investor

Joined January 2012
135 Photos and videos
Still surprised when you google the market size of any category, you mostly get slop market research reports trying to sell you a $3000 PDF with very little credible information about how they triangulated any of this
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Cole Rotman retweeted
I think this is one of the main reasons almost no “pre-AI” companies have been able to catch an AI tailwind, despite loads of product initiatives and even more marketing. And it isn’t well understood or appreciated.
9 Jun 2025
From @ericvishria on how the top AI founders are building products completely opposite of the SaaS era: "One of the things that is really different in the AI world versus the SaaS world, is that in the SaaS world, over and over again, you had people who really understood the customer. And the problem. And then they understood a domain. They understood what the technology was more or less capable of. But it wasn't a real question of if you could build something or not. For example, take Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow. CRM existed before Salesforce. HR management existed before Workday. Same thing with ServiceNow. So in every case, Salesforce followed Siebel. Workday followed Peoplesoft. ServiceNow followed Peregrine and Remedy, and others. So they were just kind of, cloud SaaS versions of the prior generation product. They just understood the customers. They understood the problem. And they were just like, here's a better version. And that evolved a little bit over time in SaaS land. But that's what it is. And so product development in that way was done by people who really understood the customer and the problems. And then just took advantage of the next wave. And this is almost diametrically opposite of product development in the AI era. When I look at the teams that are having the most success today, they have intimate knowledge of the models. They are right on the frontier of understanding which models are better at what, and why, and when. And what they're going to be good at and what they're not going to be good at. And what they're spending their time on, is figuring out how do I apply this capability of this model to this domain or to this user. So they're actually working inside out or technology out, versus customer problem in. And of course, they understand the customer problem. And a lot of times they have firsthand knowledge of it. But they're really close to the metal and capability, and they're applying it. And I think this is a really different way to develop products than in SaaS. I started my career as a product manager a long time ago, and it's almost the complete opposite of everything you learned. "Listen to the customer, understand it, then bring it back to the engineering and product teams." If you did that right now, ask a bunch of customers what they want out of AI, and you brought it back, for the most part, it may not be possible today with today's technology. Whereas the teams that are winning right now really understand the technology and are applying it out. And so I think this reversal matters. I think it's a big difference in terms of how companies are getting built. And maybe even the types of entrepreneurs that will be successful. I'm not sure. You're seeing some real change there. Look at the Bret Taylor's at Sierra. That's a super, super technical founder who really gets it. Brett and Clay really get it. You look at Michael and his co-founders at Cursor. They're super technical founders and they get it. They all really understand what these things can and can't do. And that's a pretty different dynamic relative to the way the best SaaS companies got built." Link in bio for the full conversation going deep on the current class of startups going from zero to $100m in ARR within 12 months.
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Cole Rotman retweeted
9 Jun 2025
TIL: New York bagels are the way they are because of a culinary mafia. For much of the 20th century, bagels in NYC were controlled by Bagel Bakers Local 338, a union of Jewish bakers who enforced wages and very specific standards around how bagels were made. The bagelmakers did a great job negotiating... for every date I looked up, the standard salaries for bagelmakers were $75–$100k in todays dollars- far more than teachers or police made at the time. They also controlled what a bagel was. To be called Bagels (or Beigels) they had to be made of high-gluten flour, water, salt, yeast, and malt- with no sugar or dairy. Bagels had to be hand-rolled, boiled, and baked on stone, and they maintained uniformity across bakeries by random taste tests. There were 6 flavors: Plain, Poppy, Sesame, Salt, Onion, Garlic. They defended their power like a mafia: they routinely went on strike, and crushed every non-union bagel shop that popped up, by picketing, offering free bagels in front of non-union shops, and by telling all their suppliers that if they supplied to the non-union shop they'd lose the union business, which no supplier could afford to do. In 1964, they standardized the spelling from beigel, baigel, beygel, or beygl to "Bagel" The cartel ruled the bagel industry in New York for ~70 years, until a California-based company came in with a technology that made it a lot cheaper (the Uber of its time? Lots of similarities to taxi medallions!). Daniel Thompson, an inventor in LA created a machine that could make bagels way faster and 4x cheaper. The machine-made bagels didn't taste as good, but they were a lot cheaper and had a longer shelf-life. By the late ’70s, the Local 338 union had collapsed. Mass-market bagels had won. The bagel machine was part of a broader postwar trend, and was late to it: food became cheaper, softer, and mass-produced... bagels went from chewy and handmade to frozen and uniform. It fit the era’s obsession with convenience. Making them cheaper also made them popular... they went from a niche Jewish delicacy to a popular breakfast item for many. Many of us grew up with Lender's frozen bagels... Lender's was the largest buyer of the Thompson bagel machine. In New York, handmade bagels mostly disappeared from the 70s to the 90s. But now, after decades of industrial food, we crave the opposite, and handmade bagels have made a comeback in New York. Today’s best bagels look a lot like the ones from a century ago: hand-rolled, boiled, blistered, and slightly uneven. All of our favorite spots (Brooklyn bagel, Apollo, Popup) make their bagels by hand. Your average deli bagel though? It's made in a machine, steamed not boiled, and done on a rotating rack oven. It looks like a bagel but does not have the chew or crust of a real handmade bagel. The average deli bagel, even in New York, is absolute crap!
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Cole Rotman retweeted
9 Jun 2025
Hamas tunnels under hospitals 100% verified—by uncut videos and "foreign journalists" everyone demands. Shifa Hospital. European Hospital. Evidence is overwhelming. Yet UN, fake NGOs & much of the media will still claim Israel “targets healthcare.” But truth was never the point.
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“The AI Era” New thoughts from our co-founder, Saurabh Gupta: sgthoughts.substack.com/p/th…
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My favorite snippet
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Best pitch advice: refine after every meeting based on questions. Small upgrades can compound fast and allow you to preemptively address questions before they’re asked, which makes your audience think… “Wow they must know exactly what they’re doing b/c they think like me”
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Do this enough times, the only question left will be… Where do I wire the $?
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Cole Rotman retweeted
Inspired by @ColeRotman, we looked at the seed rounds of all the AI Unicorns founded post transformer. Interestingly, none have come out of YC, and no one except a16z has led or co-led more than 2 seeds. ~20% of the founders pivoted to their current businesses.
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Cole Rotman retweeted
Consumer AI companies generally see "lumpier" growth, often more directly correlated with new model releases (especially in categories like creative tools). These companies also are often raising more $ pre-Series A...but when they start to work, the rounds can happen faster!
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Cole Rotman retweeted
5 Jun 2025
This just in, at @tabletmag: How the media manufactured the blood libel of Israeli "genocide."
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U.S. citizens were murdered on October 7th and their corpses were dragged into Gaza and stashed in tunnels for 600 days by people CNN refers to as “local health authorities” Bring back every last hostage!
After more than 600 days, the bodies of American citizens Gad Haggai and Judith Weinstein were recovered from Gaza by the IDF. My heart is with their family and loved ones. The U.S. remains committed to bringing every hostage home.
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Cole Rotman retweeted
I thought Dara offered a well-reasoned justification why Uber is well-positioned for autonomous vehicles
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Friendly reminder @duolingo is a $24bn market cap company 83% of revenue is subscription-based from the core language learning product… Which has ~7% TAM penetration based on 130m MAUs / 1,800m global second language learners (source: S1) 🤯🤯🤯
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Market is pricing in lots of runway on core product/TAM before subject expansion add'l revenue lines... plus OpEx speed to market improvements due to LLMs! In the $20bn market cap club of VC-backed consumer apps founded in 2010s w/ $DASH ($83bn) $CVNA ($74bn) $HOOD ($64bn)
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Cole Rotman retweeted
3 Jun 2025
elon’s whole playbook is: - identify broken thing - build better thing - scale it with physics level aggression i spent very little time in dc but i realized governance isn’t software or even rockets… there’s no clean api to replace. it’s all weird coalition math, patronage loops, & re election dynamics. it resists optimization because the inefficiency is the *point*. trying to “fix” that with engineer logic is like debugging a baroque opera.
3 Jun 2025
I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.
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Cole Rotman retweeted
4 Jun 2025
Friendly reminder when you see media report numbers and events quoting this: - “Gaza Ministry of Health” = Hamas - “Gaza health officials” = Hamas - “Gaza authorities” = Hamas - “Gaza officials” = Hamas - “Local authorities” = Hamas - “Health authorities” = Hamas
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Cole Rotman retweeted
3 Jun 2025
it’s been well documented and posted about but successful people wanting to be popular online yet not being able to do so no matter how hard they try is one of the things that makes this site so great. it’s something money can’t buy. some real metaverse shit if you think about it
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