#295 | Robotics' Missing Piece, Marketplaces in the age of AI, & more
Aug 2nd | The latest from Emergence, General Catalyst, A16Z, Wing, Slow, 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
Robotics’ Missing Piece: Assembly Required (Kevin Spain & Rishub Nahar, Emergence)
ISO: The Future of AdTech (Veronica Kim & Chelsea Zhang, Equal Ventures)
The Next Stack: The future of AI in cybersecurity (Thomas Krane & William Blackwell, Insight)
The Decade Space Stops Being Hard (General Catalyst Team)
Industry Developments & Analyses
Marketplaces in the Age of AI: Threat or Opportunity? (Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner @ FJ Labs)
The Hidden Math of Behavioral Health (A16Z Team)
The Other Exponential (Brian Sugar, GP @ Sugar Capital)
Supply Chain Whiplash (David Talpalar, GP @ Shirlawn Capital)
Aftermarket Harnesses (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
Cybersecurity Becomes Cyber Resilience (Amir Kabir, MP @ Overlook)
The Robot Data Pyramid (Tanay Jaipuria, Partner @ Wing VC)
AI is transforming healthcare, but it’s still hard: takeaways from six months in healthtech VC (Donna Boyer, EIR @ Cowboy)
Agentic Attacks, Identity Sprawl, and the GPU Blind Spot (Jump Capital Team)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
The Right Conditions (Jackie DiMonte, Partner @ Grid)
How to Measure AI Impact (Liz Christo, Partner @ Stage 2)
Lighthouse or Landgrab? How to Pick Your AI Sales Strategy (Joe Schmidt IV, Partner @ A16Z & Julian Marx)
A Board Meeting That Doesn’t Suck (Omri Drory, GP @ NFX)
How I’m Pricing an AI Product (Ben Yoskovitz, Partner @ Highline Beta)
A day in the life: How four companies run FDE motions (Santosh Iyer & Samma Hafeez, Insight Partners)
Get rid of 90 day windows (Yoni Rechtman, Partner @ Slow)
What I Didn’t See Coming (Melody Koh, Partner @ NextView)
Additional Reads
A Global Weighing Machine (Kyle Harrison, GP @ Contrary)
From corporation to crowd: How organizations evolved through time and technology (Tim Sullivan & Robert Hackett, A16Z Crypto)
Ed. 15 Whisper Networks (Aubrie Pagano, GP @ Alpaca)
You’re Not in a Funk (Alex Oppenheimer, GP @ Verissimo)
The Copy Problem (David Beisel, GP @ NextView)
ARR Doesn’t Mean What It Used To (Simon Wu, Partner @ Cathay)
Theater kids, nerds, startups, art and a guy named Vance (Nick Chirls, GP @ Asylum)
Why College Degrees Don’t Matter Anymore (David Cahn, GP @ Sequoia)
The Best Charity of the Next 50 Years Might Be a Company (Craig Shapiro, MP @ Collaborative Fund)
Distillation is a red herring (Chamath Palihapitiya, GP @ Social Capital)
Button-mashing never worked in StarCraft. Tokenmaxxing won’t work in AI (Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner @ Lightspeed)
Notes:
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