#281 | Blue Ocean Opportunities, AI-Driven Employment Explosion, & more
April 26th | The latest from Slow, QED, General Catalyst, Altimeter, 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
Blue Ocean Opportunities In The Agentic Economy (Rob May, GP @ Half Court)
Agent networks: How agents unlock the next generation of NFX (Yoni Rechtman, Partner @ Slow)
The third wave: Why the agent economy needs a new financial stack (Amias Gerety, Partner @ QED)
The Next Commodity Market: Building the Financial Infrastructure for Compute (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
Industry Developments & Analyses
The AI-Driven Employment Explosion (Jamin Ball, Partner @ Altimeter)
The DOE’s $23bn portfolio reconstruction (Climate Tech VC Team)
The Great Software Inversion - How AI Inverts App Economics (Guru Chahal, Partner @ Lightspeed)
The Great Blue Frontier (Packy McCormick, GP @ Not Boring)
Stablecoins are going local (Robert Hackett & Jeremy Zhang, A16Z Crypto)
Stablecoins: from DeFi primitive to global financial infrastructure (Bessemer Team)
AI Is Not a Labor Crisis… It’s a Meaning Crisis (Sam Lessin, GP @ Slow)
The Demand Side of the Trades Crisis (Santosh Sankar, GP @ Dynamo)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Competitive Strategy in the Age of AI (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
How to Build an AI Account Qualifier That Thinks Like Your Best Rep (Mandy Cole, Partner @ Stage 2)
What it takes to win for AI startups (Pascal Unger, GP @ focal)
DoW Contracting for Startups 101 (A16Z Team)
AI: Strong vs. Skinny Leadership Trade-Offs (Scott Hartley, GP @ Everywhere)
No Defaults (Alfred Lin, GP @ Sequoia)
Additional Reads
Q1 2026 Quarterly Investor Letter (Hemant Taneja, MD @ General Catalyst)
2025 Annual Letter (Chamath Palihapitiya, GP @ Social Capital)
Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier (Elad Gil, GP @ Cosmic)
The Games We Play: Venture as Two Separate Asset Classes (David Talpalar, GP @ Shirlawn)
The End of The Funnel (Rob May, GP @ Half Court)
The Demand Side of Vertical AI (Pat McGovern, Principal @ Bowery)
The Buy Window (Jack Arenas, Principal @ Founder Collective)
Ten Bets or Two Hundred: Two Theories of the Power Law (Glenn Borok, VP @ Jump)
The Interior Design of Software (Rex Woodbury, MP @ Daybreak)
Revisiting The Outcome Distortion Complex (Kyle Harrison, GP @ Contrary)
Before the Opportunity Was Obvious (Abhishek Singh, VC @ Riverwalk)
From Scarcity To Abundance (Vivek Ramaswami & Sabrina Wu, Madrona)
The Valley of Death: Frontier Companies & the Series A (Ethan Batraski, GP @ Venrock)
Light My Fire… (Michael Greeley, GP @ Flare Capital)
Notes:
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