As I continue to profile the portfolio companies of venture capital firms, as well as the services and tooling those companies use, I am left thinking about the reasons why more of these companies aren’t programmable — not just for their core offerings, but for their operational surface area. I know if I was a VC who was all in on the agentic hustle, I’d be like, “MAKE IT ALL PROGRAMMABLE!”
If I was giving big money to companies I would require them to have APIs, and I would require them to use only services that had APIs. I would push for the standardization of services across the startups I invested in to reduce the complexity of the programmable surface area of my portfolio. I’d even go so far as to develop an abstraction layer that could plug and play into different common services, one that would allow my startups to pick and choose from a buffet of services, and even choose new ones if they did the work to plug it into my abstraction layer.
I’d want the revenue and marketing layer for my startups to be programmable. If I am going to talk the talk, then my portfolio should walk the walk. If we are all in on this agentic vision, then make the surface area of portfolio companies programmable. It will benefit everyone — the VC, the startups, and the customers who are purchasing from your portfolio companies. With all the rhetoric and hype out there today, it seems like this would be the expectation of startup founders. Lay the API foundation, govern it, and ensure it is agent ready.
I am really enjoying my API Evangelist profiling work right now. My profiling process is robust. My Agent Skills for profiling have become mature and repeatable. My Kin Score is rapidly iterating based upon my profiling of top 100 VC portfolios, secondary market startups, and the industries and other meaningful areas of the technology sector. I can quickly assess the programmatic reality of any startup, industry, area, and portfolio. I am enjoying using AI to quantify the AI hype and reality, and quickly assess where the opportunities are.
