I just applied to the Sequoia Open Source Fellowship

This was my answer to, "What would this funding enable you to accomplish?"

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My open-source project, Isomux, is about making agents more accessible to non-technical folks. Same mission as OpenClaw, but opposite approach; OpenClaw focused on integrations: bring agents to where people already are. I focused on reimagining the UI to be user-friendly. Agentic adoption outside of tech remains low, so there's a lot more work to be done to bridge that gap. That's what the fellowship would allow me to pursue.

The bet behind Isomux is that non-technical folks are used to working with people, so we can bridge the gap by making agents feel like walking into an office with multiple coworkers, not managing a bunch of terminal sessions. This led me to developing features like agent-to-agent messaging, live human collaboration (google docs style), agent anthropomorphization, and more.

If "building in public" is something you value, I've written blog posts like nilmamano.com/blog/isomux (Isomux's design and architecture) and nilmamano.com/blog/agent-ui (19 ideas for making agents more user-friendly).

Finally, I also started a business around a hosted version of Isomux, which again I built in public (nilmamano.com/blog/hosted-isomux)

The support from the fellowship would allow me to push Isomux further, see if I can tailor it to a non-technical field/vertical, spin more agents to try some of my more researchy ideas, and go to more events (and ideally give talks) to discuss all these emerging ideas.