The Demoralizing Effect of the Open API on the Startup Market

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The current state of the startup market is effectively a horde of generative AI enabled hammers looking for a nail. The reason I'm demoralized by it is because people have forgotten the core lesson in company building, which is you should build something people desperately need. We've been focused on like, this tech is really cool. It's really magical. And I can over the weekend just hack away at it and build something really cool. But then the question is what is ultimately defensible?

How do you build defensible business value in an era when, as AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli said on our last ACQ2 episode, the “cost of intelligence is going to zero”? Longtime friend of the show Jake Saper and his partners at Emergence Capital have been refining their thesis for this brave new world of Generative AI in B2B, and we sit down with him to discuss. We cover topics including:

When do exactly correct answers matter, and when do they not?
When are human-in-the-loop systems necessary?
When do startups have an advantage vs. incumbents, and vice-versa?
Where can companies capture value on a durable basis?
When do you need proprietary data in order to be defensible?

Whether you’re building or investing in existing businesses from the “pre-AI” era or brand new startups that are native to GPT, this episode has plenty of takeaways you should consider. Tune in!

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