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David Walsher

Partner, FirstMark · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investor@davidwaltcher ↗LinkedIn ↗firstmark.com/team/david-waltcher ↗

David Waltcher focuses on early-stage venture investments across developer tools, artificial intelligence, software infrastructure, and cybersecurity, and hosts FirstMark's CTO Summit. Before FirstMark, he spent more than six years investing at Accel and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Venture Capital.

16statements → 10claims → 2claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.06/5average debate potential →

0 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 8 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

10 assertions · 6 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how David argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Walsher: Global software developer population grew 7x since 2006
“Over that time, so from, call it, 2006 all the way to now estimated about seven x growth in the number of global software developers”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 3:44 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark

How they sound: speaking style how? →

257 words/min while actually speaking · 39.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for David Walsher: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,779 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything David Walsher said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: Cursor announced reaching $500M in ARR
“Cursor, maybe three weeks ago, announced they're at five hundred million dollars of ARR.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 7:51 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Insight
Vercel CTO says top engineers are becoming primarily code reviewers
“Malte, among many interesting things, I think one of the most fascinating things that he said was that most of his great engineers who have been with the company for a while, as they've dogfed you know, vZero, and they've used things like Cursor and Windsurf i…”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 20:10 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Partly supported
Walsher: Computer science graduates face top-tier college unemployment rates
“Computer science grads are actually among the top five or six majors graduating from college right now with the highest unemployment rate.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 29:46 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Insight
Walsher: Tech buyers value Cursor's opinion over $80B legacy software incumbents
“Most people will care, at least in our world, What the smartest buyer at Cursor thought about a given tool than what the smartest person at the, you know, eighty billion software business that IPO'd in, in 2012 might think.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 45:25 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: Lovable reached $60M ARR in two quarters
“Lovable, which allows people to create prototypes and web apps through a series of prompts, has gone zero to sixty million dollars of ARR in the last two quarters.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 8:03 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: Windsurf recently reached $100M in ARR
“Windsurf, which is rumored to have sold to OpenAI Hit a hundred million dollars of ARR quite recently.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 9:26 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: Replit grew ARR from $10M to $100M in six months
“And then Replit, which went from 10 to a hundred million dollars of ARR in just the last six months.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 9:34 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FirstMark survey: 82% of developers use AI to write code
“We've seen a 30 to 50% faster throughput. We've seen a 12% increase in PR merges. This is a really important compounding stat here on the bottom left, which is a 17% increase in the amount of time folks are spending on roadmap versus maintenance and keeping th…”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 11:37 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: GitHub Copilot reached $400M ARR and 15M developers
“GitHub Copilot, which I know you just had Thomas on the podcast not too long ago. Four hundred million dollars of ARR, fifteen million developers, very much the steward of this category first mover.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 8:13 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: End-to-end AI coding agents are currently limited to low-complexity tasks
“And for now, many of the agentic solutions that are truly end to end, you know, complete something are very much being pointed at lower level tasks that I'd say are quote unquote more mindless that have less dependency complexity you know, that have less of a …”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 13:40 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Insight
Walsher: Production surges naturally create downstream cleanup crew markets
“It tends to be the case that actually a lot of problems emerge and in their wake markets follow or maybe a punchier way to say that would be with every surge in production, there's just a cleanup crew that naturally comes and a new market and industry that fal…”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 14:27 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Walsher: Code test flakiness is skyrocketing due to AI code generation
“We're just seeing like flakiness generally across code skyrocketing.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 25:15 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Insight
Walsher: Product ubiquity is rare in the developer tools market
“It's rare that you see ubiquity is what I'm trying to say in the world of developers.”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 41:23 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Insight
Walsher: B2B software tools get more intense public discussion than consumer apps
“You see more reviews and love and hate for software tools in the B to B universe than you do sometimes for, like, mass market consumer phenomenons”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 43:16 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Insight
Walsher: Direct marketing and distribution are now the primary startup moats
“In many ways it feels like we are at risk of being like a copycat world where you see some success online and then you go copy it the next day, but it feels like marketing and distribution and the ability to communicate directly one-to-one with your audience h…”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 44:05 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark
Assertion Contradicted
Walsher: Global software developer population grew 7x since 2006
“Over that time, so from, call it, 2006 all the way to now estimated about seven x growth in the number of global software developers”
David Walsher Jul 3, 2025 ▶ 3:44 AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
AI Engineering Revolution: Winners, Chaos & What’s Next | FirstMark Jul 3, 2025 32m
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