Six‑Week AI Shift Reduces SDRs Tenfold
I remember hosting a dinner of sales leaders to talk about AI. I asked them what will your CRM do for you in the future? Nearly unanimously came the reply : enable salespeople to spend most of their time with customers. Listening to Lenny’s Podcast with Jeanne Grosser, COO at Vercel, I discovered how some companies are achieving that milestone by transforming their inbound sales teams in six weeks. For us, we had 10 SDRs doing this inbound workflow, & now we just have one that is effectively QAing the agent. The other nine, we deployed on outbound. It was six weeks before we felt confident going from 10 to 1. So it wasn’t like this was a multi-quarter process. It actually moved super quickly. We were able to hold that lead to opportunity conversion rate flat. So the agent is as good as our humans were. In retrospect, it should be obvious that speed creates an unexpected advantage. A sales representative, or an AI sales representative, can respond & analyze a lead at any point during the day. It’s important to meet a customer at the point of maximum interest to capitalize on their inertia or excitement. It’s actually condensed the number of touches it takes to convert because it’s so much quicker at responding relative to leads inevitably sitting in the queue or coming in at nighttime & no one can get to it. The build? One engineer, part-time. The person who built the lead agent was a single GTM engineer. He spent maybe 25, 30% of his time on this. The target that every sales leader at that dinner articulated is now within reach. I think we’re getting to a point where with layering in agents, ideally, we finally get salespeople to a point where they’re actually spending 70% of their time interacting with humans. Thirty percent customer-facing time becomes seventy percent. Double the human contact means salespeople developing deeper relationships, driving more success for customers, & less on administration. That’s the promise of AI in the workplace. https://t.co/Lhu5T1ViuK
AI Cuts SDR Team Tenfold in Six Weeks
I remember hosting a dinner of sales leaders to talk about AI. I asked them what will your CRM do for you in the future? Nearly unanimously came the reply : enable salespeople to spend most of their time with...
Rethink GTM Pricing, Hiring, Compensation for AI Scale
Office Hours: GTM Leadership in the AI Era: Pricing, Hiring, and Compensation Thursday, December 11 5:30–7:30 PM PDT As AI-native companies scale, GTM leaders are being forced to rethink long-standing assumptions about pricing, hiring, incentives, and how revenue organizations should operate in a...
Rethinking GTM Pricing, Hiring, Compensation for AI Scale
Office Hours: GTM Leadership in the AI Era: Pricing, Hiring, and Compensation Thursday, December 11 5:30–7:30 PM PDT As AI-native companies scale, GTM leaders are being forced to rethink long-standing assumptions about pricing, hiring, incentives, and how revenue organizations should...
Private Equity : The New Distribution Channel for AI Startups
The post argues that private equity (PE) firms have become the primary distribution channel for AI startups, thanks to the rapid growth of PE‑owned companies—now outnumbering public firms 4:1 in the US. Because PE portfolios consist mainly of mid‑market firms...
AI Market Sizzles: Rapid Change Fuels Excitement
The AI market today is bacon in a hot skillet. Everything is sizzling, moving, & changing at an incredible pace. We’re all watching it closely. Market share is fluid because no one yet knows what AI can do & the...
The Bacon & the Skillet: When Does the AI Market Congeal?
The post likens the rapidly evolving AI market to sizzling bacon, emphasizing that fluid market share and high switching costs are driven by continual model improvements like Nvidia chips and Gemini 3. It argues that while the current phase rewards speed...
Nvidia Earnings and Gemini Tweet Reshape AI Narrative
Two revelations this week have shaken the narrative in AI : Nvidia’s earnings & this tweet about Gemini. The AI industry spent 2025 convinced that pre-training scaling laws had hit a wall . Models weren’t improving just from adding more...
The Scaling Wall Was A Mirage
The post argues that the supposed "scaling wall" in AI pre‑training has been disproven by recent developments: Gemini 3 achieved dramatic performance gains without increasing parameters, showing that algorithmic and compute improvements still drive scaling laws, and Nvidia's record earnings and...
Production AI Teams Favor Open‑Source Models and Database‑Backed Agents
70% of production AI teams use open source models. 72.5% connect agents to databases, not chat interfaces. This is what 375 technical builders actually ship - & it looks nothing like Twitter AI. 70% of teams use open source models...
Microsoft Pivots to Agent‑centric Infrastructure Business
"Our business, which today is an end-user tools business, will become essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work." — Satya Nadella Microsoft talking about their view where the value accrues : agent infrastructure https://t.co/1TaxJpOeCB
Distilling Tool-Calling Skills From Claude to Smaller Model
Ten months ago, DeepSeek collapsed AI training costs by 90% using distillation - transferring knowledge from larger models to smaller ones at a fraction of the cost. Distillation works like a tutor training a student : a large model teaches a...
DeepSeek Cuts AI Training Costs 90% via Distillation
Ten months ago, DeepSeek collapsed AI training costs by 90% using distillation - transferring knowledge from larger models to smaller ones at a fraction of the cost. Distillation works like a tutor training a student : a large model teaches...
Model Firms Risk Winner's Curse without Unique Data
If you're a model company, you may have a winner's curse. You did all the hard work... except it's kind of like one copy away from being commoditized. And then the person who has the data for grounding can go...
Teaching Local Models to Call Tools Like Claude
The author reports a proof‑of‑concept that distills tool‑calling behavior from Claude into a local 20B GPT‑OSS model by logging Claude’s tool selections, curating the data with SemDeDup and CaR, and iteratively refining prompts using DSPy and GEPA. Over three optimization...
Datadog's Platform Shift Drives 25% Quarterly Growth
Datadog is becoming a platform company, & its Q3 2025 results underscore how successful this transition is. If nothing else, the consistency around 25% growth for the last 12 quarters exemplifies this point. Net dollar retention underpins this growth, combined...
AI Promotions Spark Unprecedented Unsubscribe Surge, Exposing Reader Fear
I wrote a post about AI promotions. It triggered the highest unsubscribe rate in this blog's history. A 4-sigma event - expected once every 700 years. The data reveals what readers feared 🧵
Are We Being Railroaded by AI?
The post compares AI infrastructure spending to historic U.S. investment projects, showing AI at 1.6% of GDP in 2024—far below World War II, the New Deal, and the railroad boom. It highlights current corporate outlays (Microsoft, Google, Meta) and projects OpenAI’s...
OpenAI Plans $1.15 Trillion Infrastructure Investment by 2035
OpenAI has committed to spending $1.15 trillion on hardware & cloud infrastructure between 2025 & 2035. 1 The spending breaks down across seven major vendors: Broadcom ($350B), Oracle ($300B), Microsoft ($250B), Nvidia ($100B), AMD ($90B), Amazon AWS ($38B), & CoreWeave...
Cloud‑migrated DuckDB Slashes Podcast Processing Costs
I sleep better knowing my agents work through the night. Less work for me in the morning. My podcast processor transcribes & analyzes conversations. I started on my laptop, needed a little database to collect podcast data & metadata, & booted...
Night‑Shift Agents Let Me Sleep Better
I sleep better knowing my agents work through the night. Less work for me in the morning. My podcast processor transcribes & analyzes conversations. I started on my laptop, needed a little database to collect podcast data & metadata, &...
$555B of Cloud Spend
Microsoft and Google reported surging AI-driven cloud demand, with combined remaining performance obligations and capex commitments swelling to roughly $555 billion as both ramp data-center builds and GPU capacity. Microsoft’s commercial RPO topped nearly $400 billion and Google’s backlog hit...
Double Speed, Ten Percent Cost: Game-Changing Efficiency
Twice as fast & 10% of the cost! https://t.co/Z5m1T8nleq
Public SaaS Stagnates; Private AI Unicorns Lead Growth
As the world follows every whisper & rumor from AI, what has happened to public SaaS? The answer is not much! All the fun is in the private markets. Multiples haven’t moved outside of a narrow band since the post-Covid crash in...
Product‑Market Fit Is Ongoing, Not a One‑Time Milestone
There’s this notion that product market fit is this binary condition that once you pass the gate, you’re done. And that’s no longer the case. Product market fit is like United Miles. You continue to fly to maintain 1K. And...
Product-Market Fit Is No Longer Static
Venture investor Tomasz Tunguz argues product-market fit (PMF) is no longer a one-time milestone but a continuous condition because rapid advances in AI are constantly reshaping customer needs and technical possibilities. He points to firms that lost PMF between 2021–2024,...
Scaling AI: Strategies for Building Intelligent Systems
How do you build AI systems that scale? On Nov 12 in SF, I’ll host Calvin French-Owen (Co-founder & former CTO @Segment, led @OpenAI's Codex launch) for a Theory Ventures Office Hours conversation on scaling intelligent systems. We’ll dig into: ⚙️ Building...
From Columns to Rewards: Automating the Two Pillars That Drive Modern AI
Former Google engineers automated feature engineering with AutoML—turning manual spreadsheet column tinkering into processes that added tens to hundreds of millions in revenue—and the author argues reinforcement learning (RL) is now at that same inflection point. Today RL can generate...
Choose the Right Location for Your AI Agents
It’s 9:30 AM. Do you know where your agent is? As we enter the era of agentic AI, this is an increasingly important question. ChatGPT launched the consumer use of AI, compressing all of human knowledge into a single model....
Know Your Agent’s Real‑Time Location at 9:30 AM
It’s 9:30 AM. Do you know where your agent is? As we enter the era of agentic AI, this is an increasingly important question. ChatGPT launched the consumer use of AI, compressing all of human knowledge into a single model....
AI Becomes New Mass Media, Replacing Traditional Web Browsing
I asked Claude this morning about the most important news in tech. A few follow-up questions about Salesforce’s Dreamforce, Samsung’s XR headset, & TSMC earnings later, I popped over to ChatGPT Pulse. It suggested some updates about the Fed’s rates...
AI Assistants Streamline Daily Tech and Finance Updates
I asked Claude this morning about the most important news in tech. A few follow-up questions about Salesforce’s Dreamforce, Samsung’s XR headset, & TSMC earnings later, I popped over to ChatGPT Pulse . It suggested some updates about the Fed’s...
Fivetran‑dbt Merger: A Natural Evolution of Data Stack
Why was the Fivetran-dbt merger all but inevitable? Fivetran & dbt Labs announced their merger yesterday. The all-stock deal combines two companies into an entity approaching $600 million in ARR. The beauty of the modern data stack was the explosion...
The Data Pendulum Swings to Consolidation
Fivetran and dbt Labs have announced a merger in an all-stock deal, creating a combined entity with an anticipated annual recurring revenue (ARR) nearing $600 million, signaling a strategic shift towards consolidation in the data infrastructure market. This merger reflects...
Is Token Consumption Growth Slowing Down?
Philip Schmid dropped an astounding figure1 yesterday about Google’s AI scale : 1,300 trillion tokens per month (1.3 quadrillion - first time I’ve ever used that unit!). Now that we have three data points on Google’s token processing, we can chart...
