Harry Stebbings@HarryStebbings8h ago

What a nuts week it has been in tech! - Factory vs Cognition: The Battle Continues - Vinod Khosla Tweets a Storm - OpenAI Hits $70BN Run Rate - Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B More heat in this than a Sequoia tranched round!!! 😉 My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @dittycheria 1. Why Is It Wrong for CROs to Jump Jobs So Easily? CROs recruit their teams by selling them on the company, the vision and how the role could transform their families' finances. A CRO who leaves for a direct competitor burns their reputation with everyone they recruited. Moving to a company in a different space for a better opportunity is common, but flipping straight to a direct rival is far rarer. 2. CROs Are Promiscuous and This Is How They Find Jobs The CRO role carries high risk and heavy turnover, and when a hot job opens up, CROs tend to move very quickly. Roughly 95% of CROs would likely see a jump to a competitor as normal, since that is how many of them found their last job. For CEOs, watching an advisor leave to join a competitor is still profoundly frustrating. 3. What Are You Doing Vinod Khosla? Vinod Khosla's tweet handed every firm competing with Khosla Ventures a weapon on deals. Rival investors can now ask founders, "Is this the partner you want when things go bad?" The reaction was shocking, given that Khosla Ventures has a great team. 4. Should We Invest in ElevenLabs at 22 Billion? At a $22B valuation, ElevenLabs merits up to 10% of the fund. Its lead keeps widening despite intense competition, backed by strong growth, surprisingly impressive margins and sub-millisecond voice response times. Voice is one of the 10 most important underpinnings of agentic applications, and ElevenLabs could soon be approaching $1B in revenue. 5. What Makes a Durable Company in 2026? Durable companies create a data loop where users generate data no one else has, that data improves the product, and a better product attracts more usage. Competitors can copy the features, but they cannot copy the user interactions behind them. 6. When Agents Pick You, It's a Force of Nature Vercel has reached $600M in ARR, with agents now driving 50% of its new business, up from 3% at the start of the year. Agents form strong opinions about which vendors to use, and those choices are hard to argue with. Companies now need agents to find them and understand what they sell, because missing from an AI-generated answer is like being invisible on Google. (links in comments)