State of Play

Refreshed 2026-08-06 10:02:14 UTC

The next 30 days: get it in as many hands as possible and close the feedback loop on every one — a tight loop with diverse testers, not mass distribution, tracking where stickiness emerges. Matt (paying since Jun 11) is still the one proof point; Remix and ETV sit at contract stage, which is exactly the gap the guest-onboarding arc and this month's hands pipeline (Becca, Remix, ETV, Amit, IBM, Microsoft, Chris Perry, Oli) are meant to close.

Since the last board, the Sam Schillace onboarding thesis went from plan to shipped product: the guest-onboarding arc (v2.33–v2.35) put "value before any upload" into the real app — three teaser personas, live RAG with receipts, "Make it yours" instant provisioning, sign-in last. Demo mode's job is nearly done; the parity gap it was built to expose is closing release by release.

Aug 3 put a new signal on the board: IBM's Gabe walked the new flow and called it a different paradigm — a digital twin — then handed over the shape of an enterprise unlock (per-knowledge sensitivity tagging, PII detection at ingestion, tag-based access) that hadn't surfaced this cleanly before. It also sharpens the open-sourcing question, since IBM's own environment can only run what's open-source or publicly shareable.

YC Fall '26 is still waiting — submitted Jul 27, decision expected by Aug 28, no interview scheduled yet.

4twins
30pending memories

Ship Log

v2.36.0 2026-08-05

Bestmate 2.36.0 Download `Bestmate-2.36.0.dmg`, open it, and drag Bestmate to your Applications folder.

v2.35.0 2026-08-04

Bestmate 2.35.0 Download `Bestmate-2.35.0.dmg`, open it, and drag Bestmate to your Applications folder.

Guest-onboarding arc (beats 1–10) complete, the local-mode multi-twin fix shipped, and Gabe's demo-parity feedback — analytics top-questions, real scope column, findable stores — landed the same day.

v2.34.0 2026-08-03

Bestmate 2.34.0 Download `Bestmate-2.34.0.dmg`, open it, and drag Bestmate to your Applications folder.

v2.33.0 2026-08-01

Bestmate 2.33.0 Onboarding is a playground now — open the app and talk to a real twin before signing anything. Drop a transcript, doc, or video and watch your own twin learn it. Download `Bestmate-2.33.0.dmg`, open it, and drag Bestmate to your Applications folder.

cli-v0.3.0 2026-07-31

Team-twin access: `bestmate twin members` (invite/revoke by email or phone), `bestmate analytics` (top questions, per-asker counts, documentation-gap markers, pending-escalation SLA), asker attribution in `bestmate trace` (VIA/BY columns), and the trace list unfrozen. Graph builds now cache for instant Themes-mode loads.

Meetings

App development progress — email verification, player images, and notifications 2026-08-05
Jesse / Kaya - bestmate 2026-08-05
Decision tracking with Primitive 2026-08-05
Best Mate product feedback and onboarding testing with Oli 2026-08-05
Kaya + JB 2026-08-05
Tom Elliot / Granola Sync Plugin 2026-08-05
💸weekly IC 🔒Decisions meeting 2026-08-04
Investment role overview 2026-08-04
Career decision and CRM automation 2026-08-03
Digital twin platform walkthrough and enterprise deployment strategy with Gabe 2026-08-03

"This is a different paradigm — it's a digital twin." Gabe (IBM) saw the new onboarding + full walkthrough; personal second-brain value lands even without sharing.

  • Enterprise unlock he handed us: per-knowledge sensitivity tagging — PII detection at ingestion, tag-based access control per user/session. Two trust layers: hosted-provider trust + app-logic segmentation. Knowledge lineage named the open hard problem.
  • IBM wedge: his laptop is firewalled — open-source / publicly shareable is what he can run. Feeds the open-sourcing lean.
  • Threads: Foo Camp "Open Memory Protocol" convo; Rin's intern team building a memory reference implementation — plugability worth considering.
  • Actions: re-ping Rin (pilot / open-source collab); follow-up email to Gabe next week with the open-source decision.
Room device — knowledge graph, voice capture, and product launch strategy 2026-08-03
Salience CRM database — people scoring, agent workflows, and portfolio tracking 2026-08-03
Kaya and JB 2026-07-31
Kaya + JB 2026-07-31
SMFS | Clarifications Q & A 2026-07-30
Kaya<>Oli 2026-07-30
Best Mate product roadmap — vault testing, pricing strategy, and hiring with Justin 2026-07-30
AI agent product demo and YC application strategy with Amit 2026-07-29
kaya / chin 2026-07-29
South East Asia Startup Showcase 2026-07-28
Soon / Kaya 2026-07-28
People scoring plugin, graph visualization, and Granola API updates 2026-07-27
[Round 2] Future Female Founders 2026-07-26

Partners

Roadmap

Next 1
BYOK cloud path — Spec committed (pass-through, generation-only); this is the next build.
next
In motion 2
Every human decision = one Yes/No queue — Still holding as the simplification rule; the "200-card overload" feedback (Oli) says the queue needs digest/batching, not more surfaces.
partial
Demo mode's role — Went from display-only sales demo to the parity spec: real screens catch up to demo mode release by release, not the other way around.
evolved
Gated 2
Local Mode v2 (truly-local embeddings + Ollama) — Parked, a Chris-facing decision, not yet scheduled.
gate
CI rails before Behaviors stage 3 — Smoke tests and rollback are still required before self-modifying user copies ship; user-directed feature-gen is a prompt-injection window and stays authenticated-users-only until then.
gate
Done 3
Guest onboarding arc — Beats 1–10 shipped end to end across v2.33–v2.35: three zero-setup personas answering from live RAG with receipts, "Make it yours" instant provisioning, sign-in last, connection-signal handling, the save moment with real numbers, the BYOK ask, keep-it-fed. Closes out both of Sam's asks from the last board — the 15–30-second value bar and the "try → email → keys" progressive-escalation playbook.
done
Local-mode multi-twin fix — Ghost-twin resolution, twin-scoped index sync, and per-twin staleness shipped alongside the guest arc in v2.35.
done
Demo-mode → real-workspace parity — Gabe's demo-day feedback (analytics top-questions wiring, real scope column, findable stores) shipped the same week in v2.35.
done

Plan vs. reality.