The Ledger
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Startups can win horizontal AI because big tech is too conservative
“I actually think the horizontal, like, experiences are addressable by startups now, because I think the big tech companies are just going to be too conservative.”
AI is a sustaining innovation for software incumbents, but disrupts Google
“In the sustaining versus disruptive innovation, I think AI is like pretty clearly a sustaining innovation in almost all cases. I think it like might be disruptive to Google. And so assuming like a scale up is still Competent and can still build new product. I …”
AI startups must either advance frontier research or obsess over customer needs
“If you're going to build an interesting company, I think you either have to attack it from, ah, you have the handful of researchers that can literally push the state of the art forward, which is like maybe eight organizations in the world, or You know and unde…”
OpenAI's limited bandwidth creates startup opportunities outside their top ten priorities
“If you have some strict stack ranking of the teams within open AI, like only 10 problems can have like the top 10 teams on it. And so if you're any, if you're doing anything after like the top 10 problems that they have, then you're like by definition don't ha…”
Big tech experience does not teach operators how to attack new categories
“There were obviously sales and marketing teams at both Microsoft and Facebook, but you don't really build an intuition for how to like attack a new business category. I think unless you've worked at a startup.”
Emerging VC firms in founder mode have advantages over legacy funds
“I think there is a belief that there are things that, like, a two-, three-, four-year-old startup that is in founder mode can do that maybe a 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, seventy-year-old venture firm cannot, so.”
Blocking Big Tech acquisitions effectively kills venture funding for consumer startups
“Consumer has the, this property that like very, very, very few things are going to work, but if it works really big, but if it doesn't work, it's often like really talented entrepreneurial founders that can then either like
Take what they've built to a larger…”
Meta has spent approximately $80 billion on Reality Labs to date
“I think he's like spent eighty billion dollars so, so far on like reality labs.”
Figma, Notion, and Clay took four to five years to find traction
“Like I mean, some companies are really fast enough to the races, but like, you know, Figma was like four or five years before it started to work. Notion was like four or five years before it started to work. Clay was four or five years before it started to wor…”
Cursor, Harvey, Decagon, and Sierra are succeeding in enterprise AI
“Well, I mean, certainly there are things that are working, like obviously Cursor Cursor is working in a gigantic way. I think Harvey's working in a gigantic way. Decagon and Sierra seem like they're doing really, really well.”
Vernal made early angel investments in Notion, Wealthfront, and Human Interest
“I probably made like seven or eight. One of them was Notion, which is probably the best of the bunch, but like Wealthfront, it was like Notion and Wealthfront and this company called Human interest, which is like a foreign provider and a couple others.”