Ashish Toshniwal explains why incumbent enterprise SaaS players cannot solely rely on their existing sales channels to win in AI agents.
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…”
Insight
Product design is hard to offshore due to missing cultural context
“And design is such a thing, it's very hard to offshore, because it's so cultural. Just imagine if, you know, someone has not experienced Disney, and they have not experienced how healthcare system works, or they have never bought an automobile insurance in the…”