A Summer of AI in San Francisco - Joe Lonsdale

I’ve been spending a lot of time out in San Francisco this summer with our 8VC team, and it's been energizing to meet truly impressive founders building at the frontier of AI. At 8VC, we always evaluate companies by first asking: Why now? The best answers highlight clear technological shifts that unlock entirely new products & solutions that were previously impossible but are now strategically necessary. Over the past decade, many enterprise SaaS companies succeeded by focusing narrowly and building products for specific verticals, niche user segments, or overlooked workflows. This approach has produced great businesses which thrive precisely because they are specialized, capturing vertical data and improving their workflows. Recent advances in AI like document understanding, reliable legacy software automation, conversational agents, and structured reasoning dramatically expand the range of tasks software can execute directly. Instead of merely assisting workers, software today can au

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