flâneur

Ritvik Varghese

5 followers · 8 following · 935 views

on the atlas — 83

highlights — 409

  • They identified people as lucky and unlucky, and asked them to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took a long time to count the photographs, while the lucky people took a very short time. The reason is that the unlucky people were so focused on counting the photographs that they missed the giant text that said, "Stop counting, there are 43 photographs in this newspaper."
    Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself - jxnl.co
  • Vertical separation hasn’t happened yet. We still believe that there will be a separation between the “application layer” companies and foundation model providers, with model companies specializing in scale and research and application layer companies specializing in product and UI. In reality, that separation hasn’t cleanly happened yet. In fact, the most successful user-facing applications out of the gate have been vertically integrated.
    Generative AI’s Act Two | Sequoia Capital
  • Life’s just a bunch of todays. “Wanting always interrupts being.” - Yung Pueblo
    27 Pieces of Advice on my 27th Birthday - Jackson Dahl
  • Whenever you have bad news, call, or better yet, tell the person face-to-face.
    27 Pieces of Advice on my 27th Birthday - Jackson Dahl
  • Increasingly sophisticated agentic systems. Generative AI applications are increasingly not just autocomplete or first drafts for human review; they now have the autonomy to problem-solve, access external tools and solve problems end-to-end on our behalf. We are steadily progressing from level 0 to level 5 autonomy.
    Generative AI’s Act Two | Sequoia Capital
  • However, Amara’s Law—the phenomenon that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run—is running its course. We are applying patience and judgment in our investment decisions, with careful attention to how founders are solving the value problem.
    Generative AI’s Act Two | Sequoia Capital
  • Developers are the key. One of the core insights of developer-first companies like Stripe or Unity has been that developer access opens up use cases you could not even imagine. In the last several quarters, we have been pitched everything from music generation communities to AI matchmakers to AI customer support agents.
    Generative AI’s Act Two | Sequoia Capital
  • The Factory droid will break down all of the dependencies, propose the relevant code changes, add unit tests and pull in a human to review. Then after approval, run the changes across all of the files in a dev environment and merge the code if all the tests pass. Just like how a human might do it—in a set of discrete tasks rather than one generalized, black box answer.
    Generative AI's Act o1: The Reasoning Era Begins | Sequoia Capital
  • the flow of code and model interactions that takes user input and performs actions or generates a response.
    Generative AI's Act o1: The Reasoning Era Begins | Sequoia Capital
  • An outcome-oriented approach aligns the cost of the unit of software with the associated business value (by removing the opacity that exists without easily attributable results).
    AI leads a service-as-software paradigm shift - Foundation Capital
  • Global companies spend $1.1 trillion on sales and marketing salaries each year. The size of the opportunity for AI disruption is many multiples larger than Salesforce could ever be.
    AI leads a service-as-software paradigm shift - Foundation Capital
  • Klarna is betting AI-enabled software is the future of internal tools. The corollary : the overall cost of building internal software with AI is lower than buying off-the-shelf solutions.
    A Challenge to SaaS Orthodoxy by @ttunguz
  • When AI products are sold as services, they replace in-house labor. This changes internal processes. When the internal processes change, the opportunity to replace the system of record arises because the existing workflows are no longer relevant. If paralegals’ roles and business development reps’ roles & account executives CRM reponsibilities change meaningfully, then the systems that are fully optimized to support these roles don’t match the needs of the role anymore. Systems-of-record are the horse carriages in the age of the automobile - designed for a different job to be done, outmoded, o…
    AI Advantage for Startups : Changing the Workflow through Services by @ttunguz
  • When AI products are sold as services, they replace in-house labor. This changes internal processes. When the internal processes change, the opportunity to replace the system of record arises because the existing workflows are no longer relevant. If paralegals’ roles and business development reps’ roles & account executives CRM reponsibilities change meaningfully, then the systems that are fully optimized to support these roles don’t match the needs of the role anymore. Systems-of-record are the horse carriages in the age of the automobile - designed for a different job to be done, outmoded, o…
    AI Advantage for Startups : Changing the Workflow through Services by @ttunguz
  • You can do more than you think We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy The laws of physics are the only limit
    Nat Friedman
  • Where do you get your dopamine? The answer is predictive of your behavior Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated It's ok to get yours from "making things happen"
    Nat Friedman
  • Smaller teams are better Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun No need to chop up work for political reasons No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!) Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed
    Nat Friedman
  • It's important to do things fast You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit "Slow is fake" A week is 2% of the year Time is the denominator
    Nat Friedman
  • Enthusiasm matters! It's much easier to work on things that are exciting to you It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason Energy is a necessary input for progress
    Nat Friedman
  • As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor
    Nat Friedman
  • As a venture foundry with businesses across different industries, we can give great people time, freedom, and opportunities to find work they truly enjoy.
    Careers at SLAM Ventures
  • At SLAM's core, we believe that our best work comes naturally from doing what we enjoy. As a venture foundry with businesses across different industries, we can give great people time, freedom, and opportunities to find work they truly enjoy.
    Careers at SLAM Ventures
  • Every full-time SLAM role comes with significant ownership in the form of equity in SLAM and/or equity in the venture you work on. When we're profitable (which we've been since day 1), we pay dividends. In other words, part of your pay will be tied to your results, not your time. This makes it possible for you to unlock exceptional financial upside, very quickly.
    Careers at SLAM Ventures
  • For example, we just invested in a company called Mechanical Orchard that uses AI to move data trapped inside clunky mainframes to the cloud. This was not just hard – it was often impossible – to do before. The code was just too old, broken, and dense with no way to map it. 50% of migration projects driven by services firms failed. Mechanical Orchard saw this and put AI to work, teasing this code apart, and making it safe and secure to move.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Major in generative AI’s emerging technical capabilities and hunt for a function or vertical problem that benefits from your insights. Or… Major in deep domain expertise and market relationships, and form a team to add in the technical knowledge.
    Emergence - Specialized Software Will Win in the Age of Generative AI
  • So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
    When To Do What You Love
  • So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
    When To Do What You Love
  • For example, a firm could presumably handle all of your go-to-market from marketing to sales, customer experience to success, in which case you could focus solely on building and refining your core product. If this was real, how much faster would technology move? It’s fun to think about.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • In just a year since their founding, Mechanical Orchard has migrated to the cloud core applications for companies like Omni Logistics, hitting double digit millions in recognized revenue and ending 2023 profitable.
    Emergence - Mechanical Orchard’s quiet AI revolution – moving the global economy from mainframe to the cloud
  • Moving data to more resilient systems is increasingly non-optional, and AI is proving to be the key.
    Emergence - Mechanical Orchard’s quiet AI revolution – moving the global economy from mainframe to the cloud
  • migrating the tough stuff safely and effectively – the delicate, complex code of core applications that’s “always on” and too vital to break.
    Emergence - Mechanical Orchard’s quiet AI revolution – moving the global economy from mainframe to the cloud
  • But those who can program them, largely in dying languages like COBOL, are a dying (and retiring) breed themselves. Not only are these black box code bases fragile, they’re increasingly obsolete. Companies still stuck in the mainframe already missed the numerous benefits of building software with open source technology inaccessible to them in the mainframe. Now, they are about to miss the second massive secular shift: generative AI. For many companies the ultimatum is clear: innovate or die.
    Emergence - Mechanical Orchard’s quiet AI revolution – moving the global economy from mainframe to the cloud
  • Business process services (think data entry or audio transcription) is an area that’s long been ripe for disruption, since it involves many repetitive, rule-based tasks. Again, what makes AI so powerful here is its ability to grasp context, interpret user intent, apply reasoning, and adapt to new tasks. In the software-as-autonomous-service realm, jobs like making recruiting calls (ConverzAI), answering potential buyers’ commonly-asked questions (Docket), or entering data and reading faxes (Tennr) are entirely handled by AI.
    AI leads a service-as-software paradigm shift - Foundation Capital
  • On the very likely to happen side of the spectrum, it stands to reason that if companies can do a whole job-to-be-done (instead of capping out because they only focus on software OR services), they’ll be able to extend their TAM further than ever and capture more value. We’re already seeing this underway.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Each team’s incentives need to be aligned with evolving staffing and pricing models. You want to reward folks for building more versatile skill sets and selling services and product that produce great outcomes.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • When devs aren’t on client work at Mechanical Orchard, they’re building internal software. The versatility helps tighten the product feedback loop.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Be strategic in how you navigate the existing ecosystem of services firms – they’ve been around for a while and some of them may be great channel partners if you can help them solve a challenge for their clients that they aren’t equipped to. Outcome-based pricing. Charging for the value your work unlocks instead of for the inputs (like labor) allows you to capture more value beyond what you put in (like what the AI does…) This might not be feasible before you demonstrate value, but you can move to it over time.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Product Fewer jobs-to-be-done. Focus on just 1-2 jobs-to-be done that are shared by many clients. The more jobs, the harder to productize. You can always expand. Scalable access. Find and tap into high-quality talent channels. Mechanical Orchard did this with the Pivotal Labs network (CEO Rob Mee used to run that company). Where’s your leg up? Piggyback software. Focus on those opportunities where you can sell software alongside services. AI will widen margins by improving service delivery, but true software sales will anchor repeatable revenue.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Product Fewer jobs-to-be-done. Focus on just 1-2 jobs-to-be done that are shared by many clients. The more jobs, the harder to productize. You can always expand. Scalable access. Find and tap into high-quality talent channels. Mechanical Orchard did this with the Pivotal Labs network (CEO Rob Mee used to run that company). Where’s your leg up? Piggyback software. Focus on those opportunities where you can sell software alongside services. AI will widen margins by improving service delivery, but true software sales will anchor repeatable revenue.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • So we’ve got the “Help you do it vs. do it for you” dichotomy. The other big one is “repeatable vs. bespoke.” The more repeatable a service, the more productizable. The more productizable, the better the startup opportunity.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • . Startups have the chance to combine humans and software to handle those “do it for me” tasks that can be easily automated and have objective outcomes.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Do a job that the client doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise to do. Offer third-party expertise in decisions (cynically, to cover the client’s
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • Legacy providers are ripe for disruption: their business models rely on human labor and hourly billing which can be turned on its head by AI-enabled vendors. Further, their “product” (humans) is very difficult to integrate AI into. While software incumbents are having a relatively easy time adapting to the GenAI wave, services incumbents will struggle. Founders, this is a boomtown moment to seize.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • And with the rapid advancement of AI, I’d argue we’re on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of Palantirs.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • With massive market sizes- the Big 4 alone brought in $200B in revenue last year- and a relative dearth of dynamic tech talent, the ground is fertile. Historically, common wisdom has held “services businesses aren’t venture backable.” Compared to software businesses, services performed by humans tend to be low margin, hard to scale exponentially, lumpy in revenue, etc. etc. There are many cautionary tales. But change is afoot… hastened by AI, cracking open new, huge opportunities for founders brave enough to go against the tired wisdom.
    Emergence - The Death of Deloitte: AI-Enabled Services Are Opening a Whole New Market
  • To this end, I’d also suggest my prior post How to escape competition -- Building enduring application-level value with LLMs, so you don’t fall into the trap of providing a service that gets all the margin squeezed away.
    AI startups: Sell work, not software
  • But then EvenUp would have been stuck in the paradigm of selling software – selling a 10% productivity improvement instead of 95%. Instead, EvenUp had the foresight to sell the work product itself: the demand package.
    AI startups: Sell work, not software
  • To do this, rather than sell software to improve an end-user's productivity, founders should consider what it would look like to sell the work itself.
    AI startups: Sell work, not software
  • Only admit candidates in fields in which they have demonstrated serious depth and breadth (a “masters degree”).
    Slow Ventures - Phd
  • The next example is the rollout of Rocket Logic Assistant to our entire banking force, helping our clients navigate the home-buying journey. This AI-powered personal assistant transcribes client calls and automatically completes mortgage applications in real time, supercharging our banker productivity.
    The ROI on Generative AI - by Tanay Jaipuria