NEW: The Death of Spreadsheet Investing. Inside Benchmark's New AI Playbook Everett Randle (@EverettRandle), GP at @benchmark Why every golden rule of SaaS just got inverted & how AI is rewriting venture investing: › You can now pass $1B+ in revenue with unproven unit economics.. › Late-stage companies can have much higher upside than a Series C Benchmark's AI Bets: Cerebras, Manus, Mercor, Sierra, Legora, Fireworks, Exa, Starcloud, Gumloop.. We cover: › The Disorientation: Scale No Longer De-Risks a Company › What Happened to the Golden Rules? › AI Inverted Nearly Every Framework › New Taxonomy: P x Q x M › Inference Is the Demand Engine › Tokenomics: Frontier vs Open Source › The Liquidity Shock: Reframing the Returns Math › Benchmark's Model: Founders Over Themes 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark (00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM (04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone (08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics? (12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories (15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis (19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud (23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas (26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving (27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI (31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap (34:44) Inside the new funding playbook (40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm (42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen (49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets (52:54) The mentors who shaped him