Topic
AI Strategy
How companies are building with and investing in AI.
Related episodes
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
Startups
and introduce this to customers. There is a challenge, though. There is a caveat that I would make. As a very new technology for an established organization, there are risks associated with any launch. That's why at Amazon, we use MLP as an acronym,...
or Speedrun or Entrepreneur First offer a perfect opportunity for that. Mercury, for instance, works with 50% of every single YC batch and then grows with those companies over time. Every single new startup still needs a CRM. Every single new...
to actually do AI yourself. You can't optimize these models, so they're going to be inherently more expensive, and you risk being in competition with others, not really differentiating yourself. The analogy that I sometimes like is that on the early...
Yeah. So we're meeting some of the same people that have this point of view. Right? So the thing that is really expensive I mean, there are many things that can be expensive, but one of the things that is really expensive is I want to train a model...
You saw the first versions of things which were it was sort of spitting out content. Right? But you started to see in mid twenty twenty two or so this idea that the the models had some amount of reasoning capacity. And there's two things I might...
We all know that, corporates are slow, sometimes a bit more bureaucratic than needed. But the strength of corporates is their access to data, customers, supply chain. So use that as your advantage. More importantly, a small win across the portfolio...
I think in larger industries, there's generally more that that AI can do over time. And so we like healthcare, legal, finance, large industries versus some of the more niche ones. And then I think also there's a question of, are there 10 other use...
which might not look like an applications, right, in the way that we think of them, but might look more like, you know, this control center idea will have profound amounts of value to them and will probably also pull through even better...
if you think about the value chain of venture capital from sourcing to exit, you can apply technology and machine learning and AI, to use a terminology of today, across all the different steps. No doubts about that. And I have millions of ideas of...
So, you know, an entirely new form of data that gets sucked in to take the actions on your behalf. Like Salesforce, you know, I mentioned the form thing on the front end. The reason it's really, really sticky is the database on the back end. So to...
competitive. I think to a point earlier, some people maybe think of us later, and there's no such thing as too early for when we invest. There's no such thing as not enough traction. My question to you is we learn a lot from successes and failures....
So imagine you are trying to automate, a specific type of knowledge work, and what you want is the reasoning trace, all of the inputs and the output decision. Like, that sounds like a very useful set of data. And the incumbent companies in any given...
starts to open up, you get things like HubSpot. Yeah. Prosumer starts to open up. In just as Saf, you get all sort of PLG companies. But that's enabled by that architecture and business model. And I think if AI is to be the force that it can be, I...
is actually selling to other startups. Those startups have far fewer stakeholders. You just need to convince a CEO and a couple of founders. Those startups don't need a complete solution and those startups don't have any switching costs because they...
It will also give you an phenomenal access that will outperform and out innovate your direct competitors. More importantly, you will reinvent yourself faster this way. That's a clear learning from many technology companies. If you ask me whether you...
Some of our early winners are like Lambda, Ryder, Craya, but I personally like to work with founders that essentially absorb advancements in underlying infrastructure and turn them into enterprise grade solutions that ultimately deliver real value....
it's actually quite challenging to build effective AI applications, and we see a real difference in what some of the best companies are able to do. The second point I'd make about investing in the space is our thinking on what makes an interesting...
large enterprises from sales and marketing functions, and then there's HubSpot. And this will inform a lot of product decisions and a lot of go to market decisions. Your go to right now, I'm assuming, is founder led sales. You email a small trucking...
So I I think the, like, the most common refrain from at least OpenAI, but I think the the model companies is, you should build a company where you're excited when you hear that a new model is coming out, not anxious. I would have, have, like, one...
Do you spend time thinking about it? I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think most of them fall into if you just really think through the second order effects of it, fall into kind of like near term arbitrage, which might just take that...
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