Sarah Wang is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Speaking at the a16z LP Summit, she presents aggregated Stripe data comparing AI-native startup growth rates to SaaS 2.0 companies.
“The first thing I'd call out that seems, that sort of just jumps off the page is that the AI native companies are far outpacing their SaaS counterparts and you can see it in terms of new companies blowing past this golden metric of time to a hundred million of ARR which is truly an incredible feat to accomplish On the left, but what's amazing is that it's not just the best companies that are doing really well it's actually on average, you can see this from the aggregated Stripe data where AI native companies are growing faster and than sort of the SAS generate, SAS two point O generation, if you call it”
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Disclosure
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AssertionNot checkable as stated
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PredictionNot checkable as stated
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