What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #458

Clay's 9 year overnight success story continues - not all startups 📈 from inception

I spoke with a West Coast VC this week who mentioned they’re seeking young, ambitious founders capable of scaling from $0-10M ARR with limited capital. They’re finding plenty, especially in vertical industries leveraging agents and agentic workflows. This seems to be the benchmark many top firms are focusing on for Series A. These founders are incredible, simply getting things done, and I absolutely love celebrating real revenue and customer growth over inflated valuations. Take Harvey, for example—hitting $100M in eight quarters is absolutely insane and deserves all the applause! 🤯👏🏼

However, I do have to remind us all, that many startups are toiling away in obscurity, building, shipping, and experimenting to find that magical PMF moment. Please don’t get discouraged. Not every startup is an overnight success. Look at Clay’s numbers (a boldstart portfolio co) - no revenue until year 6 when it hit $600K and now on path to hit $100M ARR this year!

Huge congrats to the entire Clay team and co-founders Kareem Amin and Varun Anand on their new raise at $3.1B!

If interested, I broke down more of their journey in What’s Hot #430 in January this year.

BTW, here’s a slide from their first deck when we invested at Inception.

Also, let’s not forget the lessons of the past! Yes, this time it’s different 🤣, truly it is, but take a look at this post from Jared Sleeper.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

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Scaling Startups

#Success on your own terms!

#👇🏼 💯

#founder and CEO of Cognition (Devin coding agents) on its culture and what it takes to create a company worth $10B in a short time - “extreme performance”

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Enterprise Tech

#API concentration, $1.4B of $3.1B of Anthropic revenue from Cursor and Github Copilot 😲 - another way to think about is that Cursor is losing a ton of money!

this is also the reason why Cursor is building its own model whereas Windsurf decided to sell (more here from TechCrunch)

#vibe coding needs vibe security - ok, this is a great first step from Claude on the pull request but still needs scanning from first prompt like Snyk, a port co

#historical parallels for AI data center Cap X - we’re entering the railroad era…(WSJ), run rate for annual cap x was at $200B last year and now at $400B 🤯

#💯

#will SaaS become disposable software? rapid, low-cost creation to get a job done for the time being?

#simply insane scale as OpenAI executes a consumer first then enterprise model at same time 🤯

#huge release of GPT-5 from OpenAI this week but some backlash as you prompt and it abstracts which model to use - some hate it and want the control back but Reid makes an important point of user experience and reaching more…

#IMO, this is bigger - edge AI coming, privacy, security, speed, control, CHEAP - the version of 04-mini that Jesse is referring to is called GPT‑OSS (gpt‑oss‑120b and gpt‑oss‑20b) that matches the performance of o4‑mini and is fully open-source.

#you can’t make money selling to lawyers 🤦🏻‍♂️ - in a little over 8 quarters

#💪🏻 huge congrats Kustomer (a boldstart portfolio co) - not a bolt-on but full stack CX experience which means more than deflection, getting work done accurately and fast with full context

#n8n enterprise agent platform rumored to be raising at $2.3B valuation - insane growth at $40M ARR and 📈 (Bloomberg)

#agentic traffic 📈 - what’s a good agent versus bad? Battle is just getting started…

#2026 will be the year of…

#2026 is the year agents really are everywhere

#it’s already Palantir time - here’s a quote from Alex Karp as Palantir crossed the $1B quarterly revenue market with a Rule of 94 🤯 and is up 5.6% the day after earnings

With continued execution, and a focus on what matters and a near complete disinterest in what does not, we believe that Palantir will become the dominant software company of the future.

And the market is now waking up to this reality.

AI is real - look at those deal sizes!

#the train your own model era is coming and Hugging Face here to show you how 👇🏼

#slicing and dicing - market map for agent security - great to see Invariant Labs/Snyk on there but missing port co Keycard - worth a read - from Menlo Ventures

#tech trends come and go - for those who don’t remember, GraphQL is a query language for APIs that lets clients request exactly the data they need, making interactions more efficient and flexible.

great comments - ended up being too complex and insecure beyond how facebook used it

#AI eating into consultants - McKinsey faces an existential threat (WSJ)

#food for thought - if this is what social media is doing to us, what about AI 🤔?

#Random - epic time for music 👇🏻 - listened to every one of them on repeat!

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Markets

#great post from friend Tom Loverro at IVP on his 3rd company entering the S&P 500 in 15 years! - speaks about durability, single product to platform, and leadership - worth a read!

#Only the Top 10 matter