Grit · 5 min · Jul 27, 2026

Agrawal built a personal agent to catch dropped priorities

Parag Agrawal · Founder & CEO, Parallel

He built an agent that reviewed company information and the open web, then compared activity with his stated priorities.

In this episode

35:23 AI agents need incentives that keep the web open4 min
22:54 Agrawal wants engineers to move work into learning loops3 min
13:09 Agrawal would rather overuse tokens than be too cautious6 min
8:39Agrawal built a personal agent to catch dropped priorities5 min
2:49 Agrawal protects proactive work with three daily priorities4 min
18:46 AI productivity can increase engineering demand4 min
29:12 A strong close rate revealed a sales pipeline problem4 min
58:18 AI can expand the deals a PE firm can assess2 min

“it makes me feel more secure that I am not dropping the important balls because it is also paranoid on my behalf.”

Parag Agrawalat 11:09 · Grit

Takeaways

He gave it his top three priorities to infer what mattered.
It compared company information with the open web.
The tool needed hands-on tailoring to become useful.

About this segment

He built an agent that reviewed company information and the open web, then compared activity with his stated priorities. It became useful for protecting his focus, but needed tailoring to his role.

Parag Agrawal is founder and CEO of Parallel, former CEO of Twitter.

Founded Parallel Web Systems, which builds agentic web search for AI agents; former Twitter CEO.

Joubin Mirzadegan, Host · Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Took Palo Alto Networks' cloud business from $2M to $50M+ ARR in a year.

From “Ex-Twitter CEO on Why AI Needs a New Internet | Parag Agrawal”, Jul 27, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Are AI agents ready for real work?” See all 98 answers

Transcript

From the transcript Grit publishes with the episode.

8:45
it actionable. Can we go back to the top three things? Yeah. So a few weeks ago, you showed me this vibe coded thing that you built for yourself. Can you talk about that? Of course. Yeah. Why not? So you showed it to me. And it's incredible, actually. And I think it was we were having lunch together at our CEO summit, and you showed me the app, and I'm like, this is mind blowing. What was even more mind blowing was that by 1 p.m. when we were having lunch together, you had spent, I believe, $378 in on tokens that day. And I asked you, like, what the heck are you doing in the background? And you're you're clearly token maxing.
9:25
And I think at the time you're saying, hey, like, I'm just trying to do as much as possible and actually don't care right now. Two questions embedded. One is like, how does that help you with the top three things for that day? And then how does it help you, those drop balls that come back up. How does that help you with that? And then thirdly anxiety. How does it help you on Saturday morning Oh, you know, the anxiety is less because I just built this amazing thing that helps me be less anxious. So, number one, me building that wasn't one of those top three things. Just as a clarification, it is just because I was just excited about it. I wanted to play with it and I'm going, I was I built it with the rationale of making a two, understanding that if I built a thing that was that could see everything I can see, and it was doing all the work proactively
10:15
that I should be doing with the most limited access that I could give it. Um, what would that thing do? How much would it rely on all of my internal data, like slack and granola and emails versus the open web? Like, we obsess about the open web at parallel. And I really like I tell investors, I tell customers that when you do work, you're combining across all the information available to you, whether it is your personal information, whether it is your company information, or whether it is the open web. And so this project's rationale was to see what the machine likes to spend on parallel versus everything else in terms of tokens in a in the purest form I could while being productive on my behalf. Uh, and so this was a journey to one be useful and discover that for my role, uh, it has ended up
11:12
being pretty useful for me, for my top three things. Like it makes me feel more secure that I am not dropping the important balls because it is also paranoid on my behalf. It is inferring my priorities. Uh, I write down my top three priorities so it knows what those are. Uh, it will push back on other things. I'm balls, I'm dropping, and I'm slightly more deliberate about dropping those balls than I was before I had this thing. It's token uses outrageously inefficient and I wouldn't read too much into the goal. Isn't token maxing the the. Yeah, I just it was not worth it to optimize. But I think it can be materially materially optimized. Just not. The second part of the question was would you let everyone on the parallel team go build that version of themselves and spend, let's say, $500 a day on things to make
12:09
people less anxious? Probably, yeah. I haven't thought it through. I haven't done the full math, but yeah, if once useful. Totally. I think it's like the utility. It takes some real work and effort to make it actually useful to who you are, at least today. For me. Like it like out of the box. Nothing is useful unless you mold yourself and mold it around you. And I don't know if you can if I yet know how to productize it for everyone and all the different roles at parallel and but yeah, anyone who does the work and can drive through value like $50 a day's fine if you get really maximize yourself. Yeah, I remember you had an offsite coming up the week thereafter. So you were really token maxing because you had some stuff running in the background. And I imagine today less tokens have been used. I have since optimized it. It uses far less tokens, and it
13:05
works in certain periods more intensely and other periods less intensely. And how much do you think you'll spend today? Like 100. Okay, a. Couple hundred bucks. Do you care? Like, if you look at your