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Remember the first time you touched a computer screen instead of typing commands?

We’ve lived through distinct epochs of human-computer interaction: the cryptic beauty of command lines, the intuitive dance of graphical interfaces, & the ubiquity of browser-based computing in the SaaS era.

It’s different now. When I manage spreadsheets, I don’t want to manipulate formulas anymore. Instead, I want to instruct the computer as I would explain to a colleague : “run the correlations on these variables to see if anything meaningful pops out, then plot it, & add it to the deck.”

If you needed proof that every software company is an AI company, here’s the evidence. 46% of all US venture financings in dollar terms in 2024 were AI.

This revolution breeds in every corner of the startup ecosystem :

37% of Seeds, 35% of Series As, 67% of Series Bs, 24% of Series Cs, & 47% of Series Ds were AI companies. Within a year, half of software companies are AI companies.

“Feel Good Fun Mix” tops my recommendations on Spotify. Spotify has created over 6,000 such labels by hand.

Amazon and Netflix attributed 35% and 75% of their revenue to their recommendation systems. This is a profound & counterintuitive shift in how we think about marketing.

In a recent case study led by Aampe, an AI agent with this type of segmentation sent far fewer messages than traditional systems while achieving better results.

How often do you use AI? I tracked my Sunday workday to find out. Between 4:30-9:00 PM (with a dinner break), I monitored every AI interaction while handling emails, analyzing data, & writing.

If the average American picks up their mobile phone 144 times per day & we call that addiction, I am using AI about a hundred times per hour. Is AI ten times more valuable than a phone?

Speech

These are the top 10 posts of 2025. I like to do a roundup each year as a retrospective of how much the industry has changed through some of these posts from the beginning of the year. Some are outdated already & some presaged accelerating trends.

AI Drove the Largest New Bookings of Any New Product : In January, ServiceNow announced that their AI product was the fastest growing product in their history. Since then, many other companies have reported massive growth in their AI businesses. It was a harbinger of the tectonic shift to come.

Ten years ago, I hired an editor to grade my blog posts as an AP English teacher might. Yesterday, I asked an AI to do the same thing.

The verdict? A solid B-.

Claude’s Scorecard

Grade: B-

Strengths: The piece demonstrates a clear understanding of complex technical concepts and attempts to make them accessible to a general audience. The author’s personal connection to deep learning through graduate school studies adds authenticity and historical perspective. This human touch helps ground the technical material in lived experience.

In the bustling tech campuses of 2024, the age of passive AI – systems that merely respond to our queries – is giving way to something far more profound: the era of AI agents.

As we look to 2025, we’re about to discover what happens when algorithms learn to act.

At the heart of these emerging agents lies a trinity of learning approaches :

Today, we’re announcing our second fund of $450m to support our mission of partnering with early stage software companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages. This marks the next chapter in our firm’s evolution.

Since we launched Theory in 2023, we’ve gathered a wonderful team : Lauren, Spencer, Andy, Rafa, Amber, Arjun, & Kristin.

We have partnered with 8 marvelous founding teams, all using data to power the next wave of innovation across the Modern Data Stack, Artificial Intelligence, & Web3.

I didn’t notice it at first but there in the back corner of my laptop, I’ve been assembling a little library.

The library doesn’t contain books, but scraps of text that explain what an AI should do.

Visit Anthropic’s home page & you’ll find their collection :

Each of us will assemble these little libraries with tracts like :

• write a blog post in my voice about this topic
• collect action items to send to the team from team notes & format them in this particular way
• analyze the P&L for the finance team paying particular attention to gross margin
• write a performance review using the company’s stated evaluation rubric for my teammates
• summarize a competitor’s webpage every month to detect changes in positioning

As we work in a role, we have assemble these workflows and kept them to ourselves.

What it cost to have an assistant with you like in the movie Her?

The cost of using AI has dropped precipitously, an order of magnitude every year.

If the average American picks up their phone 144 times per day & engages with an assistant, each time for four interactions every day of a month, an assistant like Her would cost about 78 cents in inference cost.¹