Slop vs taste
Slop Cannons and 4 great jobs
Last weekend we hosted Slop Con: an all day hackathon for slop cannons to work on personal projects and compete for (cash) prizes. We got 60+ people squirreled away all day on a gorgeous NYC saturday - extremely bullish. Big thanks to everyone who came out.
The fact that it was, by and large, some of the stupidest projects you could possibly imagine (oneshotting Mog/Chop, e.g.) reinforces the point. These are all people who came out because they wanted to have fun, try new tools, and chop it up. Crucially, they cut across technical and non-technical folks. We had AI engineers and equity research analysts. There were founders and interns.
“Slop cannon” is a self-identification that runs in every company and every org within in.
In the weeks since I published the Four Jobs, we’re starting to see the term/idea crop up everywhere:
Even Max at Pangram, the anti-slop company, proudly refers to himself as a slop cannon.
Because there’s a difference between using slop to produce and producing slop.
The slop cannon uses janky tools and rough output as inputs to better work. The bad version mistakes the byproduct for the practice. I’ll flatter myself and say I do a good job of this in how I use (and don’t use) AI to write; bicycles for the mind vs motorcycles for the mid.
Through a willingness to go produce, go fast, and look dumb you too can reach slop nirvana.
There’s a chance that this is ultimately a distinction without a difference. It might not really matter how or why the best people produce when the modal production is both 1) bad and lazy 2) high volume.It’s very possible that, irrespective of that distinction, at least as far as it comes to communications, sales, marketing, etc., we still wind up in an age where all the channels are choked and stuffed.
And no matter what, we still reach the age of inbound where attention (abundant) and production (scarce) flip.
But what about “taste?”
I reject the idea that we need to choose between velocity and judgement, slop vs taste.
The whole organization needs intuition and judgement (more meaningful and measurable than “taste”). And the organization as a whole needs to move fast, when the moment calls for it. Gotta walk and chew gum, lads.
Taste in the common tech parlance is a meaningless, ineffable meme. It’s a cultural signifier rather than a specific attribute or skill. See also: “tasteslop.”
Slop cannons need to be product- and commercially-oriented to effectively harness their gifts and the blessings of our new AI age. But they need intuition and judgement to point themselves in the right direction, otherwise they’ll run really fast off a cliff.
So remember kids, slop ‘em up.
Slop Cannons Wanted
We have some great companies building fast and looking to add slop cannons.
An ex-One Medical, ex-Bridgewater founder backed by a16z, Slow Ventures, and 100+ leading angels is building a stealth health tech company in New York - physical AI applied to medicine, vertically integrated from software to clinics. Looking for engineers who think in systems, physicians who ship product, and a Chief of Staff who lives in Claude Code. Email stealth@rungravity.com
Michael Rado and Sam Kotlove are building Smoke: an agent workspace that runs sales, marketing, and ops for small teams. Set up a dozen agents in minutes, no code, no connectors, enterprise tools included. The core loop is prospecting, outbound, and content marketing. Nothing goes out without your say. Hiring GTM Engineers, Product Engineers, AI Wonks, and Product Designers.
Justin Woodbridge is building Phoebe: a self-driving network of agents aggregating and directing worker attention in home care. Replacing coordinators inside agencies with agents that never sleep, never churn, and never forget. Looking for a Product Ops lead who wants to be the human in the loop for hundreds of agents running real workflows in production. This is a young team where everyone ships. (NYC)
Goodlane is a repeat-founder team building an AI-native parent brokerage for freight agents in Brooklyn. Independent agents own shipper relationships and run their own mini-businesses; the parent brokerage automates everything else. Looking for an Agent Services Lead to own the relationship with the agents themselves: recruiting them, onboarding them, and making them successful. Part GM, part founding GTM, part product. If you want to run a business inside a business, this is for you. (Brooklyn)
In other news: AI Deployment
OpenAI and Anthropic have now both launched big consulting joint ventures to do enterprise AI transformation and create a new channel to sell tokens.
My bet is that most companies aren’t really ready for full scale transformation so big deployments will keep failing at high rates. The underlying data infrastructure isn’t there yet in many orgs, to say nothing of the culture.
Remember, I am long system integrators and services-led businesses where you own the outcome.
Read more:
not the slop cannons wanted 😭😭