The Ads Business Model Will Die & Lessons from Working with Elon at Twitter | Parag Agrawal
Sep 26, 2026 · 1:08:55
Parag Agrawal, former Twitter CEO and founder of Parallel ($230M from Sequoia, Khosla and First Round), argues agents will use the web 1,000x more than humans, requiring entirely new search technology and business models. He explains why agent search differs — inputs, outputs, latency and cost tradeoffs — claiming the same quality at 1/20th to 1/50th the compute, with Turbo for voice agents and Advanced for background agents. Because ads don't work with agents, Parallel is building an 'AdSense for agents' that pays content owners per agent use; he argues search prices must collapse from $10 to $1 per 1,000 queries, with another 10x coming. He also covers data licensing at inference time, the Monitor API shifting the web from pull to push, and the urgency he saw in Elon Musk.
