Aug 22, 2025

The State of AI: Growth, Fragmentation, and the Next Wave

General Partners from a16z analyze the current AI landscape, revealing that AI companies are growing faster and larger than anticipated. They discuss the fragmentation of the market, the innovator's dilemma facing SaaS incumbents, and the emergence of new moats like brand. The conversation emphasizes a shift from hype to tangible ROI, citing examples like Cursor, and outlines a nuanced investment strategy for a market defined by both unprecedented growth and rapid wipeouts.

Aug 02, 2025

State of Startups and AI 2025 - Sarah Guo, Conviction

Sarah Goa from the AI-native venture fund Conviction discusses the state of AI, arguing that despite the hype, building valuable AI products is challenging. She covers the rapid advancement in AI capabilities like reasoning and multimodality, the increasingly competitive model market, and provides a playbook for building successful applications, using "Cursor for X" as a framework. The key takeaway is that defensibility in AI comes from superior execution and deep workflow integration, not just the underlying model.