🦞AI Apps investing @ A16Z; A1111; Boards of Krea, Deel, Clutch, Titan, Arc Boats, Untitled, Happy Robot + more; If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu
- Everyone wants to be a product manager, PMs want to be GMs, GMs want to be CEOs, and the CEO just wants to build product again ..
- For years, we assumed consumers wouldn’t pay for software. Now people are happily paying $200+/mo for products like Claude, Grok 4 Heavy and Gemini. Not because they’re for everyone, but because they’re 100x better for someone. The free tier is the funnel. The real product is
- “We will call seeds pre-seed, and price them like As”
- Here is my 2 cents on OpenAI buying Windsurf + appointing a "CEO of applications". There is a concept that was popularized during the big telco era called "wholesale transfer pricing" which is effectively the ability of a supplier to extract margin from everyone else in the
- A surprising source of alpha is *actually using* new AI products - if you haven’t tried R1, Operator, DeepResearch, Cursor, Krea, Notebook LM etc you’re at a competitive disadvantage to builders / investors / consumers that have.
- Impossible Tiny Desk🔈 Obviously this is not actually Christopher Wallace nor is it NPR Instrumentation from the very talented The Frank White Experience via YouTube 4o / Kling via @krea_ai / @hedra_labs / demucs00:00
- An open question was answered today - "what will the AI-native distribution channel be?" It looks like ChatGPT will be that channel with 800M active users + the Apps SDK. This is likely as important as Steve Jobs announcing the app store in March of 2008 ...
- As much as I adore India and the many impressive founders+investors in the region, this is entirely fake news!
- Deel has grown from a cold start to over $800M of revenue in just five years. But how exactly did they do it? While they may look like a typical Silicon Valley story the truth is that @Bouazizalex and @shuooo have defied many SV conventions in their approach including
- Bad board member archetypes: 1 - Too rich to care (doesn't do the work) 2 - Ideas guy (also doesn't do the work) 3 - Fake friend (doesn't tell the truth) The best board members are high truth, low anxiety00:00
- Haters hate, builders build. Big up to all the people working on good ideas that sound like bad ideas (the story of every startup). Also, there is a special place in hell for people that work at startups and punch down on other startups. It’s the opposite of a founder mindset.
- Introducing the Abundance Agenda. We believe AI will turn luxuries into commodities - making consumers happier, healthier, and more productive than ever before. And a new generation of AI-native companies will lead the way. More from @a16z consumer 👇GIF
- Notion launched Meeting Notes today, which takes direct aim at Granola’s beloved AI note taking product. Two quick thoughts: 1 The “incumbents” in the horizontal prosumer / productivity category (Notion / Airtable / Figma) are far more capable + ambitious than the traditional
