TechCrunch Disrupt's investors didn't hesitate to say they were primarily interested in one thing. That is artificial intelligence.
Index's Nina Achadjian, Greylock's Jerry Chen, and Felicis' Peter Deng all spoke about the latest obsessions in venture capital and how startups can stand out in a rapidly crowded market. Achajan told the audience that the environment is changing rapidly and companies are experiencing unprecedented growth.
“We spend a tremendous amount of time really evaluating entrepreneurs and how resilient they can be in this moment where things are changing so quickly,” Achajan said. Now, more than ever, founders need to focus on demonstrating their passion and domain expertise, and remain honest about their product's market fit, she said.
“There is so much demand from large enterprises wanting to try the latest and greatest AI that sometimes we get false positives about product market fit, and we can make a lot of money without having customers who are seeing true ROI, or return on investment,” she explained.
This leads to another consideration that VCs are looking for: the ability to pivot as the market takes twists and turns. “There's a joke that 1,000 startups will disappear, and that's why resilience is so important,” Achadjian continued.
Deng, who previously worked at OpenAI, added to Achadjian's remarks. He said founders need to find their own data flywheel that separates them from the crowd of people pitching the exact same idea, especially since a large company testing its own product is likely also testing several other competitors at the same time.
“If you can dig deep and solve their real needs in a way that they can't do themselves, that's where data management becomes a key part,” he said.
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Founders also need to have an answer as to why their product is not just a feature added to the base model, Achajan said. It may not be a problem for the founders to not know whether the model maker is working on a competitor, but when pitching to investors, they need to formulate assumptions about how the business is defensible.
Chen pointed out that there are currently three areas of AI at work: AI in chat apps, coding apps, and customer service. But more changes are likely to occur across all sectors and industries.
Deng is excited about AI-enabled marketplaces. Meanwhile, Achadjian believes this could be an opportunity for robotics, and Chen is interested in how AI will impact SaaS and other markets not yet directly affected.
What's exciting other than AI? “We take paper and pen and digitize it,” Achajan says. Incredibly, she continued, there are many blue-collar industries where many processes are still done by hand. But they acknowledged that even that is ripe for opportunity to be automated by AI.