Greg Isenberg argues that marketing engineers — hybrid marketers who can also build and wire AI agents — are the most valuable new role in business. He traces the evolution from Mad Men-era gut-feel campaigns through digital marketing, growth hacking, and AI-assisted copywriting to this new paradigm where one person can run dozens of experiments per day by connecting AI agents to real customer data. The core thesis: the cost of marketing experiments has collapsed, and whoever runs the most good experiments learns fastest and wins.

The article provides a detailed eight-step playbook for building a marketing engineer's system. It starts with setting up an agent workspace (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and writing a "brain" — a structured folder of context files covering customer profiles, brand voice, founder opinions, and past failures. From there, it walks through connecting data sources (CRM, support tickets, call recordings), building a customer language agent that extracts exact phrases from sales calls, and then layering on five more agents: buying trigger detection, search/content, creative ad generation, closed-lost deal recovery, and performance analysis.

Isenberg emphasizes that creative is the new targeting on platforms like Meta, where the Andromeda algorithm reads ad content to determine audience matching, making diverse creative concepts more important than interest targeting. He advocates using AI-generated UGC actors to test scripts cheaply, then paying real creators for winners. The piece also covers organic social as a free testing lab, building decision tools (calculators, migration checkers) as marketing assets, and running a weekly review loop where the marketer's job shifts from production to editing and judgment. The recommended stack spans tools like Clay, HubSpot, Nano Banana, Veo, Arcads, and PostHog, with the prediction that by 2028, one or two marketing engineers with dozens of agents will outship departments ten times their size.

Sequoia Capital announces its partnership with David Silver and his new AI research lab, Ineffable Intelligence, based in London. The lab's mission is to build a superlearner — a system that discovers all knowledge purely through its own experience using reinforcement learning, without any pre-training on human data. The vision is a system that could rediscover and surpass humanity's greatest intellectual achievements, from the laws of physics to new branches of mathematics, by learning entirely from the consequences of its own actions.

Alfred Lin frames this as a deliberately contrarian bet against the dominant LLM paradigm, which relies on training over vast amounts of human-generated internet data. Silver's track record lends credibility to the approach: he was the lead researcher behind DeepMind's Alpha series (AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero, AlphaStar, AlphaProof), where removing human pre-training and relying on self-play produced decisively superhuman performance in Go. The key insight is that AlphaGo Zero, trained without any human data, dramatically outperformed its predecessor — suggesting that human knowledge can be a ceiling rather than a foundation. Sequoia is co-leading Ineffable's first funding round, positioning it as one of the most ambitious scientific bets in the current AI landscape.

Karri Saarinen, co-founder of Linear, shares the company's deliberate approach to integrating AI into their product. Rather than rushing to be first to market with AI features, Linear experimented internally and focused on understanding which workflows actually mattered to their users, while waiting for the underlying models to improve.

Saarinen acknowledges the trade-off of giving up the first-mover advantage, but argues it resulted in a much clearer view of where AI can genuinely be useful for companies. This reflects a broader product philosophy of prioritizing quality and intentionality over hype-driven feature releases.