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API Chest

Loot for API advocates. Open this chest when you need to make the case for APIs — at your company, in a presentation, a blog post, or a pitch.

How to use: Point your AI agent at this file and tell it what you're arguing for. Each section has a theme - match the theme to your argument. Use the source links for credibility. Mix quotes from different voices (CEOs, investors, practitioners, builders) for a stronger case.

Contributions welcome via PR.

theme: api-is-the-business-model

Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI

"Every company is an API company now, whether they want to be or not."

"We have added more than $1B of ARR in the last month just from our API business. People think of us mostly as ChatGPT, but the API team is doing amazing work!"

Dario Amodei — CEO, Anthropic

"I actually do think that the API model is more durable than many people think."

"If the technology is advancing quickly, if it's advancing exponentially, what that means is there's always a surface area of new use cases that have been developed in the last three months."

Aaron Levie — CEO, Box

"Make something agents want."

"The biggest implication of this advice is that everything must become API-first in what you're building. If you don't have an API for a feature, it might as well not exist. If it can't be exposed through a CLI or MCP server, you're at a disadvantage."

"If an agent can't easily sign up for your service and starting using it, you're basically dead to agents."

"I suspect we'll start to see a Darwinian effect in software where the products without the comprehensive APIs or CLIs will just slowly die off. The forces are just too strong on this one."

"Agents are going to use software in completely different ways than people will. And they won't interact with your application and user interface like a user, but instead through your APIs. This is why software more and more needs to work in a completely headless fashion."

"Agents are going to use software 100X more than people will in the future."

"...which means that the value proposition has to be: how good are your APIs? How well designed are they? Are they ready for agents? Can you monetize that in some way that makes sense?"

Andrej Karpathy — AI Researcher (ex-Tesla, OpenAI)

"Every business you go to is still so used to giving you instructions over legacy interfaces. They expect you to navigate to web pages, click buttons, they give out instructions for where to click and what to enter here or there. This suddenly feels rude - why are you telling me what to do? Please give me the thing I can copy paste to my agent."

  • Source: X reply to Aaron Levie, Mar 8 2026 (147.5K views, 2.2K likes, 226 RTs, 1.1K bookmarks)
  • Image: Lobster army marching toward giant "API" letters
  • Levie replied: "I suspect we'll start to see a Darwinian effect in software where the products without the comprehensive APIs or CLIs will just slowly die off. The forces are just too strong on this one."

Marc Benioff — CEO & Co-Founder, Salesforce

"Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI."

theme: api-is-the-foundation

Guillermo Rauch — CEO, Vercel (created Next.js)

"If you're starting now (or starting over), focus on the API. Do it for the agents."

"The best companies are going to start out as APIs."

"Focus on problems where a simple API can hide enormous amounts of real-world and business complexity."

"Your agent will read Markdown. Then, it will run CLIs and call MCP tools. Your software will make API calls to other services. And software will become more and more invisible. Computers talking to other computers to get you an answer, even before you ask."

Peter Yang — Product Lead, Roblox

"For many products, AI agents will be your first users, not humans."

"Your goal in the AI agent era should be to get user time spent with your product to 0 because you've made it so incredibly easy for agents to get work done via APIs/skills/MCPs."

"Every product capability needs a corresponding API. Pick any important action in your product. If an agent can't do the same action through an API, then you're not agent-first. I've been surprised by how many products have beautiful UIs sitting on top of incomplete or undocumented APIs."

"Most companies think being 'AI agent-first' means building an MCP server. But the MCP should come last, not first."

Aakash Gupta — Product Growth (307K newsletter)

"If your product cannot be parsed, authenticated, and executed by an agent, you are invisible in the fastest-growing software channel."

"Your API is always the foundation. MCP servers call it under the hood. CLIs call it under the hood. If your API is a mess, everything above it will be too."

Jared Friedman — Partner, Y Combinator

"Agents hate using websites. They want to use APIs. They want to write code."

Abhishek Katiyar — Product Leader, Amazon

"I think every PM, not just AI PMs, should be learning about good API design right now. The product interface is shifting from 'humans to apps' to 'humans to agents to apps.'"

Dharmesh Shah — Founder & CTO, HubSpot

"Being agentic is not just about agents running on our platform, it's about agents running our platform (being able to operate it). That's how you take AI from being a simple tool to a savvy teammate."

  • Source: LinkedIn, Apr 12 2026
  • Context: Dharmesh framed this as a note he had just posted in a private Slack thread with the HubSpot exec team.

Ian McCrystal — Staff Engineering Manager, Agent Experience, Stripe

"The world needs 100x more APIs. Maybe 1000x."

theme: designing-agent-experience

Dharmesh Shah — Founder & CTO, HubSpot

"The companies that succeed in the agentic era are those that take a thoughtful approach to designing an agentic user experience (AUX)."

"Yes, that will likely involve APIs, MCPs and CLIs. But the difference will be in the ergonomics of the interface. We need to figure out how agents actually want to use our products/platforms. Because if all they wanted to do was use them like humans do, we have 'computer use' for that."

  • Source: LinkedIn, Apr 12 2026
  • Context: Dharmesh coins AUX (agentic user experience) as the category label — parallel to UX. The argument: wrapping existing APIs in MCP is not enough; if agents only wanted to use products the way humans do, "computer use" would suffice. The design problem is how agents actually want to operate.

theme: api-buyer-decisions

Aaron Levie — CEO, Box

"Asked a group of 20 IT leaders across banking, media, finance, and healthcare if they will have any vendors left in 3-5 years that don't have a good API option for their service and it was a unanimous 'no'."

"The more I meet enterprise CIOs and AI leaders outside of tech, the more it's obvious that if you're building software that doesn't have a great headless mode to work well with AI agents, you're going to be at risk in the coming years."

"You have to be completely comfortable serving up your value proposition as much through agent on or off your platform, as you are your own interface."

Cody Schneider — Growth, AI-native operator

"Everything that I do now, where I start my work, exists within here [a folder of API keys]. I'm starting to interact with everything that I do on a daily basis via the APIs. This is actually how I'm thinking about everything I do now and how I buy software in particular, is how robust the API is."

"If you're looking at Salesforce versus HubSpot right now, Salesforce, even though it's historically a more clunky CRM, is actually the better product for this AI foundation because it has a more robust API."

"There's a thing you can do in their UI that I can't do in their API. I'm literally about to churn because this is critical for me and now it feels archaic for me to go and interact with your fucking UI to do this outcome, this output that I need."

Greg Isenberg — Startup Studio founder

"In the old way of SaaS tools, an API was a nice to have. It was about how good is the software, how good is the UX, how good is the brand... Now when you're living in a terminal and you're using MCPs to talk to LLMs, the nice to have is actually the UI. The nice to have is the SaaS."

Tim Ferriss — Author, Investor, Podcaster

"Here's an API key and it will figure out how to connect to a given service like Gmail and if you have an API key for a product, you can easily start using it in Claude as it will simply write itself a script."

"The API key is a really important component to all of this."

theme: apis-going-mainstream

Brandur Leach — Engineer (ex-Heroku, Stripe)

"Suddenly, an API is no longer liability, but a major saleable vector to give users what they want: a way into the services they use and pay for so that an agent can carry out work on their behalf."

"The convention of the future will be human language, fed into what looks a lot like a terminal, and fulfilled via API."

Ben Tossell — Founder, Ben's Bites

"Agents are the software market from now on. Build something agents choose. CLI/API first."

Contributing

Know a good quote about why APIs matter? Open a PR. Include:

  • The exact quote
  • Who said it (name and role)
  • Theme (which section it belongs in, or propose a new one)
  • Source link
  • Date

Curated by Emmanuel Paraskakis.