Investors at TechCrunch Disrupt didn’t shy away from admitting that they’re mostly interested in one thing: artificial intelligence.
Nina Achadjian from Index, Jerry Chen from Greylock and Peter Deng from Felicis talked about the latest obsession in venture capital and how startups can stand out in a rapidly crowded market. The environment is moving fast, Achajian told the crowd, and companies are experiencing unprecedented growth.
“We spend a huge, huge amount of time really evaluating the entrepreneur and how resilient they are going to be able to be in a time where things are changing rapidly,” Achajian said. Now more than ever, founders must tend to show their passion, their domain expertise and remain honest about their product-market fit, he said.
“There’s so much demand from businesses to try the latest and greatest AI, sometimes there are false positives in product-market fit,” he explained, “and you can make a lot of revenue without getting a real ROI,” meaning customers getting a return on their investment.
This drives another consideration that VCs look for: the ability to pivot as the market twists and turns. “There’s a joke that, like, 1000 startups die, and that’s why being resilient is very important,” Achajian continued.
Deng, who used to work at OpenAI, added to Akhajian’s remarks. He said founders need to find the unique pieces of data that will separate them from the hordes of everyone pitching the exact same idea, especially since the companies that are likely testing their products are also testing a few other competitors at the same time.
“If you’re able to drill down and really solve a real need for them,” in a way they can’t do on their own, then data management is “the important part,” he said.
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Founders should also have an answer for why their product won’t just be a feature added to base models, Achajian said. It might be okay if a founder doesn’t know if the model makers are working on a competitor, but they should have a case for how the business is defensible when pitching investors.
Right now, what’s working in AI seems to be three things, Chen noted: Chat apps, coding apps, and AI in customer service. However, there are still many more changes that need to happen at the beginnings of every sector and industry.
Deng is excited by AI-enabled markets. Achajian, meanwhile, believes this could be the moment for robotics, while Chen is curious to see how AI affects SaaS and other markets that aren’t yet directly affected.
As for what isn’t AI and exciting? “Pen and paper is processed and digitized,” Ahajian said. There are many industries that, incredibly, still do a lot of manual processes, he continued. However, they recognized that even this is ripe for the opportunity to be automated by artificial intelligence.
