#280 | Robotics & Physical AI, Heat Seeking Missile for Pain, & more
April 19th | The latest from Bessemer, Emergence, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Euclid, 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
Bessemer Predicts: Robotics and Physical AI (Bessemer Team)
The Next Token Supercycle: Opportunities in Long-Horizon Inference (Rishub Nahar, VC @ Emergence)
Industry Developments & Analyses
The AI Slow Boil (Guru Chahal, Partner @ Lightspeed)
Compute in the Age of AI (David Talpalar, GP @ Shirlawn)
Building Biology-Native Data Infrastructure for the AI Era (Bessemer Team)
Frontier Systems for the Physical World (Oliver Hsu, Partner @ A16Z)
Unicorn Market Cap 2026: SF is the GenAI Super Cluster (Elad Gil, GP @ Cosmic)
The 3 Year Inference Landscape: A Porter’s Five Forces Analysis (Rob May, GP @ Half Court)
79 Earnings Calls Show Enterprise SaaS will be the AI Winners (Sammy Abdullah, GP @ Blossom Street)
How perpetual futures are rewriting global trading (A16Z Crypto)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Heat Seeking Missile for Pain (Alfred Lin, GP @ Sequoia)
How to Compete with Legacy Incumbents (Euclid Ventures)
Selling IP from a Busted Startup (Sammy Abdullah, GP @ Blossom Street)
Raising investment? Here’s what to prepare for your data room (Mountside Ventures)
The CRO Paradox (Brian Sugar, GP @ Sugar Capital)
Surviving AI Price Wars Without Destroying Your Business (Tugce Erten, Partner @ A16Z)
Additional Reads
Service-Level Disagreement (Euclid Team)
Toward Hidden-Structure Models for Industrial Processes (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
All you need is terminal value (Yoni Rechtman, Partner @ Slow)
Consumption multipliers vs. efficiency multipliers (Victoria Zuo, Partner @ QED)
Cannon Fodder: Pre-Seed Investing in the Age of AI (Ben Yoskovitz, Partner @ Highline Beta)
The World Is Getting Heavier (Abhishek Singh, VC @ Riverwalk)
Consensus Came Too Early (Earnest Sweat, GP @ Stresswood)
The great reorg: A human’s guide (Joanne Chen & Leo Lu, Foundation Capital)
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.