Michael Schuster

@jefielding @dunkhippo33 It’s an easy no. Most successful businesses have an idea of a moat, but it takes a while to build and it’s easy to loose. Is Ubers network a moat or an onramp for bolt? If OpenAI delivers a worse product, people will switch, expect no loyalty. So why chase moats?

@smi @dunkhippo33 In what sense?

Right now, VCs care about one thing only…defensibility / moats so don’t bother pitching anything else. Like throw away the entire deck and just have one slide on that.

@Samirkaji Nope. Real venture debt, at least as defined by venture debt providers.

@smi That's not true venture debt. You're thinking working capital financing from banks (ARR, etc.). Early stage venture debt does not have financial covenants. Maybe milestones. I did it for nearly 20 years.

True early stage Venture debt in the classic case doesn’t have financial covenants (and cash sweeps are also rare without a massive reason/legal right). 6 months after funding also doesn’t make sense as bank lenders typically provide when runway is at least 6 months

@FritzJergitsch ich finde ja dass man viel in Europa verbessern kann, aber der Vergleich zu Formularen und Berichte in Europa verstärkt USA ist dann doch nicht gänzlich zutreffend. Viele Formulare in Europa wären ohne US Regulierung deutlich kürzer.

@HarryStebbings is right. Everything on this planet started with someone dreaming up a different reality. Go dream up yours!

I guess that’s supposed to be dispatch? I guess the most powerful AI (Claude ftw!) gets translations wrong. @claudeai

As much as I love driving a Tesla, the customer service online is as bad as all car brands. No way to get help for a simple issue. @Tesla

@msuster @braveben Never had a good coffee coming out of a Jura.

@braveben Jura. 100%.

What’s the best espresso setup for home/small office use? Ideally $5k or less but open to ideas No complicated maintenance or excessive cleaning A beautiful object

@ThoNeu9000 @heimolepuschitz Das ist greisslerlogik auf einen globalen, vernetzten Markt angewendet. Die Welt ist komplexer geworden.

@smi @heimolepuschitz Bei Gas sollen die Preise erst in ein paar Monaten steigen, beim Treibstoff geht's in 24 Stunden. Wie das? Zudem haben die Mineralölkonzerne noch "billiges" Öl, das sie verkaufen können. Wenn der Marktpreis sinkt, wird ja auch noch stets das eingelagerte "teure" Öl weiterverkauft

Wofür gibt es eigentlich Anti-Wucher Behörden und einen Konsumentenschutzminister?

@ramit There are many different ways to provide. Scott galloways notes on being a man give great perspective on this.

Amazing thread about men calling themselves a "provider" On my podcast, the man always identifies his role as "the provider" -- even when he earns less than his wife. When I ask how he can be the provider if he earns less, he is stunned. It never occurred to him

@HarryStebbings @siculars What is the value of a point and click interface on top of a relational database?

@siculars If they become a database agents crawl, how much value do you ascribe to an interaction less database?

What people don’t realize here is that these agents will get their own licenses to existing SaaS software. There is no way I’ll let an agent pretend to be me. But I will have many agents working for me. And many of those agents will have “seats” in all the software I use today. They will have their own emails and identity in Google Workspace. They will have their own access to Slack. They will have their own access to Salesforce. They will have their own access to Github. They will do what I ask them to do using the tools that I already use. And it will all be audited, reviewed, logged, tracked, traceable, and have provenance and lineage. Here’s a picture of the future “work” we will all be managing: My coding agent submitted this PR in Github against these bugs in Jira. It notified me on Slack, and it then wrote back to the original user via its gmail letting them know the progress of their bug report. It logged all those customer interactions in Salesforce. I love listening to @HarryStebbings and the guys on 20vc. What @jasonlk and @rodriscoll often miss in their banter on this is that nobody wants to rewrite salesforce for themselves. We just don’t want to click all the buttons ourselves. I’m perfectly happy letting my agent do that for me. When I was at Google, the absolute worst thing I “had” to do was interact with Salesforce (and T&E travel stuff, I shudder.) And so, all the agents that work for us will, in fact, be given “seats” on all the SaaS software we use to do “business.” The smart SaaS vendors will start offering “agentic” pricing tiers. Now, will someone build a better Salesforce? Maybe. But that’s a different problem. Every SaaS tool will build a moat around network effect. If you are a challenger, not only will you need to replace it for yourself, you’ll need to replace it for the entire network at your company and all the companies you work with. In my business, healthcare, the canonical example of this is Epic. The absolute OG King of network effect. In the meantime, just keep stacking $nvda, and buy back all those SaaS dogs.

@yoramdw @ycombinator @garrytan @paulg Apify?

Guess the company 👇 Clues: Czech. @ycombinator backed ten years ago. Little capital raised. Accidentally created rails for AI agent economy. Traffic went exponential. @garrytan @paulg any idea?

@msuster Wow Mark. That’s surprisingly shallow.

You have a watermelon next to your name so it’s strange to hear you talk about credibility

@MarioNawfal In the age of AI there should be a way to cross reference this

Why are names like this being redacted? And why is everyone ok with this??

@lessin @grok what’s csu? Which stock is this?

Wow CSU... one of my favorite thematic stories of last 5 years - ouch. Glad I just shit-post about public markets and don't trade em!

There should be a Mozilla foundation for @openclaw

@jameswise @HZoete @steipete Nah, as much as I support European success stories, this Austrian lives in Vienna. 🫣

@HZoete It’s not a company, its a very busy repo and one brilliant Austrian engineer in London ( @steipete )

And yes it did get weird. Fast.

@yoramdw @traestephens @dealroomco Yes please!

At @dealroomco we've built a 100% transparent ranking based on objectively observable data across all active VC investors globally. Incl all underlying data. It doesn't replace actual DPI but it's a good signal and more forward-looking. Happy to give free trial access to anyone who wants!

I get sent a lot of venture firm fundraising decks and every single one of them claims that they have top decile returns. I'm not a mathematician, but it doesn't seem possible for every fund to be top decile, right?