"I need to work on my empathy”
That was the first thing Harry Qi, co-founder and CEO of Motion, said when interviewing me to be his executive coach. It’s rare for CEOs - especially ones who have reached $100m+ valuations - to lead with humility and be so deeply committed to self growth.
I’m pleased to announce that I’m joining Motion full time to do 0-1 product and engineering work to accelerate the development of an end-to-end agentic work suite for businesses. What Microsoft Suite would look like if built today. I'm looking forward to defining the future of work, entering an era where every business will operate with a hybrid human x AI workforce.
In my past, I've coached hundreds of startups as a YC Visiting Partner and my own coaching practice. Harry and Motion stand out from the pack for 3 big reasons:
- Growth Whenever I gave Harry tough feedback and pointed at the “elephant in the room” problem, he came back 2 weeks later having made substantial progress. We never had to have the same conversation.
- Team Motion operates with an egalitarian culture with high ownership, agency, and transparency - recognizing it takes a team of MVPs (rather than a celebrity founder) to build a great and enduring company. As a result, it has managed to recruit a best-in-class team of executives, engineers, sales, support, and advisors from orgs like Microsoft, Google, Stripe, Salesforce, and YC - raising the bar for excellence and increasing ambitions with every hire.
- Ambition Motion chooses to compete, rapidly expanding from their initial wedge into larger adjacent markets. Motion operates with a strong operating discipline and recycles revenues quickly into R&D & GTM. This approach aligns with a study I did on how Fortune 100s and YC companies accumulate the necessary capital to rapidly scale and vertically integrate through R&D without over diluting themselves.
Harry approached me about joining full-time when I was starting to prototype and explore applications of machine learning with Google DeepMind - the research lab building the best models across several data modalities and architectures
The growth of Notebook LM, Cursor, Windsurf, Lovable, and Abridge made it evident to me that for LLMs to “cross the chasm” in business-use, the technology must be integrated into the every day work suite that mass market relies on - not just the early adopter software engineers and tech-forward professionals.
Today, these platforms are built by Fortune 100 global technology giants serving small and large businesses alike. However, despite these incumbents being the largest funders of both the model training and cloud serving layers of ML technologies, they have not yet been able to integrate language models into cutting-edge UX-driven product experiences. The classic innovator’s dilemma.
Enter Motion.
We aspire to build a platform for AI employees to take care of busywork for small and large businesses alike. To let humans focus on the higher order areas of work - arts, scientific discovery, physical infrastructure, and building great communities.
We are building out a SF engineering office focused on ML, agent workflows, and product. If you’re a principal, staff, or senior engineer, please message recruiting@usemotion.com - we’d love to chat :)
I spent a decade building Make School - a venture-funded university that served as a talent pipeline for high-growth tech companies. I then spent a year as a visiting partner at Y Combinator studying what makes founders and organizations great across industries and geographies. More recently, I spent a year at Google doing Machine Learning (product and infrastructure) consulting for Google X and DeepMind.
