Essays by Ry Walker

Essays on AI, startups, and software engineering by Ry Walker, founder of Tembo and Astronomer.

all agents ai apis architecture

astronomer automation bottleneck build-vs-buy business-model code-review coding-agents communication competition context context-engineering coordination culture customer-development customer-success data decision-making developer-experience developer-tools devex economics engineering enterprise evaluation experience founders fundraising future go-to-market governance growth gtm human-in-the-loop incentives infrastructure integration intuition judgment knowledge-management knowledge-work kubernetes leadership learning maintenance management market marketing measurement memory moats nuance observability open-source operationalization operations outbound personal personal-agents personalization phases pitching platform platforms playbook process procurement product prototyping quality rag reasoning recommendations retention review sales security seed shipping skills software-engineering startups storytelling strategy

tembo tooling trust unit-economics workflow

Jun 8, 2022	The Fatal Pitch Mistakes (and What Actually Lands) The three mistakes that sink fundable companies — setup-slide death, sanitized corporate-speak, and slide dependency. Plus what actually intrigues investors.
Jun 7, 2022	The Five-Step Pitch Framework A repeatable five-step process for building a seed pitch — bullets, narrative, script, slides, iteration. Words first, slides last.
Jun 6, 2022	The Four Pillars of a Seed-Stage Pitch Every funded seed pitch crystallizes around four elements — product, team, traction, market. Miss any of them and the rest of the deck cannot rescue you.