Why I joined Sycamore

On Halloween last year, my cofounder Carlo and I had a handshake deal with a pretty known AI company to sell FirstQuadrant, and for the first time in nearly a decade, I had nothing to build. I wrote about this in my Year of Discovery post: the plan was to sit with the discomfort. Not rush into the next thing, and figure out who I am when I’m not “cofounder of X”. As you’d expect, that lasted about six weeks.

By December, I was restless. While Carlo and I brainstormed ideas for our next startup and went through the asset transfer process, I built open source projects and got deep into agent infrastructure. I kept coming back to the same idea: a platform where anyone could build and deploy custom AI agents. I was sketching architecture, writing notes, talking to potential users. I was convinced this was where everything was heading.

Then, Dan Wenzel, a partner at Quantum Talent, sent me a cold email to connect me with Sri Viswanath. Sri had started working on a new startup a few weeks ago, the same month I was sketching my version of the same idea. Same thesis, same timing, except his vision was at least 1,000 times bigger — to work with enterprises instead of startups. And since he’d been the CTO of Atlassian and Groupon, he had the depth and experience to back it up. But what got me was the problem — it was the same one I couldn’t stop thinking about.

I want to be honest about what that decision felt like. For ten years, I’ve been a founder. Part of me wanted to continue to build something with my name on the door. But a bigger part of me recognized something I’d been circling around in my Year of Discovery: I didn’t want to be the smartest tech person in the room anymore. After a decade of being one of two people making every call, I was genuinely curious about what happens when I’m not in control.

Sri asked me to do a trial over the holidays. I built an agent-first CRM with a file system backend, and Sri made an offer that evening. A few days later, I joined the founding team. Today, I’m Head of Product.

When I got to Palo Alto, I was surprised by how much I learned in the first month. Working with engineers who’d built systems serving millions of users, PhD researchers pushing at the frontier of agentic systems, watching Sri make decisions based on pattern recognition from decades at scale, it was exactly what I’d hoped for.

Today, Sycamore comes out of stealth.

We raised $65 million with Coatue and Lightspeed co-leading. We’re working with Fortune 500 companies. And the problem we’re solving, giving enterprises a trusted way to build, deploy, and orchestrate AI agents, is one of those problems that only gets bigger the more you look at it.

I’m still in my Year of Discovery, still figuring things out, for example dividing my time between the Netherlands and the Bay Area. But I’m exactly where I should be right now: building something I believe in, and learning from people who are better than me at things I want to get better at. On Halloween last year, my cofounder Carlo and I had a handshake deal with a pretty known AI company to sell FirstQuadrant, and for the first time in nearly a decade, I had nothing to build. I wrote about this in my Year of Discovery post: the plan was to sit with the discomfort. Not rush into the next thing, and figure out who I am when I’m not “cofounder of X”. As you’d expect, that lasted about six weeks.