Iâm thrilled to announce that Odessia was acquired by OpenAI, and that I will be joining the team to focus on the future of travel.
I founded Odessia less than a year ago with the goal to ship the best AI travel agent in the market, and I believe we achieved that. Over $60M/year of travel was planned by Odessia over the past summer by tens of thousands of early adopters. Using AI to plan and book extraordinary trips is now a reality.
Weâll have more to share on the shape of the future soon â but for now I want to thank my team, Sequoia and all the phenomenal angels who supported us, and our numerous partners across the travel industry who took an early bet on a startup pre-launch.
We got started at a time where agents started really working, and we went all-in.
I previously founded Sonder, taking it from 0 to $600M in revenues which took over a thousand people and a decade. This time, my approach with Odessia was radically different. We burned the old playbooks and radicalized ourselves to truly embrace the new agentic era.
With all the context, honed skills, detailed voice prompts and frontier models, agents can multiply productivity and at times one-shot entire projects. And weâre not only talking about software engineering tasks. Strategy, partnerships, design, marketing, customer support, legal, finance â all of it.
My personal usage of agents skyrocketed 25x through 2026. As the founder/CEO, I only had one goal in mind: building a great company fast. As my individual usage surged the ROI from intelligence kept increasing.
Agents need secure access to all the same information an employee has access to. This means MCP or CLI access to every meeting recording, Slack, email, Drive, and all software tools used across the company. This means dozens of plugins/MCPs/CLIs. A single run will retrieve meeting transcripts, review a presentation in drive, look at email exchanges, Slack messages, user feedback, and tap into a few systems of record.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
We also created clean shared documentation for every decision for agents to soak up all needed strategy context. Agents maintained this knowledge base and artifact history.
Agents still need a lot of correction to produce excellent work. But writing prompts is too slow. Voice usually goes 3-4x faster. We prefer the methodology where you initially do a brain dump, even expressing your chain of thought to the agent as your thinking evolves. No need to meticulously handcraft prompts.
Before doing pretty much anything manually, we first kicked things off with an agent. As the year progressed, the quality of work kept surprising us. For example, our product launch video was created with an agent. Agents evaluated potential partner APIs by benchmarking their performance and putting together spreadsheets and slide decks with the results.
Repeated corrections were turned into skills that get proactively loaded when relevant.
Tackling a task manually may have taken say 40 hours to do. With agents powered by frontier models even with several rounds of iterations and feedback, youâve completed the task in 2 hours. 20x productivity gain. The cost of running the agent is a rounding error. The ROI is so good, that the rational thing to do is to go unlimited. We saw productivity accelerate dramatically when we removed usage limits.
The bottleneck ends up being your capacity to consume agent outputs and drive decisions. To process outputs…
