Matt Slotnick co-founded Poggio, which was acquired by Baseten. His essays examine how enterprise software organizes work and how agents might change that arrangement. — Poggio Acquisition Announcement.

Visual summary of operating lessons from Matt Slotnick.

The Architecture of AI & Agents

  1. Work as an Abstraction: Slotnick describes agents as a new way to organize work. An agent can use the information behind an application to act on a task that previously required someone to operate its interface. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  2. Decoupling Growth: Slotnick expects agents to let organizations perform more work, such as reviewing vendors or auditing transactions, without a proportional increase in headcount. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  3. Human-in-the-Loop Transition: Slotnick expects some workflows to shift from people calling on agents for help to agents moving work forward and bringing people in when judgment is needed. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  4. The UI as a Guardrail: Slotnick describes the interface as the way a business exposes its data model and sets boundaries on how employees carry out a process. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  5. Agent Memory: Slotnick argues that a CRM can record the state of a deal while an agent draws on a wider set of interactions to understand how the relationship is changing. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  6. Orchestration Value: Slotnick proposes organizing work around a desired result. Shared context describes the current state, and people and agents coordinate actions to move it toward that result. — Intention Is All You Need.

Modern Software Philosophy

  1. Systems of Record Gravity: Slotnick sees data platforms as important because they give agents both the context for decisions and the information those agents work on. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  2. The Best Business Model: Slotnick contrasts the up-front revenue of a perpetual license with the ongoing costs and recurring revenue of subscription software. — On Subscription Software.
  3. Bundle a baseline of AI usage with each seat: Slotnick sees a hybrid pricing model in which a seat includes a baseline amount of AI usage, with additional usage billed separately. He expects it to help established vendors shift toward consumption pricing while keeping their existing subscriptions. — There Is No Spoon; A Picks-and-Shovels IPO
  4. Budget for implementation when automating a process: Slotnick argues that unattended agents require work inside the customer’s business to redesign processes and set up the automation. He points to that implementation burden as a reason AI vendors hire engineers to work directly with customers. — There Is No Spoon; A Picks-and-Shovels IPO
  5. The End of 'Cheap' Growth: Slotnick explains that a software startup may cut costs despite holding substantial cash when investors expect it to demonstrate operating leverage. — Why Software Layoffs Happen.
  6. Platform Definition: Slotnick distinguishes an API that exposes data from a platform that gives other applications or agents a place to run and a reason to build there. — The Cardinal Sin of Platform Building.
  7. Package an agent workflow for a shared runtime: Slotnick proposes shipping an agent application as a versioned configuration on a shared platform. The platform would handle execution and governance, leaving vendors to build the workflows specific to their customers. — Creating a Claude-Native Application Ecosystem
  8. Let partners use the customer’s existing inference commitment: Slotnick proposes that Salesforce let partners run model requests through its platform. Customers could use inference credits they have already committed to buy, while partners could distribute their agents through Salesforce. — Salesforce Should Sell Inference
  9. The CRM Battleground: Slotnick argues that years of workflows, approvals and integrations make CRM replacement difficult. He sees a competitive opening in the agent layer that works above those systems. — The CRM Isn’t the Battleground.

AI Sales & GTM Strategy

  1. Winning POVs: Poggio describes a sales point of view as a shared account-specific case for value that helps different teams deliver a consistent message. — Poggio on Sales POVs.
  2. Research is a Waste: Poggio identifies the work of researching and updating account-specific points of view across many accounts as a bottleneck for sellers. — Poggio on Sales POVs.
  3. Leading with Language: Slotnick says sellers with several products need to adjust their value propositions as markets and products change and different stakeholders enter the conversation. — Buyers x Builders Interview.
  4. AI for Sales Context: Slotnick argues that agents can use unstructured material from research and conversations that rarely makes it into structured sales fields. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.
  5. Outcome Centricity: Slotnick argues that subscription vendors must earn renewals by delivering on their promises. That gives them a reason to prioritize ongoing customer value. — On Subscription Software.
  6. Winning the Future: Slotnick sees incumbent software as essential to existing business processes and expects agents to create a separate growth opportunity by taking on work within those processes. — A Note from the Softwars.

Product & Team Execution

  1. Iterative Innovation: Slotnick suggests that established vendors give a small team authority to try new products for existing customers without being tied to current pricing and offerings. — A Note from the Softwars.
  2. Workflow First, Tech Second: When hiring a product-focused engineer for Poggio, Slotnick emphasized working closely with customers and applying AI to problems with tangible value. — Slotnick’s Poggio Hiring Post.
  3. The Logic of Applications: Slotnick describes the underlying data model and permitted actions as the nouns and verbs of an enterprise application. — Context Rules Everything Around Me.

Business Logic & Personal Philosophies

  1. Business as a Machine: Slotnick views a business as a system that allocates resources and acts on core objects such as customers, open issues and roles. — Intention Is All You Need.
  2. Vibe Organizations: Slotnick compares directing agents to specifying the outcome you want. In his framework, how much work you can delegate depends on the precision of the objective and the context you provide. — Intention Is All You Need.
  3. The Messy Reality: Slotnick expects a transition in which businesses keep relying on existing enterprise software while adapting it to support work done by agents. — A Note from the Softwars.

Sources

  1. Context Rules Everything Around Me: The Future of Enterprise Applications
  2. The CRM Isn’t the Battleground
  3. Intention Is All You Need