💰💰 “if you strip away the UI and expose the database, what are you actually left with? How is that different from a Postgres database, a well-designed schema, and an API? …The defensible layers shift downward into data models, permissions, workflow logic, and compliance, and upward into networks, proprietary data generation, and real-world execution.”

Last month Salesforce announced it would open its APIs and launch a headless product, essentially betting that in an agentic world, its value lies in the data layer, not the UI. The announcement is a useful prompt for a more interesting question: if you strip away the UI and expose the database, what are you actually left with? a16z's Seema Amble on where defensibility moves in the agentic era & how businesses will adapt:

Many of the big cos that will make it are likely the ones that benefit from the complexity that AI creates vs just betting on new agent success (also Datadog is more infra and not pure play SaaS - harder for the latter)

Today we’re announcing Tessera’s $60M Series A led by @a16z. Enterprise transformation is broken – years-long timelines, massive cost, and high failure rates. Tessera is rebuilding it with AI, delivering in weeks what used to take years. We’re hiring engineers, researchers, and operators who want to help rebuild how the world’s most important systems evolve. If that’s you, reach out.

Kabir Nagrecha is the single smartest person I’ve ever met. After starting college at 13, he graduated from UCSD with a CS degree at 17, earned his PhD there at 20 (his advisor described him as “the strongest research student I have ever advised/mentored in my career”), and spent a few months as a researcher at Meta before founding Tessera. In the 18 months since, he’s closed multimillion-dollar contracts with enterprise CIOs and recruited a team of more than 30 people (including six people from Netflix, where he was an intern). They say you should bet on slope instead of y-intercept, and both Kabir and Tessera’s slope have been one of one. Delighted to be working with him and his team to disrupt the largest market in software - if you’d like to work with him as well, he and Tessera are hiring quickly.

The way software is implemented and maintained has changed. Tessera is defining this new reality -- we are so excited to be joining Kabir and the team on the journey! 🚀🚀 @seema_amble @zephratic

the latest from the API wars front: SAP is now locking down its API access to third parties, essentially blocking AI companies. Like many others, SAP can't really compete on building its own agents, so the next best thing is to put up the gates to protect its data and spread FUD about how AI startups are a security risk. This strategy will only work for so long...

The API wars are here, with AI apps this time. Incumbents know the value of their data and that AI startups may start rebuilding their products behind the scenes - and they’re starting to fight back. Slack just cut off API access which impacts Glean and others. Zendesk may follow. But full-on API blockades probably won’t hold. Here’s what’s more likely to happen 🧵: