AI startup

“And some of those customers will ask you to do an on-prem private deployment, will ask you to not use their data to train anything that you do, and you need to reject those customers. Because you are not going to build a company that has any sort of moat aroun…”

“Instead of focusing on delivering concrete value to people and almost delivering like Mundane value to them They. They seem to be more focused on competing for mindshare. It almost feels like a lot of AI startups today kind of think about themselves as being e…”

“I actually disagree with that. I think like we are learning so much literally day by day. I mean, GPT four was released yesterday. And there is possibly, you know, a second mover advantage. There will be lessons that we learn again from kind of seeing this fir…”

“A lot of the opportunities for AI startups is to find something that is traditionally very difficult to scale, but very easy to sell. And then you try to scale it with AI.”

“So the best founding teams are often a great AI researcher together with someone who has great expertise in, in the domain, and they get along well, and you see the dynamics when you meet them, and they just, they get along.”

“A lot of the things that we learn with traditional software are like outdated with AI.”

“The AI startups in the cohort that Stripe measured took 11 months to reach one million in ARR after their first sales on Stripe versus 15 for the previous generation of SaaS businesses, and then maybe more impressively, you know, scaling to more than thirty mi…”

“And basically the kind of end, end all of the chart kind of proves the point that you have, let's say, roughly forty billion dollars in valuation across a number of these names but less than a hundred million dollars of revenue.”

“I don't mean to be relatively pessimistic, but I wouldn't start a company in AI. I mean that from the perspective of, like, the alpha is gone.”

“And there's reportedly open questions around gross margins as well which means that on a unit basis, a lot of those companies operate at a loss. The more they serve customers, the more they lose money,”

“Those that already hit thirty million in annualized revenue got there in about a year and a half. For comparison, you know, many of us were around five years ago, like the fastest growing SaaS startups on Stripe took, you know, five and a half years to hit tha…”

“You can't operate at a hundred X less capital than a frontier lab, but you can operate at, say, 10 X, like an order of magnitude less capital when you're really focused.”

“I think the failure mode is that we optimize for today's world. So we optimize for today's product and today's world and today's needs. And it's easy when you just talk to users and you get these requirements or you talk to enterprises. You just kind of, it's …”

“One of the key lessons for anybody in the startup world. In 2025, which is bet on what the models will be able to do in six months from now.”