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OpenAI hit $12 billion ARR within five years of ChatGPT’s launch ^[1] . Anthropic reached $200 million in revenue in January 2024 ^[2] . Meanwhile, Salesforce took ten years to reach $1 billion ARR ^[3] .

We build teams in pyramids today. One leader, several managers, many individual contributors.

In the AI world, what team configuration makes the most sense? Here are some alternatives :

First, the short pyramid. Managers become agent managers. The work performed by individual contributors of yore becomes the workloads of agents. Everyone moves up a level of abstraction in work.

One trillion tokens per day. Is that a lot?

“And when we look narrowly at just the number of tokens served by Foundry APIs, we processed over 100t tokens this quarter, up 5x year over year, including a record 50t tokens last month alone.”

In April, Microsoft shared a statistic, revealing their Foundry product is processing about 1.7t tokens per month.

Yesterday, Vipul shared Together.ai is processing 2t of open-source inference daily.

Now that we’ve compressed nearly all human knowledge into large language models, the next frontier is tool calling. Chaining together different AI tools enables automation. The shift from thinking to doing represents the real breakthrough in AI utility.

I’ve built more than 100 tools for myself, & they work most of the time, but not all the time. I’m not alone. Anthropic’s Economic Index report reveals that 77% of business use of Claude centers on full-task automation, not co-piloting.

Like breakfast at a diner, software is cheap & fast to make. Ask for a new task management tool & you’ll have the first version in less time & for less money than an omelette.

AI-built tools may not last long. Some survive only a few minutes, long enough to answer “What’s our turnaround time this week?”

Understanding technology is at the core of how we research new theories. As part of that effort, Theory is starting a developer relations team.

Developer relations for venture capital? What does that mean?

Internally, we’ve built hundreds of agents, we’ve struggled to debug tool calls, tested large action models, & work through AI every day. We’ve hosted events on how to build with AI.

MCP enables an AI to understand which tools rest at its disposal : web search, file editing, & email drafting for example.

Ten months later, we analyzed 200 MCP tools to understand which categories developers actually use.

$4b in revenue run-rate. There are two data giants both now at this mark after Databricks announced it surpassed the threshold.

This is an opportunity to compare the two leading data companies at a revenue intersection.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Both are at $4b in revenue. Each claims over 650 customers paying $1M+ annually. Each boasts strong net dollar retention (140% vs 125%).

Each morning brings the excitement of a world that seems to have changed overnight.

A new model arrives promising a novel way of working. Like unboxing an iPhone in 2008, but with the steady cadence of the near-daily Amazon Prime delivery ferrying its promise of expected newness.

Those gifts present puzzles for those on the cutting edge. They offer the opportunity to look at a problem with a supercharged machine, gleaming tools replacing the loved, blunted ones.

At Theory, we create theories about the future & help them become reality.

A significant part of our work is research, understanding spaces & their evolution. Internally, we’ve been working with living market maps since our foundation.

Today, we’re exposing some of that work on our new homepage theoryvc.com. Our team especially Lauren, Bryan, & Adam have worked to visualize the structure of our market maps into a three-dimensional living market map that we will continue to update.