#294 | Request for Startups, Data Center Industrialization, & more
July 26th | The latest from YC, Dynamo, Emergence, Sequoia, NFX, Compound, 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
Request for Startups - Fall 2026 (Y Combinator)
ServiceTitan Waited 10 Years. Procore Waited 21. The Next Vertical AI Winners Won’t Wait at All. (Gregory Stofman, GP @ Veridical)
Industry Developments & Analyses
Data Center Industrialization Primer (Dynamo Ventures Team)
Freight’s Fourth Act (Equal Ventures Team)
AI-Native Support for One of Life’s Hardest Processes (Lotti Siniscalco, Partner @ Emergence)
Renting is stressful. Millions of renter conversations tell us why. (A16Z)
The Wide Open Frontier (Saanya Ojha, Partner @ Bain Capital Ventures)
Sparse By Design (Akash Bajwa, Principal @ Earlybird)
Coding Agents 2.0: Interface, Inference, and Verification (Denise Teng, Partner @ Gradient Ventures)
The Burden of Proof: Evaluating Energy and Industrial Solutions in the AI Era (John Tough, MP @ Energize)
America’s Open-Model Paradox (Dean Meyer & Konstantine Buhler, Sequoia)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Early Stage Funds of <$100 Million Should Hold Almost No Reserves (Hunter Walk, GP @ Homebrew)
How companies are building and scaling the FDE bench (Santosh Iyer & Samma Hafeez, Insight)
How The Fastest AI-First Companies Really Work (Gigi Levy-Weiss, GP @ NFX)
The 7 Hires a Hardware Startup Needs to Get Right (Zabie Elmgren, Partner @ A16Z)
Additional Reads
The Post-Agentic Founder (Rex Woodbury, MP @ Daybreak)
The Power of Patience (Rick Zullo, MP @ Equal Ventures)
Power, Status, and Legitimacy in Tech (Michael Dempsey, MP @ Compound)
How do you backup an enterprise run by AI agents? (Clayton Petty, Partner @ Gradient)
The Org Chart Comes for the Agents (Yelena Shkolnik, Partner @ Jump Capital)
Philosophical Transactions of the AI Age (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
Nothing to Check (David Beisel, GP @ NextView)
Consider The Lillies (Kyle Harrison, GP @ Contrary)
AI Engineering Productivity is Anything But Normal (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
Mid-Year Venture Capital Report Card (Michael Greeley, GP @ Flare Capital)
It’s All Pre-Series A Now (Charles Hudson, GP @ Precursor)
Notes:
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