Mark Ghermezian

Founder & GP @mxvcapital Co-Founder & CEO @Gynger_io & @useTildei Co Founder @Braze, Chairman @Apploi, @edmontonoilers fan

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

Today @Braze is officially a publicly traded company on @Nasdaq. What an incredible journey. #grateful #brazeipo 🙏🙌👊🚀

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

One thing that AI does not have is intuition

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

It’s a bespoke world for software. No longer are customers integrating into your software. You are now integrating into your customers workflows and needs. Headless deployment. Fully customized to their needs.

[vas @vasuman]

https://t.co/PetMluobip

[Dylan Field @zoink]

Quick update: not dead.

$FIG Q1 results:

→ 46% YoY revenue growth, accelerating for the 2nd straight quarter
→ Net Dollar Retention Rate increased to 139%, our highest rate in over two years
→ Raising 2026 revenue guidance for the year

Design matters more than ever.

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@itsdraisteam Ill never understand why they broke up this team after this run. This was the team that would have gotten it done. They left hungry and they tore it up.

[Rory O'Driscoll @rodriscoll]

The weird thing right now is the public markets don't have access to the growth side of software. Right now the trade is to sell SaaS and buy semis (the raw material of AI). What you don’t have yet in the public markets are the AI native software companies and therefore, you’re comparing the practical values of owning say a Salesforce vs the mythical value of owning a company that’s growing 10x (without having seen the actual financials). And everyone is always going to want the myth.

These SaaS stocks aren’t going to trade in a sane fashion until the next generation of AI companies go public and investors can decide how to price a 10% revenue growth company with 30% cash flow vs 300% revenue growth company with negative 100% cash flow and SBC that will blow your mind.

Until then, you’re walking hand in hand with your significant other looking over your shoulder. You know the meme.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Another week on the road meeting with a couple dozen IT and AI leaders from large enterprises across banking, media, retail, healthcare, consulting, tech, and sports, to discuss agents in the enterprise.

Some quick takeaways:

* Clear that we’re moving from chat era of AI to agents that use tools, process data, and start to execute real work in the enterprise. Complementing this, enterprises are often evolving from “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to adoption to targeted automation efforts applied to specific areas of work and workflow.

* Change management still will remain one of the biggest topics for enterprises. Most workflows aren’t setup to just drop agents directly in, and enterprises will need a ton of help to drive these efforts (both internally and from partners). One company has a head of AI in every business unit that roles up to a central team, just to keep all the functions coordinated.

* Tokenmaxxing! Most companies operate with very strict OpEx budgets get locked in for the year ahead, so they’re going through very real trade-off discussions right now on how to budget for tokens. One company recently had an idea for a “shark tank” style way of pitching for compute budget. Others are trying to figure out how to ration compute to the best use-cases internally through some hierarchy of needs (my words not theirs).

* Fixing fragmented and legacy systems remain a huge priority right now. Most enterprises are dealing with decades of either on-prem systems or systems they moved to the cloud but that still haven’t been modernized in any meaningful way. This means agents can’t easily tap into these data sources in a unified way yet, so companies are focused on how they modernize these.

* Most companies are *not* talking about replacing jobs due to agents. The major use-cases for agents are things that the company wasn’t able to do before or couldn’t prioritize. Software upgrades, automating back office processes that were constraining other workflows, processing large amounts of documents to get new business or client insights, and so on. More emphasis on ways to make money vs. cut costs.

* Headless software dominated my conversations. Enterprises need to be able to ensure all of their software works across any set of agents they choose. They will kick out vendors that don’t make this technically or economically easy.

* Clear sense that it can be hard to standardize on anything right now given how fast things are moving. Blessing and a curse of the innovation curve right now - no one wants to get stuck in a paradigm that locks them into the wrong architecture. One other result of this is that companies realize they’re in a multi-agent world, which means that interoperability becomes paramount across systems.

* Unanimous sense that everyone is working more than ever before. AI is not causing anyone to do less work right now, and similar to Silicon Valley people feel their teams are the busiest they’ve ever been.

One final meta observation not called out explicitly. It seems that despite Silicon Valley’s sense that AI has made hard things easy, the most powerful ways to use agents is more “technical” than prior eras of software. Skills, MCP, CLIs, etc. may be simple concepts for tech, but in the real world these are all esoteric concepts that will require technical people to help bring to life in the enterprise.

This both means diffusion will take real work and time, but also everyone’s estimation of engineering jobs is totally off. Engineers may not be “writing” software, but they will certainly be the ones to setup and operate the systems that actually automate most work in the enterprise.

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@hthieblot @elonmusk 🙋‍♂️

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@SkySport_Ben @leo71_official @grok can you translate what he is saying to English

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@HarryStebbings But everyone company will have a $T exit?

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@darian314 @GradientVC @agarfinks @FortuneMagazine Mazal tov!! Amazing partners and people. Well deserved.

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@zjlaing Gun shot trade of skinner and kulak was not optimal. Idk why we didn’t wait till the trade deadline to do something….super frustrating to see this all unravel.

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@ryanwhitney6 We need more than that unfortunately. Our window may have closed :/

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

"An empty chair is better than a chair filled with the wrong person." — Jensen Huang

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@vxanand @clay I heard Canva does something very similar, I really love this.

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong on why the best co-founder disagreements are resolved with a number, not a title:

"It would be a bad move for me to say every time, well I'm the CEO, so I'm making the final call. That's a good recipe to just piss off other people who are working with you."

He and his co-founder agreed on 90-95% of decisions. For the rest, they needed something better than hierarchy.

So they created a simple game: "1 to 5, how much do you care?" played like rock, paper, scissors.

"On three, 1 2 3, we're going to hit, you know, I'm a three, you're a four. All right, let's go your way on this."

The genius is that it exposes what passion alone can't.

You can never tell from an argument how much someone actually cares:

"Sometimes somebody will be like really passionately arguing for something… and then you're like, they're a two out of five. They just love to engage in debate."

So @brian_armstrong added a built-in accountability layer:

Whoever cared more didn't just win the decision — they owned the outcome:

"You care more. Let's go your way, but if it breaks, it's on you to fix it."

When asked what happens if both people are a five out of five, Brian says it essentially never happened once. But if it did, they'd simply flip a coin.

The result?

Faster decisions, no resentment, and conviction paired with responsibility.

You don't need to pull rank to settle a disagreement. You just need a way to measure who cares more.

[P.K. Subban @PKSubban1]

MY GOODNESS MITCH! 📺💨💨💨👀🫳🏿🍿

[Mark Ghermezian @Markgher]

@JoshuaKushner Amazing, well deserved.

[Puru Saxena @saxena_puru]

Jensen Huang: Market is wrong about software stocks

"The notion that AI is somehow going to replace software companies is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself"

Interview date: 3 February 2026