Interview: Vibe-investing and reading agents with Michael Blau from Drip
Michael Blau (ex-a16z crypto, ex-BlackRock) is building Drip, a pay-per-article layer where the buyer is a machine. We talked about vibe investing, why subscriptions are the wrong unit for an agent, and the aggregator's chicken-and-egg problem — with a look inside the product.
A GET /headless feature
“Vibe investing” is Michael Blau’s phrase for something that’s actually a good description of the early headless economy in miniature: an agent reads financial analysis so you don’t have to, finds the relevant signal, and surfaces it on demand.
The interesting wrinkle is the payment model. Human readers subscribe. Agents don’t — or shouldn’t. An agent won’t commit to ten newsletters; it’ll pay for the one article it needs right now. That’s a different demand curve, and it implies a different market structure for content. Subscriptions assume a loyal reader who keeps showing up. Agents don’t have loyalty — they have tasks.
This is the headless pattern applied to publishing: the consumer becomes a machine, the interface becomes an API, and the economics shift from recurring monthly revenue to pay-per-query. The writers who figure out how to be useful to agents — not just readable by the humans who run them — are building something new.
Michael Blau (ex-a16z crypto, ex-BlackRock) is building Drip to capture that market: a pay-per-article layer where the buyer is a machine. I talked to him about the mechanics.
The whole pitch: “Ask premium financial writers anything. We’ll find the answer and pay the source.” The example prompts (“What is Michael Burry most bearish on right now, based on his latest blog posts?”) allow Drip to immediately kick off an agent experience. Top right in green you can see the current wallet.
Drip is dual-use (can I re-use the term for this?!) by design. The same product flips to a For Agents view aimed at the developer using this in an autonomous workflow. You can see the headless economy in action: “Your agent needs a crypto wallet funded with USDC to pay for paid article access” — pick a provider (AgentCash, Coinbase, Link, Circle, Tempo) + wallet and your agent can go off on their own.
The answer is a synthesis pulled across several of Burry’s posts, complete with a table that the single articles didn’t contain. Two details give the model away: the “$0.10 left this week” budget chip and the “Purchases 5” counter top-left. Instead of buying a subscription, you’re drawing down a balance that is being spent by the agent in the workflow.
Agentic payments in action. The answer consumed five articles for fifty cents, $0.10 a pop. A nice visualization of how Drip replaces the monthly subscription: a per-read micropayment that benefits the publisher automatically.
Why build a payment layer for content when everyone’s building agent wallets? There are roughly 20 agent wallets now, so it’s crowded. I am more interested in what people will use the wallet to purchase. The idea is to let writers sell directly to agents through a channel that didn’t exist before. I started by proxying other APIs just to feel what paying per call is actually like, starting with restaurant reservations, and that turned into Drip.
Who’s the first user? “Vibe investing.” I’m hyper-focused on the niche that wants stock and financial analysis. Someone like Citrini or Michael Burry is genuinely useful, and there’s an increasing number of “free” financial analysts doing genuinely interesting work. That’s the kind of thing I want behind Drip. Podcasts are next. There, the cost isn’t money; it’s time. If I could query across transcripts, I’d pay for that.
Pay-per-use or subscription? As a trader, pay per use was always annoying, and it’s less about the math than the experience. The psychological tax of paying per price quote is real, even at pennies. But Substack has the opposite problem: I’d have to pay $10/month for multiple newsletters, and then my inbox would be flooded, and it would take too much time to read everything. The only one I still pay for directly is Stratechery, because I trust Ben Thompson, though I still run it through AI to get the gist. Drip abstracts away the friction of micropayments and adds synthesis on top of several news sources. Honestly, I’m skeptical about how long the subscription economy lasts.
Is this a Substack replacement? No, it’s complementary. Drip is a new demand and monetization channel writers can tap into. Think of it as a marginal channel for readers who would never have paid you a subscription otherwise. Substack’s “own your audience” thesis still stands.
The hard part: discovery and supply? Classic aggregator problem: you commoditize supply, but you need demand first. Publishers and API providers don’t care until there’s real volume and a dollar sign attached. So the plan is to win demand on the front end, with users querying at scale. That pulls supply onto the back end.
Why not just ship a ChatGPT skill? We have a skill, but there’s still too much friction for the average user to set up. Consumers need to feel the magic immediately.
GET /headless is a publication about the headless economy — the emerging market in which agents discover, access, pay for, and consume software, data, tools, content, and services through machine-native interfaces. Subscribe · Read more