Startup Soothsayers

The argument that Ramp is in the best position of any B2B company to capitalize on AI comes in three stages, from general to Ramp-specific: 

AI will drive extreme consolidation.

The companies that win will be in the sweet spot between owning workflows and building great products. Ramp is in the sweet spot. 

Of all of the workflows to own, finance is t... See more

There should be Retroactive Public Goods Funding for those founders crazy enough to try something truly new that failed as a business but succeeded in creating useful mutations, maybe even ticker tape parades, and certainly not derision.

Dan O’Connell, chief AI and strategy officer at the cloud communications company Dialpad, sees his current role—and the jobs of other AI-devoted C-suiters—as essentially transitional: They are there to shepherd their respective companies into a future where AI is ubiquitous enough that it no longer falls under the purview of just one exec.

“I actual... See more

There are some industries primed for what we call AI leapfrogging. Leapfrogging happens when an industry or market (usually an outmoded industry, or an emerging market) skips a step along the technology transformation chain.

These industries have historically not been digitized and don’t have a dominant cloud incumbent. We see greenfield opportuniti... See more

If 2022 was the year of quiet quitting, and 2023 brought quiet firing, 2024 will restore the time-honored tradition of “Quiet Performing.”

After four years of macro shocks, punctuated by 2023’s epidemic of white-collar layoffs, many companies are looking to rebuild confidence and focus among employees. While an emphasis on performance management wil... See more

Artificial intelligence will spur two fundamental changes in our relationship with technology. The first is that voice—already the most natural interface for human interaction—will become a dominant interface. Imagine latency reduced to less than half a second, a stark contrast to the sluggishness of touch-based devices. Even silent voice is on the... See more

It means that many startups have to justify their existence not by explaining why they’ll make the world better, but by actively showing they won’t make the world worse.

No longer will we need to learn to navigate through apps like Uber or complex systems like those of SAP or Oracle. Thus far, we’ve always adapted to software—learning its intricacies, remembering layered menus and so forth to communicate with machines. “Training” to use complex apps is commonplace. Now, AI is enabling software to adapt to humans in... See more