The Ledger, every show

“This year I was pretty blown away by the answers that we got. They spanned from, call it, 30 to 50% on the low end in terms of productivity gains to, I kid you not, one CTO told us that he had seen a 10 X productivity lift from himself and his team. They were …”

“You could be an L five and get an offer in the tens of millions.”

“It would probably be on the hardware side, actually, right, and the robotics sector, right, which is, it's, I don't want to say that it's not getting funding, because it's clearly it's sort of non-consensus to almost not invest in robotics at this point, but w…”

“This is the first time that we've seen a genuine threat to that. And that's because the distance between intent and execution is collapsing. And that's creating not a 20 to 50% better experience for the user, but how you get to that magical TEDx.”

“That's why we're starting to see even agents built on top of classic, iconic platforms like Datadog Lose to some of the new AISRE companies, like a resolve or a traversal.”

“Twenty-twenty-six is going to be the year that the dynamic agent layer overtakes the system of record.”

“Every SaaS company under the sun has launched an AI product. They're not just sitting on their hands, and you'd think that they'd have a huge advantage given distribution, but we're just seeing classic innovators dilemma.”

“You have complex workflows and a ton of customer data where deep integrations actually are necessary to get that last last mile value for the customer. This is where the specialized AI apps are sort of crushing, crushing any either foundation model layer or ot…”

“AI will drive 10 to a hundred times performance improvements, showing companies that there is a new way to work, Advancing from text to image to more complex workflows, such as text to SQL queries, or eventually text to Excel modeling and more.”

“Video editing with companies like Runway really come to mind. You know, this has the potential to replace software that's been around for 30 years.”

“I mean, they got to over 50% of the Fortune 500 and I think faster than anyone we've ever seen.”

“You raise money for compute. You pour that, or you pour the money into compute. You get some sort of breakthrough. You funnel the breakthrough into your vertically integrated application. That could be chat GPT. That could be cloud code, you know, whatever it …”

“I think the best researchers in the world have this dilemma of, okay, I want to go all in on AGI, but it's the product usage revenue flywheel that keeps the revenue in the house to power all the GPUs to get to AGI. And so it does make you know, I think it sets…”

“They have compute needs, right? That's 80% of a round that they typically raise, or typically of a round that they raise.”

“There's a company, I can't share the name but their product went GA in a few weeks, tens of millions of revenue, right?”

“A passive system of record layer stops making sense when agents can independently execute on a signed intent.”

“AI companies are growing faster and are larger than even we expected.”

“And if you look at the revenue of just two of the top tier frontier labs You know, if you look at the chart on the left, not only have they surpassed the early revenue ramps of some of the best SaaS companies in history I'll point you over to the right they're…”

“It's not the case that just two companies are growing very quickly in AI, and in fact that's probably a good segue to the next slide that shows markets are not only growing faster and much larger than expected, they're also fragmenting.”

“And in fact, I think model inference costs have gone down 10 X year over year.”

“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…”

“Most of the founders that we work with are in the office six to seven days a week.”

“Last year, it was notable that when we asked, hey, CTOs across 24 portfolio companies how much is AI actually impacting your productivity? And the answer across the board was pretty much 10 to 15%. We're all using GitHub Copilot.”

“If you talk to a Decagon customer, they're actually slashing their customer support costs by up to 80%, and not only that, are they, they're seeing deflection rates go up from 30% to anywhere from 60 to 80%, and their CSATs, their customer satisfaction scores,…”

“A lot of these high growth apps are not your typical system of record, 95% gross dollar retention companies that we sort of saw in the twenty-tens but importantly, that doesn't mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

“And so I think in this next gen of applications built on open AI and open AI's competitors, the way to really differentiate yourself is to further build and develop workflows that are not just sort of a one click button of add AI to X, Y, Z , Is really neat ov…”

“Previously it made sense to start layering a sales leader at 25 to fifty million of ARR when self-serve starts to peter out.”

“They actually beat every forecast they ever gave us”

“We talk about buying compute, but there's a huge negotiation involved there in terms of, okay, do you get equity for the compute? What sort of partner are you looking at? Is there a go-to-market? Arm to that. And these are just things on this scale, hundreds o…”

“This is probably also a unique time in that for the first time you can actually trace dollars to outcomes, right? Provided that scaling laws are holding and capabilities are actually moving forward. Because if you can put translate dollars into capabilities ca…”

“Like for the first time you can actually get one shot data analysis, right? Which, you know, if you're going to do a customer database, analyze a cohort retention, right? That's just stuff that you had to do by hand before. And our team, the other, it was like…”

“There was a wave of SAS two point O that was well-funded and tried and failed to take on the system of record, mostly through a better UI.”

“It's really the emerging agent layer that sits as close as possible to the user and is collecting data on that user, understanding user preferences that we think accrues value in the future.”

“So we invested in character in January, 23, which feels like eons ago. I mean, three years ago, feels like lifetimes ago, but and then they did the IP licensing deal with Google in August, 20 four.”