Awesome read, put into words some things I've been thinking a lot about. One way to put this in Economics-lingo is thinking about complementary goods: intuition and analysis are complementary goods; thus the cheapening of analysis makes intuition more valuable.
Many analysts make fun of the fact that they have to help people who make much more than them to do basic stuff like opening PDFs and such. Now they'll understand: it's all about tacit knowledge and intuition.
Hi Lawrence, thanks for the interesting read! I would like to learn more about the use cases of AI DR in VC. If you have any resources or people I should follow, I would appreciate it! Best regards
this was great, thanks for sharing it, i like the idea of X connectors and “your network is your net worth” this is close to https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-future-2030-2040?r=cfve0&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true "Becoming a socialite. The infinite variety and competition (human and AI) in the digital world is driving a resurgence of an in-person social scene. However, for this to be a "career choice", you must either already be wealthy, or have some other factor in your favour. The overwhelmingly most common such factor is being a young woman who inserts herself into the social scene of moneyed men."
Great piece. I think the solo GP never went away in terms of the instinct, the gut, the nuance and the network. And that will stay true. There is a strong justification for pipeline tools and management tools, but not decision making regarding an investment.
That all changes once the Series A is done. Predictive analytics can figure out most investment cases.
I think that’s likely right on “pre-data” and “post-data”. But with many AI apps now time to revenue is faster so even seed in some industries might be “post-data”: but if you have 10m+ revenue then why sell equity at A or B? Why not debt or revenue-based financing? It’s not risk capital with healthy revenues.
As a 4 decades startup person I’ve seen everything. I would scream out avoid debt at any point that you need it. Equity is the best way to finance growth and the more revenue and growth you have the cheaper it is. Debt can be great very late stage.
I’d say incremental vs exponential growth is a debt vs equity framed discussion.
Thank you for ecapsulating a very human situation with humility in an essay with pathos. No doubt you will be fine by all accounts, but millions of others will not. How will society react? Are there any other visions apart from UBI? This is a huge rabbit hole, so I have another, much easier question for you, if I may - do you have a list of tools you use and to what extent do you/have you customised these tools to do your bidding to a standard you are happy with?
the great augmentation first, well yes standard perplexity/claude/chatGPT. claude as a chatbot for daily quick tasks/assistant (no customization), chatGPT DR or o3 mini for "work" like research/technical understanding (no customization), perplexity for google alternative. gamma for decks, but i don't make many decks. today I am happy to just take what i get and be the glue in between, i am sure I can automate some of my copy+paste but never found the time to use lindy or other agent products yet. still waiting for a killer VC agent product, what about you?
Thanks I do the prompts in langfuse and then test multiple agents vs the prompts to see which ones perform better; this is for very specific use case which is an AI strategy bot - whose aim is to provide non technical ai strategies for enterprises across multical verticals that can be used by middle managers (non technical) as a basis to start deploying AI in their businesses. For general research, I tend to use chatgpt/claude/perplexity. And because I work with big tech platform commerce infra, tend to be vertical (eg gemini for g, meta.ai for, meta) because i assume their training data includes a lot of hard to find developer documentation. I'm much more down the maturity curve than you which makes me laugh because I describe myself as '0 to 1' product person in my various projects.
Awesome read, put into words some things I've been thinking a lot about. One way to put this in Economics-lingo is thinking about complementary goods: intuition and analysis are complementary goods; thus the cheapening of analysis makes intuition more valuable.
Many analysts make fun of the fact that they have to help people who make much more than them to do basic stuff like opening PDFs and such. Now they'll understand: it's all about tacit knowledge and intuition.
Excellent article. The reasoning can largely be applied to any knowledge work.
If knowledge is commoditized and later wisdom as well, it prompts the question of our relevance as a species.
Hi Lawrence, thanks for the interesting read! I would like to learn more about the use cases of AI DR in VC. If you have any resources or people I should follow, I would appreciate it! Best regards
hmm. I guess everyone is figuring it out on the fly. sam is my go to guy on interesting things related to vc: https://arbesman.substack.com
Appreciate this, thanks again Lawrence!
Great read. Curious how you see the rise of human-human networks as a source of potential competitive advantage in the Deep Research era.
I wrote more on how I can see this becoming a more common way of working here - https://thefuturenormal.substack.com/p/chatgpts-deep-research-and-thinking
this was great, thanks for sharing it, i like the idea of X connectors and “your network is your net worth” this is close to https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/a-history-of-the-future-2030-2040?r=cfve0&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true "Becoming a socialite. The infinite variety and competition (human and AI) in the digital world is driving a resurgence of an in-person social scene. However, for this to be a "career choice", you must either already be wealthy, or have some other factor in your favour. The overwhelmingly most common such factor is being a young woman who inserts herself into the social scene of moneyed men."
Fantastic read.
Great piece. I think the solo GP never went away in terms of the instinct, the gut, the nuance and the network. And that will stay true. There is a strong justification for pipeline tools and management tools, but not decision making regarding an investment.
That all changes once the Series A is done. Predictive analytics can figure out most investment cases.
I think that’s likely right on “pre-data” and “post-data”. But with many AI apps now time to revenue is faster so even seed in some industries might be “post-data”: but if you have 10m+ revenue then why sell equity at A or B? Why not debt or revenue-based financing? It’s not risk capital with healthy revenues.
As a 4 decades startup person I’ve seen everything. I would scream out avoid debt at any point that you need it. Equity is the best way to finance growth and the more revenue and growth you have the cheaper it is. Debt can be great very late stage.
I’d say incremental vs exponential growth is a debt vs equity framed discussion.
Nice framing at the end, thanks
Thank you for ecapsulating a very human situation with humility in an essay with pathos. No doubt you will be fine by all accounts, but millions of others will not. How will society react? Are there any other visions apart from UBI? This is a huge rabbit hole, so I have another, much easier question for you, if I may - do you have a list of tools you use and to what extent do you/have you customised these tools to do your bidding to a standard you are happy with?
the great augmentation first, well yes standard perplexity/claude/chatGPT. claude as a chatbot for daily quick tasks/assistant (no customization), chatGPT DR or o3 mini for "work" like research/technical understanding (no customization), perplexity for google alternative. gamma for decks, but i don't make many decks. today I am happy to just take what i get and be the glue in between, i am sure I can automate some of my copy+paste but never found the time to use lindy or other agent products yet. still waiting for a killer VC agent product, what about you?
Thanks I do the prompts in langfuse and then test multiple agents vs the prompts to see which ones perform better; this is for very specific use case which is an AI strategy bot - whose aim is to provide non technical ai strategies for enterprises across multical verticals that can be used by middle managers (non technical) as a basis to start deploying AI in their businesses. For general research, I tend to use chatgpt/claude/perplexity. And because I work with big tech platform commerce infra, tend to be vertical (eg gemini for g, meta.ai for, meta) because i assume their training data includes a lot of hard to find developer documentation. I'm much more down the maturity curve than you which makes me laugh because I describe myself as '0 to 1' product person in my various projects.
True words!!!
Thanks!
Nah researchers doing science are good for now, RIP VC analysts