#270 | Fintech Focus Areas, Tech Trends, Death of SaaS, & more
Feb 8th | The latest from Fika, Contrary, YC, Sequoia, Meritech, SignalFire, and others
SandHill.io aggregates and shares the latest investment themes, market insights, and best practices for operating and investing from 700+ VCs, analysts, and operators.
This newsletter curates a selection of posts featured on the website each week.
Investment Themes & Theses
Fintech Focus Areas for 2026 (Fika team)
AI‑Powered Professional Services, a $3T Opportunity (Aileen Lee, Cowboy)
Request for Startups (YC)
Redefining the Mining Value Chain (Jon Healy, Cathay)
AI Games Are Coming (James Currier, NFX)
Multicoin Capital’s Investment Thesis (Multicoin Team)
Industry Developments & Analyses
Tech Trends Report (Contrary Team)
Death of Software. Nah. (Steven Sinofsky, A16Z)
Software Is Dead...Again...For Real this Time...Maybe? (Jamin Ball, Altimeter)
Time’s up for SaaS (Alex Clayton, Meritech)
Will Vertical AI Survive? (Nihar Bobba, Better Tomorrow Ventures)
The American Frontier: A Trillion-Dollar Race For Technological Superiority (Ethan Batraski, Venrock)
Best of the Best of Mobile (A16Z Team)
The Limits of RL and Digital Twins in Manufacturing (Annelies Gamble, Zetta)
AI’s Impact on Manufacturing Variance (David Talpalar, Shirlawn)
AI Is Eating Software. Industrial Software Eats With It. (John Tough, Energize)
What To Watch in 2026 To Evaluate The AI Bubble (Rob May, Half Court)
AI and the End of the Productivity Bundle (Sapphire Team)
The long game for crypto (Chris Dixon, A16Z)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Advice for Struggling SaaS Co’s from the Great Recession (Sammy Abdullah, Blossom Street)
Move Fast and Break Nothing (Kevin Stevens, Energize)
The New Rules for Fundraising in the AI Era (Vivek Ramaswami, Madrona)
Legibility is a brand to capital and brand is promises kept (Yoni Rechtman, Slow)
Second order lessons from Brex’s acquisition (Alex Lazarow, Fluent)
Churn/Retention in the Era of AI (Shruti Gandhi, Array)
Additional Reads
Unicorn DNA — Where today’s billion‑dollar startup founders come from (SignalFire Team)
VC-Backed Startups are Low Status (Michael Dempsey, Compound)
The Greatest Strategy Game in the History of the World (David Cahn, Sequoia)
Harvesting CVC Portfolios: A Practical Framework for Corporate Investors (Ali Geramian, Anthemis)
The Hierarchy of Limited Partners (James Heath, Athenaeum)
The Second Desert in Venture Capital (Charles Hudson, Precursor)
2026: the biggest year of M&A in history? (David Haber, A16Z)
Software’s Metamorphosis (Akash Bajwa, Earlybird)
How Markets Price AI Risk (Tomasz Tunguz, Theory)
What if nuance is the moat? (QED Team)
The Structural Divide (Melody Koh, NextView)
Auto-formalization of the Context Graph: Where the Moat Moves for Enterprise Software (Adrian Radu, Khosla)
We Used to Build Things. What Happened? (Garry Tan,YC)
The Structural Advantage of Capital Efficiency (Morgan Livermore, Supercruise)
Notes:
If you have any great agencies or freelancers that you have worked with and would recommend to other startups, please complete this form to vouch for them! These could be growth firms, deck designers, staffing firms, engineering providers or more. Once we collect enough responses we’ll share the top providers publicly.
The SandHill app is now pulling from 700+ blogs and newsletters (full list here). Respond to this email if we missed a post or a feed.
You can view all the latest posts in a live feed on the web app.