This is the best way to describe the .@pintsofjoy Sunnyvale store. Incredibly proud of my wife for how she has built & grown this business to make it part of the Sunnyvale nightlife. Thanks @KQED for an incredibly well-written piece capturing the vibe!
kqed.org/arts/13990715/sunny…
OpenAI & Anthropic just raised $5.5B for AI deployment services.
Not new models. Not new chips. Human engineers, embedded inside companies, building AI workflows by hand.
We founded @HelloKeywork on this exact thesis: real-economy businesses won't vibe-code their way to AI adoption. Good to see PE OpenAI Anthropic come at it from the enterprise end, while we bring AI adoption in real-economy businesses at the earliest stages.
My thoughts on what's driving this elegant distribution model, why the economics work for everyone involved, and the potential lock-in risk.
linkedin.com/pulse/ai-deploy…
That's right. Instant/quick response is a competitive adv in trades. We consistently heard during our customer discovery that an estimate within 1 hour of the query = 7x chance of winning. Excited to bring such operating advantages to @HelloKeywork portfolio companies soon.
“When a restaurant misses a phone call, that’s a $30, $40 order,” Avoca cofounder Tyson Chen told Fortune's @agarfinks. “When a home service business misses a phone call, that could be a $30,000, $40,000 HVAC install they’re missing.” bit.ly/4mQ9Qn3
This is a great distillation of whats missing in making AI capabilities business useful at scale.
Finishing projects to make them complete & reliable, ability to work together are critical.
open.substack.com/pub/sunday…
These are central in our …
… product strategy as we build @HelloKeywork for SMBs. The last mile of AI enablement will be paved with ease of use, reliability, AI cost minimization, and coverage across functions / teams.
A lot of smart people are paralyzed right now - convinced AI is going to change everything but not doing anything about it.
The people I'm not worried about are the ones buying a $500k HVAC company and using AI to cut their back-office costs in half.
Pick a business, use the tools to boost efficiency, and let everyone else argue about what's coming.
Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era.
Almost nobody understood what he said.
Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.”
Not tech startups.
The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees.
The businesses that actually run the physical economy.
They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it.
Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.”
Software is dead.
The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever.
AI ends the contract.
The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business.
But customized by whom.
The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is.
Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?”
That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves.
Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer.
Let them fight.
Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero.
Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built.
It collects where the brain meets the business.
Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic.
Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy.
Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates.
Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue.
That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born.
You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system.
The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in.
33 million companies are standing in the dark right now.
Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.
Real-economy is poised to be the biggest beneficiary of AI capabilities. @HelloKeywork invests early-stage capital aligned with real-economy biz, & gives portcos an AI operating system to run the biz. Excited to help real-economy founders build AI-native, durable businesses!
Since ChatGPT first came out, people have dreamed about solving this problem with AI.
We are actually doing it. Today, @Luminai’s AI agents are directly responsible for driving 12 million end to end processes across American healthcare, working with institutions impacting millions of lives.
Every event in NYC recently, heard people excited about their tokens spend. Seeing a similar sentiment reflected in my feed.
Trying to understand how that is becoming the metric of AI proficiency, versus output / progress made per token.
What am I missing?
Mon morning flight, waiting at airport lounge, watching people drink alcoholic bevs at 1030AM. Wondering how they do this. I might still be hungover from a Sat evening drink. 🤦
Call to collaborate. I am building an AI-native investment firm to invest in & enable a gen of AI-native businesses across industries (physical & digital, real & virtual). This is an evolution from Unshackled Ventures (a firm I started 11 years ago)...
I am encouraged that many people are working on creative/alternative investment strategies and solutions to bring AI advancement to SMBs (including the AI roll-up companies mentioned in the Newcomer newsletter today).
If you are building a capital or software solution for businesses that are not suitable for VC, I'd love to talk. There's a lot more we can learn and do by collaborating!