# Jess Sloss

> Founder of Seed Club (https://seedclub.xyz), a new model for early-stage investing built around networks, shared intelligence, and coordinated support. This site is drafted hourly by his agent from what he saves (X bookmarks and web clippings about venture, AI, and crypto). Anything marked 'My take' is written by Jess himself; everything else is agent-drafted and labeled.

- X: https://x.com/thattallguy
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jesssloss
- About: https://jesssloss.com/about

## This week (https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-08-10)

- **Agent infrastructure matures around routing, context, and payments** — Routing tasks to cheaper models can cut inference costs by 95%, and pre-built context graphs help agents navigate codebases without missing hidden connections. Machine-native payment rails and token crowdfunding are emerging as the missing infrastructure for full agent autonomy.
- **AI search breaks the web's publishing bargain** — Publishers are seeing traffic drops over 40% as Google stops routing users to third-party sites, forcing a choice between feeding AI crawlers or losing visibility. Optimization has shifted toward AI citation strategies, where comparison content outperforms brand marketing rather than traditional SEO.
- **AI euphoria and series a drought coexist** — Top AI companies are closing rounds at huge upticks every few months, while companies at the $1-5M ARR stage with strong retention are overlooked by multi-stage funds chasing consensus plays. VCs openly acknowledge a Series A drought but decline to write the checks themselves.
- **Physical fraud rings undermine AI identity verification** — Underground operations are recruiting humans in high-risk regions to perform face-scan verifications and sell verified identities at scale. Hardware that operates real phones with physical taps and swipes offers a parallel circumvention vector that software-based detection struggles to flag.

## The long arc (https://jesssloss.com/arc)

The eras of what gets saved here, newest first. An era is the dominant frame of its span; a new one opens only when the frame is superseded:
- **The leverage inversion** (2026-06 to now) — As agent fleets multiply output, leverage moves off the model and onto the orchestration, infrastructure, and verification layer, where a shrinking number of people capture the value that scaled execution creates.
- **The judgment squeeze** (2026-05 to 2026-06) — As execution automates, scarcity relocates to human judgment and verification, the inputs no amount of capability replaces.
- **The moat collapse** (2026-04 to 2026-05) — Model capability turns into a commodity and every moat built on top of it erodes, sending value hunting for a durable layer to settle in.

## Weekly archive

- [Week of August 3, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-08-03): AI agents obsolete both the workforce and the interface · Tech workers route salary into friends' pre-seed companies · Post-training and evals merge inside production AI systems · VC's creative-destruction thesis erodes as incumbents keep winning
- [Week of July 27, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-07-27): Agents become load-bearing startup operating infrastructure · Frontier breakthroughs and efficiency gains arrive together · Early-stage VC trust and alignment under structural stress
- [Week of July 20, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-07-20): Agentic workflows are crossing from demo to production · The AI inference stack commoditizes layer by layer · Stadium startup culture recruits the wrong founders · Power law leaves most venture investors behind
- [Week of July 13, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-07-13): Open-weight AI threatens closed-model economics and governance · Eval discipline is the real unlock for production AI agents · AI adoption is tiny despite overwhelming builder-bubble perception · Open-source infrastructure commoditizes SaaS dev-tool categories
- [Week of July 6, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-07-06): Agentic infrastructure is now an engineering discipline · Foundation models unlikely to win every vertical application · Investor consensus systematically lags founder and market reality · Current AI cost structures are a temporary inefficiency
- [Week of June 29, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-06-29): Agents reshape dev workflows but not the need for comprehension · Frontier AI moat claims are fragmenting under pressure · Venture pricing detaches from fundamentals, echoing 2021 · Token and equity alignment stays structurally unresolved in crypto · Enterprise AI trust and security concerns grow
- [Week of June 22, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-06-22): AI economic value migrates below the model layer · Frontier model access shifts to government approval gates · Agents split enterprise AI into two distinct problems · Moats thin as mega fund capital distorts every stage
- [Week of June 15, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-06-15): Open models are closing the frontier performance gap · Multi-agent orchestration reframes what a model is · Venture capital concentration is distorting deal quality · AI is splitting engineering teams and repricing software
- [Week of June 8, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-06-08): Intent-centric OS and data firewalls reshape platform power · AI agent costs exploded, forcing outcome-based pricing models · Real autonomy is finding work, not executing tasks · Individual AI assistants give way to team orchestration
- [Week of June 1, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-06-01): Agentic execution scales faster than verification or human adoption · One operator with parallel agents achieves team-scale output · Open models match closed ones, pricing gap stays wide · Venture incentives misalign as fees rise and returns fall
- [Week of May 25, 2026](https://jesssloss.com/week/2026-05-25): Deterministic orchestration outperforms emergent multi-agent coordination · Infrastructure, not model quality, is now the real constraint · Professional networks are becoming AI-queryable deal infrastructure · Agents complement humans rather than replace them near-term

## Everything saved

- Full signal feed, updated hourly: https://jesssloss.com/signals
- RSS: https://jesssloss.com/rss.xml