First Round’s Product Market Fit Framework adds dimension & texture to a concept we all use - Product Market Fit (PMF).

PMF isn’t attained permanently, but sustained over time as companies & complexities grow. As they scale, startups move up-market, expand into new geographies,…

On April 18th at 9:30am Pacific time, Office Hours will host Evan Cheng, founder & CEO of Mysten Labs, creator of SUI.

Evan & the Mysten team were instrumental in the creation of Meta’s high-performance blockchain techology before leaving to start Mysten.

There are few key…

Product managers & designers working with AI face a unique challenge: designing a delightful product experience that cannot fully be predicted.

Traditionally, product development followed a linear path.

A PM defines the problem, a designer draws the solution, and the software…

Found this in the archives of 2016 :

It will be easier for B2B startups to amass proprietary training data as a competitive advantage than B2C startups. It’s not that we won’t see innovation in the consumer world. But to get there requires building an enormous customer base…

Situational Management is a framework for deciding how to manage a report depending on their skill level & motivation.

Where does AI fit today?

The answer is easy. It’s in the micromanage category where the motivation is high but the skill is low.

The computer is relentless in…

The average American attention span has fallen from 150 seconds in 2004 to 75 seconds in 2012 to 47 seconds in 2023 - a 5-6% annual rate of decline.

How does this compare to these blog posts?

In 2013, the average reader dwelled on this site for 47 seconds.

Today, it’s 33…

Rubrik, a Palo Alto-based data security company, filed their S-1 yesterday. At $784m in ARR, growing 47% with 130% net revenue retention across 6100 customers, the company should be one of top 10 fastest growing software companies alongside Klaviyo, ZScaler, & Crowdstrike - in…

AI will transform software sales. Most of the discourse so far has focused on how AI upends the sellers’ worldview. But the buyers’ process will also evolve. When researching software, operational buyers & procurement teams alike will use AI to research different offerings.…

Selling software will evolve to selling agents, AI that acts on behalf of users.

The efficiencies for rote work are too massive to ignore for many uses. As the technology rapidly evolves, so too will the sales strategies.

Sellers & the startups they represent will need to…

Should software assist humans or act on their behalf?

In 2016, the question was easy to answer : sell Ironman not Robocop. Technology hadn’t reached the level of sophistication we have attained today where AI is 90% as capable as a high-school student, the MMLU benchmark for AI…

Will AI sofware companies operate with better or worse profitability than a classic SaaS company?

Initially, I thought worse since the expense of serving AI as a product is signficantly higher.

But now I’m not so sure. AI SaaS may be much more profitable than the -10% average…

Within data teams, a tension exists. Centralize the data analysis to ensure accuracy or enable end-users to analyze their own data directly which is faster & more direct.

The pendulum between these two states started with centralization during the 2000s with BI products from…

If you were to watch three videos on YouTube Shorts - one on Italian cooking, one on chess openings, & a third on crypto trading, YouTube Shorts’ recommendation algorithm combines the video descriptions with your dwell time.

Watching the osso bucco video to its end would trigger…

The database is being unbundled. Historically, a database like Snowflake sold both data storage & a query engine (& the computing power to execute the query). That’s step 1 below.

But, customers are pushing for a deeper separation of compute & storage. The recent Snowflake…

The Opposite of a Good Idea is a Good Idea

For those of us who love logic, the paradoxical title of this post should catch your eye, just as it did mine.

In Alchemy, the founder of a major brand agency describes the way many of the major consumer companies in the world created…

We’ve written our ultimate guide to LLM product evaluation

This documents the best practices we’ve developed running evals for our customers

We cover test cases, evaluation, deployment considerations, and the cycle of LLM app development

blog.context.ai/the-ultimate-g…

On March 15th at 9:30 Pacific time, Office Hours will host Colin Zima, CEO of Omni Analytics.

Colin is no stranger to business intelligence & data analysis. He worked on search quality at Google, founded a dynamic pricing company for the restaurant industry, then ran data at a…

In the past, the bigger the AI model, the better the performance. Across OpenAI’s models for example, parameters have grown by 1000x+ & performance has nearly tripled.

But model performance will soon asymptote - at least on this metric.

This is a chart of many recent AI models’…

Last week, Reddit filed their S-1 to go public. At least 10% of their revenue - about $60m - comes from selling data to train Large Language Models. Reddit’s data sales revenue will likely be much more than 10% by the end of the year. Quoting directly :

We expect our growing…

The Community Source licenses may be the future of open source software.

With closed-source software, the code isn’t shared outside the company that wrote it. Open-source code is freely available to examine & use. Open-source companies like Elastic ($13b), Confluent ($10b),…