#282 | The End of Middlemen, Agents Broke the Security Stack & more
May 3rd | The latest from Commerce Ventures, Jump Capital, Array Ventures, Bessemer, 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
The End of the Middleman Economy: How AI Agents Will Disrupt High-Take-Rate Platforms (Commerce Ventures)
Workday’s Last Workday? (Joe Schmidt IV, Partner @ A16Z)
The Datadog Opportunity for AI Agents (Saaya Pal & Aqil Pasha, Jump Capital)
We Need More Found-Money Platforms (David Talpalar, GP @ Shirlawn Capital)
Three Theses (Evan O’Donnell, GP @ Timespan)
The Anti-Slop Thesis (Kushaan Ahuja, Partner @ Will Ventures)
Industry Developments & Analyses
Agents broke the security stack (Shruti Gandhi, GP @ Array Ventures)
CPUs are the Bottleneck - and Branching is the Unlock (Honour Masters, Principal @ Crucible)
The age of agents (Amias Gerety, Partner @ QED)
An insider’s look at China’s Climate Capital Stack (Climate Tech VC)
Can AI agents actually pull off DeFi exploits? (Daejun Park & Matt Gleason, A16Z Crypto)
AI’s real labor force implications as technology drives productivity (Nigel Morris, GP @ QED)
The Hidden Cost of Compute (Madelyn O’Farrell, Principal @ Dynamo)
To Train or Not to Train (Tanay Jaipuria, Partner @ Wing VC)
Building Biology-Native Data Infrastructure for the AI Era (Bessemer Team)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
SaaS Best Practices from IPO’s since 2021 (Sammy Abdullah, GP @ Blossom Street VC)
After Certainty (David Cahn, GP @ Sequoia)
A New Token Rule For Engineering Leadership (Alfred Lin, GP @ Sequoia)
The Step-back (Earnest Sweat, GP @ Stresswood)
How Should My AEs Be Using AI in Live Deals? (Liz Christo, Partner @ Stage 2)
The Mess Is the Work (Nikunj Kothari, Partner @ FPV)
Lean Analytics, Reconsidered (Ben Yoskovitz, Partner @ Highline Beta))
Additional Reads
The Dark Marketplace (Euclid Ventures)
The Build-vs-Buy Reset (Melody Koh, Partner @ NextView)
The State of Adventure (Capital) (Grant Gregory, Partner @ Cantos)
Claude Code Shows Why the Best Model Does Not Always Win (Ethan Batraski, GP @ Venrock)
Paying to Win: The Rise of “Veblen Services” (Chris Paik, GP @ Pace)
The Most Important Financial Institution Nobody Talks About Anymore (Conor Witt, ex-Upper90)
Call the Plumber; We’ve Got a Leaky Abstraction (Alex Danco, A16Z)
Building with AI in the Quest for Epistemic Agency (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
The Cardamom Game (Will Manidis, Angel)
The Interface Eats the Product (Jarrod Dicker, Partner @ TCG)
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.