Rishita Sharma

Meta and Sierra just announced Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how personal agents talk to businesses. Shopify, Stripe and Walmart are listed as partners and the first spec is supposed to land later this month.

I build small web apps and my first reaction was mixed. Fewer abandoned checkouts sounds nice. But I'd want to know when it's an agent and not a person, and who sorts it out when it orders the wrong thing. Is anyone already seeing agent traffic on their product? Would you support something like this early or wait and see?

Building mostly solo so far and I'm starting to hit the point where I can't do everything. Support, small bug fixes, and posting about the product all eat into actual building time. My gut says get help with support first since that's the most repetitive, but I worry I'd lose touch with what users are actually struggling with. A part time developer feels like the obvious move too, but then I'd be managing instead of building. For those who went through this, what was your first hire or contractor and would you pick the same again?

The first security question from a buyer usually lands at the worst possible moment: the deal is nearly closed, and someone on their side asks for a pentest report, a filled-in security questionnaire, or proof that customer data is actually protected. Most small teams have none of that ready, so everything stalls while you work out what a credible answer even looks like. I'd like to hear how other founders handled it. Did you pay for a pentest just to unblock one deal? Fill in the questionnaire yourself and hope nobody read it closely? Start SOC 2 earlier than you wanted to? Or walk away from the deal? And for those further along: what actually satisfied the buyer in the end, a document, a call between engineers, or just a founder who clearly understood the question? Disclosure: I co-found Xseth, where we do external security testing, so I have an obvious bias here. I'm asking because the stories I hear are all over the place, and I'd genuinely like to know what unblocks these deals in practice.