Alex Calder
73 posts

Alex Calder
@ATCalder
CEO @coworkerapp previously @uber 🇦🇺🇺🇸









I’m not claiming this yet, but i think it’s going to be more likely as time passes. Why? Because horizontal agents will subsume context and decision traces across hundreds of companies because of their enterprise products. I think you’re assuming that horizontal agents won’t capture any context. This is the opposite of what will happen. They will capture the most context of all, more than any vertical company. What do we think their enterprises teams and FDEs are doing? If a horizontal agent has decision / context data from 50 fintech companies, how different is the 51st fintech company from the other 50? Everyone believes their company is a special snowflake but: — most companies operate and make decisions quite similarly to others in their vertical. — the company might be operating wrongly and the horizontal agent will be able to suggest best practices.



I think one of the biggest challenges and opportunities at the same time for enterprise SW startups at the moment is that VCs want to fund startups growing from $1-->$8M or from $8-->$40M. For the most part, those tend to be PLG or infra startups with 0% or negative GM, which is partially why they are growing so fast. But, AI-native enterprise SW startups will not grow that way. AI or not, you are not going to change how enterprises buy SW. You still need to do the same work (or more) - find the ICP, connect with the buyer, make sure they have budget, articulate value prop and ROI, go through POC, security checks, and procurement process. That is not changing and still requires a lot of work. Which leads me to believe that growth rates for AI-native enterprise startups will gravitate towards what we considered great historically. A startup growing $1-->$5M signing high margin enterprise deals is awesome. So, the reason I think this is an opportunity is because I think a lot of awesome startups will be overlooked and massive companies will be built that are growing at similar rates as the startups we considered great during the SaaS era.











