why i am finally building openthings.

look at almost every consumer ai brand being built today. it does one of three things.

the users are here, and they already hand ai real work: in menlo's us survey, 41% of ai users have tried an agent and 24% use one regularly. the money is following: menlo puts consumer ai spend at about $12 billion in 2025 and about $40 billion in 2026. but the shape has barely changed since the chatgpt and claude moments. each ai got smarter, and each still works alone, inside its own walls. the person is still the one carrying the work between them.

the first order of a revolution is the technology itself. the second order is not everything built on it. it is the few things built on it that change how people use the technology itself. a few more websites could never make the web. the browser, search, amazon, online payments and social networking did: each one made the whole web more useful to everyone. phones followed the same path with the app store, messaging, rides and the camera.

on 10 march 2000 the nasdaq closed at 5,048. by october 2002 it had lost about 78%. the web was not wrong. the bets were. money went to the loudest ideas of the moment, like pets.com and webvan, and they were gone within two years. in 1999 excite had the chance to buy google for $750,000 and passed. search was not anybody's priority, not investors' and not builders'.

meanwhile people kept coming online, from about 39 million in 1995 to over a billion in 2005. wikipedia, facebook and youtube were all born after the crash. what became big looks obvious in hindsight. at the time it was on nobody's list.

what they said at the time

the same pattern is back. the money goes to bigger models and to agents that click through the old systems faster. the usability layer, the thing that will look obvious later, is on nobody's list again.

for centuries, humans have been trying to do one thing: carry less in our heads. every big jump came the same way. first a connecting layer, a base everyone can stand on. then the layers people build above it. roads, the post and ships let goods and letters travel, and trade and markets grew on top. the press let one voice reach thousands. the internet connected the computers, and email, search, saas and online shops grew above it. the phone put all of it in every pocket, and maps, uber and upi grew above that.

what took humans four generations, one person can do in months today. and what was not possible at all, we do every day.

ai is only going to expand that, and this time the base itself can think. people already touch it first: 2 billion people use ai tools in 2026. but today the models still work through the old base, inside apps and browsers built for eyes, as one more thing on the phone. what we want is the other way round: ai models and agents as the base layer, and everything else built on them. the first thing to build on that base is the layer between people and their agents, so your agent can reach theirs, with a person deciding on both ends.

a revolution holds no meaning for what is working today. the car did not make the horse carriage better. it rebuilt roads, fuel, cities and work around itself, and the carriage became scrap. when ai becomes the base, it will rebuild in both directions.

a picture, not data. the dots are the one small piece each car gets.

that is what a new base layer does. it does not negotiate with what exists. your mail, your chats, the old software at work, your clinic's booking system: some of it will be rebuilt to work through your agent, and some of it will stop making sense. the inventions will come both ways: new things the old ones can do, and new things that make the old ones pointless. i have my theories about what gets built first when ai is the base. openthings is where i am testing them.

the web did not win because it was the best technology. it won because it was open: nobody owned it, anyone could build on it, and a few shared protocols let every machine and every page reach every other.

when i started talking about this with peers and a few well known investors, it was alien to most of them, or it sounded like something they already knew. i understand why. for thirty years the playbook has been the same: saas, the lean startup, five ways to a hundred million dollar business. all of it bets on scaling the application layer, on top of a layer people touch that someone else already built: the browser, search, and lately the phone.

i have been alien many times

1. 2012 to 2013drag and drop builderswebsite and app builders you could use without code, and javascript on the backend, when that was still a strange ideanow how many sites get made
2. thensingle page appsthe web as an app, not a stack of pagesnow how most web apps are built
3. widelyprogressive web appsi founded widely on pwas, and worked with the people writing the w3c standardnow installable on every phone
4. 2019ai solutionsbuilding with ai before most rooms had heard of a language modelnow in almost every product
5. nowopenthingsthe usability layer: agents on both sides, open rules between peoplealien to most rooms, again

being early, again and again, taught me the two things this work needs most: patience, and staying longer with the problem than anyone else. with ai, all of it has come true at once.

and the time has changed. the usability layer, the one people actually touch, is being rebuilt. that needs a different kind of business: not vc shaped, and not conformist to what we all adhered to. i did that in my last startup, and it worked. after a few of those conversations i knew pitching would waste my time. if i could afford it, i should build and experiment instead. i would have loved more hands, we would go faster. but this idea's time is now and the next few years. we are right on time.

i have a vision, and ideas tested on my own problems, in a room with two laptops, trying what i imagined. i think it can work. not alone. with the force of people who want three things for the future.

• nasdaq peak, low and decline: wikipedia, nasdaq composite. year-end closes: macrotrends.
• people online: our world in data, number of internet users (itu and world bank). 1995 to 2004 are summed from country rows.
• what they said at the time: clifford stoll, newsweek, 1995 (wikipedia, paleofuture); paul krugman, red herring, june 1998 (quote investigator); barron's "amazon.bomb", 31 may 1999 (ritholtz, cnbc); bessemer's google pass (bessemer anti-portfolio).
• the hard problems, 2025 to 2026: humane and hp (wareable); openai's device date (mactrast, on the court filing) and phone reports (techcrunch); apple and gemini (android authority); mcp to the agentic ai foundation (mcp blog); claude's memory import (pcworld, techcabal); web bot auth (workos); ap2 and agent payments (siliconangle, aimultiple); ai browsers and prompt injection (simon willison, techcrunch, cyberscoop); why models hallucinate (openai); cloudflare pay per crawl (cloudflare). added on 26 oct 2026: the NANDA index (ietf draft); aweb (github); clicks with an ai summary (pew research center); crawlers re-fetching unchanged pages (techcrunch); erc-8004 (arxiv); x401 (help net security); agentid (agentmail); instant checkout retired (techcrunch, modern retail); the passkey to payment demo (tech coffee house).
• the web and its infra: cern's public domain release and the w3c (cern, web history); people online in 2025 (itu, facts and figures 2025); dns, cookies, ssl and tls, oauth 2.0, rfc 6749, captcha. agent standards: w3c did core, verifiable credentials 2.0, w3c ai agent protocol community group, a2a v1.0.
• excite and google, 1999: today i found out, from george bell's own account.
• app store at launch and a year later: fortune, 2009.
• ai venture funding, 2024 and 2025: crunchbase news, and its final 2025 count (crunchbase news, jan 2026).
• consumer ai users, agent use, use of more than one assistant, acting without a sign-off, and spend: menlo ventures, the state of consumer ai 2026 (report). the share figures come from its survey of 5,067 us adults.
• person-first agent drafts and agent permissions: principal agent protocol, agent delegation receipts, attenuated delegation profile (ietf individual drafts, no ietf standing); arcade's $60m round (pymnts, jun 2026); ap2 v0.2 (ap2 specification).
• chatgpt weekly users: techcrunch, feb 2026, on openai's announcement.
• where the money went, 2000: wikipedia, webvan, venturebeat, the worst vc investments, google's 1999 funding release, x.com and paypal, april 2000. today: valueaddvc, biggest ai rounds of 2026, techcrunch, instinct, cnbc, manus, techtimes, perplexity comet, cmswire, sierra, cmswire, decagon, businesswire, glean, thenextweb, profound, techcrunch, fora, fortune, bland, vapi.
• the connecting layers: wikipedia, printing press, electrical telegraph, invention of the telephone, app store. the heights in the staircase are my reading. people using ai tools in 2026: menlo ventures, below.
• the hard problems: nvidia, the ai five layer cake, venturebeat on altman's reflections, techcrunch on amodei, cx today on nadella, nbc news on hassabis, the new stack on karpathy, the decoder on sutskever at neurips 2024 and his nov 2025 interview, euronews on lecun, the new stack on a2a, openai adopting mcp, openai, memory, anthropic, memory, techcrunch on prompt injection. the spectrum's left to right order is my reading.
• tcp/ip: ethw, the tcp milestone, computer history museum, the 1977 test and darpa.
• the web: cern, a short history of the web, and cybercultural, hypertext 91.
• mcp: anthropic, donating the model context protocol.