Colin Flaherty
About
I’m passionate about underrated ideas, undiscovered people, and creating things that are magical.
A short biography about me:
- *-2017: Born in San Francisco, California to an old-school police officer dad and a hippie journalist mom.
- 2017-2021: Went to UChicago because I couldn’t pick between liberal arts and science (still haven't, really).
- 2021-2023: Moved to New York. Got my start as a researcher at Facebook AI Research. Coauthored 2 papers on AI reasoning (science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade9097) and pretraining architectures (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07185).
- 2023-2025: Moved to Palo Alto. Joined a small AI coding agent startup built by Sutter Hill Ventures after noticing that Github Copilot was really helpful. Saw it grow from 5 -> 90 people.
- 2025+: Quit my job to build the personal agents revolution.
With some money from friends, I invested in a bunch of awesome startups over the past 18 months.
Writings
- The Economics of Attention: Will TikTok Subsume Twitter?
- Consumer product 101: triggers, mechanics, frequency, value, sessions, and habits
- Table stakes in 2027: the democratization of consumer agent integrations
- Conversational AI and Personal Software
- The Art of the Instagram Handle and Deciding What to Name Your AI
- Giving Your Personal AI a Home and a Body
- A Poem About the Future of Software
- Discovering a Dunbar's Number for AI assistants
- The Great Fracturing of Consumer AI