Founder/CEO of @airpostai - helping growth teams enter the AI era.

Menlo Park, CA
Joined November 2007
Today, we’re launching Airpost. I’m 46. That’s not a cool age to found a startup. At least according to Twitter. I still call it Twitter. I’ve loved advertising all my life. Since I was 19 and my mom told me about a movie called “Nothing in Common” with Tom Hanks where he plays an ad exec whose main job seems to be shooting hoops with his creative partner. That sounded fun. Since then, traditional advertising has stayed… traditional. From my 1st job out of college writing TV ads for Snapple and Fox Sports, to leading product marketing at Airbnb, I’ve seen a lot. Now the AI era is here and an entire $1T industry is about to change. Who will change it? Why not me? Why not us? Introducing Airpost: a platform and service where world-class creative strategists use custom-built AI to build video ads. Fast. If you’ve ever sat down to make an ad with AI and realized 20 minutes later you’re still wrestling with that same clip… that’s why we built Airpost. Growth teams are busy. They’re asked to do too many things as it is. They shouldn’t have to be AI experts as well. Creative strategists shouldn’t have to stare at a white box trying to decide what to prompt. They should have a partner. That’s what we aspire to be. And that’s what we’ve built our tech to do. AI ads shouldn’t have to mean only AI footage. We have an exclusive library of over 300,000 video clips we’ve shot ourselves. Our engine uses these, along with client footage and AI footage to make the ads we deliver each week. We’re funded by the best investors and humans we know. We bootstrapped our performance creative agency, Ready Set, to 200 people. I was always told VCs didn’t add value. If that’s true, it must be other VCs, because ours have been awesome. Thank you Zach Perret, Nate Abbott, Peter Hebert, Max Mullen and all of the firms and folks who’ve believed in us so far. We’ve gone from 0 to $1M ARR in the six months since we quietly started working with early clients like DoorDash, Dr. Squatch, Calm and more. So far, every customer has renewed. To celebrate the launch, we’re giving away a superagent where you: 1) Put in your product URL 2) Get snippets of what your real users are saying on Meta, TikTok, Reddit and X 3) Paste them into ad scripts Comment “Airpost” and I’ll DM you the private link. It feels (a little scary but) good to be out there. Here we go! 🚀
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Video editing for advertising just turned the final curve this week. Demos to come but everything will be different now.
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This is amazing for humanity if it works. And this is the team to make it work. Go go go! 🚀
💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster. We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America. I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
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The amount of time x people spending today rotating api keys bc of the Railway back has got to be wasting billions in productivity.
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John Gargiulo retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
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John Gargiulo retweeted
I am surprised that people are surprised this is how I prompt Claude. Talk to Claude the way you would a coworker. There's no secret to prompting. There's no need to be overly scaffolded or prescriptive for most tasks -- give Claude a goal, and it will figure it out. Back in the Sonnet 3.5 days, your prompt mattered a lot. Nowadays, it's much more important to communicate to the model: 1. What you want it to do 2. How much effort you want it to spend 3. How it should verify that it did the right thing
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John Gargiulo retweeted
You can now mod Claude Code: - Change how it behaves - Customize the UI - Swap in your own features Write one with a few lines of TypeScript, or have Claude build it for you. Mods ship inside plugins, so you install them with /plugin in the CLI or desktop app. A few examples:
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Am I the only one that doesn't get these vibe coding ads? And I spend most of my days vibe coding. Snapped these in Times Square and at the airport. Both are just people working quietly at their computer. The OpenAI one is video, just the guy typing from far away. Is there some deep meaning/point here that I'm missing? I know we're not supposed to like ads that tell you something differentiated about the product, but I kind of prefer that. Codex is not a pair of jeans.
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Continuing my coast-to-coast Airpost Full Performance Loop AI-demo-palooza at the Meta Agency Summit in NYC today. That was also my new record for hyphens in a sentence. We've spent millions and have 18 amazing FT engineers building a first-of-its-kind (more hyphens!) tool and service. It's like Motion, if Motion could make ads. If you're an agency at the Meta Summit today I'd love to demo it for you! just dm me.
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John Gargiulo retweeted
New @axios: Exclusive: Hands on with ChatGPT images 2.5. The new editor is faster, better with staying true to faces and adds sketching and other editing tools
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Claude Code is taking so much longer to do things. Which means I'm taking so much longer to do things. I used to have 10-12 "pots" going all around me (glowing dots in Claude Code.) I would run around and tend to each one/move them forward. Now they all need 45min (sometimes 2-3hrs!) to think through everything. I find myself staring at the screen with no pots to check on. I'm using Codex in addition to my personal and work Claudes but it's still all so slow. And I'm afraid to use Fast Mode because I think it will be less smart. Anyone else noticing this trend? Also it's expensive! I set something up where for every prompt it tells me how much it will likely cost. Highly recommend doing this. Sometimes it's like "This will be $18-45." I imagine I'm going to have to hand someone next to me $40 if I hit go.
🤖 Made with AI
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How can I get my hands on Astra!?
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This is what happens to Opus when everyone hits Fable 5.1 limits within 17 minutes.
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Let's go! Except anyone else having trouble updating their desktop app?
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John Gargiulo retweeted
30 features of an AI native company: 1) Function-by-function process blueprint of your entire business. 2) Everyone in org using a daily driver harness like Grok Bot, Claude Cowork, ChatGPT at Work. 3) Centralized intelligence layer that aggregates structured and unstructured data, documents, and business logic into a single source of truth that is queryable & agentic work can be done on top of. 4) Model routing via OpenRouter, Ramp, etc that optimizes cost-per-successful-task across the business. 5) Treat context as code, ensuring architecture documents and conventions remain updated while allowing for diligent upfront planning. 6) Willing to throw away everything that you've built every three months and reimagine all your workflows. 7) A “skills distribution system” is used to manage agent behavior and optimize for token efficiency by ensuring developers trigger consistent skills throughout their workflow. 8) Separate technical implementation from high-level specifications, enabling non-technical staff to contribute in a format that agents can utilize to build technical implementation plans. 9) A key software metric is “cost per accepted PR”, with a focus on driving these costs down through better token efficiency. 10) An automated, agent-native development system where fleets of AI coding agents handle planning, writing, testing, reviewing, and shipping code while humans define the intent and acceptance criteria. 11) Heavy planning with higher-effort models and executing with cheaper, faster models. 12) Agent harness that uses CLI tools to parse metadata within markdown files to traverse dependency relationships, allowing agents to be granular in their input token usage. 13) Finance org that runs processes continuously in accounting (record-keeping) to re-define/reset forecasts on a much, much tighter cadence. 14) Financial models embedded in the underlying OS across the org to help drive reasoning. 15) Citizen Developer SDLC where non-technical employees can take a solution from idea to production with governance, access, versioning, and software conventions built in. 16) Closed loop, self-improving non-engineering workflows that learn from previous runs based on external performance metrics or internal evals. 17) AI ROI framework that includes experimental phase, scaling phase, and optimizing phase with bets sitting in 3 buckets: infrastructure, innovation, and efficiency. 18) Paid marketing motion that uses agent swarms to deploy thousands of pieces of creative for testing, before increasing spend on human-generated ads. 19) AEO/SEO engine that audits, rewrites, and (ideally) generates SEO/AEO-optimized blogs on a weekly basis, and then measures if any of it worked. 20) Agentic cyber security solution that fights AI with AI. 21) Combo of RL gym and first-party data to fine-tune open source models on high-volume processes that need SOTA performance at reasonable cost. 22) Human touch and judgement gets reserved for the first and final mile of most processes. 23) Evals are core infrastructure of your business. Anytime new models come out you have an apparatus for testing cost & performance against core processes. 24) Everyone is a builder. Especially C-level execs. 25) Everything gets recorded because what you don’t capture can’t be turned into ai-enabled work. 26) Legal, HR, and IT work in lockstep with owners of AI agenda so that business’ ass is sufficiently covered without slowing down transformation. 27) Bias to disrupting yourself before being disrupted by others. 28) Guardrails before features. Agents inherit the permissions of whoever is asking, enforced in the data layer. 29) Earned autonomy. Feedback feeds the evals that gate each new version, and agents move up a ladder as they clear it: observe, suggest, act with approval, act alone. The endpoint is agents running whole workflows inside a defined boundary, with humans setting the standard instead of checking every answer. 30) Traceability as the training signal. Trace every output to its prompt, model, data, and approver, so human feedback attaches to something specific rather than a vague sense that something is off. What's missing?
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California is adding sales tax to SaaS starting Jan 1 😥Not sure they could have picked a worse time - 7.25% state + local district taxes, so 8-10% for most customers - Every CA-based customer you have is getting a price increase you didn't send - And if you're based here, your entire software and AI budget goes up 8-10% in 2027 Stacks on top of vendor uplifts. A 7% renewal increase becomes 16%. 👉Custom software and AWS-style infrastructure are excluded 🤷Nobody knows yet where usage-based AI spend lands.
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Is anyone else noticing that Claude Code takes way, way longer to do anything than it used to?
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John Gargiulo retweeted
As we’re seeing in case study after case study, it turns out that the amount of value that can be created between the AI model and the ultimate end-user workflow is far larger than many people assumed or realized. Model capability is obviously doing a lot of heavy lifting in agentic products, but there’s still a lot more work to diffuse AI into the enterprise. 1. Getting agents to work well (and alongside people) in mission critical workflows tends to need to be represented differently depending on the business process. Sometimes it’s a chat experience. Other times it’s a background agent running in a deterministic workflow. And dozens of other variants. This is a mix of needing a harness that’s tuned to specific domains of work, but also making it show up in the right product experience. 2. Different workflows connect into entirely different enterprise systems and need access to very different data. Working with that data -whether it’s life sciences, financial, legal, etc.- requires contextual approaches, understanding of the data, having the right user experience for data interaction, and more. 3. The need for domain-specific change management remains critical in most verticals. The way you talk and implement technology at a bank is very different from a law firm. Having the right talent with a singular mission ends up being extremely useful for something as complex as process reengineering. 4. The ability to work with a variety of models means you can tune the workflows to different cost and performance levels. And you can eventually post train models for specific tasks to tailor the outcomes and eke out gains that aren’t coming otherwise in frontier models. 5. Evals! AI is basically not useful if it can’t be evaluated. Domain-specific evals that let you dramatically improve the performance of your harness for specific workflows just has a crazy long tail given how many tasks there are in the economy. Nearly impossible for one system to be tuned for all of them. 6. Lots of verticals and domains require pricing models that reflect relevant abstractions on top of tokens alone. The ability to price in ways that work for your industry’s consumption model ends up mattering in a variety of spaces. This just touches on some of the things that go into the applied AI layer. But it all adds up to being a huge surface area for being able to sustainably innovate and differentiate.
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John Gargiulo retweeted
the models have no moat (OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI) the IDEs have no moat (Cursor, Windsurf) the harnesses have no moat (Cognition, Factory, LangChain) the app builders have no moat (Replit, Lovable, Bolt) the wrappers have no moat (Harvey, Abridge, OpenEvidence) the inference providers have no moat (Together, Fireworks, Groq) the voice layer has no moat (Sierra, Decagon, ElevenLabs) the data labeling companies have no moat (Scale, Surge, Mercor) the AI infrastructure has no moat (Baseten, Modal, Railway) the neoclouds have no moat (CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe) the generative media companies have no moat (Runway, Higgsfield, Suno) apparently nobody in AI has a moat except the venture firm ☠️
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John Gargiulo retweeted
go into CC and type /design <something you want to design> do it rn
Today we’re releasing an early preview of the /design command in Claude Code! from CC Desktop or CLI, try something like "/design a few options for {feature}" before you build — pick your fave artboard, edit it and implement.
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If you've tried to use AI to make video ads for Facebook you may have run into a problem. Footage. If you try to use all AI avatar and footage, you get a lot of people-staring-creepily-at-the-camera, and a general "off" vibe. If you have thousands of clips of usable vertical footage, awesome. But most people don't. We spent over five years quietly building the world's biggest vertical footage library. Every kind of persona young and old doing every type of activity, before and afters, every type of b-roll - you name it. Over 500,000 clips. No other AI ad platform has any non-client-specific (hence NCS in the screenshot) real footage to pull from. AI works best when it's working with real footage. Especially if a brand needs a kind of footage that's hard to source - getting someone to look at their thinning hair in a mirror is harder than getting them to show off their abs - or cats/dogs, kids etc, footage can be a lifeline. We've been extremely careful and transparent with both the brands and actors we've worked with (mostly at Ready Set, mostly 2020-2025) to ensure anyone can use it. It's so much footage, people never see the same clip twice. It was a bet when we started collecting it in 2020, and it's fun to see how it's paid off.
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