The Monaco Plane: Economics and Impact.
If you've been in SF over the last 10 days, you've likely seen the Monaco Plane flying around. I'm receiving countless messages asking about how expensive it is and if it's working.
So here are those answers:
In the last 18 months too much capital chased a tiny pool of companies — the enabling layer for AI: models, chips, neo clouds. The building blocks are in place and compute capacity is actively getting built.
In the coming 12-18 months, we'll see the attention and capital rotate to Apps re-imagining workflows end-to-end with AI.
The tell: faster horses, or the car? Automating the human workflow is a faster horse. Re-imagining the problem entirely with AI is the car.
Never been a better time to be an AI Apps Investor! 🤩
Sources: at Build, Microsoft plans to unveil a Copilot "super app", a new reasoning AI model developed by Microsoft AI, and lots of Windows developer features (@tomwarren / The Verge)
(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
For two decades, developer infrastructure companies optimized for the first five minutes of developer adoption. Then AI coding agents showed up and the bottleneck shifted from getting developers to install your SDK to getting it implemented correctly across the entire organization.
That's where Agent Skills come in. These are small, installable context packages that teach AI coding agents what your company’s best solutions engineer knows about how your product works. One command, and every interaction the agent has with a codebase carries deep, opinionated knowledge of your SDK.
Great SDK documentation has always been a form of distribution. Agent Skills are documentation that executes. The companies building them now are pre-loading their adoption curve into every AI-assisted developer workflow.
Read more on Agent Skills from Battery's @webaficionado and @BarakSchoster: https://t.co/V1TfwUVscq
@JayaGup10 Love it.
Most AI startups are lifting and shifting -- taking a human workflow and transforming it into an agentic automation or building tools to enable this shift.
Very few are entirely reimagining the problem space using AI and those who do will create the next big thing!
@pitdesi@nbobba This is excellent - I have two speaker recommendations for you: Parker Ence (@JumpAdvisorAI) and Amrish Singh (@LiberateInc). Both these companies have become reference names in their respective industries.
The clearest signal a SaaS company has become an AI company? Revenue is accelerating on net new adds.
Only 5⃣ companies pass that test: Gong*, Hightouch, Intercom, Notion, and Ramp.
Kudos @ivanhzhao and @akothari 👏
*denotes a Battery portfolio company
Closed Q1 last week. Revenue is accelerating for the 7th straight quarter. AI now counts for 60% of our business. Cash flow positive.
The transition from software to AI is not easy, but can be done! I am proud of our teams!
Boris Cherny of Anthropic on $NOW: "If I'm doing something and I don't have the context, I'm not going to do a great job... ServiceNow is a really a great way to bring in that context that it needs to do the job."
ClickHouse might deliver on the “App Store” vision Snowflake / Cloud Data Warehouse never quite pulled off.
Who’s building next-gen AI Apps on top of @ClickHouseDB? 🤔
Two years ago, companies were paying $200K for "Prompt Engineers." Now every knowledge worker prompts AI daily — ChatGPT, Claude, whatever. Great technology democratizes itself. It's only a matter of time before anyone can build end-to-end agentic apps.
So much of the world’s AI innovation is happening within a 4 sq mile radius of San Francisco… and yet, you ask someone living in SF vs. Palo Alto vs. South Bay about AGI, whether SaaS is dead, or if Claude eats AI Apps, you’ll get completely different answers.
What a time to be alive! 😇