The best short of the AI trend are all these private equity owned software companies.
Obviously hard to short private companies but they are going to get slaughtered.
Couple a disincentivized product & eng team with underinvestment in r&d and they are struggling to keep up
AI is clearly a platform shift that dramatically improves the customer outcomes, but that requires a lot more product iteration and development than these companies are prepared to fund as they are operated like cash cows.
The biggest tech companies know exactly what is happening and they are leading the wave.
The paranoia around platform shifts runs deep in their culture and they have seen this movie before.
My bet is we see a barbell. AI is a sustaining innovation for the tech giants and a disruptive one for agile startups.
It will be the comfortably entrenched that see their moats eviscerated.
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As I have traveled around the world over the last year a lot of folks from other countries have been asking me what the hell went wrong in San Francisco.
The city so many called their favorite city in the US has become obviously broken.
Here is what I have been telling them:
SF & California is a case study in the danger of a single political party in control.
The loudest voices at the extremes invariably win arguments as their supporters are the most motivated, insane policies are enacted without push back.
Those policies have broken SF.
First and foremost is the push to reform the justice system. The US clearly has an unfair and broken justice system badly in need of reform.
SF & CA have enthusiastically rushed into changing the way we enforce crimes and how policing works.
7 years ago I syndicated my first deal on @AngelList. Since then there have been 90 more syndicates, $30m deployed into 55 companies, 4k LPs, 50% IRR, 10 exits, ~$15m distributed and over $100m in current positions in awesome high growth companies. What a ride.
Some lessons.
By far the most powerful part of @AngelList is the LP community. My 4,000 backers are founders, vc's, execs at every major company, finance pros, doctors, lawyers, engineers and every other role you can imagine. Together they are a superpower. I have 4000 people on my team
Every day they send me deals, help with diligence and point out when I am being stupid (they are really good at that...)
They are also a super power for our companies. In any deal up to 250 of them can join and become huge advocates for the company with real skin in the game.
A thread on the spooky similarities (and differences) between the Dotcom bubble and Crypto ("web3").
They both started with a big true idea. If we connect computers in a network it will be super duper powerful. If we make money digital and programable it will be awesome. Both true and huge.
The folks who got in early on both ideas saw tremendous gains, which led to more folks joining, which led to more gains, etc. Because both ideas are huge, folks were comfortable becoming untethered from traditional value metrics and rode hype to massive markups
There is a huge amount of chatter about the insanity of the venture market. Lots of folks throwing around words like "froth" and "bubble". It is full crazy. It is also working. Amongst my companies we just crossed $500m in revenues. A thread on why its working...
TLDR: We have moved from the early adopter stage to the mainstream in b2b software. Investors are recognizing this and shit is getting crazy.
1. The market is in full wild mode. I am seeing things I never would have dreamed of. At the seed stage rounds are getting done in days. Prices are 2-4x what they were a couple years ago. Marginal and some very weak companies are getting funded. Later stage multiple are sky high.
The Zoomification of fundraising is a game changer. Lessons from raising my newest early stage fund in 30 days, in August, entirely over Zoom. <Thread>
In the bad old days LPs insisted on in person meetings. Given their global distribution that meant a ton of time on airplanes, prioritization of big and high probability check writers and a super duper slow process. Zoom changes this.
1. You can now massively expanded upper funnel. In the old days you were lucky to do 1 or 2 meetings a day. That meant to talk to enough LPs you had spend months in conversations. Now you can easily have 5-10 meetings a day.
I first looked at bitcoin when it cost less then a single dollar and didn't think it would work at the time. At this point everyone is convinced I am 50,000x wrong. Therefore there is a very strong chance I am operating out of a huge confirmation bias here. But yolo...
First, despite a large number of highly specious arguments to the contrary, there is no fundamental value to bitcoin and its ilk. It has a huge negative cash flow and its value is a group hypnosis, impossible to trade either long or short in a fundamental way.