I write about technology and how to grow technology companies. I also invest in ridiculously early B2B/deep tech companies as a partner at Angular Ventures.
In 2017, VanMoof started shipping some of the most beautiful e-bikes ever designed. By 2023, the company had raised nearly $200 million. And by mid-2023, it was bankrupt. The cause of death wasn’t lack of demand. The problem was that VanMoof had engineered every component in-
Everyone is debating whether AI will kill software companies. But they’re missing the point. The interesting story isn’t whether people will replace their hardened Salesforce instance with a few well-articulated prompts (they won’t). Or whether decades of code complexity and integration know-how
Walk into a coffee shop in NYC, Berlin, or Tokyo, and you will likely see the same minimalist furniture, the same exposed brick, and the same sans-serif menu. This sameness isn't limited to architecture. In movies, the share of blockbusters that are prequels, sequels, or spin-offs
AI has both concentrated conviction and driven disorientation in venture capital. Every VC wants exposure to the latest AI winner, but it’s hard to stomach paying 200x ARR to fund yet another AI-powered platform for legal or customer support. Some investors are paying up. Others are
The release of Sora 2, and in particular its new “cameo” feature, which enables the licensed regeneration of a person’s likeness, marks the beginning of a new economic era for culture: the age of immortal IP. This is a technical capability newly enabled by generative AI,
Two weeks ago I wrote about the  bottleneck cascade  and how every breakthrough shifts scarcity somewhere else. This piece zooms in on one of the most seductive dead ends that cascades produce: the retrofit.  In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton famously declared that we should "stop
In April 2024, Mark Zuckerberg told Dwarkesh Patel that Meta’s biggest constraint in developing AI wasn’t GPUs. It was power. Even with unlimited capital, the lead time on new energy generation was years. Tyler Cowen made a similar point. When asked why the AI-takeoff may
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT and the collective realization that LLMs are surprisingly good at coding, there have been murmurs about the “end of software.” Chris Paik more or less started it with  his claim  that “majoring in computer science today will be like
I’m a sucker for a Steve Jobs keynote. And  this speech  from the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1983 is a classic of the form and eerily relevant for this exact moment in time. In the speech, he talks about the personal computer as a
Forget technical skills; in the age of AI, management skills are the new superpower. I was speaking with a friend recently about their (somewhat painful) transition from individual contributor to manager, and all the little things they needed to improve on to be a better manager. The conversation sparked an
I came across  this tweet by Aaron Renn  last week and found myself nodding along. So I wanted to interrogate why Renn’s story about the importance of choosing the “right hierarchies” seemed to intuitively resonate with me and the work we do here at
Many startups these days are founded on the premise that, to use  Sarah Tavel’s phrasing , they can “sell the work,” rather than software. (See the recent splashy  fundraise announcement  from  11x.ai  as the latest example.) And, indeed, selling the work
I was speaking with a founder the other day about who they should target as their first marketing hire. The “first marketer” is a tough role to fill, in my experience, because most marketers are too specialized. You may know a great paid marketer or content marketer, but
Every product builder I know is spending a significant amount of their time these days thinking about how to build with generative AI. And, let’s not sugarcoat it…it’s hard to do. Even harder to do well. But there’s some value, I think,
A few weeks ago, Chris Paik from Pace Capital set the startup world abuzz with a short post titled “ The End of Software .” In the piece, Chris argues that, as the cost of code goes to zero, software development will be disrupted in much the same way journalism