Standard Capital

The AI-native Series A firm.

Founders: @daltonc @paultoo @berg

Makers of @StandardDB

[Paul Buchheit @paultoo]

What it takes to reach $100B

Fewer than 0.1% of startups will ever be worth more than $100B, but those that do will have an outsized impact, so it’s worth understanding which companies have the potential and what it takes to get there.

Examining the history of these massively successful companies, it becomes clear that there are two ingredients necessary to reach $100B.

First, they must be building in a rapidly growing market of unlimited size. For example, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and AMD all emerged as part of the exponentially growing microcomputer market. These companies started when microcomputers were still relatively new and obscure. Micro-soft’s first product, Altair BASIC, was incredibly niche — MITS only ever sold about 25,000 Altairs, but that was the start of what is now a $3T company.

Likewise, Amazon, Google, and Facebook all became $T companies by growing with the Internet. Stripe ($160B) makes this dynamic explicit in its mission statement: “Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet”.

Why now? $100B opportunities only exist for a limited time. If a company could have been started 20 years earlier, then it’s unlikely to have $100B potential. Important new technologies create massive new opportunities, but those windows of opportunity don’t last forever. For example, it was not possible to start Uber or DoorDash five years earlier because mobile platforms such as the iPhone did not yet exist, and it wasn’t possible to create them five years later because the opportunity had already been captured.

Large but slow growing markets rarely produce $100B companies. For example, startups selling to dentists or auto mechanics are not good candidates to reach $100B. A simple test is to ask if demand will increase 10x or 100x in the next ten years. Startups thrive when capturing a slice of a rapidly growing pie, not fighting zero-sum games against incumbents.

The second ingredient is defensibility, a durable control point in the market. If your company is making billions of dollars, that will attract a lot of interest from potential competitors.

This defensibility is typically provided by one or more of the following dynamics:

- Marketplaces like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Uber aggregate supply and demand.

- Platforms like Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Salesforce, and OpenAI provide a foundation for large ecosystems to grow.

- Foundational infrastructure companies like TSMC, AWS, Stripe, and Arm become hard-to-replace dependencies.

- Workflow systems like ServiceNow, Intuit, SAP, Oracle, and Workday become the default systems of record and action.

- Deep tech companies like ASML, Tesla, and SpaceX require extraordinary technical, manufacturing, operational, regulatory, and capital execution to reproduce.

Competing head-on with these companies is nearly impossible. They effectively “own” their slice of a large and rapidly growing market, which earns them high revenue multiples, lower cost of capital, and the ability to acquire smaller companies and hire top talent.

Probably fewer than 1% of startups have the potential to reach $100B, and of those, fewer than 10% will ever realize that potential. However, it is our belief that we can improve those odds by building a community of the most impressive founders working on the most ambitious ideas.

We are creating the “$100B Seed Group” to bring together these early founders in our group office-hours format, to periodically meet, review, revise and strategize their Path to $100B. Apply now if you would like to be a part of the program. The first cohort will be limited to 10 companies.

Any startup from YC P26, W26, F25, or S25 is eligible. Applications are due by May 28th at 9pm PT.

https://t.co/HrECOFvyz8

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

YC founders from P26, W26, F25 and S25, this is for you 👇

[Paul Buchheit @paultoo]

We're bringing back the $100B office hours!

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

A message for recent YC founders

[StandardDB @StandardDB]

New offer from @ashbyhq just went live on StandardDB

[Standard Capital @Standard_Cap]

Link to video:
https://t.co/ZmHIW1Y9we

[Standard Capital @Standard_Cap]

Will AI kill all startups?

It's not as simple of a "no" as one would hope, and something @paultoo and @daltonc debate all the time.

Topics discussed: moats, implicit bets the models wont improve, "turkey startups", and more

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

Trigger is growing faster the bigger it gets via a combination of their existing customers growing + the product rapidly improving which attracts new customers and usecases♻️

[Pete Koomen @koomen]

This was a fun conversation with Matt and Eric about design and how they built and rebuilt @triggerdotdev 3x before finding product market fit. Congrats on your Series A, guys!

[Hunter Leath @jhleath]

after months of development, we're starting to roll out the private beta for branching on Archil disks. this will make us the first elastic file system to support checkpoints and branching, which is super exciting.

if you're working with agents and need the ability to do rollbacks and forking of your file system state, reach out if you'd like to be in the beta!

[Owen @owenoktay]

Raising from @Standard_Cap was one of the best decisions we've ever made at @boltohq

Check out the interview!

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

Bolto is a single platform that provides AI-native recruiting, HR and payroll in the same product, from YC S23.

I just posted an interview with @mrinalsingh02 and @jakeatbolto, the founders of @boltohq, about their recent $ 12M Series A from @Standard_Cap.

Link below

[Hunter Leath @jhleath]

Archil is rapidly becoming the most flexible and versatile way for agents and services to work with file data. The addition of a first-class, strongly-consistent S3 API just makes that better.

Internally, we're finding it super useful to share large files that our agents are working on in Slack, without needing to spin up a server to access the data.

Let us know what else we need!

[StandardDB @StandardDB]

Good news, @ElevenLabs now has an offer on StandardDB

[Standard Capital @Standard_Cap]

@kushbhuwalka For post PMF startups it’s worth thinking about, not intended to be instructions on what to spend all of your time worrying about

[Standard Capital @Standard_Cap]

@daltonc @archildata @jhleath 🫡

[Hunter Leath @jhleath]

delighted to sit down with Dalton to share more about Archil's past, present, and future!

it's kind of funny that the AI agent space is moving *so quickly* that even this video that we recorded (just a few weeks ago!) doesn't capture a lot of the updates that have recently happened -- such as Archil's Serverless execution.

super excited for what's to come next, and thrilled to partner with @Standard_Cap on it.

interested startups can try Archil for free by signing up via @StandardDB

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

As part of leading the Series A for @archildata, I sat down with the founder/CEO @jhleath

We discuss:
- What exactly Archil is, and why anyone building agents should evaluate it
- Why LLMs understand filesystems better than pretty much any other technology
- Hunter's 10 year career at AWS working on filesystems
- A case study of how Clay is using Archil
- What it was like raising a Series A from Standard Capital

and more!

[Dalton Caldwell @daltonc]

We led the @BoltoHQ Series A.

Bringing recruiting, compliance and payroll into a single product is inevitable. In addition, the prior playbook to scale this sort of company would have been oriented around scaling headcount/blitzscaling, and we believe now is the right time for an AI-native approach. The opportunity is massive.

[Mern Singh @mrinalsingh02]

We raised $12M led by @standard_cap with participation from @ycombinator, @generalcatalyst, and others.

@BoltoHQ is the first AI-native, proactive HR platform that lets teams find talent, run payroll, and manage compliance globally, all in one place.