like, you know, West Coast versus probably the rest of the country for fundraising?

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah. And not to open sore wounds, but you know, I had sort of moved from Atlanta. I’d done a couple of venture-backed Silicon Valley startups in Atlanta and just sort of grown frustrated. I think I just talked to a number.

I’ve been out to Silicon Valley a lot and visiting and board meetings and meeting with my investors. And I think, at one point, one of my investor friends was like, I won’t say who it is, very famous VC. But he just said, you need to move to Silicon Valley. It just makes no sense while you’re in Atlanta, and so he really weighed on me. And I’d already had, prior to that, a decade of challenges, trying to raise money and build a company and get support systems and the employees and all that. And so, yeah, I just sort of up and moved.

Me and my co-founder just uprooted our family one day after a long trip to Silicon Valley. And we just said, fuck this, we’re going to move from Atlanta, we’re just going to move. I think at the time, I just had my second child and we’d only been married a few years. And my co-founder, they had just gotten married, I think, literally that year or maybe right before then. And so it was sort of like, we just packed up and moved on a whim. And we raised money. You know, to be fair, we had just raised the Series A. Back then, Series A was the seed round. They weren’t really seed rounds. We called them angel rounds. And they were small checks, not massive checks that you see today.

So, it was like, we just raised a little bit of money. We had this Titanium thing that we hadn’t caught fire yet, but we had a really decent idea of what we wanted to go do. We moved our family to Mountain View, and that was 2007. And then the 2008 crash happened.

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm

Jeff Hanie:

And that was a scary time, even in the Bay Area and the Valley, it was a kind of scary time. We were lucky. We had just raised a bunch of money and we were heads down in founder mode and we were building Titanium. So in some ways, we were kind of immune to all the issues that were happening. And then, I would say the Bay Area probably bounced back faster. It sort of has this like a swing factor. I think that things happen way faster there, the bad and the good. And maybe they reverberate for the rest of the world, maybe a little slower, if you will. But at least that was my experience.

And then, yeah, 2008, as we moved into 2009, we were on a roll. We launched Titanium at the first WWDC with Apple. Our community was starting to really build. We started getting lots of excitement and interest in the Bay Area from people we were meeting. We didn’t know anybody at the time. I mean, we had some VCs that we knew, but we didn’t have a network. So, we started building a network. And that was, I would say, a bit of a go-go period. I think 2008, prior to the pandemic, it was a fun place to be. There was a lot of innovation and a lot of really, really smart people.

Y Combinator was just down the street. And there was just a lot. The Collison Brothers just started Stripe. I mean, there’s all the who’s-whose names of companies today that everybody knows. But back then, they were just founders like any other founder and everybody.

The Bay Area is a small place, honestly. Not just physically a small place, but it’s a really relatively small place of much like a lot of cities. Atlanta is a pretty small community. Everybody knows everybody. And I’d say the Bay Area is a similar place. Silicon Valley, there’s a lot more success there. So, you get the extremes, I think, there. You can run into someone that just is a normal person when you meet them, and you just start talking to them. And then you find out they were a founder that sold their company for a billion dollars or something. And you just don’t. You run into them and you have a conversation. It’s just a normal person. You would expect it to be different, but it’s not. It’s just a normal sort of circumstance. So I had a really great… I was there for about 11 years. I had a phenomenal opportunity to just meet who’s who of the world and technology, and it’s a really special place.

I ended up moving just before COVID to Austin. I tend to not like to stay in a place more than 10 to 11, 12 years. I don’t know why. It’s just an itch, I guess, much like starting a company. It’s sort of an itch. I like to be in different places. I live all over the world. So yeah, it’s a cool place. It’s a really interesting place. Like I said, it’s a really small place as big as it is as crazy as it is. It’s a really small place. It’s kind of easy when you’re in that when you’re there to meet people. It’s actually pretty easy. I think when you’re outside of the Bay Area, like my experience now living both in and out multiple times, it’s a bit harder, probably. Although the world, going online has made it a little bit easier, I think. But yeah, it’s a pretty cool place. It’s a unique place.

Todd Merrill:

So, you’re in Austin now. Okay. So, in Austin, you’re kind of a trendsetter is the thing I’m picking up on here. But Austin has a cool culture, right? And then South by Southwest, right, is over there. And a lot of tech is moving. I think Elon Musk, you know, came in.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Really smart people.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah. Joe Lonsdale is here now. The ABC guys are here. I mean, a ton of Silicon Valley has moved here. And there’s a ton of, like you said, big tech. I mean, Cloudflare has got a huge presence here. Mongo has a huge presence here. It’s a big second city to Silicon Valley or New York, I think, as a tech hub. I think Facebook is huge here. Google is huge here. So, you’ve got the bigger, mature anchor companies that have big presences here. And so that brings, obviously, a lot of supporting technology. And it’s a really easy gateway.

Southwest has a really nice flight that goes back and forth. We call it the Tesla flight. There’s a really easy commuting flight to San Jose that happens a couple of times a day. It’s kind of easy to kind of get back and forth. And yeah, it’s a really nice, cool place. And it has a bunch of things that maybe I would say Silicon Valley doesn’t have. It has, like you said, the music culture is really big here. The food culture is really big here. It’s got F1. So, it’s like a whole other sort of world. It’s really interesting and fun. And so, yeah, it’s a pretty neat place.

Todd Merrill:

Well, I feel like the Silicon Valley that was in the dot-com era and then the early 2000s, that was really special. Go, go, go, go, go. A lot of really cool companies got in, got founded, got big. And then you had a full-on wave, the Stripes of the world. Do you feel like Austin is on that same trajectory right now? Does it feel like those early days? It’s definitely on the ascendancy. And we’re going to see some really cool things come out of Austin organically.

Jeff Hanie:

I think so. I think that people underestimate… The Bay Area is a really interesting and special place. I’ve sort of seen the good and the bad. So, I’m not like a converted religious zealot about Silicon Valley. Obviously, I’ve lived in multiple cities. But it’s a really special place because it’s got a confluence of capital. It’s got a confluence of really, really smart innovators and risk-takers. And it’s got a lot of what’s missing. A lot of people talk about founders, and they talk about investors. And those are very important, obviously, parts of the ecosystem. But I’d say the other two pieces that it has that a lot of other cities don’t have, even when they have capital and founders, it’s got a support staff of people that come and work at these companies.

They’re not the founders, but they’re the first 100, 200, 300 employees that moved from these different companies and took all this knowledge and experience into these startups and helped them grow. And then it’s got service providers, honestly. And again, sometimes we maybe pooh-pooh lawyers and accountants and all those types of people. But they’re a really important part of the ecosystem, especially the ones that understand how to take a small idea to a growth startup IPO, public company, world domination, whatever. And there’s not a lot of those outside of Silicon Valley.

Again, it’s not to denigrate great work being done all over the world. But there’s a special lexicon, a special language, a special way and process that these companies get built. Capital, obviously, is part of that. And clearly, the founder and their idea and their vision is clearly the important part of that ingredient, but I wouldn’t discount all the other stuff. And I didn’t appreciate that as much. I thought these other cities were about lack of capital.

Access to capital is the problem. And sure, that’s true. But also like, that first or second engineer that you hire, or that first or second marketer that you hire… I mean, I’d say Accelerator… I give as much credit to Scott Schwarzhoff, who was our first Chief Marketing Officer, VP of Marketing. I’d give him as much praise now over Craft Ventures. I think he’s still done some phenomenal stuff after Accelerator. But I give him as much credit.

He’d worked at startups before. He knew all kinds of stuff. He’d worked at Microsoft. He kind of knew how to do the marketing in a Silicon Valley way that I didn’t know when I moved there. And honestly, I give him as much credit for the growth and success of Accelerator and the brand that we created and all that. I mean, it was these people that we attracted and we had the opportunity, and those people were in Silicon Valley. They weren’t going to move, you know, and so I don’t know.

So again, what’s happening after COVID, I think, or maybe I’d say before COVID, with COVID, maybe a better way of saying it. What happened was it gave permission for a lot of people to leave the Bay Area because they had to, right? And then once they were able to leave and life went on. I don’t mean life and the personal stuff because, in a lot of cases, that got enhanced for a lot of people, myself included.

Moving to Austin was a huge quality of life improvement in every way for my family and me and quality of life. But also, just the digital professional life, the Silicon Valley life that you live in. And I’ve talked to people that were in New York and moved to Miami and other places as well. And it’s a similar thing, right? It’s like life just went on. Even a lot of the Sand Hill Road VCs in Silicon Valley moved out or moved to San Francisco or took the advantage. And so once that happened, I think a lot of things kind of opened up. And a lot of people that I know that said they would never leave the Bay Area have left now, which I think is an interesting trend. I do think you’re going to continue to see some repatriation back to the Bay Area with AI. I’m getting a little thumbnail on that because there are a lot of really great people and there’s a lot of really great stuff happening right now.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Jeff Hanie:

And you can’t discount people that are adjacent and the proximity of talent, even talent that’s not necessarily working together, but working on similar things. I don’t think we could have ever built Titanium the way we ended up building it. Not that we had to be in the Bay Area necessarily. But I think the way we ended up building it because of all the smart people, not just at Appcelerator, but all the ecosystem around us, all doing similar things and meeting and talking and all those, I don’t think we could have done it if we weren’t there at the time.

Todd Merrill:

I was at Ciena right around Y2K. We bought a couple of different companies. I think we bought three companies in the Bay Area. So, I got to go out there a lot and participate in the culture, and I think it really is the little things. So let me bounce something off you. So, one of the things I thought that was really cool is when you have a need, like the culture, the community helps you find, helps steer you toward that. Hey, I need a JavaScript engineer. Hey, I need a lawyer. Hey, I need a founder. Hey, I need an investor. And then you get… You just mentioned, Hey, I need… And then also now you got like five phone calls tonight, two lunches tomorrow that are going to happen. To me, that’s a unique part of the spice. And then hopefully that culture transplant, you know, will contain… As people come in and out of that culture, and then go back to their respective hometowns, or wherever it is they go next, like you did. I think you take a little bit of that with you, right?

Jeff Hanie:

That’s correct. It’s hard to explain to people that haven’t been inside of it, but while everybody’s fiercely competitive, it’s more cooptation because even people that are fiercely competitive probably know each other pretty well, and probably share ideas and trade employees, and all kinds of innovation. It’s an interesting place where you just never know the person that you’re working with, what they’re going to do. And a lot has changed in some years, I hear. But at least while I was there, it was an extreme form of meritocracy in a lot of ways, just didn’t care. People just didn’t care.

My co-founder, Nolan, used to see Mark Zuckerberg back in those days. He lived literally like two streets over from Mark when they were in Palo Alto. And he walked by every single day. And you’d see Steve Jobs at the Coupa Cafe or, you know, back in those days, it was not an insular place in some ways at all. People were very accessible. And like trading of information, and everybody helping each other out. And even, like I said, competitor. It was just…Yeah, of course, you’re competing. We always thought that was… Everybody has a better mousetrap than the next person. But it’s just different. I’d say in other cities, it’s a little bit like, oh, you’re doing this. I can’t tell you anything about what I’m working on. It’s like, well, everybody knows everybody. 

My wife used to run a women’s exercise studio at Los Altos, and in the middle of a lot of this stuff. And she’d come home and say, “I saw so and so and her husband, if you remember, is the VC.” And he’s going to talk to you at the game on Saturday. It’s just a very… Partly why I left too, honestly, because after a while, it gets old. Everything is just… it’s a mono. Everything is about the next thing, and the next fundraise, and the next whatever. And that sometimes can get old a little bit.

And Austin is less about tech, as much as tech’s big here. It’s the smallest part of Austin, I’d say, in a lot of ways. So, there’s a lot more diversity and other things. I got tired of always talking about my startup, and always being compared to the next cool founder thing that was happening. And it gets a little old too.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well, tell me the end of the story of Accelerator Titanium. So, you had, obviously, a lot of success. At some point, you decide, okay. Did you get an offer? Did you decide to sell? How does that conversation work? Tell us that story. What happened?

Jeff Hanie:

Another interesting thing. And again, this is probably part of the way it works, if you will, in the Bay Area. We got an offer to buy 2009. We’d only been less than a year old, a little bit less than a year old, or a year from our Series A, more accurate. We’d only been there about a year, a little bit more than a year. We started getting offers to buy the company. And again, it comes back down to everybody knowing everybody, and everybody knows everybody is working on to some degree. And you’re kind of like 1 or 2 degree separation from almost everyone. And I don’t think it’s a good thing. This is probably a lesson learned, but we early on started getting a lot of inquisitiveness from a lot of people, a lot of very well-known, big companies.

And partly, that’s how I built my network, frankly, with some amazing people. Just because all of a sudden, especially when you’re a hot kind of thing, everybody wants to know you. And it’s easy access. You were saying earlier, you’re always one call away. Oh, you need to meet someone. So, you need to be shot new over to Adobe. And then two days later, you’re sitting there, meeting these people and having conversations. And from my perspective, I was like, I’m not nobody. There are a billion companies here, but you’re doing important stuff. And you’re a little bit on the cutting edge. People want to meet you. And there’s a lot of interest, not just acquisitions. So, we started getting a lot of really early on.

So all along the life cycle of the 10-year company journey, every year, we were having lots of conversations. We were raising… That was also around every year. As a Silicon Valley, and certainly most VC-backed companies, not just Silicon Valley, but certainly in Silicon Valley, you’re raising money every year. It’s a track you’re on, if you will. It’s like moving to an academic program. It’s like, all right, you’re graduating now to year series B. And it’s about that time. It’s geared differently, and those are usually the times that you’re having conversations. It’s like, well, we’re having a fundraising event coming up. You’re always in that kind of conversation. At least we were.

What happened was a couple of years before we saw it, we started getting pretty…There were a couple of really serious… like we went pretty far at the distance with a couple of large, you know, I won’t name them now, but software companies that you would know by name. They ended soft and things like that. And so we started talking to these usual suspects in really serious ways, and they started getting really serious. And we were starting to go like, what’s the longevity of this? We were built… the company had gotten much larger. We’d raised a lot of money. Our problems got much more difficult. The problems started becoming like, how do you continue to monetize? How do you scale a sales team? We’d raised a bunch of money. And we were just having those very typical difficulties and going from a zero-revenue company to a much bigger revenue company. And I was spending all of my time traveling all over the world. And yeah, that’s interesting. Back to the interesting stories of travel. Back then, you had to be in front of people. That’s how you sold. I had to speak at conferences. There wasn’t a lot of Zoom. Zoom wasn’t a thing.

Literally, I was traveling a couple hundred days a year at the peak. And all over the world, we had offices. We had an office in Singapore. We had an office in China. We had an office in London. We had an office, obviously, in the Bay Area. We had an office in San Francisco. So yeah, we had a big thing in Brazil. So, I was traveling a lot. And so those kinds of confluence of lots of interest, harder to scale the company. New competitors were coming out.

Xamarin was a big competitor. It eventually got bought by Microsoft. A better fit than we were because they were C-sharp and a .NET kind of thing. We were JavaScript and open-source and that world. Yeah. So those conversations continued. We didn’t materialize them for a couple different reasons, but we continued to have lots of acquisitions. And then eventually, the summer, we sold… we announced the following spring in January, but the summer is when that all happened. We ended up hiring an investment banker because like, all right, this is going to probably get pretty serious. And that’s what happened.

The company that started the process ended up not getting the deal, and we ended up going to another company, but that was how it transpired. When we were 10 years in, we were tired. We weren’t sure how things were going to play out. We probably should have sold a couple of times before, honestly. It’d be really… The outcome was okay. People made money. But we could have probably had a better outcome if we’d sold maybe a year before.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, but you don’t know.

Jeff Hanie:

But you never know.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Jeff Hanie:

Life’s hard to look back and reverse.

Todd Merrill:

Right. So, it sounds like you’re very intentional. You kind of looked at your clock and said, Okay, it’s time.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

We did pretty good. Don’t want to go much past this growth point. And it’s time for somebody else to take it and do something bigger with it. And then, okay. So now you’re fat, dumb, and happy. You did your earnout, probably.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah, I did the earnout. Yeah, that was interesting.

Todd Merrill:

Okay. Yeah. And that’s always a weird time because it’s kind of your baby, but it’s kind of not your baby.

Jeff Hanie:

That’s right. That was very, very difficult for me.

Todd Merrill:

You’re in a weird broom closet type situation, you know where…

Jeff Hanie:

… well, and what was interesting is like, you know, I think every founder that sells has this issue. But it was extremely more difficult, I think, because we had a community that we also are worried about. So, it wasn’t just our customers, like the actual paying customers. It was also the larger community, which was very large and influential in a lot of ways that we were mostly worried about because we just knew without the community, there was nothing here. You can buy the assets and the people around the company. But if you don’t really take care of the community, then that can evaporate overnight. And that’s ultimately what happened in a couple of years.

Todd Merrill:

Oh geez. Well, okay. So now you did your earn out, and now you got a little bit of money. So, what goes through the mind of an entrepreneur? How bored did you get before you got itchy and jumped into something else?

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah, I started Pinpoint, which was a complete failure, but I acquired Axway because, you know, at that time, we were there a little less than a year, me and the co-founder. And we knew we were going to do another company, clearly. And we came up with the idea actually at this company, because we went from being a multi-hundred-person company to a multi-thousand-person company and we saw the same problems, but just at a much bigger scale about how efficient is R&D, and what’s going on with R&D, and how do we understand engineering productivity. And so I had openly talked to the CEO of the acquiring company about some of these problems. And I said, “Yeah, I think I’m gonna start a company around this.” And they were very gracious, honestly. They knew they weren’t going to keep us long. And so they were super gracious, and they were very helpful. They even offered to invest in the company and incubate it and whatever. And we were like we don’t really need that. We’re not getting anything from that. So, appreciate it, but no, and that’s what we left.

So, we didn’t have any time to rest because literally, as soon as our vesting was done, and as soon as our contract was up, and we’d been having those conversations a quarter before. So, it was a totally open board about it. We started the company. We left and literally started the company the next day. It started and raised money pretty much right out of the gate, kind of walking away. And that journey was another few years of trying to… it was right before COVID. So, a couple of years before COVID. So it was an interesting journey. But we started that company in Silicon Valley, me and the co-founder. It was our third company. We’ve been 20 years working together. A couple of years into it, we decided to split. He wanted to go in a different direction. And we’ve been working together a long time. And it was like, well, maybe we should try some things apart. And he wanted to go in a different direction with the idea that we were going. And I’m going to go in a separate direction. And it was very amicable, but we went different ways.

He took the idea that we had and went in a different direction. I think the company is still around today, raised money, and has gone off in its own direction. We tried this other direction through COVID. COVID created all kinds of problems. And we ended up aqua hiring into another Bessemer company a couple years later. And that’s where I spent the last 2.5 years with them and took the team over there and hired a bunch of people that I’d worked with in the past and a bunch of new people and helped Shopmonkey, which is a vertical SaaS software company in the automotive solution space, doing really well. Great company, great founding team. And so I came in and helped them take it to the next level and social on their platform.

And through that journey is where I started getting more involved. And at Pinpoint, we were doing AI, but this was prior to LLM, just prior to OpenAI and ChatGPT and all the cool stuff that we have today. It was like the old school of AI. It was like hire PhD data scientists and do PyTorch and build your own models.

Todd Merrill:

Done that.

Jeff Hanie:

And that was really hard.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Jeff Hanie:

And it was very expensive. And we couldn’t quite get Pinpoint to work in a lot of different ways, technically and like the business model go to market as well. And so we couldn’t quite figure out how to get the go-to-market fit. We had a lot of interest, raised a bunch of money, but couldn’t quite get that to work. But we knew there was something there. And we knew AI was going to be pretty big.

I mean, we had a pretty good idea, but we didn’t know the LLMs were going to come along, obviously. So that two and a half years at Shopmonkey, towards the end of that, we started meeting another co-founder here, started doing a lot more in AI and thinking a lot more about AI post OpenAI and ChatGPT, frankly. But we weren’t going to probably be able to do, you  know, Shopmonkey is a different company. I wasn’t a founder. I was a CTO. And they had a different trajectory as a business. And we were just like, we’re itching to do something in agents because we had this idea that agents are going to be really big, AI agents. As we move from highly deterministic software to non-deterministic software, and with LLMs, and the understanding of English and task orientation, we felt like there was a really interesting opportunity and we felt like the opportunity was very similar to Titanium. It was sort of like how do we take JavaScript? How do we enable the web platform to be able to build agents in a really simple way, both on the development side as well as the runtime cloud execution side, much like we did with Titanium on the iPhone, obviously a different form factor. And that was sort of the genesis of the idea. There’s got to be a huge opportunity here to build. There’s going to be way more agents than there are apps. And maybe there’s whatever, I don’t know, half a million apps have been built on the App Store. And there’s going to be that many agents probably in the next 12 months.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Jeff Hanie:

So, the cardinality of agents is way, way larger than apps or APIs or websites, frankly. And so that we just felt like there’s a huge opportunity there. And we just need to go spend all of our energy thinking and executing on that. And that’s kind of what we did earlier this year. We kind of launched the new company. We raised $4 million in a seed round. And we’re sort of off to the races where this is our eighth week at the end of this week.

Todd Merrill:

And what’s the name of the company for the record?

Jeff Hanie:

The name of the company is called Agentuity.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Jeff Hanie:

We wanted to combine the sort of human ingenuity and craftiness and innovation of the human spirit with the kind of the software intelligence of agents that we think is going to be what the future is going to be. It’s a combination of like, the best of human ingenuity and intelligence with agents, you know, with software automation.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s just fun the way your engineer brain works. Like you’re working on the problem. You’re like, okay, we’re going to find a thing. Let’s, you know, try to get a solution for it. Okay, that didn’t work. Okay, let’s kind of iterate a little bit. Try another little angle here. And then, you know, you’re right in the middle of the gold rush at this point. Everybody and their brothers got a bunch of agents. How do you manage them? It’s going to be a mess.

Jeff Hanie:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

So, you know, I think that’s going to be a huge thing for us. Maybe talk about, you know, AI seems to be this kind of fairy dust that people are throwing on a lot of things. LLMs are an important technology, obviously. How do you speak English that sounds good and authoritative? How do you understand English or other languages, I guess is important as well. And then understand intents and then route them through this agent, you know, Maze, is going to be important. You’ve seen a lot of coding tools come and go. We’ve seen no code, low code, 4G, you know, Report Builder, all that stuff.

Jeff Hanie:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

You know, here we go again with the coding agents. What are your thoughts on, you know, do we all have to get some Cursor licenses and go for it? Or what does that look like for the future?

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah, I’m super bullish. I’d say my baseline is like, here’s sort of my way to think about it. I think that we’re going to shift from right today, where we sit right now today, March 25th, 2025. I think we’re in the middle of a transition from human-directed, AI-assisted. That’s kind of where we’re at. That’s been the last, you know, you could probably argue 10 years with auto intelligence, not really AI. AI has been the last year of that. Like there’s really, you know, maybe two years of Copilot with GitHub did. But like that sort of is the first humanist, truly AI-assisted to the human, like writing code.

We’re going to shift, I think, in the next one year, maybe a little less, maybe a little longer, from AI-driven human-assisted. So, I think that’s going to kind of flip-flop. Again, not for every application, not for every developer, but like in general tasks. And that’s not low code. That’s different. It’s not no code, low code. That might be no code from a developer writing the code, but it’s not no code. There’s still going to be a lot of code. AI-generated code with human, again, review human, human- assisted, human-directed in the sense of at least what to go do. And then I think probably maybe, you know, two to five years out, we’re probably going to go to fully autonomous. 

Again, unevenly distributed. It’ll start in certain areas, not a hundred percent. And it will take a while for, you know, we’re not going to go back in time and rewrite old stuff, but certainly everything kind of green till going forward. And maybe some brownfield stuff will get rewritten. And I think that’s the transition. And so the question that I ask, and a lot of us ask around here is like, how much of Cursor is a transition to the future? It’s a question mark. I don’t have the answer. But like what I would posit is a lot of what’s going on right now is the bridge to the next thing, right? It’s not the thing. I don’t think Cursor is the thing. This is not knocking Cursor. We’re big users of Cursor. We pay for it. We’re big users of a lot of that type of technology. Like Devin, we use it dramatically. We use Cursor. Obviously, we use all the LLM stuff directly as well. We built a bunch of agents. I’ll maybe talk a little bit about so then the question mark is like what is the next thing? I think the other question that a lot of people, it’s the depth of programming. It’s the, you know, sort of sick of the depth of everything, right?

Todd Merrill:

Right, right.

Jeff Hanie:

And I don’t think that typically happens. Like most of technology evolution, it certainly shifts things, right? I mean, we don’t ride horses to the city center anymore, the town center anymore. Doesn’t mean horses went away, but you know, and certainly. So, I do think that probably the question mark is what happens? And I think probably what happens is the floor rises and the ceiling rises. 

I think that’s kind of typically what happens. And I think the middle maybe gets crunched a little bit. So, I think the bottom end, if you will, of software programming, those tasks go away in a lot of ways, meaning like they probably go to automation. But like a lot of things on the web have gone to automation, you know, that we don’t do anymore. Like, you know, CICD being one of them. We used to have release engineers that actually did the build, right?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Jeff Hanie:

And then they staged the build and then they reviewed the build. And then they wrote the, you know, like we don’t even have that anymore. We have CICD now, right? So, there are a lot of things that in technology, the skills shift to something more productive and high yield. So, I think that will continue.

The top end, I think, again, doesn’t go anywhere. I think the top end probably gets smarter, more sophisticated, much more enabled by AI to do more interesting and important work and sort of unleashes us. The question then is the middle, what happens? Does the middle compress? Does it get bigger? I don’t know.

I do think there are a lot of these tools that expand people’s capabilities, you know, bring more people into the ability to have more power. And that’s sort of my belief. So, this Cursor, sort of how did they navigate and using Cursor as an example, is Windsurf. There’s, you know, a ton of these out there. But like what does that instate for them? I think they’re pretty smart. And if you already noticed, whether it’s Cursor or even whether it’s the new GPT models that are coming out from OpenAI or Anthropic, those are all built around agents. It’s not really LLMs natively, the frontier model itself doing everything. What you have is a consortium of agents that are sitting in front of the LLMs. And that’s what creates this sort of smart, the feeling of intelligence is I think is the agents using the LLM in a really smart way to create these sort of much more intelligent experiences, much more lifelike or human-like type experiences that you’re saying that you don’t think of it like as an agent, but that’s what they actually are. 

Cursor is a whole bunch of agents sitting on top of an LLM that really has gotten very good at how to create a pull request. There’s an agent that’s gotten really good about how to diff the code and figure out what went wrong or how to read the documentation. And so that’s what we believe the future is going to be is like millions and millions of these agents that are highly tuned around very, very narrow tasks that know how to work together, much like humans do.

Todd Merrill:

So just reflecting on that, you know, so I’ve been frustrated over the years, you know, so to kind of extend on your Titanium. So, Adobe had this, I can’t remember what they called it, but it was a visual builder for UIs that you could click and drag. And that was awesome, right? And then, but they had this weird language, you had to run it in, in a container. So, it was almost there, but it wasn’t. And then it was like, I don’t know, another one just, you know, Ionic kind of came and went, right? But they had this visual builder. And then there were a couple flickers where you had like backend agents. And then you could think about what does my business objects look like? And then like Firebase is kind of going that way too. And I’m just like looking for the thing that’s going to pull all this stuff together. Man, I don’t want to think about that kid database. I want to think about, you know, I know what the frontend is supposed to look like. I don’t want to spend a lot of time coding it up, but I’m really sensitive to, Hey, give me a quick hit and then let me edit, you know. I could do that very quickly. But then, you know, Hey, that’s a good proof of concept. I feel like I could bang out a small, early, early, you know, 1.0, pretty quick, single-handedly, find the right set of tools. I feel like we’re almost there, but there’s always something…

Jeff Hanie:

We’re almost there.

Todd Merrill:

But then like you said, brownfield or like, why can’t we, you know, what’s stopping us from unleashing a bunch of agents on the IRS code that’s still running COBOL on a mainframe, you know, going, dude, just go figure it out. Rewrite it.

Jeff Hanie:

I think that’s actually a huge opportunity. As an example, there’s a buddy of mine and again, I won’t name him, but a buddy of mine in Atlanta that’s working with a government institution doing this around security. Old security rules for an old product and they’re using AI to rewrite them, to modernize them into like the newer kind of security language, security rules language. And I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit and that’s a perfect task for LLM. I think especially old code, like where there’s a large corpus of data on how to do it, documentation online. It’s really good at those types of tasks.

We use a product called Devin that we really love that’s an AI coding agent and we use it like all of our change notes, change logs are all now written by AI. Like, as soon as it sees that we have a set of agents that as soon as we merge on a release, it automatically goes, creates a pull request, writes the documentation, writes the change log, and all that. And so I think you’re going to see a lot more of this kind of, like I said, lower-end tasks that get automated away very quickly. And then the question is like how does it move up the stack, if you will, not I mean, physically up the stack, but like how does it kind of get smarter? And I think we’re going to see a dramatic improvement.

Right now, it’s better. Like, right now, most of the agents aren’t really the coding agents, aren’t great with super large code bases, like they have a harder time understanding. I think what we’re seeing, you know, one of the benefits right now of us starting from scratch is we don’t have a large code base. We started from the beginning and we started coding with AI in mind. So, it’s interesting when you start new things with AI from the beginning, you write code differently and you use the AI differently. And so I think there’s going to be a bit of a time transit. Now, I think AI is going to figure this out. I think the next year, they’re going to figure a lot of these types of issues out. 

But yeah, I think it’s sort of like the low-hanging fruit. I think the easy things are easy to repetitively automate. It’s very clear deterministically how to like … you know, I was working on this thing this morning around a PowerShell thing and Windows for some installer thing I was working on. It was like this old like MSI XML thing.

Todd Merrill:

No

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah. But AI knew everything about it. Like, like it’s old, right? So, like it just knew how to do all the stuff. And I was like, I just need to do these three things. And it was like, yep.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Jeff Hanie:

And it worked. And it just works from the beginning. Right?

Todd Merrill:

Nice

Jeff Hanie:

And that’s like a perfect example. Like, I don’t want to go learn. I can go Google it. I can figure it out. It would take me several hours to figure it out. Like some back and forth. AI was like, boom, I’ll just do it for you. And so I think those are kind of the junior engineer type things right now. I think, you know, how long until it becomes a principal engineer, like a really senior engineer? I just think it’s a matter of like, we’re just talking about how long. We’re not talking about if, but when.

Todd Merrill:

Right. Well, and then, you know, so go back to this 1.0 thing that, you know, exemplar problem, when reality hits and you get in the market, now you have to iterate. If it’s well-architected, you know, in your experience, architect or builder, you could build, you know kind of what’s going to happen, right? Or a couple of scenarios that are likely, and you probably plumb those in. So, what happens when you have to iterate or when you do have like a schizo, you know, business finding where all of a sudden, now you’re working on a different problem. How do you shift gears? You know, those are all always difficult. That’s why I worry. The human factor, humans can handle the chaos. AI is great at things it’s seen before.

Jeff Hanie:

Right

Todd Merrill:

I don’t know, it’s going to be interesting. You know, I don’t know that AI is… I don’t know that we’re going to have brilliant MBA types that are great at finance and can just talk to a computer and get a great app, that’s going to scale and do all the wonderful things for a while.

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah, it’s going to be a while, but there’s going to be interesting findings, I think. I was talking to an entrepreneur. He’s building an AI around, kind of around a digital CFO. He started with it because he was doing lending. And so to build this lending business, which didn’t really take off. He’s a perfect example for AI. He had to pull all this data from your QuickBooks and from your operations system. So he had all these data sources and they were using that to do due diligence for how much creditworthiness and like what’s your creditworthiness score for like, you know, buy now, pay it later, kind of like lending, but for businesses. And that didn’t quite take off. But what they kind of ended up building was an AI because they had all this data. They could build an AI that could help you understand problems in your business from a financial standpoint. And that has all of a sudden rocketed because they’ve been able to get all these really good data sources. And I think that’s a perfect example.

So, is it going to replace the CFO? No, but they already are able to see insights into the business that even a really experienced CFO might not see and you already may not have access to in a smaller business. So, I think there’s the early kind of early indications of some really interesting opportunities. Is it going to replace people? I think probably not. You know, like, that hasn’t really happened. Will skills shift? Absolutely. Skills will shift. They always will. It doesn’t matter what’s AI or the next thing.

Todd Merrill:

So, what’s the next big thing? You know, what do you get your eye on? Obviously, agentic architecture is a thing now that you’re going after. Where does that all lead? Or what’s?

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah, I think, you know, I should say, me and the other founders, our fundamental belief is the cloud has to change, the cloud infrastructure, and I’m just going to call it cloud loosely. Today, you know, if you look at today’s cloud, it’s built around low latency, global-based edge computing, and sessionless sort of like sessionless architectures, which makes sense for where we’re at edge devices, mobile devices, IoT devices, desktop computers, etc. But they just need something different. And so that’s sort of our, you know, like they’re not going to be low latency. Probably they’re going to probably go work for hours and days at a time and they’re going to be always on and there’s probably way more of them. And like where the proximity, the proximity to the edge device probably doesn’t matter as much as the proximity like to the LM and to the GPU and to the data source, the proprietary data source, especially if you’re a company building things.

So, then it’s like, well, then what happens to the cloud? Like, what are the needs of the cloud? And energy probably becomes a much more important, critical resource, you know. And so that’s kind of like what we’re thinking about. So, it certainly is the agentic systems themselves. And like what do you need for agentic, you know, sort of capabilities and the apps that are getting built? But a more fundamental problem we’re thinking about is like what the modern data center looks like.

Today’s modern data center was built for humans, right? And I don’t mean the physical data center. I mean, also the thing that we interact with. Like, we have the visualization dashboards so we can visualize logs and, you know, Prometheus metrics and all those things.

Those are built for humans and they’re about human factors, right? And for automation, all the tools that have been built were for humans. AI doesn’t need any of that. And certainly, agentic systems need different things, right? It doesn’t need pretty charts and graphs. It could just use the underlying low-level data. And so like, that’s kind of the big thing that we’ve been thinking about, like the next trillion-dollar opportunity, and frankly, disruption is what happens. And now all those cloud providers aren’t going to go anywhere. And certainly, all the workloads aren’t going to go anywhere. They’re going to continue to grow because we’re still going to need mainframes and we’re still going to need mobile devices. But agents are going to need something different, and that’s kind of been our big thing.

Todd Merrill:

Do you think it’s centralized or decentralized?

Jeff Hanie:

No, I think it’s highly decentralized. I think we’re seeing this already with the cloud. There’s a big repatriation, especially in larger companies, but even smaller midsize companies that are spending huge amounts of money. There’s a pretty big repatriation. And I think we’re going to see, you know, especially with land use and energy use and how that’s going to get nationalized. I think we’re going to see a much bigger decentralization of infrastructure away from, at least for maybe the next-gen, you know, again, maybe legacy things stay where they are. And maybe that changes differently. But certainly, for next-gen type agentic systems, I think we’re going to see a different … I don’t think we’re going to see, personally. I just don’t think we’re going to see Amazon dominating all of that by themselves.

Todd Merrill:

So, I got a buddy in my hometown. It’s an hour south of Atlanta, and he’s got an old family farm, 500 acres or something. He did not say I’m going to build a data center. It’s going to be back in the woods, you know, and we all kind of went, yeah, you don’t know what you’re getting into. But, you know, he’s electric. There’s a river that goes by there so he’s got cooling. He needs cheap power from the river.

Jeff Hanie:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

He needs internet, right? So, I’m not sure.

Jeff Hanie:

I think he’s onto something. I don’t know, but I think he’s onto something. I mean, me and my other co-founder this morning, we’re driving by a couple of really big buildings here in Austin. We’re saying, all right, we’re going to get that building. We’re going to build a data center in that. I mean, what a perfect building, low-cost warehouse space, easy access to a massive power grid here in Texas, relatively low-cost power here in Texas. And, you know, internet access is pretty, pretty plentiful. And so, again, you know, I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t know how decentralization works at scale because you can’t put… every farm can’t have a data center.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Well…

Jeff Hanie:

…but, you know, but who knows?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. What’s going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out. There’s definitely a lot of energy, a lot of really smart people thinking through these problems for sure. So it’s going to be really cool to see what happens. Well, it’s about travel and getting out of the world. I know you’re probably a million miler on a couple of different airlines. So you got any great travel stories you want to share with us?

Jeff Hanie:

Oh my God, I’ve got so many great travel stories. Where do I even start? You know, the funniest, I don’t know if it’s funny. It’s probably two-part funny. Funny and not so funny. And it’s kind of the reality of travel.

Me and my head of sales back at Accelerator. We were coming from Japan. So, we were doing like a worldwide two-week trip, which is really difficult when you go the cross world, especially we went from Japan and we did Korea and a few other places all the way to the Middle East. And we did Abu Dhabi and we did Spain and a couple other places then eventually back to San Francisco and trying to carry two weeks’ worth of clothing and different, you know, it’s snowing in Japan and of course, you get in the desert in Abu Dhabi and sort of in Madrid and Spain. And so that was really crazy. But the funniest thing was we were going to an event in Spain and we were kind of a little bit last minute and booking and so my assistant was like, book something. We just need a flat. We don’t care. We’re going to fly in. We’re going to be there a couple of days and we’re going to be gone and we’re traveling. This is the end of our trip. I think we flew from Korea. I forgot where we flew from. I think it was either Korea or somewhere else. And we flew all the way to Madrid. We get there. So, you know, we’ve been traveling, feels like for two days. We get there. It’s late at night. We go to check in our hotel and we can only get one room. So, we’re like, no problem. Just get one room and just get a double, right? You’re up.

Todd Merrill:

Don’t care.

Jeff Hanie:

So just get a double. We don’t care. You know? Like, we’re traveling together all the time. You know, whatever. You know, business guys, like, it doesn’t really matter. So, we checked into this hotel. We’re tired. We get it. We came in. We got a double, you know. Two beds. But in Europe, a double is really like a single, like a small little bed, switched together… sorry, I said Madrid. We were in Barcelona.

So, in Barcelona, in a little flat. And literally, it was a double, what we’d call a double in America, you know, a small bed. That was like the bed. We were two relatively tall dudes. We ended up having to stay there for two days, literally sleeping in the same bed together. It’s like you turn this way; you turn that way. And it was nothing we could do because there were no hotels, no flats left. It was one of those huge events in the city. To finalize the story. So then we’re like, okay, whatever, two days doesn’t matter. You know, who cares? Full of meetings, two days. We get on there. Now we’re exhausted. It’s been two weeks. We’ve been on the road traveling. Finally going to get on our flight on an EL AL flight, direct from Barcelona to San Francisco. The longest flight I think I’ve ever been on in my life. It was like a 13 or 12 and a half hour flight or 13 hours, something that was very long. So we got on this flight and they put us on the last row. You know, huge EL AL flight, last row in the middle, back up against the lavatories. And you know, on these long flights, where do people congregate on the long flights? In the lavatory. Like, at the end where the lavatories are. And they slam them all, you know, slam, slam, open, slam, slam. And we’re trying to sleep. So, we get on this plane.

First class is completely empty because it’s like a 15,000 or $20,000 first class. There’s one dude from the Middle East with a freaking hawk, literally on his, or whatever they call it. I think they’re falcons. I think they call them, right? And there’s nobody else in first class or business class. I think business class had maybe two or three people in it. It was virtually empty. So, at the gate, we’re like, we want to upgrade. We’ll upgrade right now. How do we upgrade? You know, like we’re, you know, because we looked at our seats and we’re like, we got to upgrade. And they’re like, you can’t, you know, it’s too late. You have to upgrade with the purser on the plane. And we’re like, okay, but can we, you know, are there seats? Oh yeah, plenty of seats. You just upgrade with the purser on the plane. They’ll let you upgrade.

So, we got on the plane, we called them, you know, got in our seats, we called the purser, the purser came back. We’re like, we would like to move to a business class right now. We’ll just pay it right now. And she’s like, I think she said $10,000 each. And we’re like, $10,000. It’s empty. The plane doors are going to close in a minute. Right? Like, we’re like, no, we’ll give you $2,000 each of us. Right? She is like $2,000 right now, $2,000. They will literally allow it, or I said allow. I mean, the other, sorry, not allowed. That’s Israeli. The other Middle Eastern airline, I can’t think of the name of it.

Todd Merrill:

Qatar?

Jeff Hanie:

Qatar, yeah. And they were like, no, they wouldn’t do it. Like, we went $2,000. They went to $3,000. I think we went to $4,000, you know, because we were so desperate and she would literally not do it at all. And so we ended up just sitting just literally like this the whole time. Both, there was like a four-seater in the middle. We were sitting like this the whole time. 13 hour flight, the longest flight I’d ever been on. It was awful.

Todd Merrill:

I couldn’t do that.

Jeff Hanie:

And that’s, yeah, it was so bad. But we were just like, it must be nice to be, you know, a rich company that doesn’t need the money.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, geez. Holy smokes. That’s awful. Well, Jeff’s been awesome catching up with you. I’m glad you’re doing well. We look forward to your launch in Miami here in a little bit. And, you know, if we want to get in touch with you and follow up with any of this stuff afterward. What’s a great way on the internet?

Jeff Hanie:

Yeah. It’s Agentuity. Agent U-I-T-Y.com is our website. Or you can email me. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, Jeff Haynie. I’m really easy to find. I’m pretty public. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me. And I’d love to talk to you. I’d love to talk to you about your agent use cases or maybe just in general, like what are you trying to automate or what are you trying to do.

Todd Merrill:

It’s been good having you.

Jeff Hanie:

Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Todd Merrill:

Bye for now.