Gavin Baker, CIO of Atreides Management, and David George, General Partner at a16z, provide a macro view of the AI landscape. They discuss the trillion-dollar data center buildout, compare the current AI boom to the 2000 telecom bubble, analyze the competitive dynamics in AI infrastructure between Nvidia and Google, and explore the evolving business models for AI applications and the future of SaaS.
Alex Rampell of a16z explains how software is evolving from digitizing records to performing labor, shifting the industry's focus from the $300 billion SaaS market to the $13 trillion labor market. This transition, accelerated by AI, is forcing a change in business models from seat-based pricing to outcome-based pricing, creating new opportunities and expanding the total addressable market.
In a YC interview, RevenueCat co-founders Jacob Eiting and Miguel Carranza discuss their journey from experiencing the pain of in-app purchases to building a critical piece of infrastructure for the mobile economy. They cover their early-stage conviction, the keys to selling to developers, and the operational and personal lessons learned while scaling to a globally distributed team.
Box CEO Aaron Levie discusses the paradigm shift from cloud to AI, arguing that AI will augment jobs by automating non-strategic work and create massive opportunities for startups to tackle previously unsolvable problems with unstructured data. He covers the evolution of SaaS business models, the 'build vs. buy' debate, and offers key advice for founders in the AI era.
Co-founder Sam Ross discusses Numeral's journey from a personal e-commerce pain point to a venture-backed global tax platform. He covers the market opportunity created by outdated incumbents, the 'do things that don't scale' approach to finding product-market fit, lessons from fundraising, and how Numeral leverages AI to automate complex compliance workflows, shifting from a tool to a full-service solution.
Eoghan McCabe, founder and CEO of Intercom, shares the unfiltered story of transforming a multi-billion dollar, stagnating SaaS business into a rapidly growing, AI-first company. He details the necessity of 'founder mode,' a radical cultural overhaul, and why having nothing to lose is the ultimate advantage in the AI era.