# Pebblebed

> A seed-stage venture firm for technical founders. We back people solving
> technically rigorous problems.

Every page on this site has a plain-markdown twin: append `.md` to any path.
The HTML and the markdown are generated from the same source, so they cannot
disagree.

## Machine-readable surfaces

- [Markdown mirror of any page](https://pebblebed.com/index.md): append .md to a path, e.g. /portfolio.md, /blog/krea.md
- [RSS feed of the essays](https://pebblebed.com/feed.xml)
- [Sitemap](https://pebblebed.com/sitemap.xml)
- [robots.txt](https://pebblebed.com/robots.txt)

## Essays (14)

- [Introducing Nous: The Chess Engine That Doesn't Search](https://pebblebed.com/blog/introducing-nous.md): Every strong chess engine wins by search. Nous does not: it imagines a whole line of play at once, judges it, and rewrites any part, the way a person does. Building it that way also made it an instrument, because a system that imagines, judges, and revises let us measure something the rest of AI is betting on but cannot usually see, whether a system can trust its own judgment. Here is what it showed.
- [Build: Automating the Built World](https://pebblebed.com/blog/build.md): From a seed conversation about shipping hundreds of thousands of buildings to compressing weeks of technical due diligence into hours—why we backed Build to construct the digital substrate for the built world.
- [On Computers](https://pebblebed.com/blog/computing-is-bigger.md): A walk through the computer-brain industry (CPU, memory, accelerators) from a $15B footnote to a $350B heavy industry in 2025. Its recent, and we speculate, near-future doublings change where value accrues for infra founders and application builders alike.
- [Ulysses: The Ocean Company](https://pebblebed.com/blog/ulysses.md): From a leaky seagrass-planting prototype in Dublin to the autonomous platform for the entire ocean—how Ulysses is building the Ocean Company.
- ["Intelligence" is not a technical term. Hardness is.](https://pebblebed.com/blog/intelligence.md): AI eschatology rests on intuitions about 'intelligence' that have no technical definition. Computational complexity gives us a real notion of hardness — and a sturdier foundation for thinking about what AI can and cannot do.
- [Agentist Manifesto](https://pebblebed.com/blog/agentist-manifesto.md): Work outside our respective zones of genius should go to agents wherever possible — and where it cannot, we should build toward making it delegable.
- [Escape Sequence](https://pebblebed.com/blog/escape-sequence.md): The same bytes can be a harmless string to an RFC 8259 parser and a cognitive exploit to a language model—until the boundary between data and instruction collapses in the systems we trust.
- [The End of Per-seat SaaS](https://pebblebed.com/blog/per-seat-saas.md): Per-seat SaaS assumed humans bound load, attention, and cost. Autonomous agents break those bounds—and force pricing and product to anchor on work, outcomes, or coordination instead.
- [The Internet Will Have More Agents Than Humans](https://pebblebed.com/blog/operational-autonomy.md): If agent populations exceed human populations, the internet becomes a network of actors that individuate, persist, and coordinate—requiring new infrastructure for identity, memory, reputation, and trust long before “the economy of agents” fully arrives.
- [Software is dead. Long live software](https://pebblebed.com/blog/software-is-dead.md): Vibe coding has commodified engineering. When execution gets cheap, the definition of what is worth executing changes — and taste and trust become the scarce assets.
- [Who Writes the Bugs? A Deeper Look at 125,000 Kernel Vulnerabilities](https://pebblebed.com/blog/kernel-bugs-part2.md): Part 2 of our kernel vulnerability analysis. Part 1 covered bug lifetimes and VulnBERT. This post digs into the human side: who introduces vulnerabilities, when they do it, and what we can do about it.
- [Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20.](https://pebblebed.com/blog/kernel-bugs.md): A mining expedition through two decades of Linux kernel commits to understand how long bugs really hide.
- [KREA](https://pebblebed.com/blog/krea.md): From a park bench handshake in 2022 to millions of users creating at the speed of imagination.
- [Hello, World!](https://pebblebed.com/blog/hello-world.md): We are Pebblebed: builders who invest in builders.

## Portfolio

34 companies. The full list, with descriptions, founders and
years, is at [https://pebblebed.com/portfolio.md](https://pebblebed.com/portfolio.md).

## Notes

- There is no API and no authentication. Everything here is public.
- The concordance at https://pebblebed.com/concordance indexes every named thing the
  essays mention.