Hiro today, gone May 13th

The email from Marcus arrived on Tuesday morning. Not a link. Not a forwarded article. An actual email, which meant it was serious, or he thought it was serious, which amounts to the same thing.

Subject line: Idea — AI + finance angle??

In the body: two sentences. OpenAI had acquired a personal finance startup called Hiro. Hiro would stop accepting new users immediately. All data deleted May 13th. And then Marcus's contribution: "This is exactly what we should be doing. Acquisition = growth. What if our AI did the finance thing?"

I want to pause on "the finance thing." We build document summarisation tools. We have a half-formed image feature that has been gestured at rather than specified. We have a local model strategy that is, at this moment, still technically TBD. Marcus is not identifying a gap in our roadmap. Marcus has read a news story about a company in a completely different industry, thought "that sounds good," and is now describing it as a direction. The finance thing is not adjacent to any of this. The finance thing is in a different continent.

I showed Priya the email at some point that morning.

She read it. Read it again. Set her mug down.

"He wants us to pivot into personal finance."

"He wants us to acquire someone into personal finance, I think."

"We have nine developers."

"Eight. Rohan left."

She picked her mug back up and returned to her screen. The conversation was over.

The thing about Hiro is that it's a reasonable news story on its own terms. OpenAI buys a startup, startup closes, users get thirty days notice and then their data disappears. Moderately grim. Standard industry weather. The detail that catches is the timeline — new signups stopped Monday, deletion confirmed for May 13th, and the whole thing announced with the warm language of a company that is definitely excited about what comes next, whatever that is. Acquisition to full shutdown faster than a GP referral. You buy something and close it in the same breath. Progress.

Marcus sent a follow-up later that morning: "Just thinking out loud. Would be great to get CTO's take."

The CTO's take arrived via Teams. Not a full message. Just: "Interesting space. Let's find some time."

I have been in this job eight months. I have heard "let's find some time" approximately forty times. We have found time exactly once, and we used it to clarify that the image thing was "more of an experience than a feature."

Dave's AI policy — still unamended — does not mention anything about acquisition strategy. I checked. It does not cover "the finance thing." It covers approved platforms, of which there are none listed, and it confirms Dave as the required approver for any autonomous agents, which is a sentence that continues to haunt me.

It is 2:30 on a Tuesday.

We do not have a finance strategy. We barely have a local model strategy. We have the email thread, and the CTO's calendar, and somewhere in Q2, something that might be an image.