@bdsams My wife recently bought a 4Runner in Everest (essentially same color) and they can't keep them on the lot...so I think you are right.
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Bryan Offutt
1.8K posts
Bryan Offutt
@BryanOffutt
Co-founder/Partner @hanabicapital Prev Partner @IndexVentures, Infra Eng/PM@ Palantir + MemSQL
Sumali Temmuz 2009
599 Sinusundan1.7K Mga Tagasunod
@andrew__reed Always try to remind people that yes you are building a product, but you are also building a place that people spend the vast majority of their waking hours.
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the way to build shareholder value is to build a workplace that brings out the best in people.
companies that focus excessively on might-be shareholders at the expense of their teams will bleed talent at the moment in time when talent matters the most.
it’s unfashionable to talk about culture, and near uncouth to bring up the “work environment”. while surely the cold-brew-on-tap office perks of the 2010s were useless, and stock comp may be frittered away in uneconomic ways, the returns to building camaraderie and a winning locker room have never been higher than they are today.
the best CEOs are building their companies both for their customers and for their teams. the shareholders will take care of themselves.
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With the proliferation of agents, everyone needs to develop an "exec skillset".
"Team" construction, systems, defining roles, perf mgmt etc in order to maintain clarity/context on what is going on. Easy to do poorly, hard to do well.
Fundamentally different skill than IC SWE.
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@rahulj51 It's a skill to run an org of 200 ppl and maintain clarity and context. Also a skill to build an org of 200 ppl that enables that. Easy to do poorly, hard to do well.
Agents are no different. Most ppl being asked to do it don't have this skill/are being asked to speed run it.
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There are 3 types of burnouts I am seeing from AI:
1. Overwhelm from the changed role definition (aka this is not what I signed up for).
2. Overwhelm from the frequent context switches and spreading oneself too thin (aka I am losing track of all the agents. Nothing is ever finished)
3. Overwhelm from the fomo and denial (aka I need to be on top of this tech revolution. I can do this.)
Rohan Paul@rohanpaul_ai
New Harvard Business Review research reveals that excessive interaction with AI is causing a specific type of mental exhaustion ( or AI brain fry), which is particularly hitting high performers who use the tech to push past their normal limits. A survey of 1,500 workers reveals that AI is intensifying workloads rather than reducing them, leading to a new form of mental fog. While AI is generally supposed to lighten the load, it often forces users into constant task-switching and intense oversight that actually clutters the mind. This mental static happens because you aren't just doing your job anymore; you are managing multiple digital agents and double-checking their work, which creates a massive cognitive burden. The study found that 14% of full-time workers already feel this fog, with the highest impact seen in technical fields like software development, IT, and finance. High oversight is the biggest culprit, as supervising multiple AI outputs leads to a 12% increase in mental fatigue and a 33% jump in decision fatigue. This isn't just a personal health issue; it directly impacts companies because exhausted employees are 10% more likely to quit. For massive firms worth many B, this decision paralysis can lead to millions of dollars in lost value due to poor choices or total inaction. Essentially, we are working harder to manage our tools than we are to solve the actual problems they were meant to fix. --- hbr .org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry
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Is it just me, or has 5.4 made ChatGPT annoyingly overpromise-y and cliffhanger-y?
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@boristane Even if it isn't long term valuable, I do think it's a necessary stepping stone from a human psychology perspective. It's a stop gap.
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Objectively, the highest-impact use case for AI is automating code compliance and permitting. You should be able to propose a townhome development and find out if it’s code and zoning compliant within 60 seconds.
Small Cap Snipa@SmallCapSnipa
Jeff Bezos wants AI to approve Miami building permits in 10 seconds: “Miami should have an AI application that reads your building permit and it should give you a yes or a no in 10 seconds. Why does it take months and months and months to get a building permit? It doesn’t make any sense.”
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If an intelligent human is making decisions through the lens of value/time, won't an intelligent agent make decisions based on value/# of tokens?
Wouldn't that bias it towards using off the shelf software vs recreating things from scratch, even if it could?
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There is another angle here that is internal incentives. Many funds do not incentivize junior partners to be honest about the perf of a company. Ppl bias towards adding follow on capital to present a company as "just around the corner" from takeoff. They also need the positive founder reference.
I think the biggest challenge in running a scaled venture firm from a headcount perspective is managing the tension between individual interests and firm interests.
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"In the beginning the majority of our fund was for initial investments, and now the majority of our fund is some level of reserve for follow-on. I don’t know if we’re good at it.
I could say to a founder right now that I think there are few firms as good as First Round to be your partner for the first 24-36 months. The hunt for massive product:market fit, building culture, building a team, figuring out pricing and positioning… all that stuff, that’s our power alley.
I don’t know if we would be the best partner for founders at the later stage, and maybe we’re just a dumb provider of capital."
How To Make Money in Venture
Josh Kopelman, Founder of First Round
Odin@JoinOdin
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@PeterJ_Walker For sure, the point still stands. Entry price doesn't matter that much on an investment by investment basis. Being right matters more. Paying up only works if you are right.
Entry prices does start to a matter a bit across a portfolio, pending fund size. 5x M&As do add up.
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@BryanOffutt I bet it would. But I doubt it would result in the 0.8% becoming a massive higher share
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Thought experiment - you run a VC fund investing into seed rounds.
Should you invest into expensive seed rounds or cheap ones?
Turns out both can work!
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@MBGilroy @Adyen Great example is the inference cos. Lot of ppl myself included) had big questions around GM. GM is one part of a larger system. If you can make up for it in volume, it doesn't matter.
Asking about GM was the wrong question, "will people do a ton of inference" was the right one.
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The business model innovation of this cycle is as exciting as the technology itself. We are learning that the best business model in the world was highly inefficient for the end customer. More efficient business models = less margin on % basis.
I am reminded of @Adyen earnings calls where they constantly talk about the total addressable market and not the take rate % (GP margin) itself. TAM forecasting has never been more important.
Naval@naval
Pure software is rapidly becoming un-investable.
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@EthanChoi7 On a technical level you almost certainly need to totally re-orient the curriculum away from being able to write code and towards being able to read/parse complex codebases.
The value of writing code is going to 0 the value of reading it + product level work going up.
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@EthanChoi7 As a Stanford CS graduate imho the problem is partially a complete disregard for soft skills. Stanford at least forces you to take non-technical coursework, so its better than most.
But, totally under-indexes on creativity, sales skills, etc.
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I’m meeting Stanford CS kids who can’t get jobs right now! 🤯
I’m also constantly getting questions regarding what we should be teaching our kids to survive and thrive in an AI-first world…
Entry level jobs were how we as a society turned education into “useful skills”.
With these jobs shrinking, how do we help our kids accumulate judgment, domain intuition, and professional taste?
We are running straight into a structural dislocation of labor supply and demand with not a lot of answers…
Social contract breaking of “go to college and get a job” and we as a society and our universities likely training too many college grads.
Leading universities have been silent so far on how they’re going to change and adapt.
Many of those institutions seem frozen with fear given they’re structurally disadvantaged if the number of enrollments go down.
Stressful times for juniors and seniors right now and their parents…
Going to put some thoughts down in an article on this topic given I’m trying to figure this out myself as a father of 3!
unusual_whales@unusual_whales
New graduates now account for just 7% of new hires at big tech, down from 25% in 2023 and over 50% pre-pandemic, per Forbes.
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just to be absolutely clear i believe the us military deserves the most advanced ai powered capabilities available esp robust defense against adversaries like the ccp isn’t negotiable.
but strong arming a private company into compliance is antithetical to the foundational principles that make america worth defending in the first place.
this is just my personal view. hopefully we can just move on to tomorrow where there will be entirely different drama waiting for us.
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I guess put simply, the market is over indexed on the risk to the “software” part and under indexed on the “as a service” part.
Bryan Offutt@BryanOffutt
Software companies are not really selling software. They are selling “thinking through a problem so you don’t have”. It’s just packaged as software. FDEs are selling the same. The value of “thinking through something for you” isn’t going away. Just needs a different package.
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Software companies are not really selling software. They are selling “thinking through a problem so you don’t have”. It’s just packaged as software.
FDEs are selling the same.
The value of “thinking through something for you” isn’t going away. Just needs a different package.
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