Perpetual Optimist

Building a research engine

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@TheHolyKau It is not like tooling was the issue earlier - the saas world had great products with mediocre adoption rates within large companies . AI products are feeling the same too.

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

Fair take - one thing that I learned building marketplaces is the fulfilment consolidation becomes the eventual moat. Agents can do most of what marketplace does from discovery standpoint but less so on fulfilment side. Actively managing thousands of hotels to ensure they make revenue on platform is not going to be one of them.

The middle ground I see is agents connecting to marketplaces and sharing the commission revenue.

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@venkyganesan Lovely read. Curious though - does reclusive self learning also mean knowing what to build and improve upon in the economic sense?

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@Trace_Cohen Yeah we are at a point where big rounds with no revenue makes minimal sense. The Anthropic and Open AI IPO will be a reset for the industry.

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@gokulr Is it because you see valuations or momentum collapsing ?

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@pearlagarwal7 Is this because most rounds are bigger? or is it because of less activity in early stage? Any insights on which stages stayed the same and which stages suffered would be appreciated

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@pearlagarwal7 Yeah better to own up. Put across a couple of ideas or pathways and get investor feedback

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@ColinGardiner Yup we are building something similar with that thesis. AI with trained dataset removes the browsing behaviour to a large extent

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@JayaGup10 @VinIyengar Where do operators fit in this?

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@gokulr To add - Understanding the competion & their incentive model also helps a lot with your understanding of how the industry operates

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@ericbahn @pitdesi Too much focus on ARR

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@jrfarr Been a part of three marketplace business before and building one now. The dual sided cold start is always scary than it looks no matter how many times you have done it before.

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@ColinGardiner Agree with this. AI is creating new marketplaces

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@rabois Very interesting!! What are your thoughts on when you should hire one? At what size?

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@agupta I like to think intelligence creation and intelligence absorption have two different pace in real world. The main challenge currently is the latter. Frontier models are already good in the former but need absorptions layers that accelerate transformation

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@dharmesh @bhalligan Congrats!! This is an amazing run

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@fishmanaf @a16z @pmarca The lowering the chairs sounds genuinely funny in my head!!

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@mamoonha Well written!! Conviction based companies dominate S&P 500 market caps over the conventional ones too !! Plays out the same in public markets too.

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@adamshuaib Very well written - in some ways both the biggest companies in the world and biggest VC returns have been conviction bets not conventional bets!!

[Perpetual Optimist @Hopeful_Living]

@anshublog But you are still selling the tool for a price and not the outcome for a price right?

You don’t go and pitch if you hit 100 percent of outcomes pay x dollars, 80 percent pay y and so on.