Arun

John O'Shea at

[Royal Challengers Bengaluru @RCBTweets]

Ee Sala Nu Cup Namdu! ❤️‍🔥🏆

Welcome to the RCB Era, ladies and gentlemen! 😎

You waited, you believed and you stayed… this one’s for you again, 12th Man Army! 🥹❤️

#PlayBold #ನಮ್ಮRCB #IPL2026

[Cadel.ai @cadel_ai]

Episode 3. Rev Rec series.

CFO: $5K Jan credit.
Controller: $100 → $150.
Sales VP: $8K discount.
Audit: 15% constraint.

Variable consideration overrides, governed. ASC 606-10-32-5.

Cadel reads. Classifies. Reallocates. Posts with email cited.

Inbox → GL.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@reddy2go @ponnappa Right. We are no #5 defence budget in the world apparently and are an importer for high end stuff.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@ponnappa @reddy2go IMO requires defence procurement as a sort of a guaranteed buyer of indian advanced tech. we seem far from that. its a better indicator that $4T GDP

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@ponnappa People think lower r&d cost is the saas disruption (vibe code crm over a weekend etc). The actual risk is the end of the recurring revenue pricing model which was just a decoy for cloud penetration.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@harshilmathur @levie It’ll also mean we move away from recurring billing to up front + maintenance models again in enterprises?

[Arun @arunsdevine]

Anthropic investors seem similar to ETH investors during peak crypto cycles where the entire point of apps above them is to enable extreme value capture at ETH layer.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

If I am building an AI App, my incentive is to spend the least in token cost on COGS not the most. And be generous with R&D spends [i.e. token budgets for teams]. Also, ARR is also a terrible metric - it forces one to underwrite the buyer's business' and hence become a quasi-VC.

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

Some solid Q&A on seat vs usage vs outcome pricing for AI. Clearly, no perfect answers but it def made me fine-tune my POV. Views:
> marginal cost of s/w = 0; marginal cost of AI is not. That alone implies you HAVE to find SOME way to correlate price to usage/COGS.
> "but AI labs all do tiered pricing" - actually all AI-lab rev is token metered which is why every tier has rate limits, caps, model gating, etc. Labs are actually the strongest case _for_ token/usage pricing.
> variable cost / task, but customers want predictability; agree - but true only for tasks that have median & mode usage within striking distance; in AI, power users can use 1000x median and seat pricing on variable COGS is a disaster. Needs to be _very_ carefully planned.
> I recall "runaway" usage as a huge issue when we launch bigQuery at GCP; knee-jerk reaction was to limit use; what made BQ a $10B biz was still usage pricing but paired with account budgets, threshold alerts, dry-run estimates. That's a better approach (but harder for long-horizon / unbounded tasks I'd admit)
> "why not do outcome based pricing" - imho, this _is_ usage/token based pricing, just metered at a higher order unit. It works best, again, when median vs mode are similar. e.g. say sierra charges 2$ / resolution, and resolution takes 2min (cost = 0.2$) or 2hrs ($12), the lose on the 2hr call (v low vol) and make money on the 2min call (v high vol). Unbounded agentic tasks need to be metered on usage.

My best guess is that the real uncapped promise & value in AI is on agentic tasks. There is this idea of agentic frontier where if you are more human-assist / co-pilot, you'd end up preferring seat-based but over time as you start solving agentic problems, which is the true value of AI lies, you'd end up above the frontier and shift to usage based. The more unbounded & agentic the problem, the higher the preference for usage pricing. Harvey may be sitting below the frontier today, but will eventually move above.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

IT budgets of medium growth firms like BFSI are $1T+ and they don't operate on an ARR model - they hate variable costs. So much of this ARR + token spend is indistinguishable from crypto circle jerk

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@Jason I’m in

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@ponnappa Sirrr Claude code keeps writing to the wrong worktree when I have 3 CLI windows up. Leave alone replacing Elon with Claude

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@toddsaunders It’s generally been more CAC than build costs.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@illscience It’ll be more token-efficient to write a chrome plugin using Claude to generate such workflow outcomes. Those interfaces don’t change that often and you’d like higher gross margins

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@AmanKabeer11 You needed the SaaS pricing model since your up front cost to build was quite high so you amortised it over multiple customers. If your build cost has collapsed, you can just keep building bespoke solutions. Invest in internal infra that gets you build velocity and scale

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@ku1deep you can also spiced peanuts [congress kadale in bangalore] for the crunch.

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@chribjel Woah. That screenshot is very useful to calculate ARR

[Arun @arunsdevine]

The same will happen to accounting. Everyone becomes an auditor/reviewer. And we get to real time close. ERPs become irrelevant along the way.

[Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj]

Enjoyed this piece on Stripe's Minions: an internal built end-to-end background coding agent

“Over 1,300 Stripe pull requests merged each week are completely minion-produced, human-reviewed, but containing no human-written code”

[Arun @arunsdevine]

@ashugarg The impact of Databricks/Snowflake on enterprise is poorly understood. Internal Audit of firms run a lot more on such Data Lakes than on ERP data. Which makes such Lakes the actual SoRs. And AI Agent shops will just write to Lakes and bypass the entire mess that is legacy ERP