What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #475

Let the AI giants battle while founders keep building and winning

Dec 06, 2025

It wasn’t too long ago that every year we’d show up at AWS’s invite-only VC roadmap preview and realize we were basically attending our own red wedding. AWS was so big and the buzz so overwhelming that it felt like they might swallow the entire ecosystem. Fast-forward to today and the energy feels very different. For a while it looked like OpenAI might become the new AWS and eat the world, but this week showed the first real cracks in that armor with its Code Red moment and a forced shift in focus. Which brings us to what actually matters for builders watching all this unfold.

OpenAI issues a code red and Benioff kicks ’em while they’re down implying all of the value is in the app layer where Salesforce plays. Nothing new here, except the takes are getting even spicier as Michael Burry continues to amp up on his short position on all of AI tech from Nvidia on down. But here’s what actually matters for founders: none of this determines who wins. The market isn’t rewarding the most advanced model today… it’s rewarding the teams getting real workflows into production. The faster you can ship, automate, and deliver ROI, the more value you create. And that pace is accelerating, not slowing.

After a week full of model drama, it’s worth remembering what every serious enterprise builder already knows. The game isn’t about picking a single model. It’s about orchestrating many. Accuracy, latency, cost, and workflow criticality dictate the choice, not brand loyalty. Brett Taylor calls it a constellation of models. He’s describing the architecture that will dominate the next decade.

This all reminds me of a conversation I had with John Furrier at The Cube back in early 2024 about where AI was headed and why the model wars were always going to give way to workflow-driven architecture. Still true today.

If you don’t want to watch the video, Silicon Angle story here.

And while the U.S. platforms are trading headlines, China is quietly pushing the frontier. Founders across the boldstart portfolio are already mixing Qwen, DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Anthropic in production. Competition is intensifying across every layer of the stack, and that’s exactly what keeps the ecosystem healthy.

Builders stay the course. Competition among model providers only expands what you can automate. And nothing like a little pressure to make sure OpenAI doesn’t eat the world.

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

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Scaling Startups

#i read the book awhile back and there are some great lessons in here

#this is how it’s done

#fantastic advice and framework

#sadly too many of these situations out there - you raise too much at too high a price and don’t execute, you lose your optionality

Enterprise Tech

#how to be worth $32B and continue shipping quality products with insane velocity…most of gates automated and powered by AI

#all of this advice is pure 🔥 so posting the whole thread here

#everything you missed at AWS in one post other than the VC parties 🤣

#LT bullish - one of crypto’s core value propositions - tokenization of real world assets to allow instant liquidity

#AI talent wars are insane

#more autonomous agentic hacking, this time for smart contracts and all things crypto - huge implications for security - glad we have Hypernative to help 😄