What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #455
A Nanosecond Pause in the AI Frenzy (With a Word from Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko—Yes, That One, AI Edition)
I am as bullish as anyone with this new GenAI and agentic platform shift. However I believe it’s time to just take a pause and reflect for a nanosecond as this space is moving 10x faster than anything before.
Credit to Arfur Rock for calling it out, and yeah👇🏻 🎯 this is not going to end well…
Too much money 💰 all around
And $2B Inception rounds 👀
And perhaps investing in famous founders with no product at massive valuations may not be the way to go???
And can’t even keep missionaries onboard as Zuck going all out throwing lots of cash at key AI researchers
Here’s his rationale as laid out in an interview with The Information - makes a ton of sense.
So yeah, it’s quite a time to be investing and building, but, just a reminder, we’ve been here before - the era of abundant capital - too many companies getting funded but not enough talent to go around.
When the world tips into excess, there’s no better cultural mirror than Gordon Gekko. Some of you may not have seen Wall Street or lived through the ’80s boom, but the vibes? Unmistakable.
Back then, Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good” line defined an era of high-flying ambition, where capital chased charisma over fundamentals. Today, it’s déjà vu with $2B inception rounds, valuations driven more by vibes than traction, and a talent arms race treating AI researchers like oil barons. The packaging has changed. Figma decks have replaced LBO spreadsheets. But the core story remains the same. Narrative over numbers. Missionaries replaced by mercenaries. And a cycle of hype that always ends in correction.
Here’s the original Gekko moment from 1987. Still hits.
Thanks to Google Flow/Veo 3 for bringing Gordon back to life AI version - watch 👇🏼
We’re still early in this GenAI/agentic phase and the swings between excess and fear will gyrate wildly and faster than ever before, but in the end, the biggest and best companies created will create far more value than dollars invested. The problem - way too many companies will die in this era.
But for every Lovable, there are 500 to 1000 others that won’t make it. These are insane metrics by the way with incredible efficiency! (TechCrunch)
Fast-growing Swedish AI vibe coding startup Lovable has become Europe’s latest unicorn. Only eight months since its launch, the startup has raised a $200 million Series A round led by Accel at a $1.8 billion valuation.
…Stockholm-based Lovable helps people use natural language to create websites and apps. The startup’s trajectory so far has charted straight towards the sky, with the company claiming it now has more than 2.3 million active users.
Those users are using Lovable for free, to be clear, but in a recent talk, the startup’s CEO Anton Osika said it now has more than 180,000 paying subscribers, and the company had reached annual recurring revenues of $75 million in seven months. That traction likely contributed to this oversized Series A.
The Series A saw participation from existing investors, which include 20VC, byFounders, Creandum, Hummingbird, and Visionaries Club. In February, Creandum led a $15 million pre-series A round in the company, which at the time said it had reached annual recurring revenue of $17 million and had 30,000 paying customers, with “just $2 million spent.”
The startup has managed this hockey-stick growth with a pretty sparse team of only 45 full-time employees. That’s almost as many as the high-profile angel investors who it said participated in this round, including Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski; Remote CEO Job van der Voort; Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield; and Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah.
The question of course is how durable this revenue is but only time will tell…
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Scaling Startups
#👇🏻 💯 more of this please
#💯
#so you want to work at OpenAI? Here’s an insider’s look
and little email and mostly Slack
#beware of fishing 🎣 expeditions from strategics who reach out…👇🏻 read the 🧵
Enterprise Tech
#read the fine print when you click through Sam’s post 🤣
#second order effects from all of that AI-generated code - small sample set but something many devs complain about
#but still amazing how fast AI coding in enterprise going wall to wall
and…
#huge announcement from Andy Jassy with the launch of Kiro.dev - wild that AWS opted for a separate brand and also this is the first launch of spec-driven development which abstracts development a layer above the code. I do have a dog in this hunt and part of the battle will be what a “spec” actually is - stay tuned for more…
#analyst James Governor of Redmonk does not offer praise like this usually so I’d pay attention
#enjoyed joining Chris Hughes on Resilient Cyber podcast talking about…
I dove into this and much more with Ed Sim recently, including:
- The intersection of venture capital, AI, and cybersecurity
- Success stories such as Protect AI and their acquisition by Palo Alto, and what signal that sent to the industry
- The role of AI-driven development, such as coding agents, copilots, and LLMs, and the implications for cybersecurity
Ed is a longtime investor and industry leader of boldstart ventures, where they recently announced a new fund focused on the "autonomous enterprise", which he also broke down during the discussion.#the age old SaaS vs AI debate…
and my previous comments…
#RL (reinforcement learning) is not the full story from Andrej Karpathy
Scaling up RL is all the rage right now, I had a chat with a friend about it yesterday. I'm fairly certain RL will continue to yield more intermediate gains, but I also don't expect it to be the full story.#Resiliency - CrowdStrike 1 year later post meltdown and stronger than ever 💪🏻
#great to see more use cases moving from coding and support transforming work
#thank you Jensen with the positive vibes for the future with AI
#the data wars continue - in a world of data powering AI, companies are protecting their data from competitors and aggregators - not dissimilar to what Salesforce is doing preventing Glean from accessing Slack data
Markets
#so Google buys the founder of Windsurf and 20-30 key engineers for $2.4B and leaves an $82M revenue business behind so what happens next? Cognition, builder of the Devin agents, made a BOSS move and just bought - what a wild week in AI dev land! 👇🏻 🧵
#Mag7 vs the other 493?
#simply huge
