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.