The Ledger, every show

“I think there are dozens of companies that are poised to eat Salesforce's lunch. But those companies, despite the distribution disadvantage, are positioning themselves to do so.”

“When I say there's a thousand people, those are the people that are really innovating at the model layer.”

“Our belief is that the most successful AI startups of the future will be those that are able to build a moat by building a unique context graph.”

“Existing systems of record are not the natural owners of the context graph, and so they will capture a declining share of the value that's created by technology.”

“So I think there will be the trillion dollar plus opportunity will get captured by a hundred plus winners in context graphs.”

“I believe that four years from now, The winners and losers on the SNP or the Nifty in India, the winners and losers will be separated by their ability to embrace context graphs.”

“So this is by no means, even the model layer is not a winner-takes-all market.”

“First and foremost, every organization will have multiple Context Graphs. There is no one world model or one world context graph in any organization.”

“And every global 2000 company will build many context graphs in house.”

“And so I am bullish that they will also capture some share of this value. And so I, I'm a buyer of Salesforce and I'm a buyer of Salesforce stock. I'm a buyer of Snowflake stock and I'm a buyer of ServiceNow stock.”

“There is an intermediate abstraction Which we call context graphs, which is the accumulation of decision traces. And this incumulated abstraction, in our opinion, will be the one that will matter the most over the next decade. It's the enduring layer for the m…”

“And so where the unstructured data is such a large part of it and conversation data is such a large part, most likely the context graph will actually consist of small models. The context graph itself is a model layer. Like you use that data to train a set of m…”

“Glean's an amazing company, and I have a lot of respect for Arvin, but it's so horizontal. Like it's a very powerful chatbot, and it allows people to build some agentic applications or systems of agents on top of them, but really the deep cross-functional cros…”

“Two, I think the enabling infrastructure stack for context graphs would be well-defined. And there will be variations and flavors, but, you know, I totally anticipate that this time next year we'll be writing, okay, here's, here's the way, here's the best prac…”

“If you step away from the technology, ultimately what is going on is we're seeing the shift from co-pilots which assist a human To an autonomous agent that for a certain class of tasks can replace a human.”

“In a world where the cost of the activity comes to close to zero, because an agent is doing the activity, the infrastructure to enable the activity will all have to change. So I think that's what's underway today. And that is going to cause us to reinvent the …”

“I anticipate that over the next five years, we will see the same level of progress that we saw over a decade in the internet.”

“I also think that open source has demonstrated that while it can't compete with the SOTA models, it's only six to 12 months away.”

“Every startup in the AI application space, every, you know, service as software startup has to first and foremost internalize that their vendor is also their competitor. The model provider is both vendor and competitor. And that's a hard place to be. And they …”

“If you cannot have a product that can compete with GPT-Five, you're dead on arrival. Because you want to spend the next five years losing money. To the point that you can have a profitable business five years from now, and you'll be competing with GPT-Sev.”

“So, because of the antitrust issues, companies are choosing to, you know, lift out teams, including the IP. But the bet they're making is the IP is changing so rapidly, you take a licensed copy of the IP, you leave the, you leave a copy behind, And that team, …”

“You know, I think Databricks will be a trillion dollar company one day.”

“I think many more Decacorns will get created over the next decade than over the last decade.”

“So depending on the role, depending on the person, maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 80%, but somewhere between 20 and 80% of the questions you have are answerable by a digital twin in that case, because that twin has built an institutional memory of you, the individ…”

“If you are the CIO organization in a Fortune hundred company, and you are thinking about an SAP or an Oracle migration, well, call one 800 Tessera, because if you are looking to drive a major, you know, system of record migration without exploring What, you kn…”

“A database vendor can't capture them because no, they're not in any one database. An analytics vendor cannot capture them because it's, they capture the outcome, not the why and the how. And the only people who capture the how decisions are made are the orches…”

“And we also believe, and we'll talk about it more, that it's unique and new, and it's not well suited for incumbents.”

“We think context graphs, because they have to emerge from the automation of a specific set of tasks or business processes. Like no one's going to do or can do the work to say, let me capture all the decision tracing organization and put them in one universal c…”

“Look, we believe that a year from now, You will actually have hundreds of context graphs in production at scale.”

“Certainly I think the value of experience Has diminished in the value of intensity and curiosity has exploded.”

“Maybe in a decade, maybe in two, I think Bangalore is an interesting ecosystem. I think in a decade or two, I think Bangalore, you know, has a shot at being there.”

“I think Perplexity has a shot at that. So I wouldn't rule it out. I think Arvind has done a remarkable job. I think, ah, I am blown away by what he has accomplished, and I think he has, you know, he has put a stake in the ground. I think he has a shot. But to …”

“Ah, but really when you think about the players today, I think the three contenders today are really Anthropic, Google, And OpenAI, and I think Microsoft and Meta are sort of fast followers, ah, and Apple is the dark horse.”

“So, OpenAI has pivoted from being a developer-focused company to being a consumer and prosumer-focused applications company.”

“I have a startup that's, you know, barely six months off the ground. They're about to sign what might be a thirty million dollar deal.”

“So, in some ways, the founders today that I see being successful are more technical than the founders in the SaaS way. Which also means that repeat entrepreneurs who grew up in a less technical world are struggling with the technical complexity. They're strugg…”

“Think of a context graph as the institutional memory for an organization. At its simplest level, it is an aggregation of the knowledge of why decisions were made, how they were made, who made them. And the why often has to be inferred from the how and the who.…”

“Historically, organizations do not have these decision races in a form that can be processed. They have the outcome. So systems of record capture the output of these decision traces.”

“To get to that, and that might not make sense for everything, but there are many situations where that makes sense. To get to that nirvana, we need context graphs.”

“We believe that the best, the companies that win in the era of context graphs will find a way to deliver enough value that they earn the right to build a context graph.”

“So look, obviously this varies from customer to customer, but the common pattern we're seeing is we're seeing a 30 to 80% reduction in exceptions.”

“Most people give it access to email. They give it access to their Google Docs, or SharePoint, or Box, Dropbox folders. Most people don't want to start out by giving access to all Zoom calls. Or phones.”

“Because context is a function of pairwise relationships. When I ask you a question how things are going, your wife asks you the question how things are going, and your CFO asks you the question how things are going, you have very different answers to the same …”

“You know, in the last six weeks since we talked about context graphs SaaS stocks have collapsed 30 to 40%.”

“Tessera won a twenty-five million dollar contract from a Fortune 50 corporation, and they went from zero to twenty-five million dollars in bookings.”

“So I think you can have superhuman performance. For specific classes of tasks, but it requires us to break down the aggregate task into smaller tasks, have agents to do smaller tasks.”

“Context graphs are not bound by system constraints. You're not going to build a context graph on top of your Salesforce data. You're going to build a context graph on top of your sales process. And every business process touches dozens of systems in a large co…”

“The context graphs of three years of, you know, from now would be 10 to a hundred X better than today's context graphs, because the enabling technology will make them better. And the decision traces you capture will make them better.”