On Saturday, I began my “10,000 hours of AI” journey in earnest So far, I’ve been a fringe observer / user but reality has hit: A large % of our portfolio is Enterprise AI (count & $ amount), the founder quality in AI continues to remain top notch. My naive take is that in the

Update: I've pinged @AcquiredFM to host this across all 3 cities - BLR, BOM and NCR 👍 BLR would mostly be on 17th December 2025 (Wednesday) - more details to follow. Now, you need to work your magic to get Ben & David to make the trip in 2026 for at least one Acquired India

Happy Dhanteras 🙏🪔 Fulfilled my grandmother's wish - 5 years of making it home for this important Puja

Those of you who have read several of my posts might wonder why I frequently cite ICONIQ - they have a unique structure (given their Tech founder centric LP base) and an incredible portfolio (Glean, Databricks, Snowflake etc) While most valley VCs have pivoted to video

(5) GC’s Hemant Taneja got roasted but he’s right - (1)3322 has become (5)5322 If you read this and said :”WTF is this?” - here’s the simple explainer: (a) Pre-AI (2020) - the gold standard of Software was to do $1M ARR in Y1 - and then triple, triple, double & double again

(4) AI native v/s AI enabled v/s AI adjacent (a) AI native co’s see 3x faster revenue addition v/s AI adjacent co’s (b) $100M ARR in 2 yrs is possible & proven (albeit subject to the FCF margin & churn dynamics mentioned earlier) (c) You will see AI native companies with < 20

(3) ERR is the new buzzword - “Experimental Random Revenue” - elevated Churn haunts (a) ICONIQ totally didn’t come up with that - I added it to an internal doc last week for one of our partners (who totally glossed over it) (b) There is a dual headwind for revenue retention in

(2) The mere presence of “AI” revives growth (not joking) (a) The one pint comment is that every VC has an “AI heavy” portfolio because all SaaS co’s have pivoted into AI co’s (b) There is some data to support why this might help - it reinvigorates innovation (EPD teams),

(1) “AI” has changed what “best in class” means for Software (a) OPEX leverage: ARR per FTE has increased 65% from ~$200K Pre-AI (2020) to $331K now; touching $390K for co’s with $500M+ ARR (b) The goalpost “Rule of 40%” is now the “Rule of 60%” - BUT, there is ONE nuance: FCF

This year, ICONIQ led Anthropic’s $5bn Series F, ElevenLabs $180M Series C, Legora’s $80M Series B and TinyFish’s $47M Series A.. They are a media shy Wealth Mgt firm with $90bn+ of AUM who put their money where their pen is (quite literally) Earlier this yr, they published

An Update on Snowmountain AI: We started by building AI Agents/ ML Systems and went live with a couple of customers in Finance and US Banking use cases. However, in spite of a large number of demos and discussions, conversions were tough and the sales cycle long.  Also, we kept

Note: By popular demand, can do Mumbai as well 👍 We have offices in both cities... If anyone wants NCR, possible in Gurgaon too.

I'm looking to host a meet-up for @AcquiredFM listeners There has been some convos around this on the Acquired Slack channel And, in my own circle, lots of folks listen to the podcast. Keen to gauge demand - are you interested? Can host @DeVC_Global office terrace in December

If you're travelling to BLR airport, pls budget 30-45 mins extra for a couple more weeks Just past the Hebbal flyover, they are doing major roadwork. What should be 8 odd lanes is operating as 4 lanes. This is the usual choke point which has become worse given the construction.

The interview with Doug is highly underrated - it was published recently and only has 2.5K views - it is VERY rare to hear from Doug and in the context of the AI hype - his through cycle experience across Tech waves (chips, systems & servers, networking, Internet, mobile, social

(4) Did Sequoia foresee the AI wave? Nope! “In March 2022, I had a slide that talked about all the waves - the next box was a question mark. We (Sequoia partnership) did not see the wave coming; this wave has been a tsunami and I don’t think there’s there’s any end in sight.”

(1) Where will value accrue in the AI stack? Applications! “Values always accrues up at the application layer - near the customer, money & the business user.” (2) Can you sit out of AI as an investor? Nope ”You are at the front end of a cycle, which doesn’t mean you have to

Doug Leone has been a Partner at Sequoia for 32 years now - he doesn’t do a lot of interviews - but his track record is incredible - ServiceNow ($187bn), Nubank ($73bn), Medallia (acq. $6.4bn) and he continues to serve as a board member to many companies. Doug did a rare

Thrilled to announce our investment in CoCreate (YC S25)🎉 Video is eating the world — but the production process hasn’t caught up. That’s where CoCreate steps in. And their origin story is even more interesting. Tamish, Sid, and Archish are musicians who bonded at Stanford

The hosts Ben @ben8128 & Anay run Stepchange Ventures (a climate focused VC fund anchored by BCV) and bring in the same dynamic duo format which Ben & David from AcquiredFM bring. In their episode on Data Centers - they covered the history of Computing from punch cards to time

I’ve been an Acquired listener for 5+ years now and the only thing I dislike about the show is the 3-4 week wait times between subsequent episodes Acquired episodes set a VERY high bar on depth (4+ hours post editing), research quality (often orignal source discussions) and