One of the things I love about AI is that it forces overpriced legacy products to step up their game Someone put ChatGPT on to their family history search In a few hours, it turned up WAY more than a paid Ancestry account had in years 👇

This argument gets thrown at consumer / prosumer startups all the time. IMO, it’s almost always deeply flawed. Here’s why: - Products that feel magical might seem easy to use, but they are almost never easy to build. There is a lot of thought and craft that goes into them. You can reverse engineer the product but not the intuition behind it. This will keep the startup’s product ahead of the game - If a bigco could do it, they would have done it. I have seen many cases of a bigco attempting to replicate what seems like a “thin” product and failing to the degree that it never even ships. To the Siri example - we’ve been talking about a functional Siri for 15 years, and for three years now post-LLMs. Apple has 170k engineers and a $4.5T market cap…if it was easy to fix Siri, they would have fixed Siri - Turning a large boat is hard. Sometimes, fixing or improving a legacy product isn’t actually about the technical complexity of doing so. Large companies have infinitely more bureaucratic hurdles and political battles that prevent progress. They also have existing business lines that they need to be careful about cannibalizing, especially when they are accountable to quarterly earnings reports. Google has a whole army of VPs holding back innovation 😂 - Big companies are stuck in their existing product interfaces. When you have 100M users on your product, changing how something little works in that product - or even introducing something new - is a big deal (which, to the point above, could mess up those numbers you’re responsible for!) The risk of screwing up something that is technically “working” at major scale is often not worth it. They are also stuck in their existing operating systems - whereas a startup can ship a product or feature that is device / OS-agnostic. Apple is unlikely to build a Wispr Flow clone that works on Android - so if you have an Apple laptop and a Google phone, you’re out of luck - New products can achieve lock-in before incumbents catch up. This is especially true for product with network effects or compounding data advantages. Say Apple did perfectly replicate Granola tomorrow. I already have 2.5+ years of very valuable meeting data stored there, and it has context on me that is not transferable or ingestible by Apple. If you’re asking “what if X big co builds this….” the startup product usually has enough psychological, behavioral, or contextual loyalty that it is too late to just rip and replace it

Ask for other VCs: Please don’t aggressively reach out to a startup’s customers (esp when they aren’t fundraising) to do diligence There are many ways to do this that are much less disruptive to customer relationships 🙏 (at the very least, ask the founder first!)

Books with at least some AI detectable text now capture nearly half of observed industry sales And in Sci-Fi, 40% of the top 25 slots are have substantial AI text People like AI-assisted content..otherwise they would not be paying for it

A debut author's $2M contract (a "dazzling" manuscript with a massive bidding war) was cancelled due to suspicions of AI use The author denies the allegations But I am once again asking...if someone uses AI to make something that other people like, what's the problem?

Congrats to @Whatnot on their Series G! When we @a16z first partnered in '21, live shopping was mainstream in China but hadn't meaningfully shown up in the US. Now, Whatnot is the standard for live commerce and is the largest live commerce platform in North America and Europe. @GrantLaFontaine and @loganhead13 are relentless, and they'll keep expanding categories and service levels.

Data from @Shopify's earnings call on AI's impact on commerce 👇 TL;DR - the time to optimize your product for agents is now -3x YoY increase in AI traffic + AI-originated orders -AI-referred new buyers convert at 2x order rate - 75% of AI-referred orders were in long tail categories (outside top 100) - LLM-referred visits are 2.5x more likely to send users to a specific product page vs. non-AI search

I can count on one hand the number of product experiences I've had that feel so magical I almost doubt it's real Calling @HappyRobot's first voice agent in early 2024 was one of these This team knows how to build AI that gets things done in enterprises - and they're expanding!

We just raised a $150M Series C at a $1.2B valuation led by Prysm Capital and co-led by @eurazeo. 🦄 Two years ago we deployed one voice agent in a US freight broker. Today, we’ve deployed a full platform in over 150 enterprises globally across supply chain, energy and utilities, telecom, insurance and airlines. 5x growth since our Series B. Some of those incredible customers include @DHLGlobal , @Kuehne_Nagel, @Naturgy, @Repsol, and @Uber. We’re building Enterprise Superintelligence: the state where an organization's collective intelligence compounds as agents and humans learn from one another. And it starts by deploying your first agent. Much like that first agent we deployed two years ago. Thank you Prysm and Eurazeo. And to @a16z, @Base10Partners, and @ycombinator for doubling down. Thank you to the 200 @HappyRobot folks who worked so hard to make this happen. If you need us, we’ll be heads down, building a world where things just work. ▶️ & Thank you to our strategic investors including including @DisruptiveKoch, @orange, (@deutschetelekom), @Bankinter, @endeavor_global, @Kfundvc and Wave-X.

Someone bought a billboard in SF to advertise a new LLM ...but the LLM is a real guy answering every message, including image gen requests he hand-draws He's been talking to thousands of people per day, and had to pause new usage due to overwhelming demand (h/t @tucksbryant)

We @a16z spend a lot of time with vertical AI startups. But how do you get a toehold when buyers aren’t on LinkedIn, or don’t have IT teams? Takeaways from our convo with @LassieAI’s founders, who passed $10M ARR selling AI to run dental practices 👇