Ben South
@bnj
building @variantui • past: vp @postmates, founder @sonar (acq) and @bold (acq)
We raised $5.9M to build @variantui: code generation with taste, range, and room to explore Invites start rolling out today, reply for early access
We passed on a few notable suitors of @sonar, because they weren’t willing to bring on the entire team Hoping what we’re hearing about Windsurf isn’t true
Caveat: These are solutions to “at-scale” problems By the time teams run into these issues, they’re already locked in to Slack Startups will fail if they try to go bottoms-up while solving for “at-scale” problems, since small teams simply don’t care about those challenges yet
My dream Slack replacement: 1. Simple, clean design 2. Feed of key discussions (summarized) across orgs 3. Natural language prompts, no commands 4. Perplexity-like search in and across orgs 5. Agents instead of bots 6. Universal usernames 7. Notifications for DMs, mentions, or…
As a founder, you’ll meet billionaires and raise millions... and also scrub toilets and do the dishes Usually in the same week
"What are we going to do when AI does all the work" Turns out, when you can move faster there's way less downtime Everyone I know is working insane hours right now
Great design is less about sudden inspiration and more about seeing paths others don't, and the patience to explore each one
Built a prototype of this over the weekend with @variantui Super simple, answers are fully editable, flip the page for a new note
Is there a “Perplexity for Notetaking” yet? I realize I take a lot of Apple Notes but per Apple being not very good at software anymore, the chance of it becoming smarter anytime in the next 24 months is zero Eg if I paste a link I want the important or interesting parts inline…
If prompting is management in disguise, this explains a lot about managers
Everyone is a manager of AI. Most just don’t realize it yet. Every prompt is a directive. Every correction is supervision. Every output is feedback. You’re managing a system that doesn’t ask for 1:1s but it still needs them.
Excited to welcome @maximmcnair to the @variantui team You may be familiar with his work @thecosmos: