Startups I Am Watching.

This started as a side effect of something practical. I was building myself a small system for reaching out to founders, the kind of cold outreach that is easy to do badly and hard to do well. Doing it properly meant actually understanding the companies I admired, not just collecting names off a list.

So I went looking. I read about who is building the most interesting things in B2B software and AI, how their products are put together, and which engineering bets looked least obvious. Nooks was one of the first to stand out, partly because they are solving the exact problem I was working on, real-time AI for sales conversations, and partly because the engineering underneath is harder than it appears from the outside.

The research outlived its original purpose. What follows are my notes on the companies that kept my attention. They are not reviews and they are not analyses. They are observations from someone who thinks about product and engineering a lot, and finds certain bets more interesting than others.