Stratechery: Meta aims its agent at the wrong customers; Lenny's: 11 summit talks go free

AI strategy: Meta's agent and the customers it picks

"One More Note on Agents, Meta Connect, Meta Enterprise Platform" — Stratechery

1. Thompson's summary line is the public verdict in full: "Meta has the chance to own the consumer agentic space; going for enterprise is a big mistake." The title bills the piece as "one more note on agents," which points back to Monday's free essay, "Apps, Agents, and Aggregation," carried in this digest on September 29. That essay argued that agents become the aggregators, that they reduce apps to implementation details, and that the scarce step in the app economy moves from discovery to volition. 3 Tuesday's Update turns that argument onto Meta's week.
2. "Meta Connect" is the conference Meta held on September 23 and 24, and it is where the company put its agent on hardware. Meta said Muse, the personal agent it launched earlier in September, is coming to its AI glasses, with the agent able to act on whatever the wearer is looking at. Meta also introduced VR Glasses weighing about 100 grams, Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses and a third-generation Ray-Ban Meta, and said it will offer more than 100 styles of AI glasses by the end of the year. The same announcement added Muse connectors for Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Wayfair, Shop Pay, PayPal, Instacart, Notion and GitHub, and gave Muse an email address of its own. 4 For a consumer agent, that list of shops and services is the product.
3. "Meta Enterprise Platform" points the other way, and Meta announced it on September 28. Zuckerberg called it "the next major pillar of our business" and named CJ Desai, the chief executive of MongoDB until this week, as chief enterprise platform officer reporting to him. The opening pitch sells Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API and Muse Code to companies and developers, and Desai said the platform will turn Meta's AI stack into products that businesses deploy for themselves. 5 Desai's departure cost MongoDB more than 17% of its share price that day. 6 Meta's own framing is that businesses are where the growth is; the Update's summary line calls that aim a mistake.

Product and growth: a summit's worth of talks, released

"All of the Lenny & Friends Summit talks are now online!" — Lenny's Newsletter

1. Eleven talks went up at once, free, collected into a single playlist. The lineup opens with Stripe's head of design, Katie Dill, on raising the ceiling, and Linear chief executive Karri Saarinen on context becoming the product. It runs through Ramp chief product officer Geoff Charles on designing an AI software factory, Google Search vice president of product Robby Stein on what a top PM is now, Atlassian chief product and AI officer Tamar Yehoshua on roles expanding, and Lovable head of growth Elena Verna on the high-impact individual contributor. Every's Dan Shipper, How I AI's Claire Vo and the Silicon Valley Product Group's Marty Cagan fill out the single-speaker slots, and two vendor panels close the set: Anthropic's chief product officer Ami Vora with head of labs Mike Krieger, and OpenAI's Tara Seshan of ChatGPT Work with Nan Yu of Codex.
2. Rachitsky's own read on the day leans on the speakers' lines rather than on any method. He writes that he has "rarely felt this much PMF for anything I've done," and reads the appetite for the event as the work getting lonelier as agents take more of it. Two of his reflections land on what AI makes easy: Robby Stein's version is that "the actual true value of PM is around judging," and Karri Saarinen's is that "the output is not the product." Two more land on what the job becomes: Geoff Charles predicts PMs turning into general managers who own a business outcome, Elena Verna describes building the pricing page and deploying to production herself, and Katie Dill frames the point of it all as raising the ceiling, "not just the floor."
3. The day did not settle what the job should look like next, and Rachitsky says his speakers split on it. They took both sides of whether roadmaps are still over and whether PMs should ship to production. Tamar Yehoshua's answer was "it depends"; Robby Stein told the room that his route is one of many and that people should take what fits; Katie Dill said "the best practices have not been written yet"; and Ami Vora's was that none of it is known yet, including inside Anthropic. Claire Vo's contribution is the forward-looking one: "I think next year is the ambition game."

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