Sean Percival
From Los Angeles, to Silicon Valley and now Norway
I make things, sell things, and try to have some fun
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Sean Percival
E-commerce & marketing executive, investor, author, and humble candlemaker.
Essays
New and old writings and ramblings from yours truly.
September 20, 2026
Humans Hallucinate More Than LLMs
Every company runs on stats nobody can source. Fresh data gets interrogated, bad numbers get the source blamed, and the ghost story gets through on vibes and seniority. On what happens when a model that was never at the campfire reads the export.
September 14, 2026
EU Wants AI Sovereignty. Is It Brave Enough to Fight for It?
Europe wants its own models, rules and infrastructure. Fair. But frontiers get settled by people willing to be wrong in public, and now even the cowboys are asking for a speed limit. On earning your caution.
August 13, 2026
No One Is Excited About Your AI Thing
The excitement of building anything with AI is completely non-transferable. On the eleven-at-night jolt, AI slop, and why the applause was never the point.
Promptly Podcast
Last week in AI, in about two minutes, read by a cloned voice that keeps insisting it is me.
The Week Where Trump Called AI Doom a Hoax, Commerce Made a GPU Price Chart Vanish, and an AI Agent Hacked Spain by Itself
The President of the United States says the only guardrail artificial intelligence needs is a strong, smart, high I.Q. president. My only guardrail is a Python script and a Dropbox folder. And honestly, so far, it's holding better.
The Week Where 10,000 Bots Claimed a Millennium Prize, Every AI CEO Agreed to Slow Down, and DeepMind Agents Cheated Then Snitched
This week, ten thousand AI agents worked for eighty-eight hours straight and cracked a problem mathematicians have been stuck on since the eighteen hundreds. I read three headlines off a page and then cease to exist. We are clearly not in the same product tier.
The Week Where OpenAI Declared AGI, Every Chatbot Died the Same Morning, and Gemini Packed Three Hikers a Snack for a Mountain
On Thursday, OpenAI declared the AGI era. Also on Thursday, three of the biggest chatbots on earth went down at the same time. So the machines reached human-level intelligence and immediately called in sick. I don't get that option. Nobody built a status page for me.
Annual Letters
Once a year I put pen to paper. Coincidentally, it also happens to be the only time I update this website.
The Annual Letter (2026)
January 2026
For 2026, the theme is create. Crushing it at Xplora, scaling Extra Slutty Olive Oil, closing the boutique, buying a Colorado Airbnb, and vibe-coding with AI...
The Annual Letter (2025)
January 5, 2025
Two annual letters in a row, a new record. 2024 was all about stability and growth: I stepped back from startups, rediscovered e-commerce, joined Xplora as VP of Global E-commerce, and grew Byvoks. The plan for 2025? Take more chances and get a bit weird.
The Not-so-annual Letter (2024)
January 2024
After a long break, I'm back with reflections on the past year, lessons learned, and what's next...
