Back in ZIRP land, the flex was how much you raised. Bigger round = better company (🙄). Now in the AI era, the flex is all about ARR; specifically, how fast you sprint to $100M. Way better metric, but let’s be honest: not all ARR is the same. Some are padded with pilots, contingent contracts, GMV, or one-offs. ARR ≠ ARR.
That being said, give founders a metric to aim for and they’ll give it to you. While most of these ARR numbers are legit, it’s not all the same. Some $100M ARR companies have lots of contingent contracts which operate more as pilots which can be canceled and others report GMV and others include revenue from one time sales, etc.
Here’s some of the latest:
In the end, we need to look at the longer term horizon as it’s near impossible to grow this fast unless you have a PLG, low friction easy-to-use product or service.
Easy on = easy off.
Case in point, look at the latest buzz around folks moving from Claude agents to Open AI Codex, just like that, a Thanos snap of the finger.
Back to the obsession about time to $100M ARR, here’s one of latest charts.
Brett Taylor, founder/CEO of Sierra and former co-CEO Salesforce, nails the current state of the world on the Triple Triple Double Double Debate - I highly encourage you to 👇🏼 click and watch. It’s still so early to determine who will win and lose.
Growth has accelerated no doubt and getting to 20M fast is fantastic but not direct correlation to $250M or $500M.
Still too early to understand durability of revenue.
First mover matters but what is machine 10 years from now to continue that growth.
Switching costs so much lower for many of these PLG cos and IMO, Easy on = easy off
It’s all about the quality of the revenue and numbers and ability to show sustained execution not just speed out of gate.
It’s still too early to tell.
To that end, ❤️ this flex from Harvey - yeah, our revenue is durable!
It’s wild out there! Keep your wits, stay ambitious, but don’t beat yourself up if you’re not at $100M ARR overnight 🤣. The real wins come from tinkering, iterating, and building cash-efficient businesses with AI leverage and high gross margins. That’s an awesome outcome; even if it’s not what the multi-funders chase. Just look at stories like our very own Clay: proof there are many paths to greatness.
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Scaling Startups
#get people to root for you and your company - great pod on what great storytelling and comms should deliver for you
#🤔
#peak bubble behavior back but exit opportunity is bigger than ever and investors battling for piece of what “might” be…
#rethinking and reframing what burnout is…this is from last month but worth a read
#state of the world in SF and comments are worth 👇🏻 clicking to read
#the future
Enterprise Tech
#yes agents are coming for labor but so are robots - still so many problems to solve especially to get a data set that can train and build models - first up is Gemini’s latest
#next up is GeneralistAI (one of our port cos at boldstart) with insane breakthrough - monkey see, monkey do 🤯 - btw this team is lights out with founders from Deepmind, OpenAI, Boston Dynamics and what you’re seeing is super important to understand:
“Our team constructs a small structure, and the robot copies it. We’re evaluating our models on how well they can build Legos – end-to-end, from pixels to 100Hz actions. No task-specific engineering, no custom instructions: it sees what you build and replicates it.”
co-founder Andy Zeng share the implications of why this is so big!
#here’s Martin from a16z 📣 - many of smartest infra investors I know have been pointing their war chests into robotics - physical agents vs. software only
#sometimes you can just do things - but notice, i can’t tell you what i’m building, it’s secret
#the last mile in the enterprise is the longest so lots of talk of forward deployed engineers and half-baked agents that don’t work yet - lots of new consulting firms being created to just build and get the work done…Dystyl AI - AI Consulting Startup Founded by Ex-Palantir Employees Raises at $1.8 Billion Valuation
#power of distribution - no download, just type, going to be interesting to see how market share evolves for chat and browsers with agents - and Atlassian just paid $600M for a browser?
#must read and watch on AEO (answer engine optimization) - so many great tips and tricks
#🎯
#everyone is competing and all going after same pie!
#congrats to Justin and the Waldo team, 🔥 up for boldstart to have partnered with Justin not once but twice and we’re all excited to work with Footwork! No more prompts, agents that just do your work built on domain specific data moats and real revenue with little 💰 spent - excited for the future!
Markets
#Great discussion
#💯
#kind of feels that way in VC land 🤣
