For the past 25 years, application software startups have had a singular focus: increasing company and employee productivity. AI enables a paradigm shift: Rather than sell software to improve an end-user's productivity, consider what it would look like to sell *the work itself*. When you sell the work, instead of selling a 15% productivity improvement, you sell a 95% improvement. Incumbents are not only advantaged in selling software, they are stuck there. You don't need to play their game. Post: sarahtavel.com/p/ai-startups…

NEW: The Death of Spreadsheet Investing. Inside Benchmark's New AI Playbook Everett Randle (@EverettRandle), GP at @benchmark Why every golden rule of SaaS just got inverted & how AI is rewriting venture investing: › You can now pass $1B in revenue with unproven unit economics.. › Late-stage companies can have much higher upside than a Series C Benchmark's AI Bets: Cerebras, Manus, Mercor, Sierra, Legora, Fireworks, Exa, Starcloud, Gumloop.. We cover: › The Disorientation: Scale No Longer De-Risks a Company › What Happened to the Golden Rules? › AI Inverted Nearly Every Framework › New Taxonomy: P x Q x M › Inference Is the Demand Engine › Tokenomics: Frontier vs Open Source › The Liquidity Shock: Reframing the Returns Math › Benchmark's Model: Founders Over Themes 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark (00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM (04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone (08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics? (12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories (15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis (19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud (23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas (26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving (27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI (31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap (34:44) Inside the new funding playbook (40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm (42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen (49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets (52:54) The mentors who shaped him

"There should be as many models in the world as firms in the world." Satya and I dig into when to own vs. rent your intelligence, why every company should be building and climbing its own private evals, and what makes for a stable frontier.

You can now try GLM 5.2 in Cursor! Excited to see more useful open models, thank you to Fireworks for partnering here. Results from our evals ↓

introducing t-rex with t-rex enabled, greptile doesn't just review your PR, it runs your branch in a sandbox to find bugs. it mocks api calls, clicks around the UI, and writes runs unit tests in our benchmarks, it caught ~20% more bugs than base greptile. most of the new bugs caught could not have been caught with more inference, they required code execution. t-rex is available in beta to all greptile users

NEW: How Benchmark invests, what @chetanp looks for, and what every founder/operator needs to rethink about go-to-market. General Partner at @benchmark, Chetan Puttagunta (@chetanp), joins GTMnow to give founders/operators an inside view to how they invest and think about go-to-market. He breaks down the $5.6B legal AI company that grew from $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months (despite a competitor already raising at $3B before they launched), Benchmark's first-ever $2B growth fund, and tips on scaling in the AI era. Highlights: 02:10 Why Benchmark's first-ever $2B growth fund is a historic departure 05:22 From Cursor and Lovable's PLG to AI-native direct sales companies 09:40 Why 12-month sales cycles are dead and expansion is happening in months 11:52 Meeting Legora's founder in YC, pre-Demo Day, Feb 2024 13:36 $1M to $100M ARR in 18 months, breaking enterprise speed records 17:46 The Salesforce vs Siebel analog playing out in AI right now 27:14 Workday took 5 years to hit $100 million. Legora and Sierra did it in under 2. 33:39 Legora's pilots that don't expire (and the trust unlock) 41:46 Why hitting $1M ARR might take LONGER in the AI era 43:15 Why the MVP is dead (customers can vibe code simple apps themselves) 55:18 Benchmark's first $2B growth fund and the Star Cloud investment

We have raised a $75M Series B from @IndexVentures and @usv, with continued support from @benchmark!

We have raised a $75M Series B from @IndexVentures and @usv, with continued support from @benchmark!

SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models. For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon. We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities

Perpetuals are now live on fomo, powered by @HyperliquidX and @tradexyz. Equity, pre-IPO, crypto, indices, and commodities perps, all from one app. See you on the leaderboard. Trade perps on fomo today.

After working with both frontier labs and enterprises across industries, @mercor_ai CEO @BrendanFoody joined our CEO @ypatil125 to discuss why proprietary data and custom models are what keep a company competitive at the frontier.

Sierra just hit $100M in ARR, just seven quarters since we launched in February 2024. @claybavor and I are very grateful to our customers and proud of the Sierra team, who has redefined the meaning of intensity and craftsmanship. I have never had this much fun in my career. (Photo is Clay signing the contract that crossed the $100M mark) sierra.ai/blog/100m-arr