#293 | AI Inference Market, Return of Nuclear, Broker's Edge, & more
July 19th | The latest from Chapter One, Maveron, Altimeter, Homebrew, Insight, 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
Some areas we’ve been investing in (Jamesin Seidel, VC @ Chapter One)
Provenance Becomes Infrastructure (Amir Kabir, MP @ Overlook)
Industry Developments & Analyses
The AI inference market (Denny Gabriel, VC @ Runa)
The Return of Nuclear: AI, Geopolitics, and the Next Energy Boom (Selina Wang, VC @ Altimeter)
The broker’s edge: How AI is finally coming for the oldest game in insurance (Amias Gerety, Partner @ QED)
Closed vs. Open-Source: The Ongoing Model Market Share Battle (David Talpalar, GP @ Shirlawn Capital)
TradFi doesn’t want DeFi. It wants blockchains (A16Z Crypto)
The Treadmill: Why Frontier AI is Starting to Rhyme with Semiconductors (Bilal Zuberi, MP @ Red Glass)
Coding Agents 2.0: Interface, Inference, and Verification (Denise Teng, Partner @ Gradient)
Winning the quantum race: America’s blueprint for dominating the next tech revolution (Dr. Prineha Narang, Partner @ DCVC)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Product Market Fit is Hard to Find, but False PMF is Even More Painful (Hunter Walk, GP @ Homebrew)
The Cautious Team’s Guide to Autonomous Delivery (Phin Barnes, Partner @ The GP)
How Companies Quietly Lose Product-Market Fit Without Noticing (Ben Yoskovitz, Partner @ Highline Beta)
Demystifying the forward deployed engineer (Santosh Iyer & Samma Hafeez, Insight)
The Upgraded Go-to-Market Playbook (Pete Flint, GP @ NFX)
The CEO’s Field Guide To Strategy In An Era of AI Tokenomics (Rob May, GP @ Half Court)
The Autonomous Middle (Melody Koh, Partner @ NextView)
Additional Reads
Seeing People Clearly (Alfred Lin, GP @ Sequoia)
Outlier Investing in the Age of AI (Arsham Memarzadeh, VC @ Meritech)
The Return on Real Life (Veronica Kim & Chelsea Zhang, Equal Ventures)
Bending Spoons: An AI-native Berkshire, or an overvalued software acquirer? (Jason Stoffer, GP @ Maveron)
Depth Over Breadth (Jack Arenas, Principal @ Founder Collective)
Redesigning Around a New Power Source (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
Unicorn Lists Are Prediction Markets. This List Is a Scorecard. (Founder Collective)
Clear Eyes, Full Stack, Can’t Lose? (Euclid Ventures)
Nobody Will Buy Your Shares (Andrew Ziperski, VC @ General Catalyst)
The Same Brain (David Beisel, GP @ NextView)
The Harness Is the New Battleground (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
The Most Human Technology Ever Made (Anish Acharya, GP @ A16Z)
Notes:
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