Ashish Toshniwal shares YML's financial scale at the time of their first major equity sale to MDC Partners.
Insight
AI application startups educate their model vendors to compete against them
“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 …”
Insight
Toshniwal: Early founder liquidity unlocks fearless growth instead of defensive downside optimization
“When founders are not financially secure, and let's say they put in five, six years in the company. They became, they become so fearful as this is a hundred percent of what they own. Yeah. This is a hundred percent of what they own. They cannot let it go becau…”
What-if
Toshniwal: Taking venture capital would have worsened financial outcomes for YML employees
“I think the outcome would have been, probably the personal outcome would have been worse for not just me, but also the people at YML.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Toshniwal: Agentic AI will consolidate five-person knowledge workflows down to two roles
“I believe that a big chunk of that work, there will be, let's say, 50 to 60% is done by agentic system. And let's say there are five jobs involved. Instead of five, they will all merge to maybe two jobs.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Toshniwal: OpenAI and Anthropic will eventually cannibalize coding agents like Cursor
“If you don't create enough of a deep expertise in a certain area, you know, ChatGPT, Anthropic, they are going to cut into you, which you are seeing probably with coding agents, you know, Windsurf and Cursor. Clearly they have grown very fast, but I expect Cha…”
Opinion
SaaS distribution power does not transfer directly to agentic AI
“I definitely think that the power of distribution in SaaS does not apply one-to-one in the agentic era.”