Building an AI Startup in 2026 (the last 3 months changed everything)
From Main Street AI by Multimodal
May 4, 2026 · 25 min
About this episode
Ankur Patel and Ishita Jaiswal discuss the transformative impact of agentic AI on Multimodal's operations and the broader market changes in recent months.
At Multimodal, agentic AI is reshaping how the team ships product, hires, and thinks about work itself. In this episode of Main Street AI, Ankur Patel sits down with Ishita Jaiswal, Head of Growth at Multimodal, for an internal look at how a 3-year-old agentic AI startup is operating in a market where the last three months brought more change than all of 2025.What makes this conversation different: just a candid conversation between two operators about what's actually changed. Why prompt engineering is dead. Why planning now takes 25 minutes and execution takes 5. Why Multimodal scrapped entire product lines when Claude and ChatGPT caught up. Why the team is doubling down on agentic coding before hiring more engineers. And why "10x workers" are about to become the norm across every function — not just engineering.Host: Ankur Patel, CEO & Founder, MultimodalGuest: Ishita Jaiswal, Head of Growth, Multimodal0:00 Introduction: The last 3 months changed everything1:08 How agentic AI reshaped product development at Multimodal3:18 What taste and judgment look like when execution is free5:21 The product lines we scrapped in 2026 (and why)7:30 Why prompt engineering is…
People in this episode
Host: Ankur Patel
Guest: Ishita Jaiswal
Topics covered
- agentic AI
- AI startup
- product development
- workflow changes
- hiring practices
- engineering teams
Keywords
- agentic AI
- product development
- prompt engineering
- workflow
- hiring
- engineering
- market changes
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Multimodal
Products: Claude, ChatGPT
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