Hamed

Earlier this year we met with our Limited Partners. Their top question was “will the AI transition destroy your existing cloud companies?”

We began with a strong default of “no.” The classic battle between startups and incumbents is a horse race between startups building distribution and incumbents building product. Can the young companies with coo... See more

Last decade, we got used to identifying influencers, content creators, internet personalities—pick your semantic poison—by their platform of choice: the TikTokker, the YouTuber, the Twitch streamer, and yes, the Substacker. The TikTok ban proves the inherent risks of this strategy. Audiences aren’t fungible. Perhaps this explains the persistent val... See more

“We’re a species that rushes through everything, then complains that time flies.”

Steve Maraboli

Another example that comes to mind is this David Perell’s series of observations about “everything looking the same now”; in this case, company logos all moving to a narrow band of sans serif fonts. There are many possible explanations here, like homogenous design tools, but the Occam’s Razor answer is simply that these brands have global audiences... See more

The primary opportunity for startups is not to replace incumbent software companies—it’s to go after automatable pools of work.

creators generate cultural capital (i.e cool), fans generate social capital (network of relationships), and mops generate liquid capital (i.e money that subsidizes the scene). But too many mops causes problems, mainly because they free-ride off the geeks and offer little to the community. David Chapman explains:

“However, as mop numbers grow, they b

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