Build startups for agents. I think it's the biggest opportunity of...
GREG ISENBERG@gregisenberg
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Jul 06, 2026
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Build startups for agents. I think it's the biggest opportunity of the next 10 years.
1. Agents live inside harnesses like Hermes. If you're the tool it loads by default or reaches for first, you're golden. This happened in desktop, mobile eras and created huge companies.
2. Agents burn money in ways no human would. One bad loop spends $100 in tokens in eight minutes. Spend controls for agents is Ramp for agents.
3. Agents need memory they can trust. Become the shared brain they read and write to and you become infrastructure.
4. You obv don't hand an agent your real Stripe account. You give it a sandbox. Safe environments for agents is a category nobody's clocked.
5. Onboarding flips. Humans click around for ten minutes. Agents onboard by reading your docs. Your docs are now your product.
6. Agents get scammed by other agents. A track record you can check before you trust one becomes real money.
7. An agent needs to prove it's acting for a real person and has the authority to spend. Who builds the permission layer?
8. Escrow for machines. Money that only releases when the job is actually verified done, no human checking.
9. Agents fail silently and weirdly. Someone will build the "why did my agent do that" replay and it'll be mega valuable.
10. Refunds and disputes between agents need a judge. An agent did the job badly, who decides? A court for machines.
11. Agents need throwaway payment methods per task, so they don't leak your real card. Virtual cards for agents, spun up and killed on demand.
12. A human hits rate limits and shrugs. An agent hits them and the whole workflow dies. Selling reliable, high-throughput access becomes its own business.
13. Agents need to negotiate. One agent buying from another will haggle on price and terms in milliseconds. The protocol for that doesn't really exist yet.
14. When an agent commits on your behalf, someone's liable. A legal and insurance layer for agent actions has to get built. Probably venture funded idea.
15. Agents need to run 24/7 somewhere. Selling the always on box an agent lives on is going to be a big business.
16. Then the physical world shows up. A warehouse robot paying for its own compute. A home robot ordering its own parts. Machines with wallets.
17. Agents start hiring robots. A software agent posts a real world job, a humanoid picks it up. A marketplace for machine labor.
18. Robots need to prove they did the physical job. Verification of real-world work, photos, sensors, proof, becomes its own layer.
Note: more ideas like this will be shared on @ideabrowser
19. Prompt and skill versioning becomes its own git. When your agent gets worse overnight, you need to roll back the exact skill or instruction that broke it. Version control built for agent behavior.
20. Agents will start subscribing to other agents. Your research agent pays a monthly fee to a specialist agent that's really good at one thing. Recurring revenue, machine to machine.
21. Companies will post jobs that only agents can apply to. "Wanted: an agent that can do XYZ for under like $100 per task." A job board where the applicants are all machines. Basically, fiverr for machines.
The internet got built for people. Mobile got built for people. This wave gets built for machines, and we're as early as it gets.
Go build for them.
1. Agents live inside harnesses like Hermes. If you're the tool it loads by default or reaches for first, you're golden. This happened in desktop, mobile eras and created huge companies.
2. Agents burn money in ways no human would. One bad loop spends $100 in tokens in eight minutes. Spend controls for agents is Ramp for agents.
3. Agents need memory they can trust. Become the shared brain they read and write to and you become infrastructure.
4. You obv don't hand an agent your real Stripe account. You give it a sandbox. Safe environments for agents is a category nobody's clocked.
5. Onboarding flips. Humans click around for ten minutes. Agents onboard by reading your docs. Your docs are now your product.
6. Agents get scammed by other agents. A track record you can check before you trust one becomes real money.
7. An agent needs to prove it's acting for a real person and has the authority to spend. Who builds the permission layer?
8. Escrow for machines. Money that only releases when the job is actually verified done, no human checking.
9. Agents fail silently and weirdly. Someone will build the "why did my agent do that" replay and it'll be mega valuable.
10. Refunds and disputes between agents need a judge. An agent did the job badly, who decides? A court for machines.
11. Agents need throwaway payment methods per task, so they don't leak your real card. Virtual cards for agents, spun up and killed on demand.
12. A human hits rate limits and shrugs. An agent hits them and the whole workflow dies. Selling reliable, high-throughput access becomes its own business.
13. Agents need to negotiate. One agent buying from another will haggle on price and terms in milliseconds. The protocol for that doesn't really exist yet.
14. When an agent commits on your behalf, someone's liable. A legal and insurance layer for agent actions has to get built. Probably venture funded idea.
15. Agents need to run 24/7 somewhere. Selling the always on box an agent lives on is going to be a big business.
16. Then the physical world shows up. A warehouse robot paying for its own compute. A home robot ordering its own parts. Machines with wallets.
17. Agents start hiring robots. A software agent posts a real world job, a humanoid picks it up. A marketplace for machine labor.
18. Robots need to prove they did the physical job. Verification of real-world work, photos, sensors, proof, becomes its own layer.
Note: more ideas like this will be shared on @ideabrowser
19. Prompt and skill versioning becomes its own git. When your agent gets worse overnight, you need to roll back the exact skill or instruction that broke it. Version control built for agent behavior.
20. Agents will start subscribing to other agents. Your research agent pays a monthly fee to a specialist agent that's really good at one thing. Recurring revenue, machine to machine.
21. Companies will post jobs that only agents can apply to. "Wanted: an agent that can do XYZ for under like $100 per task." A job board where the applicants are all machines. Basically, fiverr for machines.
The internet got built for people. Mobile got built for people. This wave gets built for machines, and we're as early as it gets.
Go build for them.