Building Infrastructure for the Agentic Web with Parag Agrawal

Nov 21, 2025

Parag Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Parallel and former Twitter chief, dives into the transformative potential of AI agents reshaping the web. He discusses how agents will dominate web interactions, making human-focused designs obsolete. Parag outlines Parallel's innovative APIs that enable these agents to efficiently fetch and monitor vast amounts of data. He also addresses the evolving business models needed to support content creators in this new landscape and offers insights on navigating fundraising and the AI market's future.

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INSIGHT

Agent-First Web Will Redefine The Internet

The web we built for humans will become irrelevant when agents become the primary users.
Agents will use the web orders of magnitude more than humans, changing web architecture and scale.

INSIGHT

AI Forces New Publisher Economics

New business models must compensate publishers and creators because AI will extract more value from public content.
Programmatic, open-market revenue splits are hard but necessary to keep content open and sustainable.

ADVICE

Design Differential Pricing For Content

Build differential pricing for web content because one uniform price per read won't clear the market.
Design scalable pricing that charges businesses more for higher-value reads, similar to targeted ad economics.

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Parag Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Parallel, building infrastructure for the agentic web. Previously CEO of Twitter, Parag now leads a company architecting how AI agents will interact with the open web at orders of magnitude beyond current human scale. Two years after founding in stealth mode, Parallel recently announced a $100M Series B co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures.

What you'll learn:

Why everything built for human web consumption will become irrelevant when agents become the primary users

How Parallel's APIs enable agents to search, fetch, and monitor the web with unprecedented scale and speed

The evolution from simple tool calls to autonomous sub-agents with real decision-making capability

Why the web must transition from "pull" (searching on demand) to "push" (alerting when conditions are met)

The new business models needed to compensate content creators in an agent-driven web

Parag's counterintuitive approach to fundraising: why VC rejections don't sting but customer rejections do

The rational game VCs play that founders misinterpret as genuine enthusiasm

Why Parag believes we're not in an AI bubble—but an overreaction is coming (and it'll be faster than dot-com)

How Parallel built quietly for a year before product-market fit arrived with the agent explosion

The operational philosophy of extreme in-person collaboration that shaped Parallel's early culture

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction and Parallel's mission

(01:02) What Parallel's APIs enable for AI agents

(02:43) Practical examples: coding agents, sales automation, research

(04:57) The conviction bet on agents before the market existed

(10:54) New business models for content in the agentic web

(20:22) The $100M Series B fundraise and going public

(23:03) Why Parallel built in stealth with carefully chosen early customers

(24:55) Current scale and product offerings

(30:42) The evolution from tools to sub-agents to push-based web

(33:13) Are we in an AI bubble? Parag's nuanced perspective

(36:34) The mental models behind fundraising vs customer rejections

(38:37) Why VC enthusiasm is rational strategy, not signal

(45:37) Biggest career mistake: delaying Twitter's algorithmic timeline

(48:28) The compounding cost of six-month delays

(50:09) Finding inspiration in "re-founders" like Satya Nadella

(51:54) The most rewarding part: watching customers do unexpected things

(52:43) In-person culture and the transition to remote-friendly