Opinion
Evans: The term 'agentic' AI is currently more hype than reality
“I think, unfortunately, I think the phrase agentic has become overused, and it really is more hype than reality, but I do think there, the core of the shift to agentic is, is really enterprises are looking for demonstrable ROI.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Evans: AI automation in compliance and HR will not eliminate jobs
“It's not going to take anyone's job away. It's actually a place where companies will realize the benefit of being better in their HR processes, being better in their compliance processes being better in their recruitment processes. You'll realize the benefit o…”
Opinion
Evans: Investor helpfulness is the most oversold cliché in venture capital
“I think it's one of the oversold cliches and ventures that were helpful.”
Insight
Evans: Sell existing products to matching buyers before building new features
“You built the thing. People are buying the thing, find more people that will buy that thing. Because the insight there is that a lot of times what we tend to do is we tend to look past the people that are already paying us. Right. And you go and you look and y…”
Insight
Evans: Building deep vertical AI is difficult due to public training data
“Building deep vertical solutions is still really difficult because if you think about the data that's been used to train chat GPT, it's largely data that's available on the internet.”
Insight
Evans: Vertical AI requires marrying proprietary data with public models
“The interesting opportunity for most of our companies is to be able to marry that sort of private data that's behind the scenes or that proprietary data. With these public models.”
Insight
Evans: Co-pilot time savings are too fragmented to measure enterprise ROI
“And the challenge of the sort of co-pilot model, there's been examples of where a private equity firm has deployed a co-pilot to 20,000 employees across their portfolio, saving on average, 48 minutes a day. It's a fantastic end outcome. However, it's not 48 co…”
Insight
Evans: Startups outside OpenAI cannot skip sequential revenue growth stages
“You go from zero to a million to 5,000,005 million to ten million dollars, but you don't sort of skip steps in the middle. And there's this common misconception in venture capital that you somehow just wake up one day and you're a hundred million dollars a yea…”
Disclosure
Evans: Sentiero mandates founders have direct vertical market experience
“So for our thesis and our profile, it's always mandatory that founders have experienced In the vertical market that they serve.”
Insight
Evans: Product-market fit means getting inbound leads from unpredictable sources
“You've got product market fit when you don't know where the customers are coming from. You know, when you're early in the life cycle, when you're early in the life cycle of the business, you know, exactly how you got the lead, you know, exactly the process you…”
Insight
Evans: Founders Remain Part of Sales into Perpetuity
“So I think I would agree with that founders are going to be a part of sales essentially into perpetuity.”
Disclosure
Evans: Sentiero requires deeper solutions from agentic startups than co-pilots
“So what ends up happening on the agentic side is the, we tend to require companies to have a much deeper solution than you would in the co-pilot use case.”
Disclosure
Evans: Sentiero targets AI investments in under-resourced compliance and HR functions
“So we tend to like the, we call it the jobs not being done. You know, it's the, it's places where they've historically been under-resourced and under-invested. So think about things like compliance and human resources.”
Disclosure
Evans: Sentiero ignores CAC and LTV metrics for early-stage startups
“So we don't use a lot of metrics. You don't have a clearly defined customer acquisition cost or lifetime value yet just because of the age of the company. But we do look for is exactly one of the things that you described is we want to see customers voting wit…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Evans: Building without customer feedback cost his software startup 18 months
“With my software company, I gave you the example of building, building software without engaging customers early. We lost a first mover advantage Because we didn't do that, right? We went away and we built rather than working with our customers, getting to an …”
