One of the challenges of the venture market today is that, for almost every net new opportunity, there are 30 competitors chasing it. Beyond taking on product-market fit and execution risk, these companies face immense competitive pressure. And given how quickly startups are raising capital, many of those competitors are also well-capitalized. A zero-sum thinker might argue that the market is doing itself a disservice by funding a bunch of companies that will inevitably compete head-to-head, potentially eroding each other's margins and returns. Alternatively, you could take a more abundance-oriented view. We're witnessing a fundamental shift in the world order. The TAM for these emerging businesses is enormous, to say the least, and there's plenty of room for AI-native companies to capture meaningful value. One of the hard things, though, is that all the money in the system distorts things. A lot of traction might be coming from fundamentally unsustainable sources of money, meaning that what might look like PMF or strong margins is more the result of a short-term dislocation than a market steady state.

Consortiums often face a tragedy of the commons. People commit loosely and treat participation as a call option: if it works, they benefit; if not, they walk away. So everyone waits for someone else to do the work.

We are seeing a lot of teams build financial products around AI, be it GPU marketplaces, inference marketplaces, etc. Many of these teams are choosing to build these markets on stablecoins since they are out of the box programmable, global, and easy to use.

The internet’s business model was built around attention: free content in exchange for ads. That worked because humans were doing the browsing, and humans can be marketed to. But agents don’t look at ads. As agents start acting on our behalf, the economics of the open web start to break. Why publish for free if your audience is mostly bots? One answer is micropayments. An agent fetching one article or hitting an API once shouldn't have to subscribe at $10 a month. The natural unit of pricing is a fraction of a cent per request. Another path is that advertising mutates. Websites can slip sponsored information directly into their content to influence the agents.