We're back!

Well folks, I’m back on the job market. The upside is I’ve spent the last 14 months neck deep in building products with AI and building AI into products. Lots of best practices to share with all of you in the coming days and weeks — building with AI is powerful but comes with pitfalls; the hype is real but doing it as part of a team shipping production code looks nothing like the vibe coding influencer videos on YouTube.

How you can help: I’m looking for a VP or CPO product leadership role at a Series B+ company, ideally that has some consumer component to it (B2C or B2B2C). Remote or Austin-based. I’ve got 20 years of experience, mostly in product leadership, with 8 of those years also leading engineering, and 4 years as a founder or GM. My specialty is marketplaces, and I also have multiple stints of experience in AI Healthtech, e-commerce, and Edtech.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

The browser wars are back, stuffed with AI agents, and they are great.

Dia, from The Browser Company (who also made the now deprecated Arc Browser), was recently acquired by Atlassian for an impressive $610M in cash, has been my default browser for the last few months.

I’m writing this newsletter using Comet, the new browser offering by Perplexity, the LLM company that is doing tremendous work on AI agents, and is trying to beat Google at Search instead of competing with ChatGPT at being a chatbot.

I’ve got 3 invites left for Comet and 5 invites left for Dia. First come, first served.

Here’s the highlights:

1. They’ve added AI chat to the sidebar of the browser, which can read any or all of the content in your browser tabs as context. So you can use it to summarize content, analyze data in Google sheets, prep for a job interview, plan a trip, etc.

2. They’ve built in custom support for Gmail and Google Calendar, so you can ask it questions (“When am I free next Thursday?”) or have it compose draft emails in your style.

3. They now have really impressive AI agent support that can do a lot of the work for you. Comet impressed me more than Dia here. You can ask Comet to:

   1. Watch a YouTube video and summarize the highlights

   2. Plan a trip and have it add pins to a Google map of places to visit

   3. Read an email in Gmail, check your Google calendar for free times, respond to the email with a time that works, and send a calendar invite.

With the Atlassian acquisition, Dia’s strategy will be taking a really interesting turn — I fully buy into the strategic hypothesis that in the future we’ll have a browser optimized for work use and a browser optimized for personal use. And, to be honest, having AI agents custom built to deal with Jira and read/write Confluence docs would be a huge relief.

I think, for me, I’ll be adopting Comet for personal use and Dia for work.

Have you tried these yet? Thoughts?