Startup founder: okthink.ai, a next-gen software company. Our first product: itsumo.study. MIT grad. React Native, AI, conference speaker.
Boston
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Its so weird to me how westerners defend the fact that Europeans came and wiped American natives with disease by saying that the natives just had weak immune systems.
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Everybody is starting a rock band wtf. Only one band is allowed to play rock. Everyone else needs to come up with their own music that's different.
.@OpenRouter co-founder Alex Atallah on the "everyone is building the same thing" take:
"This reminds me of this tweet I saw... Everybody's building an agent loop with notifications, third-party connectors, context management, memory, sandboxes, agentic web search, an always-on agent on top."
"This product is showing up everywhere. It is showing up everywhere, but these are just the new table-stakes primitives."
"A 2005 version of that tweet would be: 'Oh, everybody's building the same thing. A database, a users table, a sign-in page, a sign-up page, a profile page, a logout page. Everything's the same.'"
"There's like a lot of differentiation really. There's table-stakes needs for AI just like there's table-stakes needs for the web."
@alexatallah @amasad
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With all the advances in AI and videogame hacking that's happening right now, if there was a company that had some sort of, I don't know, like a "meta verse" or some kind, they would stand to benefit hugely.
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I recently understood that some people get dopamine from drinking alcohol. That's so bananas to me. I've never liked the taste of beer, and I never understood why so many people in tech are into homebrewing.
All it does to me is get me drunk and lower my social anxiety, but it's not like I get happy.
Imagine you're drinking a beer. It's cold. It's refreshing. It's your favorite brand. It's exactly what you need after a long day. Now, imagine drinking that same beer—again
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I think we're going to end up with product that have "sign in with your agent" and there's some global standard for piping your agent (any provider, commercial or the homemade one running on your raspberry pi) into the company's software.
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I've been thinking... (and excuse the take, I obviously I have this perspective because I've been in the React Native community forever)
React Native feels like a competitive advantage right now. There are big operational and competitive advantages one you hit 100% completion on implementing it. But I think a lot of engineering teams, due to org changes in direction (which is ok!), don't have the time or attention to take full advantage.
I think it's just the human element. No matter the platform, technology, RN, native, etc, it's probably hard for any team to take full advantage of what's available in front of them.
But now we have agents! Who can just magically solve things for us! So now I'm actually really interested to try out a lot of cool things React Native offers that I never got to try professionally, like out-of-tree platforms.
RN's unified API makes it easy to orchestrate work across platforms, and agents are going to be orchestrating... so why not just go for all platforms at once: Web, iOS, Android, Mac OS, TV, and other out of tree platforms. Agents make out of tree platforms a lot more accessible now.
Yeah, you can have agents easily build directly natively easily. But when you're trying to maintain product parity, don't you just end up with some unifying layer anyway?
I imagine developers think of RN in two ways
An additional layer of abstraction that makes the user experience slow.
A layer that really facilitates managing a very large product surface area across devices. I think this is true whether humans or agents are doing the work.
You can have your cake and eat it too now. You don't need someone with my experience. Agents can optimize the hell out your RN app for you, and make it operationally easy for you to shoot for having a universally consistent webMobileDesktopTv[WhateverComesNext] app.
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Rafael Mendiola retweeted
reactghana.react.foundation
Tickets on sale now! Come break ground on the first West Africa Conference ever, Nov 4-5 in Accra, Ghana!
Thanks to @AgbenyoOfficial for opening the doors and welcoming us so graciously and being a force in the community there!
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Rafael Mendiola retweeted
I don't even know where to begin to express my excitement about the fact that this is the year React finally makes it to Africa! We've had wonderful communities on the continent for years, and no way to get there. Thanks to the React Foundation... Now we can!
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Rafael Mendiola retweeted
Not able to join us this week for the State of @ReactNative? You can find the full conversation here with @GroundControl, @ccheever. @mazenchami. @GantLaborde, @BrandonMathis, Jake Krupski, and @ladyleet.
piped.video/watch?v=dx-5GCUX…
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AI is finally letting us return to the natural order of things: the artificially split mobile ecosystems created by Apple and Google's jealousy and greed.
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Rafael Mendiola retweeted
YC and dropout culture have convinced us the ideal founder is 22, straight out of school, but the data tells a different story.
Some interesting data:
- An MIT study of 2.7 million US founders found that the average founder was 47 when starting a company that later exited through an acquisition or IPO.
- The same study cited that the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1% of U.S. startups were 45 years old on average when they started their companies.
- A 50-year-old founder was approximately twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to produce an acquisition or IPO.
- Founders with at least three years of relevant industry experience were twice as likely to build a top-0.1%-growth company as founders with none.
So it seems that experience is one of the strongest advantages a founder can have.
Two lessons here:
1. It's never too late to start
2. It might actually be TOO early to start; getting work experience is worth considering
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The world is changing so fast wtf
Ben Affleck (Hollywood star & Artists Equity CEO) talks about how he fine-tunes open video models by unfreezing weights and trained only the last cinematic layer so a film crew can hit real production standards.
for context, Ben Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022, a 16-person AI shop for film post and Netflix bought it in March 2026 for $587 mn in cash.
He needed that model because public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he did not think that was a real business. So InterPositive raised money, shot its own dataset for 8 months on a controlled stage, and used it only as late-stage training.
Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so the production keeps the footage and the learning. That is the product Netflix paid $587 million for.
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From "Bloomberg Live" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
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Rafael Mendiola retweeted
Belief is so powerful. And I’m not talking about the religious kind. It’s the kind that knows you will get there. That you will win. That you will overcome. That you will get through this. That you will be a good human. Believe.
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Rafael Mendiola retweeted
I built the same four-screen app six ways — native, React Native, Flutter, Compose Multiplatform — with agents doing the work.
Some teams dismiss native's cost too quickly. In my tests, it was the slowest by a wide margin — up to 3.5× the agent minutes.
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