I remember the day I received it : my first Blackberry. A few weeks later I lost it in the back of a taxi cab in Paris. But I haven’t forgotten the chiclet keyboard, its subtle click with each keypress.
A year later, the iPhone presented the world with an all glass keyboard. Who would type on a flat surface, detractors asked? In the end, all of us.
This week, I saw another user interface for a phone : dictation only.
Is tech M&A back?
Google announced its intention to buy Wiz for $32b today. If approved by regulators, it would be the 6th largest technology M&A ever.
This transaction would make Wiz the 5th most valuable pure-play security company.
For Google, this would be its largest acquisition ever second to Motorola for about $12b. Notably two of the top three acquisitions are security. Mandiant sold for $5.4b.
Engineering teams within AI application startups are much smaller than a classic software company - maybe half the size or less.
Let’s run an experiment : let’s assume every public software company benefits immediately to the same extent & cuts R&D spending by half.1
How would the value of these businesses change?2
72% of unprofitable SaaS companies would become profitable.
Public SaaS companies’ growth rates have halved since 2023, as David Spitz pointed, from 36% to 17%.
Why? There are few, fast growing, younger SaaS companies to sustain the growth rates.
The top quartile companies are growing at slower rates today than the bottom quartile companies in 2016. The median has never been lower in the last ten years.
Monday’s analysis cost about 27 cents to produce.
This little screenshot is of Claude Code, the product I use now to write the analysis of datasets like estimating the value of a venture firm.
I didn’t expect to find this feature initially as useful as I do now.
But it makes me feel great because of how inexpensive it is to be productive. 27 cents for a statistical analysis of a small dataset is a bargain considering the battery of statistical tests the AI applied.
How do you position and scale an AI company in a rapidly evolving market?
Join us for an in-person Office Hours session in San Francisco with Alan Hsia, VP of Marketing at Fireworks AI.
Alan brings deep expertise in go-to-market strategy and will share insights on:
📅 March 25, 2025, 5:30pm
📍 San Francisco
🔗 Register here
A small spin-out from a publicly traded behemoth launched with the ambitious vision of transforming their entire industry. Within just a few years, as capital markets shifted in their favor, they emerged simultaneously as both innovators & titans in their field.
We don’t often think of private equity this way, but that’s exactly what happened when KKR spun out of Bear Stearns and Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert catalyzed the junk bond boom of the 1980s.
Imagine if every time you edited a document, the word processor forced you to retype everything that had been written before that edit.
How expensive would that be for a company?
This is exactly how data transformation works today. Each time a data engineer modifies some part of the data stack, the Cloud Data Warehouse & its transformation layer recalculates everything.
What if the system were designed so that it only recalculated the metrics needed? How much less expensive would it be?
As startups scale, effective management becomes the difference between chaotic growth and sustainable success. After analyzing hundreds of posts on startup management, I’ve distilled the key pieces of advice that founders and leaders should keep in mind.
Management, like engineering, has repeatable design patterns that can be learned and applied
Which is the best business in AI at the moment?
I analyzed Q4 revenue data from publicly traded companies across multiple sectors—software companies, consulting firms, and hardware manufacturers to determine which segment dominates the AI market.
NVIDIA’s data center business dominated the field, generating $31b in Q4 revenue with impressive margins exceeding 70%.
In second place, Microsoft’s AI business, including Azure, is at a $3.25b Q4 revenue.