Gil Dibner

@jjen_abel Agree with you. And it's a very dangerous zone too. How do you avoid getting sucked into sales inefficiency at these price points? I guess either be ruthless about self-service or aggressively go up market... Or both?

it blows my mind that half the market disagrees with me on this ... $10K - $50K/year deals are NOT enterprise sales

.@Base44 is booming. So why is @Wix collapsing? The startup Wix bought to secure its AI future is growing at breakneck speed, but the costs are shaking investor confidence. calcalistech.com/ctechnews/arti…

Israel’s economy is booming

Israel numbers here are incredible. India has 140X the population

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

Relative to native-born Americans, several countries' immigrants to America have produced vastly greater rates of unicorn founders. In particular, Israel: with shockingly few people in the U.S., Israel is the #2 origin *in total* for foreign Unicorn founders.

Israelis who counted on Trump have just learned what everyone who ever counted on Trump has learned. Israelis who counted on America have just learned what countless leaders from Israel's greatest generation knew deep in their hearts: that we have no one to count on but ourselves. The only silver lining I can see from this geopolitical own goal is that it might lead to better leadership in Israel. Netayanu is far past his expiration date. But if this agreement with Iran is concluded - generations will look back on it, not as the beginning of the end of the era American strategic and moral leadership but as proof positive that that era is long gone.

Israel’s tech boom faces an unexpected threat: Its own currency. As the shekel surges, Israeli engineers are becoming among the world’s most expensive workers. calcalistech.com/ctechnews/arti…

robotics is inherently about hardware, however I'm meeting more and more founders who want to find a software (or just non-hardware) business to build for robotics. thoughts: > software is behind hardware (so this realization is correct, but not unique), and "robot brain" is indeed a hard problem to solve (further out than most think). that being said, I don't think solving robot intelligence as a company that is neither 1) collecting data (either by robot deployment, or other means) nor 2) a true research company like PI makes a lot of sense > Selling dev tools to robotics companies is a horrible business idea right now (sounds smart, but not enough robot deployments + nowhere near the #1 pain point) > the most obvious non-hardware opportunity is in the deployment gap. specifically, imo the demand for businesses in manual labor that want to try robotic solutions *today* I believe is much greater than most people realize, however no robot (humanoid to service bot) is ready to work out of the box (i.e. someone needs to come set them up, teleop, maintain etc). if I were thinking about a business, I would think about doing something that helps old-school, regular-ass businesses put robots into their space tl;dr build stuff that actively puts more robots into the world

AI has completely revolutionized software and software investing. Before AI, 99% of software companies were non-durable, not interesting, and not investible. Post-AI, 99.5% of software companies are non-durable, not interesting, and not investible.

Cloudflare CEO Prince on how AI changes who gets laid off first: Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it. We haven’t found another example in U.S. business history of a public company growing at more than 30% that laid off more than 20% of its workforce. Yet what we did is likely going to become the norm over the next year. This is a story about artificial intelligence, but executives and commentators are misunderstanding how it will disrupt business and who will be affected. AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees. For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to scrutinize each quarter. Now we’re moving to a system in which every business risk is audited continuously. We’re closing our books faster. We’re making fewer mistakes and catching the ones we do more reliably. And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars. The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate. We received almost a million applicants for 1,111 paid internships this summer. The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI-native. They’re all builders or sellers, and we expect that the majority will get full-time offers.

Private markets made going public optional for companies and necessary for funds. One side can wait. The other cannot. A late-stage software company can raise private capital, run employee tenders, skip daily pricing, and keep building. The company gets time. The cap table stays stable. Management avoids distractions. The board picks when the market gets to vote. A fund cannot do this. A venture fund has a fixed legal life, capital calls, management fees, reserve requirements, and scheduled LP reports. It can carry a private mark for years. It cannot send a mark to an LP and call it a distribution. At some point the fund needs cash, or something close enough to cash that an investment committee can stop pretending patience and liquidity are the same thing. Look at what happened to the companies that did list after 2020. Most of those companies now trade below their IPO price. That created a reference point for every private company that did not list. Each weak IPO gives the next company a reason to wait. Each company that waits makes the public software market a thinner sample of the best companies. Each thin sample makes the public marks look less relevant to the private ones. That sounds convenient because it is. LPs helped build this. Endowments, foundations, pensions, sovereign funds, and family offices wanted access to private growth. They wanted the companies before the public market got them. They wrote checks to the funds that wrote checks to the companies that avoided the IPOs that would have produced the distributions those LPs now want. No villain is needed. Everyone followed the incentive in front of them. Founders wanted control and time. GPs wanted ownership and flexibility. LPs wanted access and long-term compounding. The problem is that these preferences do not all pay off at the same time. Saying private markets are capturing the value is true and incomplete. Capturing value is easy to claim when the mark rises. It is harder when the value has to travel through a fund waterfall, into an LP capital account, and back to an institution with bills to pay, benefits to fund, or a board asking why capital keeps getting called while distributions trickle in. Secondaries exist because the system needs a way to trade time. A GP can produce liquidity without pushing a company into the public market. A company can stay private while its investors rotate around it. This is elegant. It is also a signal that the old path from private funding to public exit no longer absorbs the pressure. The next software IPOs will be called tests of the IPO window. That framing is too small. They are tests of a private-market structure that turned public exits into optional events for companies and required events for funds. Some companies may justify the delay. Some marks may turn into cash. Some value may have been real but held in the wrong format for the institutions that needed it. That is the part the market still has to price.

Check out my latest article: Founders in search of quiet linkedin.com/pulse/founders… via @LinkedIn

Scoop: UAE and Israel have started a joint fund for defense acquisitions, former and current U.S. officials tell me. 🧵

@mikebutcher As a former solo GP, I think I won the jackpot by partnering with @edavidpeterson. Staying "solo GP" is a weird thing to optimize for. It's not a meaningful category in my opinion. So many other attributes of a firm matter more than how many GPs there are.

Who are the most successful and influential Solo GPs in UK/Europe?