Length of tasks Al startups can automate is doubling every 7 months

3 trends in startups/tech/venture

🚀 Length of tasks Al startups can automate is doubling every 7 months

• The length of tasks AI can automate has been increasing exponentially. If sustained, AI will be able to handle week-long tasks in 2-4 years.

• As AI can handle longer tasks, startups can start to not just automate what people have been doing (e.g. generate content), but also what people haven’t been able to do (e.g. personalize content for each user).

🤖 More people are treating AI like a teammate, not a tool

• For those who treat AI like a teammate, AI increases performance, provides expertise, improves user experience, and crosses business/tech siloes.

• For creative work, brainstorming with AI increases the number of ideas and reduces human effort. While the average AI is better than the average human, the best of humans still beat the best of AI. For example, AI may produce funnier memes than the average human, but we’re not yet ready to binge-consume AI humor over our best stand-up comedians.

💰 More startups are buying other startups

• Despite growth in secondaries (as companies stay private for longer and investors seek liquidity), they represent only 2% of unicorn valuations.

• Venture exits by acquisition is still the most common path. Since 2018, startups have been continuing to buy other startups, reaching a record high of >1/3 of acquisitions last year being made by other venture-backed startups.

• As a result, VC has been indirectly consolidating into fewer startups.

2 theses on what’s next

📈 You can’t time the market. You can only invest consistently.

• Looking back, every crisis seems like a missed opportunity. Looking forward, every crisis seems like a unbearable risk. The only thing investors can do is to invest consistently.

• Gates' Law states that “most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”

• Despite macroeconomic uncertainty, I plan to stay consistent with my pattern over the last 10 years in backing fractional founders and staying disciplined with valuations.

🕒 Founder success = luck x drive x skill

• Luck = how the founder has positioned themselves to be the right person at the right place at the right time.

• Drive = how ambitious and persistent the founder is.

• Skill = how good founders are, and how quickly they get better.

• The best investors develop a repeatable process of assessing luck, drive and skill in founders. Here is more about our process (ongoing draft). This framework is also true for career success more broadly.

1 tool I love

👥 AI for customer testimonials

• Laudable helps companies generate customer testimonials directly from call recordings — now acquired by Zapier.

• Learn more about how Laudable helped Copy.ai, Figure, Gainsight, Instawork, and UpKeep.

More of my work 👇🏼

🎤 Decode videos | For top Berkeley and Stanford founders

• DECODE is the largest founder community co-hosted across UC Berkeley and Stanford. The DECODE annual conference focuses on helping founders in their earliest stages of starting a startup. I’ve had the honor of serving on the DECODE board since 2016.

• You can find the latest conference highlights video and playlist here.

🤖 Founders' prompt library

• My team and I have compiled the largest AI prompt library optimized for founders – especially fractional founders. This is not just another collection of prompts. It’s the largest and most comprehensive prompt library for founders.

• You can access it here.

👥 Pop up board

• I regularly host pop-up board, which is a unique 45-minute session where founders can present to a handpicked group of seasoned operators and executives, who have led teams as C-Suite at some of the world's top companies. This is founders’ chance to ask their toughest strategic questions, get tailored advice, and learn what it’s like to engage with a real board.

• You can find the application here.