Reflections from a week on the ground.
- 01The dev tool space has never been hotter - emphasised by Figma's recent IPO.
- 02Agentic UIs and workflows are becoming the bare minimum.
- 03Fundraising is rarely a concern to founders in the Bay Area. Founders are raising pre-seed with a Notion doc and hype, despite macro sentiment.
- 04Talent density is unparalleled. So much so that I met a cracked engineer living in his car just to be close to the Bay.
- 05Most founders I met were both extremely technical and could sell ice to Eskimos.
- 06Vertical AI platforms could be huge disruptors to mom-and-pop shops. Think AI-native ERPs for niche markets: AI for insurance underwriting, AI-first factory optimisation, AI-enabled supply chain ordering for dentists. Verticalised solutions with a full-stack GTM, co-built by domain experts, with a network as a moat.
- 07Founders are truly pushing frontiers of innovation more than I've ever seen - agentic deployment in under 5 minutes, agents working with agents, agentic browsers (see the trend?), fitness non-wearables, poop scanners, chat-to-3D-print, and more.
- 08Tremendous long-term efforts in bringing together the ecosystem for upskilling, knowledge sharing, and connecting. I attended startup events at a library, a community centre, a comedy club, an accelerator, and AWS's builders' loft. Shoutout Amazon Web Services for all the free food.
- 09AI on billboards. Everywhere.
Verticalised solutions, full-stack GTM, network as a moat.