Motive Notes

Mapping Work, Not Markets

A Process-First Investment Thesis for Enterprise AI

Oct 27 • 

Oana Olteanu

8

2

Beautiful Software for the AI-Native Product Team

Why I Invested in Soffi

Oct 14 • 

Oana Olteanu

3

What Makes 5% of AI Agents Actually Work in Production?

Beyond the Prompt: Notes from the Context Frontier

Oct 2 • 

Oana Olteanu

27

4

August 2025

What Are Things For? Lessons from 120 Years of Design for the Age of AI

Reflections from the MUDE Design Museum in Lisbon

Aug 24 • 

Oana Olteanu

4

July 2025

Background Agents: AI for Work

Reflections from my recent fireside chat with the CEO of Wordware at GenAI week.

Jul 16 • 

Oana Olteanu

3

Normalizing the Founder Journey

Getting something going from 0 to 1 is pretty much driven by mental resilience and grit.

Jul 2 • 

Oana Olteanu

9

2

June 2025

Founder Mental Software

While most VCs debug your pitch, I focus on understanding your System Prompt.

Jun 30 • 

Oana Olteanu

19

Digger: Pull-Request Infrastructure Automation for the AI Era

Proud to be an investor in Digger, the open-source Terraform orchestrator that sits inside your existing CI and catches issues before they happen.

Jun 16 • 

Oana Olteanu

4

AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025 - Field Notes

(San Francisco • 3-5 June 2025 • ≈3 000 attendees • 18 parallel tracks)

Jun 6 • 

Oana Olteanu

8

5

April 2025

The Unfiltered Truth About Early-Stage M&A: Lessons from Founders Who've Been There

Early-stage M&A is not something people talk about in public, but many are thinking about it, especially in the bloodbath of AI.

Apr 8 • 

Oana Olteanu

6

2

December 2024

LLMs Reliability - learnings from the CTO of Persana.ai

More than a decade ago, when I studied echo state neural networks, AI was mainly in Academia and the main tool I had was Matlab.

Dec 16, 2024 • 

Oana Olteanu

2

October 2024

Are Semantic Layers the treasure map for LLMs?

Semantic layers are not new, they started in 1991, when BusinessObjects patented the semantic layer. It’s a great concept but it hasn’t really taken…

Oct 18, 2024 • 

Oana Olteanu

5

1