early last year, anthropic reassured cursor that claude code was “more of a research effort than a major commercial push”

From @chetanp on why SaaS incumbents should be spending 20-30% of their market cap acquiring AI companies: "I think Salesforce should buy a lot of companies right now. Throughout their history, they've done a very good job of buying the right companies at the right time. When marketing cloud took off, they acquired a great company. When commerce took off, they bought another one. They made key acquisitions at the right times throughout their growth trajectory. I think if you're a SaaS company, you should spend 20-30% of your market cap acquiring AI application companies right now. And then either feed them into your existing distribution networks, or build new ones around them. If you look back, there were a bunch of moments where the on-prem incumbents should have just bought the cloud upstarts. And they didn't. But in retrospect, it would have been a very good deal. And we're in that same period now. These AI companies are about to get gigantic. And they should really jump in and buy some of them now before they can't. There's still questions around the margin profile. But people forget, SaaS went through the same thing. Workday had negative gross margins in one of the years shown in their S-1. If you've been around software long enough, you've seen these patterns before. Customers start using them as a system of record, build workflows around them, and they become a key part of their business. The only way that account goes to zero is if the customer goes out of business. When you see the first wave of AI company S-1's in '27-28, I think people are going to be very surprised at how much these companies look like software companies. And instead of paying a ton of gross margin to the cloud vendors, they're paying a ton of gross margin to inference providers. And the companies will get better at optimizing that. The private markets have fully realized this opportunity. But I'm not sure public market investors have quite embraced this. And I don't think public companies have either."

For the young builders that follow me: Don't get caught up in the VC hype The money raised, the kingmaking, the exclusive dinners Nothing matters more than working with good people and building something you like There is way too much noise in this market over intellectualizing everything.

“i know enough to be dangerous,” my favorite VC-ism

If you need FDEs to make your product work, you have a shit product

NEW YORK OR NOWHERE

We did it. 120mins of pure value. How to Build with AI. From the pov of an investor, unicorn founder, and a cracked builder, with bites from yours truly. Thanks to Deedy, Tanay and Dhravya for this one. Coming soon.

Just invested in a YC startup at $200M valuation. Pre-demo day. The most expensive seed valuation I’ve ever invested in.

fun recent set of interviews for @NoPriorsPod (Zuck, @satyanadella) and we have @LipBuTan1 (@intel CEO) next week. who do you want to see in the lineup!

they’re going to nationalize the ai companies

stripe should’ve gone public in 2016 and started acquiring startups like google and fb did early on they should’ve acquired mercury, ramp, & plaid at the very least generational missed opportunity

something sus about this launch that i can't put my finger on

fun recent set of interviews for @NoPriorsPod (Zuck, @satyanadella) and we have @LipBuTan1 (@intel CEO) next week. who do you want to see in the lineup!