Happy Friday and welcome back to the Leaderboard. In the final issue of the week, we are talking about: An AI that makes online shopping less terrible, a wingman for your job interviews, and a less intrusive developer assistant. Let's dive in.
Agora: AI search engine for e-commerce products.
Agora has indexed 4 million products across over 8,000 Shopify and WooCommerce stores and created a platform that lets you use AI to find and compare products. As it stands, I don't know if I'd actually use Agora to shop unless it came with more granular filters (country of origin, material, sizes, etc). But I think there’s a lot of potential here. Google Search is swamped with ads, GPT Search isn’t great at comparisons, Amazon is soul-sucking — the world is waiting for a less-terrible online shopping experience. And we’ve got billions to spend.
OfferGenie: An AI-powered interview copilot
I love the idea, especially for candidates who might not crush traditional interviews. It’s about time we stopped asking questions like, “What’s the difference between X and Y?”—stuff anyone can Google in five seconds. When I interview, I’m more interested in what makes someone tick, how they solve problems, and hearing their thought process. Honestly, they should make a version of this for hiring managers too. We could all use a little help asking smarter questions instead of the same old snoozefest.
Mordecai: A browser based coding wingman.
As a hobby dev hacking away on my own projects, I’ve dealt with tools like GitHub Copilot that barge into my editor like they own the place. Mordecai, on the other hand, is the wingman you actually want around—browser-based, unintrusive, and smart enough to keep up with whatever editor you’re loyal to (Neovim, Helix, VS Code—you name it). Thanks to a nifty CLI tool that keeps live context of your code, it feels like Mordecai gets how devs really work: by staying in the flow, not fighting their tools.
In an era where AI is reshaping how businesses operate, the journey of building an early-stage startup has never been more dynamic—or complex. How do founders navigate finding product-market fit, delegation, and scaling, all while adapting to technological innovations?
Join on January 14 at 3 pm PT for a fireside chat with Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder of Vanta, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Founder of LTSE, as they explore the journey of the modern startup founder.
Eric and Christina will discuss: