#292 | AI-Enabled Services, The Task Economy, Death of AI Wrappers, & more
July 12th | The latest from Benchmark, Sequoia, USV, NFX, Madrona, 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 AI-Enabled Services Opportunity (Patrick Salyer, Partner @ Mayfield)
The Task Economy - Data will be the next $1 Trillion Category (Everett Randle, GP @ Benchmark)
The AI Wrapper is Dead: 3 Approaches to Verticalization for Early-Stage Startups (Pete Flint, GP @ NFX)
The New Whitespace in AI (Rob May, GP @ Half Court)
Data At The Edge (Rebecca Kaden, GP @ USV)
Industry Developments & Analyses
Everyone’s Watching the Wrong Benchmark (Zach Bratun-Glennon, GP @ Gradient)
The most underrated token type (A16Z Crypto Team)
Own Your Weights (Jamin Ball, Partner @ Altimeter)
Tech Is Globalizing. The Money Is Lagging. (Alex Lazarow, MP @ Fluent)
Model Mania (Saanya Ojha, Partner @ BCV)
Which Vertical Incumbents Will Survive AI? (Euclid Ventures)
The FDE Arms Race: Why Every AI Company Is Spending Billions to Embed Engineers Inside Customers (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
The Only Moat Is Deployment (Simon Wu, Partner @ Cathay)
Rat’s Nest Problems (Kyle Harrison, GP @ Contrary)
Own the Data Loop (Vivek Ramaswami & Sabrina Albert, Madrona)
How to Build a Lead Gen AI Agent That Books Meetings While You Sleep (Mandy Cole, Partner @ Stage 2)
Know Your VC (Megan Maloney, MP @ Dria Ventures)
The AI Preflight Check (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
Additional Reads
The Great AI Irony (David Cahn, GP @ Sequoia)
I’ve Been the Weird One Before (David Beisel, GP @ NextView)
The thoughts that never become behavior (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
The Loneliest Jersey (Morgan Livermore, GP @ Supercruise)
The Stable Era: The Modularisation Of Post-Training (Akash Bajwa, Principal @ Earlybird)
An explosion in creativity (Jax Vullinghs, Partner @ Airtree)
Sanitized Slop (Nikunj Kothari, Partner @ FPV)
Constraints and Ambition (Kevin Stevens, Partner @ Energize)
Sticks, Stones, and Light Speed (Alex Oppenheimer, GP @ Verissimo)
Notes:
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