Robert Kim
Founder, Laminar YC S24
27 Mar 2026Sifted’s Bro’s, Delve Spiral, Europe’s New Unicorn, Replit & Polsia Join
AI agent 'Rachel' calls 3,000 pubs for Guinness prices
The hosts cover TechEU's story on Matt Courtland's Guindex: an AI voice agent named 'Rachel' that called over 3,000 Irish pubs across all 32 counties over Paddy's weekend to price a pint of Guinness, filling a 14-year gap since Ireland's CSO stopped tracking prices. Built on ElevenLabs, Twilio and Google Places data for around €200, Rachel used a Northern Irish accent inspired by trader Rachel Duffy, and only a handful of pubs realized she was AI.
Neuralink's N1 implant plays Warcraft & Kalshi's fun invoices
The hosts read John L Noble's 100-day update on his Neuralink N1 implant — robotic surgery, cursor control on a MacBook, and playing World of Warcraft hands-free — and watch the mind-controlled gameplay clip, surprised it only pulled ~1.6M views. They then pivot to Kalshi's playful 'fun invoices,' sparked by Benjamin Achar sharing a 200K invoice decorated with flowers, and debate whether invoices should ever be entertaining.
Claude computer-control launch, OpenClaw drama & OpenAI x Van Cleef
The hosts react to Anthropic launching Claude's ability to control your computer — a launch video that hit 41M views — and the hype calling it a digital employee. They discuss Peter Steinberger's combative OpenClaw exchanges on X, then weigh in on the OpenAI x Van Cleef bracelet from 'Jeff in Venice,' with Ronan telling his story of being invited to judge a hackathon because his 'taste is OP.'
Should VCs have built startups? The Eisenberg debate
The hosts debate Greg Eisenberg's claim that you shouldn't be allowed to be a VC without having built a startup, weighing Dan Gray's rebuttal that former founders underperform professional VCs and Carl Harrison's Midas List breakdown showing roughly 35–42% have operator backgrounds. They hash out what makes a good investor — returns versus hands-on help — note the rise of hyper-specialist micro funds, and reference recent guest Chaz Englander, who built Model ML after his own investing stint.
Laminar's Robert Kim: observability for AI agents
Laminar's Robert Kim joins live from near King's Cross days after the company announced its $3M seed led by Atlantic VC with YC and angels. He explains that as AI agents run longer and in swarms, debugging becomes the core problem, and Laminar tells teams why, when and how often their agents break. The conversation turns to where the human will sit in the loop as agent runs stretch from minutes to hours, and continues beyond this part of the transcript.
Laminar: Agent Observability & Why Infra Beats Model Lock-In
Continuing from Part 1, the Laminar founder explains that humans stay in the loop but need tooling to triage hundreds of thousands of running agents. He describes the customer base as mostly small and mid-sized agent-first startups like BrowserUse and OpenHands, plus a few large enterprises, and argues Laminar is protected at the infrastructure layer: as long as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google compete, businesses will multiplex between model providers. He wraps by pointing people to laminar.sh, the open-source repo, and the London office.