CEO, NQB8. GP, @FlexCapital. fmr CEO, @LiveRamp. loves: crazy ideas, weirdos, and email. host: Summation podcast. reading: @AurenReads
Washington, DC
Joined November 2006
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Auren Hoffman retweeted
Your AI is vaporware without deep integrations with your customers’ systems of record.
Introducing @WithAmpersand: integration infrastructure for enterprise agents.
We power 11x, Orb, and Square's ability to take agentic action in systems of record like Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, and Workday.
Ask anyone serious about building AI and they’ll tell you:
- The SaaSpocalypse didn’t happen. The world depends on CRMs, ERPs, HRISs, and ITSMs.
- Your customers customized their deployments beyond recognition.
- Systems of record companies are basically monopolies. They never had to make their APIs and MCPs user-friendly.
- Docs don't explain half the weird edge cases you'll hit.
- One bad write can blow up your pilot or renewal.
- Once you finally get it working, someone changes a field and it breaks again.
The world's data lives in structured databases. AI needs a translation layer to work with it.
So, for your AI to truly transform the way enterprises work, you'll need deep integrations built for:
- scoped permissions
- bi-directional actions
- real-time speed for agents
- custom objects, fields, and workflows for each of your customers
We built Ampersand to power the future of software.
AI didn't trivialize writing integrations. It made them the critical path.
I believe that deeply, so I didn't make a launch video about Ampersand.
Instead, it's the best builders I know explaining just how big of a challenge this is.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
"what you should NEVER do is ask for advice, get an answer you don’t like, and then spend the remaining 20 minutes arguing. you wanted validation. you should have said so."
A must-read for anybody trying to build their career with intention and purpose: @auren's step-by-step guide on the right way to ask for advice auren.substack.com/p/how-to-…
Auren Hoffman retweeted
Children need to be teach-yourself-on-YouTube-maxxing
the most important skill is to be able to teach yourself something complicated from a youtube video.
The other day, I met some parents, and they were super concerned about their 16-year-old daughter. The parents both went to very fancy colleges, and their daughter was not on the track to go to a very fancy college. They were lamenting that and were concerned about that.
Then I happened to meet their daughter, and two things I noticed right away:
(1) the daughter was a wonderful person, and she just seemed like a genuinely nice and caring young lady. The parents obviously did something right raising this great, genuinely nice person.
(2) She told me that she recently taught herself how to play guitar on YouTube. and not because her parents asked her to play guitar and not because any teacher asked her to play guitar, but because she just actually wanted to learn how to play guitar. She went on YouTube and taught herself how to do it, and now she's actually pretty good at it. Her only tutor has been YouTube videos, and she's been at it for quite a while and has gotten really good at it.
I ran into her parents again the next day, and I told them, "Look, you have nothing to worry about: your daughter is a wonderful human being. AND your daughter has the one most important skill in the world: being able to teach yourself something complicated on YouTube by yourself because you intrinsically want to learn."
If you have a son or a daughter and you're worried about that person, just don't worry if they can actually just teach themselves something. If they actually just want to go learn something on their own -- that's amazing.
if, on the other hand, you have to hire a tutor every time they want to go learn something, then you should be worried.
the one skill, and the most important skill is being able to teach yourself something complicated through something like a YouTube video or an AI or something like that to help you learn something quite complex.
That complexity could be something to do with gardening or fixing something around the home, or some sort of art or hobby, or, obviously, computer programing. It could be a whole bunch of different types of things. Whatever it is, if you can teach yourself something complicated from a YouTube video or equivalent, you're going to be fine in life.
The most important skill you can have in this new era of AI is the ability to teach yourself something somewhat complicated on YouTube. If you have a child and you're worried about your child and you're worried about what college to get into, don't worry. Just make sure they can do one thing: teach themselves something on YouTube. They should be teaching themselves something on YouTube, not because their parents assign them to do it or their teacher assigned them to do it, but because they intrinsically were interested in it.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations:
We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.
These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense.
We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
How many times do I need to write "2+4=5" in Reddit to change the laws of arithmetic?
Auren Hoffman retweeted
We've raised a $143M Series C at a $1.5B valuation.
In 2023 we spent our time arguing that AI code needed its own reviewer. That argument is over. The work now is moving into the change itself.
This is where we think Agentic Change Management comes in.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
This is a pretty big shift in U.S. cyber policy.
The White House is setting up a program that would let private cybersecurity companies conduct government-authorized operations against foreign cybercriminal groups, including surveillance and disruption of their infrastructure.
Not exactly “hack back,” but definitely a major expansion of the private sector’s role in offensive cyber operations.
whitehouse.gov/presidential-…
Auren Hoffman retweeted
A civilization powered by nicotine is vastly preferable to one powered by marijuana.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
The anti-AI sentiment, especially on the Right, is one of the most successful Chinese psyops I've ever witnessed
Auren Hoffman retweeted
the more i learn about history, the more I appreciate America. America is actually an extremely cool and special anomaly in the timeline of civilizations. It's so successful that it's allowed the people inside it to lose touch with how bad things can truly be
Auren Hoffman retweeted
This was a great pod with accomplished tech entrepreneur @Auren - we covered a lot of ground
new Summation pod with @Carson_C_Block, founder of Muddy Waters and the short seller who's gotten companies delisted across China, Europe, and the US.
we get into why outright fraud is the least of our problems, how Germany became a paradise for criminals, and the Wirecard saga that ends with a fugitive founder working for Russian intelligence.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
Dialog is one of the best conference series of the last 20 years. It’s exposed me to ideas and people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise and I’ve made enduring friendships from it. Cheers to more Dialogs and more projects like it that push the intellectual frontier.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
I am proud to attend events held and sponsored by Peter Thiel. I will continue to go to them and Wired isn't what it once was.
See how easy that is?
Auren Hoffman retweeted
I finally read the WIRED article about Dialog and this is the the silliest controversy.
This has been a widely known event in tech circles over the past two decades - it wouldn’t even qualify as an “open secret.” Back in my comms days, it was on my list of conferences to track lol (I’m sure other PR folks can attest). If an exec had been invited, I would have encouraged them to attend.
Yes, powerful people participated (a draw). And the sessions list is more interesting than most conferences (the lowest of bars).
Somehow, the combination of Thiel’s involvement and the guest list coming to light via a hack made this newsworthy.
Also, @ezraklein, I’m a fan but I think you made this way worse with your long-winded explanation/apology!!
My favorite part: the member “talents.” Who among us hasn’t been asked to submit dumb stuff like this ahead of an event, with the unspoken mandate to make yourself sound interesting.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
This is correct. Last Dialog event I was at included a general, a weapons dealer (to the good guys), several entrepreneurs, a philosopher etc. and we did not discuss overthrowing democracy.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Auren Hoffman retweeted
This dialog story is really exasperating. Powerful and smart people like to hang out together to knowledge share and think ahead about stuff. Who knew?!
Can’t wait for the same level of scrutiny to befall Davos in the Desert. YPO. World Minds. Or any of the other countless “access” networks that regularly meet in fancy hotels or online. There’s an entire industry of private members clubs. Back in the day many of them involved golf.
And it sounds like this group was pretty ideologically diverse unlike say the meetings of the Fabians or the John Birch society.
I guess it’s no longer the case that in democracies everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association.
Besides everyone knows that the most powerful and most radicalising secret societies these days are parental WhatsApp groups.
Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So:
–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.
–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.
–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.
–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.
–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.
–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)
–That said, Dialog was a pretty ideologically diverse crowd. I met some people there who were *extremely* far left and far right. I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it.
– I’m a journalist, I go to lots of things in the hopes of getting to know people, hearing new ideas, finding podcast guests, etc.
–Being at something does not mean I endorse it, or everyone at it, or everyone who organized or founded it. I try to go to things where I don’t share the politics and perspectives of the crowd, for obvious reasons.
–I am surprised how credulous some people have been on this story. You have to believe some weird things about the world to believe Julián Castro and Peter Thiel are somehow engaged in a common project. Secret societies, I imagine, need a lot of trust to function, but the people being named here do not trust each other and do not have aligned agendas.
So that’s what I saw at Dialog. I’ll just end by saying it’s a weird experience to have a conference you haven’t thought about for years become the center of a new conspiracy theory.
wired.com/story/leak-exposes…
Auren Hoffman retweeted
BREAKING: @wired going to release who cried at the TED talk on global warming talk in 2019!! 😂😂😂
DISGRAZIAD Wired!!!
WIRED reported that Austin-based billionaire Joe Lonsdale was listed as a member of Dialog, an exclusive group co-founded by Peter Thiel. statesman.com/news/politics/…
