Tasso Argyros

Software is no longer the bottleneck.

Venture capital has a recurring problem. It keeps measuring the wrong thing with great confidence. Distribution is not fake but it is often a terrible proxy for usage. Something being installed by default does not mean it is used in any meaningful way. If default presence equaled engagement then everyone would be a power user of Apple Calendar simply because it ships with the phone. We all know that is not how behavior works. You can touch a product without choosing it. You can open it once a quarter without relying on it. Default availability measures proximity not pull. Proximity is a very weak signal for product market fit. This is where the Slack versus Teams framework keeps getting recycled as wisdom when it is really just convenience. Teams benefited from bundling. That made it visible everywhere. It did not magically make people love it. It did not make it indispensable. It made it unavoidable. Those are very different things. Venture capital loves proprietary distribution because it is legible. You can put it in a spreadsheet. You can count seats provisioned. You can point to rollout numbers and feel smart in a partner meeting. Engagement by contrast is messy. It requires looking at behavior instead of slides. It requires asking uncomfortable questions like would anyone be upset if this disappeared tomorrow. Engagement is how you actually quantify product market fit. That is not a new idea. It is why I got into this business in the first place. Ironically it is also why some of my best investments did not need much venture capital from me or from anyone. When engagement is real capital is an accelerant not a crutch. When it is not capital just papers over the truth for a few more quarters. We invested in Slack at a 250M post. Slack later exited to Salesforce for roughly 27.7 billion dollars. Hardly a failure by any reasonable definition of venture outcomes. Despite the annual obituary tweets plenty of remote teams and modern companies still actively choose Slack over Teams today. They choose it despite Teams being free in a bundle. They choose it because it is used deeply inside workflows every single day. Voluntarily. Intensely. Yes you can touch Teams because it is bundled. You can also touch the unused exercise bike in your garage. That does not mean you are fit. It just means you own equipment. If you measure properly real usage depth of collaboration willingness to pay retention over time and expansion within teams I would still bet Slack wins on engagement and lifetime value over the framework that keeps getting retweeted. This is why venture capital keeps making the same mistake globally. Indian VCs are not uniquely doomed here. They are just inheriting the same outdated measurement systems with more enthusiasm and fewer scars. Installed base looks impressive. Engagement compounds quietly. So we get confident tweets instead of careful analysis. Headlines instead of homework. Distribution slides instead of behavioral truth. That is fine. But let us not confuse legibility with correctness. Worth doing a bit of work instead of retweeting the framework

Lots of experienced devs are not going to get through “their grief cycle”, they’ll just leave the industry or move into real management. Coding with AI is not intrinsically enjoyable unless you have an ownership stake in the outputs. It’s not why we got into coding.

People often ask me why we think Databricks can succeed in new areas we expand to. This is the recipe why: we build stellar teams in areas where we think we can greatly improve on the status quo. Lakehouse was one, Lakebase is next, but there's more coming, especially in AI.