#246 | Evolution of MCPs, Future of Grocery, & more
Aug 24th | The latest from Cowboy, Battery, Gradient, Floodgate, Madrona, First Round, 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
Where we’re looking to invest: the evolution of the MCP ecosystem (Cowboy Team)
AI Agents and the Future of Grocery Delivery (Thomas Reiner, Partner @ Altimeter)
From LLM wrappers to RL sculptors: The dawn of reasoning AI (Brandon Gleklen, Principal @ Battery)
Someone please make channel sales easier (Clayton Petty, VC @ Gradient)
The Future of Human–Machine Interaction: The Application Layer (Vivek Ramaswami & Sabrina Wu, Madrona)
Workflows Are the New Databases (Jamin Ball, Partner @ Altimeter Capital)
In the Costco Era of Software, Design Is the Differentiator (Rex Woodbury, MP @ Daybreak)
The Next Automation Frontier: Models and Data for the Physical World (Peter Schmidt, Sr. Associate @ Refinery)
Industry Developments & Analyses
The State of Vertical AI (Q2) (Euclid Ventures Team)
Logistics x AI | The First Wave of Gen AI (Equal Ventures Team)
Rocket Fuel for AI: Why Reinforcement Learning Is Having Its Moment (Astasia Myers, GP @ Felicis)
Resiliency Software: Safeguarding the Built Environment (Mark Tomasovic, Principal @ Energize)
AI is eating software, but in healthcare, is the EMR eating AI? (Alysaa Co, Principal @ BCV)
Non-consensus bets, AI pricing traps, chat limitations, and more (Abhishek Maran, VC @ Rampersand)
High Valuations, Flat Deals: Venture Capital's Selective Betting (Sammy Abdullah, GP @ Blossom Street VC)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Don't Ship Your Pitch Deck to Your Website. Here's How to Translate Your Story for Customers (First Round)
The Value of Your River Guides (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
The healthy B2B Sales Pipeline (Sammy Abdullah, GP @ Blossom Street VC)
Every Reframe Starts with a Refusal (Mike Maples Jr., GP @ Floodgate)
Getting Started with Usage-Based Pricing (Liz Christo, Partner @ Stage 2)
Explore vs. Exploit in Agentic Coding (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
Product Market Fit Starts with Gross Margin (Farooq Abbasi, GP @ Preface)
Additional Reads
Valuation Matters (David Beisel, GP @ NextView VC)
Context is King (David Haber, GP @ A16Z)
Much ado about margins: The grossly overhyped AI gross margin debate (Janelle Teng, VP @ Bessemer)
Questioning Margins is a Boring Cliche... (Sarah Wang & Martin Casado, A16Z)
Solo founders, Search funds, good writing as bad triaging, and AGI (Sajith Pai, VC @ Blume)
The 95% Problem: AI Isn't Overhyped, Enterprises Are Underprepared (Saanya Ojha, Partner @ BCV)
One Prompt, Zero Engineers: Your New Internal Dev (Gabriel Vasquez, Stephenie Zhang, and Yoko Li, A16Z)
Notes:
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