I asked @alfromnexhealth why most future value in AI will accrue to the action layer: "First, it was the chip makers, like Nvidia. Second, it’s OpenAI and Anthropic. The companies that do the R&D. The research to build the actual LLMs. The third wave, which hasn’t truly come yet, but more and more of the ecosystem is realizing it, is the companies and the infrastructure that takes the LLMs and enables them to actually action stuff in the real world. This is the layer that sits between the physical world and the software world. Where these LLMs can then actually go into the physical world and action that data. A very basic example: if you’re a healthcare practice today, you can use the OpenAI API to build a chatbot product on your website. A patient can chat with it about their condition. And it’ll recommend the right provider, and a time slot in the office to book an appointment. That chatbot or LLM needs to connect to the physical world. "What day is the doctor in the office? What room in the office is available?". All in real time. Because the patient is talking to that chatbot in real time. To then surface, “Hey, here’s what’s available,” and take your information and write it back as well. Otherwise the patient will show up and it won’t be on their calendar. So if you just track the hype cycle: it's chip makers, the companies that build the LLMs, and then the action layer that sits between the LLMs and the physical world."

.@alfromnexhealth on surviving off a $391k Seed round: "We didn’t have any connections to Silicon Valley. Or any VC's at all really. My co-founder and I grew up with immigrant parents. So honestly, we didn't really have any connections to money to begin with. So the way we raised that initial capital was two sources. One was actually a couple of our professors at school. And then a couple of our customers on top. And that’s how we scraped together $390,000. We still have two of those customers on our cap table. Still using us, love us. So honestly it was our customers, and then people we knew, professors, a couple of friends. But then one year later, we almost ran out of cash."

Are tech companies founded before 2022 cooked due to AI? @alfromnexhealth thinks the opposite: "You can't really use AI if you don't have access to the data. We've been building these painful data integrations since 2017. It's actually a huge strategic advantage."

"The state of payment collection in healthcare is insane today. Your doctor usually doesn't actually know who paid their bill. At most offices, employees are manually matching up payments in the PoS terminal to appointments in the system to guess who paid which amount."

From @samdblond on automating intent signals with AI to increase sales conversion rates: "There's a lot of intent signals that you might pick up on that actually benefit the recipient of the email. "I see you have a job posting for this role. We actually automate what that role does." Somebody may have a job posting for an executive assistant. That would be a reasonable time for an AI executive assistant company to reach out and be like, “Hey, saw this posting. Do you want to try us for one week for free? And if we don’t work, you just keep your job search going.” That will convert. It won’t convert 100% of the time. But it’ll certainly convert more than just randomly blasting everybody to see if they want your AI EA. I’ll give another example, and there are a bunch of these, and maybe the takeaway is you should be leveraging these if you’re a founder of a company. We have a customer called Nowadays that does AI event planning. And one of the intent signals is something like, “Agent, crawl the internet and see if you can find a blog post about a company kickoff or a recent offsite that they had.” And then it’s, “Hey, saw your blog post. We can help you plan the next one.” So not only are you reaching out to the right person at the company that planned the thing. But it’s also top of mind. They have a blog post about it, so people read it. Those dramatically increase the likelihood of somebody replying relative to, I’m going to send 10,000 emails to everyone in my TAM with the same message."

From @chudson on why the best Series A's are always expensive: "If you look at companies that were ultimately successful, the price at Seed is very noisy. Some of them are very expensive. Some of them are very cheap. Price is a signal more of capital access than of ultimate value. When you look at Series As, it’s not anything like that at all. The good ones are all expensive. There’s actually a very strong price-quality correlation at Series A historically. And it makes sense. By the A, you should know a lot more about the business, and the ones that look good should get bid up. So it’s one of those things I think about a lot, which is, as information becomes, in theory, better understood, pricing should become somewhat more rational."

From @chudson on why signaling risk from multi-stage firms doesn't exist anymore: "When I first started Precursor, we were in the "founders should beware of multi-stage funds” signaling era. Most seed funds had enough experience with companies backed by multi-stage funds at seed failing to clear the Series A bar, oftentimes with the firm that had done the seed declining to lead the A. And people are like, “Oh, you’re gonna get signaling risk if you take the money.” I’m like, “Well, it’s only a signal if you don’t raise money. And you’re probably only gonna not raise money if you’re bad relative to what else is in that company’s funnel.” This argument carried the day from, say 2010 through maybe 2017-'18. Most founders were like, “I’m open to the idea that taking a seed check from these multi-stage funds is not great for my business.” And then it flipped. And I think it was really driven by repeat founders who were just like, “I know the bar at those funds. If I can’t clear it, whether I have their money or not, I don’t care. Their lack of willingness to fund me is a signal of quality, and I can deal with it.” And I think it eroded this argument that multi-stage funds shouldn’t play at Seed. Because we’d gone through this cycle where multi-stage funds would dabble in seed. They’d create a lot of ill will from founders who they didn’t follow on. And they’d pull back, and they’d be like, “You know, we should just leave this to the seed people.” In a world where AUM is the name of the game... and I’d like to point out that a16z, the firm with the most AUM in our industry, is less than twenty-years old. In less than two decades, they’ve gone from nonexistent to the largest firm by AUM. At some point, if you’re gonna grow AUM, the only way you can do it, if you believe that each of your individual strategies has a different elasticity, you have to be in every asset class. So at some point, the multi-stage folks said, “You know, if we’re really gonna be a tip-to-tail multi-stage VC fund, we actually cannot allow someone else to just do seed for us. We have to have our own product in the market that competes with what they have.” There’s an AUM opportunity here. But there’s also a full lifecycle pipeline opportunity. And their decision to come in, in a permanent way, I do think changed seed."