Motive Notes

AI Engineers Are Getting 3x the Equity of Regular Engineers

What 50 AI engineers told me about their compensation, and why founders need to radically rethink their equity budgets

Dec 4 • Oana Olteanu

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November 2025

The End of the Prompt: Building Voice Systems, Not Voice Apps

Notes from Pipecat's November 2025 Voice AI Meetup in San Francisco

Nov 18 • Oana Olteanu

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October 2025

Mapping Work, Not Markets

A Process-First Investment Thesis for Enterprise AI

Oct 27 • Oana Olteanu

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Beautiful Software for the AI-Native Product Team

Why I Invested in Soffi

Oct 14 • Oana Olteanu

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

Beyond the Prompt: Notes from the Context Frontier

Oct 2 • Oana Olteanu

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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

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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

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Normalizing the Founder Journey

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

Jul 2 • Oana Olteanu

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June 2025

Founder Mental Software

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

Jun 30 • Oana Olteanu

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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

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AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025 - Field Notes

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

Jun 6 • Oana Olteanu

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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

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