Growth Stories

About Growth Stories

Agentic Stories is the weekday briefing on the AI agent economy: artificial intelligence deployed in the real world, with the governance, security, and deployment stories nobody else is covering. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, Friday, plus a weekly newsletter. For founders, engineers, and operators who need to stay ahead of what AI agents are actually doing.

Publisher

Alex Hirsu

Category

news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Aug 2024

Latest episode

6 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

45 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Jul 2026

   Deep Dive: Martin of Corso AI | Agentic Workflows for the Factory Floor

   Deep dive with Martin, co-founder of Corso AI — a YC company building agentic workflows for factories and manufacturers, with a customer base concentrated in Asia and a deliberate focus on the parts of manufacturing that most software has skipped. Corso started before the idea did. Martin and his co-founder Daichi wanted to build together and looked for the domain where they had the most experience. Martin had interned at General Motors. Daichi had done PCB work as an electrical engineer at a startup. They picked manufacturing because they knew it. Over winter break, Martin visited five or six factories in person to figure out what the operators actually needed. The consistent answer was manual data entry between email, Slack, Teams, and the company's ERP or CRM, plus follow-ups with suppliers and procurement chains. That is where Corso started. The product, Atlas, integrates directly into a manufacturer's existing ERP. The onboarding is deliberately slow. Atlas does not start executing workflows on day one. It sits in the system, watches how emails come in, how responses go out, how the team assigns roles and shares information internally. Over the first few weeks it learns the company's patterns. Then it starts suggesting outputs, gets corrected by humans in the loop, and only takes autonomous action once the accuracy is near 100%. The efficiency gain Martin cites for procurement teams is 8 to 15 hours per week saved on manual work. Corso is also building what Martin calls an intelligence layer on top of the workflows. Executives at manufacturers do not just want the manual work automated. They want insights the current tooling cannot give them. Martin's vision is a system where an incoming RFQ gets analyzed against historical pricing, current commodity prices, shipping bottlenecks, and geopolitical constraints in real time. The system would then suggest what the quote should actually be, informed by all of it. The company's ICP is in Asia, which is why they did a pre-YC trip through Japan, Taiwan, and China visiting manufacturers before starting the batch. WhatsApp integration is live. WeChat integration is in progress, and Martin is direct that WeChat is the hardest platform they have ever built against. The team is moving to LA after YC because there are more factories to iterate with in person than in San Francisco. Also covered: why Corso pivoted from building an AI-native ERP to integrating with legacy systems after talking to customers, why the pace of AI progress makes planning past three to six months feel pointless right now, and the long view on which parts of manufacturing procurement should stay human, and which should not. — Agentic Stories is the weekday briefing on the AI agent economy — governance, security, and deployment. Deep Dives drop on off-days with founders building in the space. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. agenticstories.ai

2. 

   28 May 2026

   Deep Dive: Naman of Manicule | The AI-Native Studio Writing Docs for Agents

   Deep dive with Naman, co-founder of Manicule — a YC Spring 2026 studio that writes end-to-end documentation for developer tools companies, with a specific focus on making those docs readable by AI agents, not just humans. Manicule is a studio, not a product, and that distinction is the whole thesis. They work with seed to Series B developer tools companies that know documentation matters but do not have a dedicated DevRel function or the founder bandwidth to build it. Manicule comes in for the full process: talk to the engineers, understand the codebase, design the information architecture, write the pages, verify the code, create diagrams and screen recordings, and then maintain the docs so they do not drift out of sync with the product. They ship a complete project in two weeks, which Naman says is the fastest in the industry against a baseline closer to a month for a single writer. The technical core is a pipeline of internal sub-agents. A client installs a GitHub app, and Manicule's agents explore the codebase, build a separate repository of context about how the product works, and carry that understanding into the writing process. The same approach works for UI-based products, where agents navigate the actual interface to understand it rather than just reading code. The part that fits this show is Manicule's bet on documentation for agents. Naman's view is that a human reading a page to learn something needs content written in a fundamentally different style than an agent consuming the same page. One concrete finding: adding an explicit anti-pattern section to agent-facing content measurably improves how well agents use a product, because some mistakes are so ingrained that an agent will keep repeating them unless told directly not to. Manicule writes separate content for humans and agents on the same docs, and is benchmarking approaches as the field figures itself out in real time. Naman is direct about why this is not a fully automated product. Agents can produce a first draft, but he still spends around two hours per page bringing it to a publishable standard. His argument tracks the Sequoia thesis that AI-native services are the next big category, because clients do not want docs, they want outcomes, and outcomes require accountability that a standalone tool cannot provide. Also covered: how Manicule got into YC by pitching a completely different idea and pivoting in the interview room, why the founders first applied to YC at 15, why a billion-dollar competitor in your space is not the threat founders think it is, and a fully manual cold email strategy that caps at five or six sends a day. — Agentic Stories is the weekday briefing on the AI agent economy — governance, security, and deployment. Deep Dives drop on off-days with founders building in the space. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. agenticstories.ai

3. 

   21 May 2026

   Deep Dive: Varun and Kratik of Kinect | Dynamic Storefronts for Humans and AI Agents

   Deep dive with Varun and Kratik, co-founders of Kinect — a YC Spring 2026 company building dynamic e-commerce storefronts that adapt in real time to every visitor, including the AI agents that are starting to shop on their owners' behalf. Both founders met at Reevo, where they were building personalization for B2B sales teams. The signal they kept seeing across e-commerce friends was that DTC product pages are still one-size-fits-all in 2026, even though every user lands from a different ad, a different platform, a different intent. A friend in e-com asked them to build something for him. That conversation became Kinect. The product reads the inputs every visitor brings to a page: where they came from, what device they are on, what they have clicked, what filters they have used, what they have typed into search. Then it quietly reorders product images, rewrites descriptions, and adapts the surface to match what that visitor is actually looking for. The change happens before the page renders, so it does not look like a transformation — it looks like the page was always going to look that way for them. An AI sales assistant sits in the corner of the page, answering questions, surfacing constraints, and condensing the discovery loop that usually takes a real associate inside a physical store. The forward-looking part of the conversation is where Kinect gets sharp. AI agents are starting to be customers, not just users. Varun caught himself asking an agent for gift ideas for a friend's birthday. That agent then visits brand websites on his behalf. The current generation of browser agents struggles with modern e-commerce because the pages were built for humans navigating pop-ups and scroll-heavy layouts. Kinect's view is that the interface of the future is agent-to-agent — a buyer's agent talking to a brand's sales agent, with the storefront acting as the translation layer between them. One of Kinect's early brands is seeing a 25% add-to-cart rate, against an industry baseline closer to 5%. They are working with DTC brands across protein supplements, apparel, and consumer goods, with Kinect deliberately white-labeled so visitors do not know they are interacting with it. Also covered: why San Francisco is the wrong city for e-commerce sales (Kinect is on the road in LA, New York, Kansas City, and Austin), the YC environment and the density of talent in the Spring 2026 cohort, why every founder should apply to YC even if they do not get in, the kind of first hire they are looking for next, and a brief case study on a protein-plus-electrolyte brand whose discovery problem Kinect solved in onboarding. Kinect is hiring. They are looking for a high-agency generalist growth hire who can show up to conferences, message people on LinkedIn, and bring DTC operators into a room. — Agentic Stories is the weekday briefing on the AI agent economy — governance, security, and deployment. Deep Dives drop on off-days with founders building in the space. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. agenticstories.ai

Who has been a guest on Growth Stories

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Nicole Schaefer
• Winny of Chipped
• Alek Hannessian

Podcast Authority Score: 20 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

39

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

Contact Growth Stories

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.