Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings1d ago

I think @NaveenGRao is one of the most under-discussed but brilliant entrepreneurs of our time. He is able to consistently see where a market is going and place himself ahead of it. - Founded Nervana and sold to Intel for $400M. - Founded MosaicML and sold to Databricks for $1.3BN. - Raised $450M seed round at $4.5BN valuation for Unconventional. This success has given him license to say things that few people would have the confidence to say. - “Most software investors today are f*****”. - “Agentic coding is overrated and uninvestable”. - “It is completely techno-optimist to assume companies will have their own models and own their own intelligence”. This discussion rallies against some of the conventional beliefs of the valley in a way you have not heard before. My notes from the discussion with Naveen below. (Link in comments). 1. Are Software Investors F**ked? Pure software investors are "kind of f**ked" because SaaS will no longer be where margin is gained. Since around 2010, cloud services let founders spin up products quickly and chase $100M to $200M markets. As applications shift toward the intelligence layer, Naveen does not see software being a huge market in 20 years. Do you agree software investors are f***** in a much more infra/hardware centric landscape @PalmerLuckey @mttgrmm @shaunmmaguire 2. Why Agentic Coding Is Overrated and an Uninvestable Category Agentic coding is overrated as a market because the value moves to the model provider. The harness and the IDE are not very sticky, and people move between tools fluidly. Outside of the model providers, it is a category he would not invest in today. What is the single biggest reason why the coding agent should not sit within the model provider @ScottWu46 @matanSF 3. Is It Completely Techno-Optimist to Assume That Companies Will Own Their Own Intelligence With Their Own Specialized Models? Owning your own intelligence takes scale. A firm like Cooley can invest to make it happen, while a mom-and-pop shop in Nebraska will buy an out-of-the-box service instead. Big players will customize because rivals using AI to supercharge their margins force them to. 4. Where Is the Value in the Robotics Stack? The value in robotics will not sit in the model alone. Naveen invests in companies building robotics models and expects them to end up building end-to-end devices, selling the robot together with a model that does something very well. Where will the most value accrue in the robotics stack? Model? Data? Hardware? @tonyzzhao @joshavata @bercankilic 5. Why Steve Jurvetson Is My Favorite Investor Meeting Of roughly a thousand investor meetings, the one that stood out was with @FutureJurvetson. He geeked out on numeric representations and marked up the papers Naveen sent him like a technical colleague. In 2014, when no one had pitched a hardware startup in 10 years, he was keen to invest because he had been thinking about the space himself. 6. How American Investors Differ From European Investors Founders in the US are given permission to think bigger. In Europe, the investor network is so conservative that a founder with a crazy idea is written off as mad, while in the US the same founder is seen as awesome for thinking big. EF has largely moved focus to the US and SF specifically, would you agree with this @Alicebentinck @matthewclifford? 7. Why the Inference Market Will Be $10 Trillion Within 10 Years AI models alone will be a trillion-dollar market in the next few years, and inference will reach $10 trillion within 10 years. Cutting the cost of delivering a token by one order of magnitude effectively 10Xs the market, since the base of potential uses grows more than 10X, which Naveen ties to Jevons paradox. What does no one see that everyone should see about the inference market @GavinSBaker @lqiao @bernhardsson