Insight
Lanng: VCs leverage founder fear in down markets to extract better terms
“Like, risk is just all the investors and, you know, especially when they want to, Extract a bit better terms or, you know, bully you in a down market or whatever, right? They will tell you, like, oh, we would lose you. We'd hate to see you lose everything, rig…”
Opinion
Founders should never accept a 40% valuation discount for 'smart VCs'
“I kind of always disliked the whole You should pick us as a VC. We know it's a 40% discount to the other guys, but we are smart. Ah, like the smart VC, like, story, because the reality is, like, if I need to give us 40% discount because the VC is so smart that…”
Opinion
Lanng: Tech companies should ban internal political discussions to focus on building
“And I like what David Heinemann says, like, he banned politics in, in, in in signals and I think that's absolutely right. I think we shouldn't sit around the table discussing all this stuff. We should just build something and make it work, and if we're allowin…”
Opinion
Lanng: European startups lag Silicon Valley due to work-life balance
“We just honestly like vacation a little bit too much. We like coming home at five with the kids. Like we're starting to have other things that are other benefits, right? Because I mean, like, look, the very best people in the world in, in say AI or engineering…”
Opinion
Lanng: Salesforce turns software users into robotic button-clickers
“Salesforce don't have a human in the center. Salesforce makes you into a robot that has to click buttons in a certain order.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Pursuing AGI Will Disappoint Due to Asymptotic Limits in AI
“Everybody who's pushing for AGI level AI right now, they're going to be sorely disappointed. I think it's an asymptomatic curve, and I think we're going to end up with Waymo-style cars, meaning you almost have a lawyer, but not quite, and the five percent you …”
Opinion
Lanng: Salesforce is just a database and LLMs bypass software UI layers
“I'm so sorry, but Salesforce is just a database. And LLMs are really good at talking with databases and querying data. You don't need 15 layers between you and that database to do it.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2028
Lanng: Copyright Issues Will Not Severely Impede AI Model Training
“I think the copyright issues are trending in a direction where I don't think it's going to be a major problem. I mean, fair use, I think, is, is, is, is covering this fairly well”
Assertion Partly supported
Ariba acts as a toll gate, extracting 80% of revenue from suppliers
“One of our competitors, you know, Ariba, they've for a long time gone out to these huge companies and said, hey, we will help you Digitize your supply chain, and you just got to buy our platform, and then they go and they invite all of the suppliers in the sup…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lanng: VCs own most equity after six years for 99% of startups
“The first thing is, for 99% of startups, you know, I mean, No offense, but VCs is gonna own most of your company by the time you have worked for six or seven years, and your salary will probably be less than if you had worked anywhere else combined.”
Disclosure
Lanng refused to sign Tradeshift round without protecting employee stock options
“In the latest financing round for trade shift, I refused to sign the papers until the employee stock option pool got moved from common to prep two, because I did not want All of our employees to be underwater in any potential transaction in the future.”
Disclosure
Lanng removed team slides from pitch decks to control VC questions
“I used to always take out one or two slides of the deck, like I'll make the perfect pitch deck, and then I'll remove the team slide. All VCs will then ask the question, but what about team? And that's the question I want them to ask instead of asking some stup…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Tradeshift fired 50% of VPs with no productivity loss
“At one point we fired 50% of the VPs in TradeShift. And there was no drop of productivity.”
Insight
Lanng: Higher prices accelerated Tradeshift's enterprise sales cycle
“We found out in trade shift very early on that there was an inverse relationship between price and speed of sales cycle. The more we charged, the faster we closed.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Counting Apple out of the AI race is a major mistake
“And I think, by the way, everybody will be making a mix, make a big mistake if they count Apple out of the AI race. They're gonna come With a hundred miles an hour, I mean, they come in, it would be really, really good.”
Insight
Lanng: Enterprise software is multi-polar, not winner-takes-all like consumer
“Because enterprise is a multi-polar world. It's not winner-takes-all. I mean, Peter Thiel's power laws works really well in consumer, but in enterprise, there's so many modes. I mean, compliance, regulatory, Incompetence.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Traditional software user interfaces will be obsolete within three years
“There would be a new generation of user interfaces that haven't fully been invented yet, but we will look at all of the screens of the applications we use every day as dinosaurs in less than three years.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Christian Lanng: Software will shift entirely to consumption-based pricing
“I think we're gonna absolutely move to consumption-based pricing. It's the only way. I think it's gonna be very hard to hold the mold mode on, on recurring revenue as it is today. Because customers will want to see more value, and they'll want to see a more so…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: 99% of venture capital invested in AI will be wasted
“99% of the money going in is going to be lit on fire, and two, we are underestimating the impact of AI.”
Insight
Lanng: AI is just underlying infrastructure, not the value proposition
“AI is Essentially as interesting as saying database or, you know, we have an HTML rendering layer or whatever. It's a set of technologies, and I think what is really, really important, and I think most people right now that are rushing into, as you said, AI is…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Most application-based software brands will struggle due to AI
“I think actually that one of the biggest impacts of AI and LLM is that most application-based brands are going to be really struggling because the brand is the UX.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Building and retaining consumer tech brands will be extremely difficult
“And to try to build a consumer tech brand and hold on to any population of users is going to be very, very, very hard in a world where innovation is almost free and LLMs can make anything.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lanng: Proprietary Data Will Be Primary Differentiator in AI
“The biggest differentiator in the world to come is going to be proprietary data.”
Assertion Partly supported
80% of US manufacturing job losses came from tech, not China
“80% of the jobs that disappeared in US manufacturing did not Go to China. They went to technology.”
