Highlights, Hype, & Hot Takes on NY Tech: Marty Ringlein with Jenny Fielding
Marty Ringlien, co-founder and CEO of Agree chats with Jenny Fielding, General Partner of Everywhere Ventures about New York Tech Week.
In episode 122 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Marty Ringlein, co-founder and CEO of Agree, for a founder’s-eye recap of New York Tech Week 2026. Marty breaks down his week — from demoing Agree at Intercom to a poker night at Bessemer — and what the energy on the ground said about where New York’s tech scene is heading. Together they dig into what had every founder and VC buzzing — agents, commoditization, and whether New York is finally having its moment as the center of the tech universe.
In this episode, you will hear:
New York Tech Week reaching its inflection point.
The best and worst events of the week as a founder on the ground.
Agents and commoditization turning once-defensible products into overnight features.
Regulated industries as the last viable moat against AI encroachment.
The question every founder is now asking: what won’t Claude or ChatGPT build?
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
Transcript:
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So, the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:32 Jenny: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Venture Everywhere. Today we’re excited to talk to one of our founders, Marty, the CEO and co-founder of Agree. Welcome, Marty.
00:00:42 Marty: Hey, thanks for having me. This is going to be exciting.
00:00:44 Jenny: I thought, no better person to talk about what’s happening in tech in New York, across all these things than you, because I think you go to more events and are part of more interesting circles than any other founder I know.
00:01:01 Marty: Sometimes it’s contentious for founders whether they should be, quote unquote, “wasting their time at events.” But for us, it’s always BD. I think we’ve just found a lot of success and meet the customer where they’re at IRL. And so, we, by that nature, end up at a lot of events.
00:01:16 Marty: And then I just think New York’s a little bit more social where the events are always twofold where I will meet some interesting people. But also, it’s usually like a pretty good time, whereas in San Francisco, you’ll meet really interesting people, but it’s kind of a snooze fest. It isn’t always the most socially engaging time.
00:01:32 Jenny: Well, also, like what you do. I mean, I know there is that controversy, you know, amongst people of just heads down, should we be going to events?
00:01:40 Jenny: But I feel like for you and what you do, and maybe you can give us a little bit of a plug of what Agree is up to, you kind of have to get the brand out there. Give us the one-minute on Agree and how you guys are doing.
00:01:54 Marty: Agree’s full contract to cash. That really just means the second a customer says yes to the second that the revenue hits the account and all the workflows that go in between there.
00:02:03 Marty: So, e-signature on the contract signing, invoicing, billing, payments, revenue recovery, all-in-one. But essentially, rip and replace of your DocuSign, a rip and replace of your bill.com, even your Stripe. Those are some big brands to go up against.
00:02:18 Marty: One of the things that we always try to do, especially when we do the event marketing is when we get on a demo with somebody, have them say, “Oh, Agree, I’ve heard of you. You’re everywhere.” And the reality is I can’t afford to be everywhere.
00:02:28 Jenny: Wait, that’s my line. You’re everywhere. Don’t take my line. You are everywhere because this is my go-to hat that I wear all around the neighborhood. So, I am doing free advertising for you. And I feel like people stare at me when I wear this hat.
00:02:46 Jenny: One, because I wear it really low. So, they think I’m important and famous. But also, because people are like, “Oh, Agree. You’re a New Yorker. That’s so funny because you’re so unagreeable.” But this is my go-to hat. It’s like right on the little hook by my door.
00:03:01 Marty: I appreciate that. I’m going to make sure that you’ve got plenty of backups in case anything ever happens to that one. But I do feel like when we talk to folks that they do think that they’ve seen or been exposed to Agree a lot.
00:03:10 Marty: But the reality is we just stay within the four block radius virtually or in real life of wherever they are. And I think part of that is you’re just showing up.
00:03:19 Jenny: For sure. So, a little bit of fun history. I started my first company in New York City in 2008. Everyone said, “That is a shitty place to run a startup. Go west, young woman, to California if you’re going to be running a startup, especially software.”
00:03:34 Jenny: And I kind of looked around. I was like, all right. Well, there’s not a lot going on here. I will give you that. But it kind of had all the raw ingredients.
00:03:42 Jenny: So, since 2008, I’ve been really long New York tech and small contributor to it. Over those years, it has really blossomed and now, second biggest tech ecosystem and so much going on.
00:03:56 Jenny: And the thing that I find amazing about New York is like, when I was building my company here, there were some ad tech and media. There were obviously lots of industries, but those were the things that were starting to bubble up in tech. I wasn’t building in one of those categories.
00:04:09 Jenny: But then we saw it become the center of fintech and healthcare, to some extent, and crypto. Now, you know, it’s really developing on AI as well, which is exciting. So, what I love about New York is that it kind of embraces whatever the thing is and figures out how to build an ecosystem around it.
00:04:29 Jenny: Even hard tech, which everyone said it’s just inherently hard to build product in New York cause like the space. But all these amazing spaces have opened around hard tech.
00:04:38 Jenny: I kind of love the resilience and the buoyancy of New York to create what needs to be created. It’s been fun to see that. Tell us a little bit about your journey here in New York.
00:04:48 Marty: I think the biggest differentiator is the diversity of the people and that like, you have to like, will it into existence. Not all founders are going to make it. Not all startups are going to make it, but everyone building in New York, they’re going to will that thing into existence. They’re going to do whatever it takes. Brute force.
00:05:04 Marty: I appreciate that probably more than anything else because I’m just now exposed to so much creativity, especially on the go-to-market side. How they’re building things, how they’re launching things.
00:05:14 Marty: And it is getting a little bit easier to build things like prototypes and get them to market with AI. But it is getting much harder to stand out, getting much harder to launch because we are seeing this influx of people building and launching.
00:05:30 Marty: And now it’s just, you’re over what’s signal to noise has never been more out of whack, but far exceeding anything that happens in the San Francisco Bay Area. New Yorkers are the most creative and relentless when it comes to taking their thing to market. So, I’ve appreciated that probably more than anything else.
00:05:45 Jenny: For sure. Let’s fast forward to New York Tech Week. I’ve obviously been here a long time, building in and around the startup ecosystem. I do remember back in the day there were these startup weeks.
00:05:56 Jenny: I think Startup Weekend and Techstars were actually kind of involved early on in getting them going. And then they petered out. And I remember they were never particularly big. They were very like insidery thing.
00:06:08 Jenny: But I remember asking a couple of very prominent VCs, “Why isn’t Tech Week here a thing?” And they literally looked me in the eye and they were like, “Well, because we’re just busy and we can’t really agree on a week and everyone’s just doing their own thing.”
00:06:27 Jenny: And I thought like, wow, it’s weird because we saw around the world, other ecosystems really coalesced around the important dates. And in New York, everyone was over it. You can’t get all the firms to agree. There’s no center of gravity in New York. Everything’s so dispersed.
00:06:41 Jenny: It’s very different than doing that in like Boulder, Colorado or somewhere where you can actually hit everyone up. And I remember thinking to myself like, “Oh, that kind of sucks, but it does make sense. I mean, we’re a city of radical individuals, so it makes sense that like they don’t want to be part of a club that wants them.”
00:06:57 Jenny: Then this thing happened that Tech Week came into existence. And I would give real props to Andreessen Horowitz for making that happen. I think they started in L.A. as the L.A. scene was coming together as well.
00:07:10 Jenny: You know, I remember when they set their sights for New York and everyone was like, “I wonder if this will actually work.” But I think it took a huge giant like that to kind of get everyone on board.
00:07:19 Jenny: And now we’re a couple of years in. I looked at the calendar a couple of weeks ago before Tech Week. I mean, it was thousands and thousands of events. It was just insanity. So, thoughts on just seeing that all come together?
00:07:33 Marty: I think I saw some 40 to 50,000 attendees throughout all of the New York Tech Week events. That’s wild. That’s a huge turnout. I’ve seen these ebbs and flows of communities and local geographic constrained networks come together.
00:07:46 Marty: Sometimes, you know, you just need those like one or two breakout startups to come back. There’s been a few in New York, but Ramp sort of ramping up so much has helped because there’s just this energy.
00:08:00 Marty: And then you see other folks like Rho and just a handful of other startups like really coming together and launching in a big way that the level of excitement just gets larger. I feel like, especially in New York, it compounds and compounds quickly. That’s been pretty cool to see.
00:08:16 Marty: It’s very classic New York. You know it’s good, but it’s also annoying because there’s a line and I’m just trying to constantly bob between the ones in which I can either skip the line or get there early enough that I don’t have to wait in the line.
00:08:28 Jenny: It’s also interesting because the guidance given by Andreessen, if you are organizing things, you’re kind of on the organizer side. And there’s this whole team of people at Andreessen that are there to really set you up for success.
00:08:42 Jenny: They’ve put a lot of infrastructure into this, but there are a couple of people there and they email you the calendar and to get your Lumas up to date and your Partifuls.
00:08:50 Jenny: And one of the things that they sent emails around was saying that in other ecosystems, other Tech Weeks, the drop off from people that sign up to people that actually attend is 50 to 70%.
00:09:03 Jenny: We’ve done these a number of years. We actually don’t get that drop off, but you do get paranoid. And so in every event, the ones that we were doing and the ones I attended, we over-admitted. We had hardly any drop off.
00:09:19 Jenny: Every event I went to was heaving with people and every event I hosted, we ran out of seats, which I felt really bad about. So, something happened. More people came, more people decided to show up for the things that they signed up for. There was something in the air this year.
00:09:35 Marty: For San Francisco, the weather is almost always consistently the same. But in New York, if it’s really beautiful out, like one of two things are going to happen. Like everyone’s just done working because it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. This is a rare moment. Go out and grab it.”
00:09:48 Marty: Or it just draws more people outside and everyone ends up showing up. And I think like this week, it was just almost perfectly idealistic and everyone wants to be outside. New York, there’s no shortage of beautiful rooftops. Just almost every single event I went to was on a rooftop and the weather was just perfect.
00:10:05 Jenny: And then also, like there’s so much concentration around a couple neighborhoods that you just find yourself walking to one or another. And when the weather is nice, you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I can pop into that other one.”
00:10:15 Jenny: I was pretty much speaking at four events a day and I was mostly walking to each one and bopping between them. So, I think the good weather helped.
00:10:25 Jenny: But getting back to the people, every event I went to, lines at the door had to turn people away. So, that seemed like a little bit of a change from other Tech Weeks I’ve been to or even years past in New York. That was a bit of a shocker.
00:10:39 Jenny: You also mentioned Ramp and Rho and some of those folks. One thing I noticed is just how much resource they’re putting in to, not just sponsoring their own events, but like co-sponsoring events with startups and VCs and other people.
00:10:54 Jenny: There were so many events that were sponsored by what we would call the service providers, but a lot of them were startups. I also noticed a couple of the usual suspects doing more than usual. One of them was Microsoft.
00:11:09 Jenny: We, as a venture fund and before when I worked at Techstars, there was always the like Microsoft for Startups crew. They offer credits and they help startups. But I’d say the last couple of years, they haven’t been as active as some of the other folks like AWS.
00:11:23 Jenny: And then this year, not just for Tech Week, they’re making a huge push into startups and they’re everywhere right now. They’re doing tons of events. They’re sponsoring lots of folks.
00:11:34 Jenny: It’s been interesting just to see them rise up. I guess these things ebb and flow. AWS used to be the one sponsoring everything. They’ve been a little more quiet. Now it seems like Microsoft is really on the prowl.
00:11:45 Marty: It’s been cool just to even go into some of these spaces where there’s so much collaboration and co-sponsorship. I went to a poker event for a startup but then, it was at Bessemer.
00:12:03 Marty: I mean, it’s a beautiful view. You’re just looking over the New York Public Library. But then there’s other ones where like they’re at law firms or like Fenwick. And so pretty interesting to see those.
00:12:12 Marty: And this is another thing I think that’s unique to New York is they just found the shell of a building and then completely renovated it and took it over. Like they were literally installing the bathrooms the night before.
00:12:24 Jenny: Oh, my gosh.
00:12:25 Marty: Yeah, it was this epic space where you walk in and you just kind of assumed it’s been there for like 15 years. It was beautifully designed. And they’re just like, no, this literally just got built up for Tech Week.
00:12:34 Marty: And I was like, “That’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of effort.” They did one of those things where they had the building for the whole week. It was a constant… every hour, every day they had a different event going on. And so it was pretty cool use of space.
00:12:47 Jenny: That’s fun. One of the best events that I participated in was… Mercury had this like Mercury Vinyl Lounge. And it was at one of my favorite restaurants, Port Sa’id, which is an Israeli restaurant originally there is one in Tel Aviv.
00:13:05 Jenny: And if you go to the Tel Aviv one, it’s super cool. Like everyone’s hanging outside. It’s just very like chic, but laidback. You can never find the waitress. They’re like too busy smoking or doing whatever they’re doing. Like super cool.
00:13:18 Jenny: And then they open one in New York and I was kind of like, “How could it be as cool as like being on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv?” But they opened this space, it’s like all windows has this like loungy vibe and then they have all these records and things. So, it’s like actually a really cool space.
00:13:32 Jenny: So, maybe they don’t serve except for during the day or something. So, Mercury took over their space and they made it a coworking and content and lounge space. I just thought it had like the best vibes.
00:13:45 Jenny: They didn’t let in too many people. They had it so it was just kind of enough to be packed, but not painful. They had food going all day and I did a live pitch feedback session. So, people just lined up like whoever wanted to and they pitched and we gave them like real time feedback.
00:14:03 Jenny: It was with Brandon from Harlem Capital. And we just had such a good time. It was like great vibes. It was really good spirited and it was such a beautiful space. I had lots of people that I ran into later in the week that pitched or at that event and they really appreciated it. I feel like that was one of the best events I went to. It was just good vibes.
00:14:21 Marty: I love the ones where they purposely make it so you’re just not shoulder to shoulder. I feel like that’s another thing that can inadvertently happen in New York City.
00:14:29 Jenny: Yeah, you had to sign up in advance. They monitored it. There were a lot of people there from Mercury mingling about, but they had this whole lounge where you could essentially just like work with your laptop and it was super nice and clean and like they serve really good food. That was my favorite. What was one of yours?
00:14:45 Marty: I do go to a handful of events at my Tech Week. I am the super nerd in the back corner that finds the table and just got the laptop out. So, I’ll usually try to show up early so I don’t have to wait in the line.
00:14:55 Marty: I mentioned a Gamma one. I think it was called a Gammarama or something, but it was in Hammerstein Ballroom. So, it’s a pretty cool venue. Malcolm Gladwell shows up. So, it’s like, that’s cool. Bobby Brown’s there who like I’m not that big into fashion, obviously.
00:15:08 Jenny: I signed up for that and I couldn’t go. That one looked really phenomenal. I didn’t realize that’s where it was.
00:15:15 Marty: Mike Birbiglia is there, which is like… Awesome Comics. I’m just like, okay, you got fashion, you’ve got literature, you’ve got comedy. But my favorite one, which is a very like… can only happen in New York, this local guy in New York who I know you know, Andrew Young, hosts a lot of events and does a lot of the collaborations.
00:15:31 Marty: I think this was like a HubSpot event. It’s one of the closing events for the week. I love Andrew. Andrew’s a big Agree user. So, I go to that event. A lot of my friends are going to be there. So, it’s just a good catch up.
00:15:41 Marty: But it’s maybe six to eight blocks away from Times Square area. End up leaving and going to go grab dinner and just start heading in the Times Square direction.
00:15:53 Marty: And you talked about vibes earlier. There’s a vibe shift. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s going on, but something is going on in New York, near Times Square. And I don’t know what it is.
00:16:03 Marty: I just walk up and I’m in a free Madonna concert in Times Square, which is not a New York Tech Week related thing. My most popular tweet of the week was that the ultimate New York Tech Week power move is find events within a 10-minute walking radius. And so this is just Madonna within 10-minute walk of my last event. That’s cool.
00:16:25 Jenny: That’s insane. I thought you were going to say you saw the Everywhere logo in Times Square because we were up on a digital billboard with a few folks. Thank you, Microsoft for Startups.
00:16:36 Jenny: A few people saw it and messaged me, which was really cute. They’re like, I think your logo is in Times Square. It was above the Pele store. That was really fun.
00:16:45 Marty: Like you go to San Francisco, like that is not the equivalent of a digital billboard on the 101. Or like Sam Blond’s getting a lot of credit right now for how successful his airplane ads are. Those are cool. But like we’re talking, you get a billboard in Times Square. That’s a once in a lifetime feeling moment of like, this is cool.
00:17:04 Jenny: Yeah. Do you want to tell us the worst event you went to?
00:17:07 Marty: Oh, man.
00:17:09 Jenny: You don’t have to name names, but you can tell us what happened.
00:17:12 Marty: There’s always a few where you kind of walk in and you realize, one, there’s like nobody you know here, but you’re not early and that’s the reason it’s empty. It’s just empty. But you can kind of tell like they weren’t prepared. And this is one where I dropped the ball. I’m only here because it was in close proximity.
00:17:27 Marty: And I love like learning something new. So, it’s like, hey, there’s a track around AI. I want to hear like a different take. But it’s kind of a ghost town, half assed the AV set up. So, it’s just someone on a higher level than everyone else yelling to the crowd. It’s just like, I would rather just go to Starbucks and open my laptop and get some work done. When that happens, you know it’s not good.
00:17:47 Jenny: Yeah, that’s no good. I had a couple of events where the founders were just aggressively pitching. My piece of advice on that for founders is you have to read the room a little bit.
00:18:00 Jenny: It’s totally fine to go talk to speakers after they’re on a panel, but better off just make conversation and like, thread a needle of something that was spoken about as opposed to like, having to get your two minute pitch out because it’s just a lot when there’s like hundreds of them. So, I found that to be a little bit overwhelming.
00:18:18 Marty: I’m usually a fan of these things. Like at the intercom space, they gave us a slot to do like a demo of something we’re building at Agree. And the cool thing is they had a full on AV team recording it.
00:18:28 Marty: So, they’ll do a video. They’ll do a promo spot around like, all the social media content that you can use and clip up later use on this particular feature you’re launching. So, I was like, that’s cool.
00:18:36 Marty: But you could tell there were some founders who got up where it was just a sales pitch. And some of them almost treated it like a VC pitch and just kind of felt awkward to the room of other founders.
00:18:45 Marty: On your same vein of your advice is like, they want to go grab you afterwards and ask you questions. That’s the goal. Then do your little subtle pitch there, follow up with them afterwards. Like I look at it as like a retargeting thing. Just make them fall in love or get them really curious and spark that curiosity when you’re with them.
00:19:00 Jenny: One of the funniest things was during that thing where people were pitching us, this one guy comes up and he was pitching a pretty interesting story. But it’s like a very hot day and he’s wearing a long sleeve turtleneck, cashmere sweater. He’s wearing dress shoes and socks. And then he’s wearing very short shorts.
00:19:19 Jenny: And Brandon, we’re like, “What would you call that look?” It was so distracting because we’re like someone had stolen his pants. He was in a full on winter outfit with his dress shoes, his dark socks and his long sleeve sweater. And then he was wearing like the shortest gym shorts ever. And we were like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s interesting.”
00:19:41 Marty: But there’s got to be a backstory to that.
00:19:43 Jenny: Got to be a backstory of why he was up on stage pitching. I had a fun one. I did a reverse pitch. So, I was the person pitching to a room full of startups. So, that was really fun.
00:19:54 Jenny: I did a very alternative pitch. So, everyone was pitching what their fund does. And then I got up there and I was like, I’m not going to tell you what our fund does. You can look on our website. I’m going to tell you about me, my startup journey.
00:20:08 Jenny: I launch into like being a startup founder, having a co-founder breakup, having a term sheet pulled, running out of money, like sob story, Jenny. And I think it went over pretty well. So, that was fun just to like mix it up.
00:20:21 Jenny: That’s the other thing, whether you’re a founder or anyone pitching, at least in these performative pitch competition things, that can be a good way to go as well.
00:20:31 Marty: Anything that sparks people’s interest, gets them to peek up from their laptops and phones – and then maybe just anything memorable.
00:20:50 Jenny: Another highlight of the week for me, we always do a pre-seed founder breakfast. This one had 800 founders apply. We do it at a restaurant in a private room, seated. Everyone sits down. They share a meal. They get to know everyone.
00:21:03 Jenny: We did a little bit of content, but that one’s really special for me because I get so many pings after. And someone messaged me afterwards, saying that like, they’re collaborating with the person that they sat next to, it turns out. Like, they’re going to go work on something, which was super cool.
00:21:18 Jenny: And then someone said that they think they might join forces with someone, like become a co-founder. So, there were 800 people applied. We only had 60 seats. And it was a great moment of just connection with founders because I feel like they were all pre-seed. Sometimes there’s just not enough camaraderie or like it’s just hard to find other like-minded people.
00:21:38 Marty: We don’t qualify anymore, but I was super jealous not to come hang with you guys because that looked like a really, really cool event.
00:21:44 Jenny: That was a fun one. That was my Tech Week, all in all. I was dead exhausted on Friday. I like collapsed in my bed after that. I had such a great time. I feel like I covered a lot of ground.
00:21:55 Jenny: I was at and part of a lot of events. I got to see a lot of founders, meet some new founders, hang out with all the amazing sponsors. I mean, literally, I was the agnostic like, “Sure. AWS, Microsoft, Google.” So, I did events with everyone. It felt very collaborative this year. I was pretty pleased, but exhausted.
00:22:15 Marty: I thought it was awesome because I did the same thing. It was Thursday night. It was last night. Friday, I’m exhausted. Still have some work to do. And then I remember on Sunday, I got one of those emails from Katie at A16Z about like, Last day!” I was like, “It’s still going?”
00:22:30 Jenny: I know. I had the same response. Friday to me, it was done.
00:22:34 Marty: Yes. But she had a whole long list of events. I often glanced at it thinking like, “Oh, maybe I could get up out of bed and make it out.” But no, no. Same. Quick roundup. I started off with a podcast interview and then I went to a demo session where I demoed Agree.
00:22:51 Marty: Then I got to play poker at Bessemer and then got to party and then hang out at a free Madonna concert, which was epic. But bouncing around. And for me, it’s get to connect with some VCs that, usually, I only ever see on Zoom, which is weird, even in New York.
00:23:05 Marty: Sometimes we’ll get a coffee meetup but then there’s a handful like, I only ever see them at these larger things. I think that’s what makes Tech Week easy, too. It’s easy for a lot of in-person catch ups. It’s like, “Oh, we’ll be at the same thing together. We’ll just meet up there.”
00:23:19 Marty: Because I think we are sometimes looking for that person we know and, you know, kind of hang out with them for a little bit and then meet some new people, too, and like, broaden our collective circles. Those were all cool, too.
00:23:29 Jenny: What were some of the themes that you saw across all the programming? For me, I was at mostly like, startup-focused things geared towards startups who are fundraising a lot. The number one theme that I heard was defensibility.
00:23:44 Jenny: How do we build and convey defensibility when we’re pitching, when we’re building, you know, when we’re scaling? That was an interesting one just to hear many people’s take on that. But I think in general, startups are really worried about it.
00:23:59 Jenny: And VCs are actually worried about that as well. Like, what are your moats and are those moats durable? And I think there’s just so many unknowns. So, as much as it was like a celebratory week, there also was this air of just uncertainty and unease when it comes to building in the age of AI.
00:24:17 Marty: I think I saw three things. One was the Knicks, which is New York-related, but not Tech Week related. But everyone was talking about it. And then the other one, a little bit of a IPO talk.
00:24:27 Marty: Despite how the economy may or may not be doing, maybe we’re back. We saw a few IPOs last year with Chime and Figment. And then, now it’s SpaceX on Friday, then Anthropic to follow, and then OpenAI after that.
00:24:37 Marty: So, that seemed to bring a little bit of energy and excitement to the room. And then, I think the big one is just agents, agents, agents. I don’t think people are saying headless like they did two or three weeks ago.
00:24:48 Jenny: That was a quick trend. That was a two week trend. We’re done with headless.
00:24:53 Marty: I don’t know if they’re just using the term that Benioff used, but I do think a lot of people are stuck on this, hey, the world might be powered by like APIs and MCPs. So, there might be like an interface-less world. You know, it might be more text-based or voice-based.
00:25:09 Jenny: Oh, I heard the MCPs are dead, Marty. You’re… that’s passe.
00:25:13 Marty: Oh, I’m late.
00:25:14 Jenny: You’re late.
00:25:15 Marty: I think what’s interesting about the headless MCP narrative was what was once defensible or had a moat or could stand on its own is now a commodity. DocuSign can stand on its own, but nobody net new is going to build a business on e-signature.
00:25:30 Marty: Nobody’s going to build a business on invoicing. I don’t even think anyone’s coming to the table and building a business on like payments like Stripe did. Those are all now just commoditized features that a lot of people have.
00:25:41 Marty: And so I think the big conversation is what else is like that? Are the CRMs going to be commoditized? For us in FinTech, it’s revenue reporting, revenue recognition.
00:25:50 Marty: People built their standalone companies even within the last 18 months and raised a bunch of money. But like those seem like they’re going to be just commoditized features that live within someone’s MCP, another MCP. But they’re just calls.
00:26:02 Marty: We’re seeing a lot of CFOs now being able to do real time contextual like financial reporting. But the big caveat is if they connect all their data sources to some model.
00:26:13 Marty: We’re seeing older incumbents be a little uncomfortable with that, especially enterprise. But left and right, some new startup pops up, they just… they connect everything for better or worse.
00:26:23 Marty: But they’re doing a lot with that. And I think that’s going to like change the game. That was the spirit I saw was headless, MCPs, but what was once defensible now just a commodity feature.
00:26:33 Jenny: I’d agree. I think general consensus, if you’re building a single player tool, that might not have a lot of longevity. If you have multi connectivity to your customer and you’re solving many problems through various channels, then that seems like a little bit more messy integration, which… hard to conceive that, you know, an LLM can do that anytime soon. But we’ll see.
00:26:59 Marty: The other one I saw too is people asking, like, if in theory, Claude or ChatGPT, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI, if they could build anything in and Claude could do anything, what would it not do? I think it was Claude or ChatGPT that released basically like a Mint.com for personal finance. So like PFMs.
00:27:19 Marty: They were always kind of dead, but now they’re definitely dead. You just do it within the native environment that you’re working in. But like, what will they not do seems to come up a lot.
00:27:27 Marty: Will they not do payments? Will they not do other like, things that are highly regulated or have compliance? You know, there’s stuff in healthcare they won’t do. And then is that the safer place for a founder to go where they’re not going to – because now everyone’s asking, you know, before it was, what if Google did it? Now, what if Claude releases it?
00:27:43 Jenny: Well, we invest in a lot of regulated industries. I haven’t seen much automation impact there yet because human-in-the-loop and the trust layer is so important in things like healthcare and finance. But I think it would be naive to say, never say never. We’ll see.
00:27:58 Jenny: But I think also the enterprise, not just the sales cycle, but like, to get integrated into a hospital system can take years. And so it’s hard to imagine how a tool would be able to do that without a lot of buy-in from a lot of stakeholders. I think that gives it a little more longevity right now.
00:28:18 Jenny: The problem is you can’t rush into doing a regulated industry. They’re very painful to work in. The friction is huge. The sales cycles are long. So, I mean, yes, there’s more defensibility because they’re more painful.
00:28:31 Marty: You reminded me another popular thing that’s been coming up recently is it was the like death of the SDR. You know there’s those famous billboards in San Francisco. Artisan like, “Don’t hire any more humans.”
00:28:41 Marty: But, especially in New York being so GTM heavy and sales heavy, the death of or the automation of GTM seems to be very hot topic right now. Fire your head of marketing, get rid of your marketing team, let an agent do it all. I haven’t quite seen it yet, but it definitely seems narratively it was very popular.
00:28:59 Jenny: I totally get that that billboard can be on the 101 in San Francisco and like people get it. But it was on a bus stop in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side. And it’s this robot looking woman being like, you know, whatever that tagline is about not hiring people.
00:29:13 Jenny: And I just remember like walking by, cause it’s right around the corner from where I live. And there’s this older woman and she’s just standing by the bus stop and she’s just looking at this, trying to understand.
00:29:24 Jenny: And I was like, well, I’m not sure the Upper West Siders are on board with this. It was so funny just to see like, she had no context of what this was, but like the words just seemed so crazy to her. And I was like, “Well, it’s not really your tech market up here.”
00:29:39 Marty: I love in New York, you’ll see… you’re going to just see the juxtaposition of you’ll have one ad that says stop hiring humans. And then you’ve got another one that says like friend.com. It’s like, AI is your friend. AI is going to take your job. I don’t know which one it is.
00:30:07 Jenny: On that note, Marty, this was so fun. It’s always so great to chat with you. I’m glad you had a good Tech Week. I did as well.
00:30:22 Marty: No, thanks for having me.
00:30:24 Jenny: Shout out to everyone who came out for such an epic week. We’ll catch you soon.
00:30:28 Marty: And go Knicks. Tonight’s a big night.
00:30:30 Jenny: Go Knicks. Woo.
00:30:32 Marty: All right. Take care.
00:30:33 Jenny: Bye.
00:30:36 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Marty Ringlein in Founders Everywhere.