Speaker 1It's 100% exhausting.
Speaker 2I've never worked harder in my career. I've never been also more optimistic in my career. That's Rajiv Dham. He's a managing director at Sapphire Ventures, a $10 billion venture firm. On our last episode, the legendary Jeffrey Moore told us there's zero chance this AI bubble doesn't pop. So today, Rajiv shares whether you should be bracing for that pop and how long a correction would last.
Speaker 1I think there's just a duration mismatch. In 2000, when the market corrected, it took seven, eight years. I think it could be.
Speaker 2We also get into whether AI models will ultimately eat any software built on top of them. We debate whether go-to-market AI can ever be anything more than a spam cannon and how the best AI companies are operating differently than traditional SaaS. A buddy of mine, he just
Speaker 1left a SaaS-era darling $16, $18 billion valuation company. And he said, Rajiv, I thought we were innovating with AI there. This is a whole different ballgame.
Speaker 2Tech stocks just took a beating and Anthropic is about to go public. If your number depends on where this market goes next. This episode is for you. Welcome to Top Line.
Speaker 3Hey, everybody. Before we get started this week on Top Line, we do want to acknowledge and share our condolences, our thoughts, our love, and our prayers for all of the folks that perished in the plane crash recently in Florida. We knew Adam Robinson pretty well. He was a guest on Top Line. He was obviously. A big presence on LinkedIn. And I think he had a big influence on each of us. So we just wanted to share some thoughts and some memories. Asit, I know you think and thought really highly of Adam. Any thoughts or reflections?
Speaker 4You know, I think back to the SaaS era and all of the great entrepreneurs from that era, I think he's one of them. Not because of the scale of company that he built, but because of how he built the company. There were things he believed in, how much he believed in them, how he was able to confidently be vocal about those things. He showed people that there was a different sort of company that you could build. And what a great life you could create for yourself downstream of that. Don't have to raise venture. You can take dividends from a tech company. You can run a $20 million business with less than 10 employees. These are things that he kind of showed the market. And he was able to take dividends from a tech company. And he was able to take dividends from a CEO. He was a cool guy. He was a cool guy who I think inspired many people. And so he will be missed.
Speaker 5I first met Adam actually at the CEO Summit, Sam. And I had read all about him. And at the time, LinkedIn was definitely becoming this channel where entrepreneurs and founders were trying to find their brand and their voice. And I viewed at that time, Adam is someone that I saw from afar. And I saw him as someone who was very open and honest with what he was building and how he was building it. And I just was skeptical at that moment in time. But I got a chance to sit next to him on a bus ride at that summit. And we talked for 45 minutes. And he was just as open and warm and vulnerable in person as he was online. And it's extremely rare to find a personality that matches who they are to their online persona. And Adam was that. He's a great human being. And I had once or twice a year would just reach out to him and catch up with him. And the last time I did was actually last month. I'm just checking in on him. And, you know, he was able to be that the thing we talk about in durable rent of revenue and sustainable, he was able to do that as a bootstrapped entrepreneur. And that's incredible. So he will be missed and deeply saddened about the accident as well.
Speaker 3Yeah. The thing that I shared some thoughts on social media, but the one I'll emphasize, the post that I most remember that I think about a couple of times a week is the calendar post. He did a screenshot of his calendar. He built this incredible businesses and he would post his financials. So we always brought the receipts and you'd see like $2 million revenue, $1 million of cost, $1 million profit in that one month. And you're like, damn, that's pretty fricking good. Yeah. Yeah. And then he would show his calendar and there was nothing on it. And, uh, you know, it was all meetings. Yeah. And then the rest was like blank. I mean, there was a few things here and there, but it did not look like my calendar. That's because he was spending time with his family. You know, he was with his kids and he was with his wife. And I just, of all of the different things that he inspired me about, that was perhaps the biggest one that you can do all of these things and you can still have boundaries around what is your time. And what is the company's time and what is family time. And, um, yeah, it had a really big impact on me. And of course, you know, my wife, uh, you know, she's always talking about him in our house because we always dream of building companies, you know, with a small number of people that are truly passionate and not needing big teams. And, um, she was, he was a huge inspiration to her and her co-founder. So, um, Adam, you'll be missed, uh, and rest in peace to all of the folks that died in that plane crash. It's truly tragic. And, uh, our hearts go out to their families.
Speaker 5Well said, Sam.
Speaker 3Hi, everybody. Welcome to Top Line. It's Sam Jacobs. I'm your co-host. I'm joined by my other co-hosts, my good friends, Asad Zaman, the CEO of Sales Talent Agency and A.J. Bruno, the CEO of Quotapath. We've got a very special guest on the show today, Rajiv Dham. He's currently an MD at Sapphire Ventures. If you don't know Sapphire, they're a $10 billion venture firm, and he's been there 13 years. Rajiv has invested in, uh, a merger's row of incredible companies, including Harvey, Base 10, Open Evidence. His pre-AI portfolio is also quite special. He invested in Clay, Glean, Monday, Langchain, and also a lot of go-to-market tech, and he's got a seat at the table on where AI is taking us. He understands the SaaS era really well, so we'll have a lot to talk about, including his point of view on the public market carnage of last week. So, Rajiv, welcome to Top Line. Thank you for having me. So, let's get into it. Asad, why don't you kick us off, as you usually do?
Speaker 4I think, uh, a good place to start is actually last week's episode. So, Rajiv, we had Jeffrey Moore on, and one of the things he said was that this is very much a bubble, and there's a hundred percent probability that this pops. He didn't say that he's not an AI believer. He's like, this is really powerful. It's going to shape the world for the better, but both of these things can be true. And he compared this situation and why there might be a bubble that bursts to 2008, not to 2000. He's like, this is a financial issue. This isn't a technology type of issue the same way. After that, literally the next day, Google announced their earnings, stock dropped 12 percent. Over the course of last week, you had Amazon that took a hit. You had Meta that's been down quite a fair bit. Intel was down quite dramatically. And a lot of the concern the market seems to have is with the free cash flow of these organizations. And so, looking at the last few months, it seems like every couple of months, there's a reason why we have to go back and question our priors. And most of those are technical, right? Like reasoning models and then a fable. Is this, especially in your seat, one of those moments? Has this changed how you're thinking about things in any meaningful way?
Speaker 1Yeah, no, I think that's the right question, Asad, to ask, especially at this time, you know, you're spot on. I do think that there are some trepidations in the market, but I think the issue is, as we all know, this AI build out is just incredibly expensive. And so, it's more of a and when you look through all the impatience, if you will, with the large capital expenditures of the large players, it's more because the central question today in the public and Wall Street and all of our minds is, is there really a return on investment for this technology? And when will it come? And how patient will folks be? Obviously, me as a venture investor, we see the return, we see pockets of companies, especially the most sophisticated ones, using agents in incredible ways and driving not just 10, 20% enhanced productivity, but 10 to 20 times better productivity across lawyers and accountants and salespeople and marketers. But as you saw from the Anthropic S1, and we can dive into some of those metrics, clearly the diffusion is still early. And so, when you see all of this capital outlay, it's not enough just to point to Anthropic's revenue run rate growth anymore. People want to see it impacting the S&P 500 earnings. It's okay if it's maybe one or two years delayed, but no one knows what is that duration mismatch and what is the delay that Wall Street and retail investors will put up with. Amazon in 2010, don't quote me on it, but I think it was around that time, went through this sort of similar period, if you look back, where they were building out AWS. And there was a lot of questions at the time to say, all of this on CapEx and these facilities and compute and what, and once they started to turn it on, I think it was a lot of questions. And I think it was a lot of questions I think it was sort of four or five years later. You obviously saw the rise of AWS, and it's just been incredible ever since. So there's some analogs there. I'm a believer. And so if you're a long-term believer, you're going to end up on the right side. And I agree with Jeffrey. I don't think this is a situation where, you know, in 2000, when the market corrected, it took seven, eight years, maybe even longer for some of the stocks and companies to get back to their previous trading level. I think it could be a six-month, nine-month period when this mismatch needs to be reconciled. But in the medium to long-term, obviously, a bull, and I think it'll end up okay.
Speaker 4Rajiv, I was talking to some investors that fund these data center build-outs, and they have really changed the bar for who they're willing to give any money to in the last few months. There's a lot more diligence. The bar is just a lot higher. How has your bar evolved? Like, have you changed how you're thinking about what's attractive, what's not attractive, which company gets money, which company doesn't get money right now?
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. And by the way, to your prior question and somewhat this one, just taking a step back, remember, my job as a venture investor is to be a long-term thinker. When we invest in a company, it takes three, five, sometimes 10 years before we exit. So if we over-rotate in the moment based on some market jitters and trepidation around what we invest in, it could actually lead to adverse selection. Our job is just to identify and partner with the best, the best founders of the best enterprise AI companies, period. But yes, you're right. There has been some cracks in the environment, both on the public side and the debt providers, just to fill you guys in. Even the private markets, even before the public markets had a downturn in the last couple of weeks, already some financing rounds were taking longer to fill. I was already sensing those cracks.
Speaker 4And I think that's because- Open AI apparently had to reduce its value. The valuation, it's taken longer. Reduce the valuation.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. And that's filtering down to some of the hottest robotics companies, the hottest NEO labs, where I'm seeing these rounds stay open for about a month or two. It's due to the anthropic wait and see mode, amongst other things. And so it has changed the bar. I think it's a good thing in that when you have a month to do diligence, you could do a lot more of it than when you had a day or a week just two, three months ago.
Speaker 4Was it literally like that? Were you having to make decisions about $1,500 million in? Yeah, I would say a
Speaker 1week sometimes maximum to, yeah, two to seven days. And I mean, that also means you just got to come in really prepared. But when you have a thousand companies all growing incredibly fast, we as
Speaker 2investors feel it.
Speaker 3Can we double click on that? So really, I'm really curious, like all of these companies in every category that just have.ai at the bottom of, you know, at the end of the company name are growing that fast? Or there must be. Yeah. There must be categories of companies that are growing super quickly, like, you know, like Neoclouds or inference companies. I mean, or is it really every company in every category? Because my perspective is in B2B, there's an upper limit on growth, unless it's like some pure PLG motion. But, you know, unless you're selling multimillion dollar contracts because these large enterprises like need compute and they'll purchase it at any cost. Application companies typically can only grow with. At the rate of enterprise buyers purchasing software. But are you seeing something different? Am I wrong?
Speaker 1I am seeing something different. And you're right on a relative basis. Data companies, companies reselling data or RL environments and probably Neocloud and inference platforms or invest in a base that are growing the fastest at the moment. Right. These are the components powering this build out. Of course, I'm sure some power and other companies are going fast, but at least in terms of what we focus on. But even. The application companies and even those application companies that are disrupting systems of record or selling to large regulated institutions like investment banks are growing at rates that we've never seen before. And so just the growth rate and the bar keeps getting higher month over month. These are the companies that are growing from 15 to 100 million in revenue, not 15 to 45, not 15 to 30. And these are companies.
Speaker 3This is consumption based pricing where you get a beachhead into an organization and then. The lawyers just start doing all of their work on Harvey and all of a sudden it's just game over and you have a lawyer that maybe was buying, I don't know, whatever the equivalent unit would be like a hundred dollars worth of stuff initially. And now he's buying a thousand dollars worth of stuff because he's running all of his production, all of his, all of his work through this AI platform. Is that sort of how you're seeing when it works?
Speaker 1The adoption. It's actually a hybrid, believe it or not. At the applied AI. Layer, the leading companies have been very careful not to go too quickly towards charging by consumption outside of AI coding, which did that brilliantly. And maybe AICX where you can relate it to a resolve ticket, right? Most of the other categories are charging platform fees, per seat fees or hybrid fees. They don't want to overcharge their customers. They want to be able to relate the product usage to some level of value, right? Based on the tokens used. So that transition. That transition is still early. So what I'm trying to tell you is even just on new logo growth, not just purely expansion because consumption and PLG is going through the roof. These are companies that are going from, again, 15 to 100, 200 to 600, which is just incredible in terms of the pull and how powerful these products are, even at that layer of the sack. Rajiv, we heard a
Speaker 5lot about like negative 50% margins for Harvey, of course. And so what you're talking about is what I'm hearing you say is that that in that create a beachhead. At the enterprise is more important now than ever and just create value before you extract value. How much of the board level in these meetings are you looking at the unit economics behind this? And is that a big portion of your conversations are like, OK, well, we're in with these companies, but we have to we have to actually get the scale of it right. And is there a lot of tension?
Speaker 4What's that? That doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. 200 to 600. Fuck it. Like, well, who cares? Who cares? Like, eventually you'll figure it out. Probably. I don't know if that's.
Speaker 1Well, I think the reason that gives you confidence that you'll figure there's some companies where we don't have that confidence. We passed on one recently that was already running 90% of their workloads on open source models, and they were working with baseline and fireworks to do so. And so when I when I talk to the CFO, I'm like, well, what are your leverage? You're already pricing based on consumption and you're running on open source. How are you going to go from 7% gross margin to 40? And we can talk about what I think these companies. We'll look like, by the way, it's steady state. How quick was their growth at that point? Like, was it astronomical still? For the company in question that I'm referring to right now? Yeah. Incredible. Incredible growth. Interesting. But for but for most of them, there is a very strong. Well, one, it's economically rational, as we just talked about when the capital markets are good. Get the money. If you can run it at break even gross margin, go land grab. And we could talk about why that's important. But two, there's very good reasons why. If you're running on 97% frontier, as most applied AI companies are. You could sort of shift over and go to open source and open weight. And there's cheaper alternatives, which now they're doing as well. And helping these companies post train their own models and do all sorts of things. And then you move to consumption based pricing. And then you have a huge amount of margin uplift.
Speaker 4Wouldn't it be an argument to you be like, I know we are on fireworks and based and it's still looking expensive. Gross margin starts. But as as we do more compute build outs, compute gets cheaper. Maybe you can you the chips get better. The compute gets. Cheaper as well as what I'm whatever I'm spending on right now. Open source as models get better. That same value I'm providing my customer, I can provide it at a better margin eventually. And so believe in me, give me money now. Like it'll work out. Like, is that the pitch that they have in return?
Speaker 1Yes. Yeah, we'll have new, there are still infrastructure optimizations we can make. Instead of calling an open source model three times, you call it once. And therefore the amount I needed need to pay fireworks or base 10 is a little bit more. You need less inference from them. And we'll provide new products and services, which is a reasonable argument. By the way, these, these products are just evolving and becoming more and more magical every single month. It's a reasonable argument for us as a capital allocator. It's just figuring out if we only have so many dollars, all of us as a vector, where do you allocate your dollars? But I, I will say something. I do think steady state margins for these applied AI companies will just look fundamentally different. I don't know if we're going to have this 78% margin, but it very well be you have a 30% gross margin. So you might think, Oh my gosh,
Speaker 3we talk about that a lot on this show and, and that it's, it's sort of a wistful sentimentality about the golden age of SAS because we, we might not ever get back to 80% whether you call it software, whatever the word is for how people will use, you know, um, AI or code or whatever. Like your point, maybe the steady state is just 30 or 40% margins, which may be compared to labor businesses is still way. Better than having to hire all the equivalent humans that would have done that work, but it's not the 80% cloud-based gross margins that were so magical for 20 years.
Speaker 1But I think you're hitting on it. All that matters is bottom line. And if you could charge 30 to 40% of a $10,000 per person per year versus 1000 versus 80% of $1,000, your gross profit dollars are a lot bigger. If you have an AI or agent product, that's doing the work. Therefore you can cover all your sales and marketing and R&D. R&D and probably still throw off incredible because your magic number is great because you have pull for your product so that's how i see asps will grow by 10x it
Speaker 3does put well you tell me my my initial reaction to that is it puts more pressure first of all in operating execution because you don't have that much margin of error to play with and then it just the competitive dynamics can be really really brutal it's it not that it's going to become grocery stores but you know grocery stores operate on razor-thin margins and ultimately there's consolidation because it's just too hard to run a standalone store my point is yes it's a bigger dollar value of gross margin but it still constrains the operating flexibility of the business at least compared to traditional sass but maybe that's just the world that we live in
Speaker 4what if they just continue growing at these crazy rates right like a grocery store grows at a really slow rate and has shitty margins that's like that's two problems but if you're growing at like 200 to 600 you might you know you just you get this different sort of leverage i think that balances it out probably right yeah
Speaker 1i and i think that land grab is so important this level of customer intimacy and and holding these customers hands whether they're doctors or lawyers or accountants or salespeople or marketers and and showing them the future i think that's so critical for this layer of company in order to succeed and and help working with them in very nuanced ways and so that is the name of the game and it's proving out to work you can go so deep with your customers and know their nuanced workflows as a result
Speaker 4there was this story i think the rogo founder told on invest like the best that he presented a plan for how much sales capacity he was going to add on in the following year and i think it was pat grady on the board who was like hey and he thought this was an aggressive plan and then pat grady was like listen if we assume that every financial institution is going to make an ai-based bet in the next 12 months do we now have enough capacity to be in all of those rooms and i was like no we don't have enough capacity to be in all of those rooms okay so then make it more aggressive do that so there is a land rub that's happening when does that end like you know that can't go on forever so is there like a view that everybody has that in the next 12 24 months 18 months everyone's made their bets then how does the market change at that point like very curious to understand the other side of that because it does feel like that is what's happening right now but then when does it end i think for the best companies it never ends
Speaker 1and let me explain what they what they look like is is a tight vertical market maybe selling to investment banking but imagine all the adjacent uh corporate banking wealth management and ria firms and and um these companies you might have all this adoption in one sub-segment in the first 12 months but it'll continue on and then of course eventually you're going to start expanding and selling more and consumption and providing more value to your existing customer but i truly feel like the best companies aren't just going to sit here three years from now and say okay i'm all topped out of new logos they're going to go into new and and more and new interesting areas it's so interesting i grew up in the sas era we used to tell these founders focus focus focus until 50 even 100 of air are one product product market they do it well one geography it's s curves are building at five or ten of era right new products new icps new models new pricing models everything is just disrupted every month and that's actually what we look for we look for harder pivots that founders have made versus the versus otherwise which is completely opposite than
Speaker 510 years ago 30 to 40 margins is interesting given the time horizon that you cited which was still 10 years so the time horizon that you would have cited 10 years ago still feels like the time horizon that you're citing today but then the question is like the multiples on these businesses because it's so early we have no idea what that's going to look like and does the rule of 40 like even matter at any point in the future when these companies are at scale so fuck it i'm not going to talk about it i'm not going to talk about it i'm not going to
Speaker 1fundamentally every business you know at the end state trades on cash flow my only point with the 30 40 is that if we do end up there and there's highly likely there's going to be services and all sorts of stuff on top they can get to 60 but if we end up there and if you're on a higher asp or acv or arpu per customer whatever it is you still have enough cash dollars slushing around to support the rest of your opex structure and throw off cash and if you're doing that and you're doing that for these for these agent products unlike anything we saw in sas then you should really you should really trade it a healthy multiple right people will probably overlook that it's all about the bottom line dynamics and of course the growth rate
Speaker 5what are you doing with all so those are all the companies that you're investing there's a lot of excitement now but what about your pre-ai companies and those companies that are in like now tweeners as they become ai native and trying to figure it out everything is being disrupted at the ai level but now everything is being disrupted on the sas
Speaker 1level yeah no i mean i think the the guidance to those companies and and i'm fortunate to partner with a lot of great founders there has just been to innovate as fast as you can you know i told one of my founders the other day that hey whether you grow their 300 of ar their cash flow break even and i think he was drawing up a budget to grow you know 24 next year or or something like that and i said hey man like whether you grow 24 or 18 it doesn't matter i'd rather have you focus less on that what if you grow 10 on that business i know it's hard because you've spent 15 years building this incredible business but do that less and work on ai your ai products more like hire a clo a private equity like clo press just to run that business and and nurture it do right by your customers for sure but eventually get take learnings there innovate on ai and merge the businesses right because it's just not work the incremental time uh and that's been the advice and i think listen i i probably shouldn't have partnered with eric at podium he's done a great job of that uh we were investors uh also at intercom and finn and owen obviously did a great job but those guys were willing to kind of burn the boats and spent all of their time focusing on the new things and then merging the businesses in elegant ways and i think that's really what it takes it's very hard
Speaker 3to do is there an m&a market for the company you're talking about 300 million maybe going to grow between 15 to 20 cash flow break even if he
Speaker 1has if he if he develops a agent product which he he is um that can go 0 to 20 under the hood and now we'll start to benefit from that huge install base and all the other data he's getting from his other customers to continue to fuel a better and more agentic product in this particular market yes you see salesforce they're picking up companies left and right that aren't the super gen ai native companies that they can afford it's just the the era before that something happening in ai without
Speaker 4the ai story so like is
Speaker 1there a problem with that or is there a problem with that or is there a problem with that or is it a pe firm that yeah not today though today yeah private equity firms you can talk to them but from my understanding and speaking with them they're still frozen but this is their exact strategy they're not going to be able to afford the companies that even salesforce is buying so they're going to
Speaker 4want to be able to buy this company and agentify it but what are they waiting for because like you see some of these tomo bravos and francisco partners etc they're not that aggressive right now like i would imagine they can go to a bunch of these founders who feel like you know look like dears and i think there's two things there's two things one is they're
Speaker 1still underwater with a lot of the large software purchases that they made and and and lp's questioning what are these work are they even worth the debt that we put on to finance this deal we can all talk about what those names are but even beyond that when you're so early in a technology cycle we just talked about how quickly this technology is moving you need to be young and clever and you need to be close to the metal and here in silicon valley just to know how to harness these models and figure them out a private equity firm hiring operating partners to go agentify a business is just not going to work right now that happens when your technology is more mature at the end of the wave and we're in the beginning of the wave so
Speaker 4that's a really good point because like the fundamental business model is still the same which means you have less operational expenditures so like you have less to invest in and putting ai within the operations of the business as well like less risk to take whereas like figuring out how to get ai roi requires some use i think in the start it's highly inefficient when you're trying to take any like workflow in a business like i look at like everything we've done with ai in the first go of it it's actually inefficient you're experimenting you're trying things that didn't work that didn't work tokens get lost you know all of that stuff and then you find it then you're like okay here's something that works now let's make it efficient this is like a journey and some firms don't have the ability to go on that journey right now i would imagine these be one firms of those to journey it's about efficiency but it's also
Speaker 1about talent and know-how and and working with these products and technologies is just unlike anything we've seen before at least being truly native with them and getting getting the ebitda lift that they're going to need to get but they'll open up and they'll do it and they'll get five or ten points off the bat once the remember the term reference architecture once there's like an agent reference architecture that everyone knows how to plug in you don't need to be in silicon valley you don't need to be part of your back office private equity firms will have a field day with that and probably pick up a lot of these sas companies from 2015 this
Speaker 3episode of top line is brought to you by thinkific most customer churn isn't a product problem it's an education problem customers who never get to value never renew this episode is brought to you by thinkific the leading enterprise learning platform where courses and community come together to power business growth think if it helps customer success and revenue teams build learning programs that lower the cost of lower churn, accelerate product adoption, and scale without adding headcount. automated onboarding paths, role-based access for complex organizations, AI tools that dramatically cut admin time. Your learning platform should drive growth, not just track it. See what's possible. Book a demo at thinkific.com. That's T-H-I-N-K-I-F-I-C.com. AJ, will you book a demo at thinkific.com? I
Speaker 5always book a demo with our sponsors, Sam. On the point of customer retention, I was, last week I spoke at Rice University and I had five takeaways from my 15 years of entrepreneurship. The number one takeaway was know your customer relentlessly. So the education part of what Thinkific is doing is 100% aligned with how companies and startups win. So 100% put that front and foremost there. Asad, what do you think? Yeah, Thinkific. Thinkific.
Speaker 4Canadian company too, I think. So fantastic company. Ithic? Yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 3Terrific. Yeah, terrific. Thinkific. Maybe it comes from terrific. You think so? I think it does. Think it terrific, probably. So if I had to pronounce it terrific, Thinkific. Thinking is a terrific
Speaker 4thing, so then they probably like Thinkific. There we go.
Speaker 5They should come out with a product called Think. Thinkific. We have our other sponsors that are
Speaker 3computer. Thinkific. Thinkific. Terrific. Terrific. Thinkific. This episode of Topline is brought to you by Pavilion. I want to tell you about Pavilion Gold. It's so exciting. Pavilion Gold is an invitation-only community for senior go-to-market leaders at many of the world's leading B2B companies, CROs, CMOs, presidents, and executives navigating scale growth and transformation in real time. Pavilion Gold is about a year and a half old, but our first group of 24 Pavilion Gold members came up for renewal on October 1st. I want to ask Asad, how many of those 24 people renewed their Pavilion Gold membership? Which, by the way, is not insignificant. It is an investment.
Speaker 4I think I did my talk right before, and so I would imagine close to 100% after this on the onstage. Your talk? I was also there, Asad. Your talk. AJ was around. AJ was around. I would imagine just from the conversations I've actually had with people that are in it, I would imagine this has one of the highest renewal rates you've ever seen in your life.
Speaker 3100%. 24. It is 100%. 24 out of 24 people. 100%. 100%. And then there's a few people that came up for renewal through October and into November. Again, so far, the renewal rate is 100%. That's crazy. And in fact, my favorite, so here's one other thing. Matt Thompson was the president of this cyber company called SoCure, and he got recruited away to be CEO of a new company called Transmit Security. We got an email from him that says, may every day be day one. That's the subject. On his first day as CEO of this new company, we don't normally let CEOs join, but we're not going to kick you out if you were previously an operator and then you get promoted to CEO. And so the first thing he did, literally, this is not a joke. The first thing he did was re-sign up for Pavilion Gold, and he gave his old membership to his CMO at the departing company.
Speaker 5Sam, let's talk about this for a second, because this is no BS. I think Pavilion Gold is awesome. Like, look at it. It's a great company. It's legitimately the best conversations I've ever had as a part of a community member at Pavilion. I've happened at Pavilion Gold events. The dinner in New York was amazing. When are you going to let CEOs in, and why can't we be in? Seriously. I'm honestly frustrated about this.
Speaker 3AJ, you are well-served, sir. You are well-served. You got Pablo. You got Insight. You got HubBot Ventures. You're being wined. You're being dined.
Speaker 5I'm asking for the world, though.
Speaker 3I'm asking for sex. You're doing just fine. You don't need us. You know who needs us? Operators. Operators need us. So the answer is, we tried a CEO group, and sadly, besides AJ and Asad, who I love, besides those two people, I can't say that it was the top brass of CEOs that we were getting. We were getting a lot of RevOps consulting firms trying to sell into the go-to-market community. And that's because, you know, we're not pavilions for operators.
Speaker 4Yeah, we're a go-to-market, community. So I really liked that in the event that I attended, I even felt for myself that we were able to be far more open because you trust, it was a smaller room of people that had come in trusting that we're not going to let this information out. We're going to use it for ourselves, but we're not just going to like, you know, quote this person on social media, and so it actually allows real conversations. And that's very rare. It's very hard to have real conversations. It's
Speaker 3our, it's our highest performing program. It's really, really powerful. If you're interested, please reach out to me. You can email me, sam at joinpavilion.com. You have to report to the CEO and you have to be either super fast growing AI or at a hundred million plus, but otherwise we'd love to talk to you. Thanks everybody. Okay.
Speaker 4So let's go back to like the venture side for a second. So in the last few, like, let's say in the last year, 2026, you are sitting in a seat where every day you open your inbox and you see a crazy amount of companies growing at crazy, crazy rates. You're having to make decisions on 50, a hundred million dollar bets in 24 hours, 48 hours. If you're really lucky seven days, but then you're thinking maybe this is a shitty company. Something's wrong. Seven days. Like what's wrong here. So like, how is, how does that feel? Like, well, after going through that for a year, how does it feel? That must be exhausting.
Speaker 1It's a hundred percent exhausting. Uh, just from a Sapphire perspective, I'll tell you, we invest in 12 companies a year. We're pretty tight on our pacing. We've all as an industry, hopefully maybe not, but learned the lessons from the 2021 period. But certainly at Sapphire, we try to be slow and steady with it. We have top prospect looks. So even when we go meet that company and we get the data and it might be three days until we have to indicate one way or the other, I've hopefully done three months of work before. Right. Before even maybe sometimes even meeting the CEO or certainly before even getting the data. So we are well, well honed on those spaces, meeting all the competitors before. And if we're not, there are some set of investors that will still take a shot. That's usually not our game. If we have no idea about a company comes out of left field and it's growing super fast and we've never done work on it, never met the founder and we have 24, 48 hours. It's just not our game to play. And I know some others are playing it and that's great. It may work out fine for them. It's just and it has, I think that is also led to some of the slowness around the rounds. We're seeing there's almost this callous that has been built up around growth rates. Like I don't even look at growth rates. Growth rates are a, they're kind of a gating factor, but they're a tertiary factor as it relates to like the excitement of a company because everything is growing fast. Well, that's interesting.
Speaker 3Now
Speaker 4you have like, I went from a hundred
Speaker 3to 600 and you're like, eh, what gets something electric or, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's difficult.
Speaker 1I mean, some of this is, is, is a uniqueness in the positioning of the company that's slightly counter-positioned to the competitors are doing something that's slightly different. A lot of it is the founder looking back just in the last three months, how many product announcements were made, what is the velocity of the founder? Um, but it's not, it's certainly not growth rate alone because that's not going to be, you know, as differentiated. Yeah. A hundred. I mean, we, we saw a data company. It was at 900 of run rate up from zero in three months, six months. I saw a company in the AI video space. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, they, they, they were doing, they were doing 70 or 80 million of, of, of revenue in a month. Remember this is big revenue, big contracts that come from the big labs. They had three or four customers that just needed data in a very specific area.
Speaker 4That's crazy. And so then when you saw that, was that like, man, yes, because, because
Speaker 1the whole data space, because I had 10 companies in the prior two weeks, we also have an investment in that market. So we're like, you know what? We have the exposure in our portfolio to an incredible growth market and data and RL and, and, and tasks. Um, and so, you
Speaker 4know, you guys are like when, when all the VCs are having dinner together, do you guys like after a few drinks be like, Oh, this is crazy. Like, like five years ago, if somebody told you, you would see that company and be like, eh, you would be like, there's no chance. Like if we saw that company come through our doors, if anyone came through our doors and said, I went from zero to 900 in a year, I would give them money blindly. Now it's like, man, you know, isn't what a world, like how much
Speaker 1every day we Marvel at these companies and it's challenging. Yeah. I mean, I see companies selling like we talked about earlier to the top end of the market, you know, growing nine to 38 this year, I'm thinking of one in particular and it's a very good company. Uh, it's an incredible product set of agent products for the back office and CPQ and finance and this and that. And it's, and it's just, it's just hard for us to get excited relative to what else is out there. Um, and so it is, it is, uh, certainly while, but there have
Speaker 3to be, there have to be some, I mean, I, I hear, uh, cause you're not the first person that said this, there, there, there has to be capital available for that company, whether or not it's, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you know, you're not the first person that said this, you're not
Speaker 1growth equity businesses that used to target 20, 30% growth are now targeting a hundred percent growth. VCs are targeting a thousand percent growth. And so, yeah, I think there are, but there's not many firms that are available for those companies today. And I'm seeing some of those rounds not happen or stay out there for two, three months.
Speaker 5I mean, if you're going nine to 38, you're probably, I don't know what you're doing hiring wise, but you're probably pretty efficient. And you, I mean, if you wanted to, you could raise around debt. It seems like, like, why even take the dilution at that point? What's the capital going to do?
Speaker 1Or raise a small round
Speaker 3from insiders. It's so interesting, you know, because it's, I hear that and I'm like, well, then let's just not play that game at all. You know, like my, my reaction to that is then it's sort of what AJ was saying. It's like, well then find a way to become profitable and do not rely on any kind of institutional capital and who cares and see if you can print beginning with a million of EBITDA a year and then get it up to five or six or seven. And, you know, it just feels like why even get on the treadmill if that business isn't fundable and it's not exciting.
Speaker 4You started on the treadmill, right?
Speaker 1That's the problem. I mean, if you do cut the burn in a business like that, maybe it'll double next year, which is 36 to 72 in 2015. I would have thrown money at that blindly. But then even the buyers for that business even become more narrow. That's the issue is that it's capital allocation, it's opportunity cost of capital from VCs. And it's also this worry that we all backed companies that were doing pretty well in 2018, 19, 2020, 21, and then they didn't exit. There's no exit path, right? You have to be in the best companies and everyone's dreaming big, looking at trillion dollar markets with Anthropic, then the Databricks and Andrew Rolls, and then the next tier, and then the next tier. Then after that tier, how are you going to get your money back from these companies?
Speaker 3Sales, would you be, would you be like if a company, if you had a company like that? Would you be open to it? I didn't just say, you know, it's like, fine, what you got? Just trying to get your attention. Yeah. Well, it's more like at what cost would you be willing to get out? You know, like your founder comes to you and says, you invested, you're underwater. Can I just have the company back? You can go focus. You can go focus on your other things. Like you really need to, do we need to go through the process of me, you know, shucking and jiving and dancing for you for the next five years? Like we all know there's going to be no return here for you, but there is a business here if you're willing to give me the keys to the car back. Or is that a crazy thing to say? Because I know that there's investors that would take massive markdowns on their preference. And you know, some people put in 30 and would take six. And at that point, it's like, why not just take zero?
Speaker 1It's a great question. I think it's too early for those businesses. And I don't want to come across this because I do think those are some solid businesses and the market's a little rotated one way today and it'll come back. And there will be a new product of financing available for those businesses. And I've thought a lot about that too. Like what would that look like? But it's too early for those businesses. Where that's happening though, are the 2015 and 17 and 19 businesses to say, okay, do I just get my capital back? Is there some hybrid secondary primary that I have? Is there some that I help the investors get some money back? Do I give it all back and just do something else as a founder? I mean, how many of those founders have moved on from those businesses and started some sort of new product and the CFO is now doing the CEO. And I get that, right? I mean, your time is precious. And so I understand that too. So it's happening more with that cohort.
Speaker 5If you're, I mean, if you're still around from 2017, 2018, you've built a business is probably sustainable because you haven't raised since 21, 22 would be my guess. So you're probably have this whole bunch of 30 to call it a hundred million dollar businesses that are growing 20 to 40% that are just kind of waiting for the rotation to come back. I mean, I'm sitting here listening to you and being like, whoa, we definitely have the like far end of the spectrum of like, where is, where's all that money coming from? Well, it's coming from the frontier models. It sounds like of just like they have so much capital that they have to, to spend, but is it coming from just enterprise? Is it coming from those tier models? Like if you're a mid market SAS company feels like you're, you're kind of screwed overall. And it's never coming back five to 10 years, unless you do what you said, which is innovate and completely burn the boats for your
Speaker 1business. You have to have an AI product that is magical and driving some value at the application layer. And at the infrastructure layer, the name of the game is fueling the AI, the trillions of dollars in AI CapEx and compute sort of build out, right? Next gen chip company or data or power, whatever the ingredients are, is, is getting in, getting in there. There's just no budget for anything that doesn't have that level of magical feeling impact in ROI, even though the ROI math might be a little fuzzy. Sometimes it's actually pretty hard and clear, and you need to be able to show that and show that pretty quickly to customer suit. There's no patience around, Hey, like take three months and now show me a product that works. The time to value is also shrinking even amongst the highest of enterprises.
Speaker 4Going back to the moment we're in, as, as a, as an investor, you've got, you know, we were just chatting about all these companies that are coming at you, these fast and press timelines. Um, what are you noticing that people are making their decisions awful? Because it feels like if, if growth itself is, is almost not a signal the same way that one would think it is, um, is it that you're trying to look at founder ability to keep evolving? Cause I, there's this whole question of durability and maybe the, the core of it is that we're too early in the cycle for any of this revenue to be considered durable long-term revenue. We're getting in the doors with customers, but the reality is these businesses are going to evolve a great deal and they might be well positioned because they have the law firm, they have the bank, they have the customer, but the way that they're going to serve that customer is going to evolve a lot as the underlying technology evolves a lot. And so what we're looking for are people that can just twist and turn at, like what speed now, is that the game?
Speaker 1Yes. Yes. And I want to, I'm going to answer that directly, but I do also want to say, uh, I, I founders shouldn't feel discouraged necessarily from how many companies are going fast and the extended times. Remember diligence. I really feel like more diligence benefits disproportionately, the very thoughtful and airtight and put together founders that have built an incredible business. So you want a founder to be able to do that and not indiscriminately give money to all of your competitors. So I think it'll actually help. The best companies, this kind of market where hopefully things are taking a little bit more time. People are raising the bar and doing more diligence to your question. Uh, I, I believe that it's interesting as growth stage investors, we always looked at the CEO and the founder, of course. And that was, I don't know, a 30% weight or maybe a 50% weight. Now it's an 80, 90% weight, even at sometimes a billion of run rate. Yes. You look at the unit economics and the margins, but as we just talked about, that's going to evolve so much. Even the products, are going to evolve so much. So we look at the founder. What has the founder done in the last three months? What has the founder done in the last year? I've backed a couple of founders who have had to rebuild their whole harness. And sometimes we architect their whole product after the Opus four or five moment in December, because the models became so good and they just quickly did that. And to continue to capture market share. I love that. I love that level of agility that they showed right. In order to do that. And that's almost like, like I said, a good thing, that level of pivot and first principles, thinking and ability to make hard decisions, to continue to grow.
Speaker 4Is there like an age thing here where that sort of dexterity, a younger founder has more of it, you know, like twenties, early thirties, that sort of thing, you know, this whole idea of like, is the founder, the one who has the advantage or is the, is the kid, the one who has an advantage?
Speaker 1There's, there's a, listen, I, I, I think founders can be great at all ages. I mean, I think if you probably look at the statistics, I have not, but just thinking about the companies, the star companies of today, they do tend to be younger because they probably have less responsibilities. They are, uh, they, they grew up more with this new and novel technology than someone like me. Uh, and so they can innovate a little bit faster, but yes, that agility is today the name of the game. I mean, just the, I'm just going back to applied AI, the very thought of an apply, it's not really an application software company. I mean, look at what Harvey's doing. Harvey's a part McKinsey, part deploy co and, and, and part SAS agent platform, and even a part AI infrastructure, AI lab is a service business working with these. This is interesting because
Speaker 4we think of this as application lab, but like you are thinking of this as like way more than application is a piece of what they're doing. This is interesting.
Speaker 1Yes. It's it's, you have to do all of that in order to differentiate, especially if it becomes very easy to build a UI with cloud and serve some tokens, you, you kind of be close to the customers and serve them where they are and really work with them in a differentiated way. And therefore you need all of those components.
Speaker 4Is that where the durability comes that if, if in topic and open AI are releasing legal, uh, tools, the reason Harvey will do fine in the longterm is all of these things are happening where those guys are just competing at the application layer equivalent.
Speaker 1So I take a different, I feel like a lot of the industry worries that as the models become so great, they're going to be able to do a lot of the things that they're doing. They're going to eat the harness, right? And then you're going to have a one quick and voila, all your work is done for you as a lawyer. I, I find it, I look at it differently in that I believe as agents and intelligence get undoubtedly more powerful, you need these specialized vendors even more. Think about the legal industry. How are they going to figure out their pricing model? How are they going to figure out how to differentiate from one another or what the kinds of products that they, new products that they can deliver to their customers with AI at their back or what should their organizational design look like? These are almost McKinsey-like questions. How are they going to figure out how to train their own models and run evals to figure out what agents are doing and where they're following and what models are good at what? Anthropic, I don't think it's going to help them with that, right? And so you need a specialized vendor to take all of that amazing intelligence, keep up with it and help plug it together for them, hold their hand
Speaker 4into the future. Sam, our friends who've built growth stage SaaS companies in the previous era, their game was just so different to this game that like it feels like those are just too simple. Like, you know, for us to think about, I'm adjusting to this, like this is a whole different sport. Like that was football and this is cricket. Like it just feels very different, so different that it makes it feel unlikely that many of them are going to figure this out. You know, what do you think, Sam?
Speaker 3I think there's technology, there's capability and there's culture. And I think, I mean, Rajiv would know better than us because he saw Owen do it with Finn at Intercom. And you have to have this burn the boats mentality. But I don't think it's going to help them. I don't think it's going to help them. I just, I think there's so many people in the workforce right now. They are still getting them to think that a problem can be solved without adding headcount versus employing agents or doing it from an AI first perspective is really, really, really difficult. And then you have all of these product people and all of these engineering talent that have been trained pre-AI that are told to think in two week sprints. And they're told that every response to a user asking for a feature is we'll put it in the sandbox. And we hope to get to it in three sprints. The entire operating cadence of some of these businesses, I think needs reworking the culture, the belief system. How long should things take? How long does it take to build a new feature? What's okay for how, how, when should I get back to somebody? How much should I work? You know, when should I respond to an incoming message? All of these things, I believe culture is such a real thing because you're not going to change somebody's mind, especially as a CEO. I mean, maybe you will, maybe you will, you know, maybe you say, listen to everybody. This is the new world and we're moving in this direction and you're either with me or you're against me, but there is, there are entrenched. It's not even that people, they're not lazy. They're just, there's an entrenched set of beliefs that became codified, particularly in my opinion, coming out of COVID. And you would know this better than me also, because, you know, you're in the search business, but this, what work is to a certain group of people is not what it used to be. You know, it's not the same level of hours input. It's not the same level of productivity. It's not the same level of responsiveness that it was when we were all in the office. And that's why in San Francisco and in New York, where people are in the office, they're moving at a totally different pace. So is it possible to sort of re-architect a company like Outreach? Maybe, you know, maybe.
Speaker 1I think that's, that's spot on and great examples. So just, just reminded of, I have a buddy of mine, he's, he's around my age and he just left a Sassera Darling, um, 16, $18 billion valuation company, 850 of ARR growing 50, 60%. This is a great company, right? This is not a company that's slowed down to 8%, but it is from the Sassera. It's a name of company you guys all know. And he just joined an AI native business in the agent search space as their, you know, as their CFO. And he said, Rajiv, I thought we were innovating with AI there and everyone's using Cluck. This is a whole different ball game. Everyone here, the vendors we work with are all AI companies. The way we communicate, uh, is very different. The whole ecosystem, the head count ratios are all completely different.
Speaker 4And I'm having an internship at these companies, like, cause I think I'm fairly good with AI as well. And then like, sometimes you look at a particular person. Let's, I imagine that when you sit down with the best, most cracked developers on earth, you know, even if you think you are advanced, you sit with them. That's crazy. I think it'd be so cool. Like as a, as investors, if you took like your old school founders and gave them like an internship, like for a day, spend the day at this company, this is the way it's done. Like I really, it'd be really cool.
Speaker 5This is what the next class of YC should be doing. They should just be going from like going to real it, going to all these AI native companies and just like spending a day.
Speaker 1Listen, look no further than this, this, the Delta I thought was fascinating. The thing that's interesting about this is that they're not spending more on agents than they do on the rest of their expenses. Yeah. Yeah. I think they're on sales loft or outreach, which is hilarious. Yeah, I know the average fortune 500 enterprise spends 0.1% of their total expenses on, I think it's entropic or AI. I mean, right. And so it's, it's, it's when you wonder where's the ROI and people are wondering, well, why isn't this all this revenue growth? It's VC's funding it. Where's the profit? That's why it's going to take time to diffuse. And that's also why you need these
Speaker 4specialists. I heard the Stripe founder with Sam Altman, he's like, I spent 10% of my budget on AI internally. And Sam Altman was like, that's not enough. And he's like, I know. And you're like, if the Kralisms haven't figured it out, what the hell am I going to figure out? They're one of the greatest of all time.
Speaker 1I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is people always like to talk about how agents are going to take a percentage of the labor, labor really the services, TAM, $10 trillion TAM that we estimated. I think Sequoia just published that too from their AI. I actually think it could be more like if you're a capital allocator and you're doing something 20 times better to do a 20 hour fund formation doc, you can do in one hour now with heart. Like, wouldn't you just allocate more dollars towards agents if the ROI is there? But that's, that's, you know, that, that,
Speaker 3that is exactly why, you know, when we, in, when I was in business school, you learn that if it clicked, because again, like you go in, we were, I was doing financial consulting and you go in and you say, this is your cost of capital. Any project that clears your cost of capital, you should fund, assuming that you have the balance sheet to fund it. But your point is like, well, this nine to 38 company, I'm not going to fund those. Isn't there a play to just fund all of the, all of the good companies that are clearing their cost of capital?
Speaker 4They're limited by their balance sheet too, right? We're limited. We have opportunity cost of capital. So do we divide into a hundred? I'm saying no to the zero to 900 million. What am I going to do with this guy?
Speaker 3Shouldn't that be an opportunity to deploy that? Maybe you can raise a much bigger fund saying all of these good companies are going unfunded. We're going to have agents run the due diligence and we're just going to fund, instead of doing 12 checks a year, we're going to write 4,000 checks a year. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, it's certainly not our strategy.
Speaker 3Are you with me? Are you, are we doing this together, Gene?
Speaker 1It's certainly not our strategy today, but it's, it is.
Speaker 4Like the problem is like, who's going to give the funds to play this game? Cause it's like, it's a low return, high risk strategy. You know what I mean? Like that company is never going to provide the biggest return on earth. And like the risk that it doesn't work out, it's pretty high. Whereas over here, there's high risk, but at least like the upside potential seems crazy, which is like probably a place we should spend some time. The Anthropic S1 has come out. It's been covered a lot. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is this bar for going public. You've got all these companies that are raising all of this money. At some point, some bunch of these have to start going public, right? Like you've got all these inference companies at 50, $60 billion. Like how many more private rounds are left for them? Not that many. And so when Anthropic goes public, trillion and a half, maybe 2 trillion raises about a hundred billion. We just had space ads. We're going to have open AI do it in the next couple of months as well. Does this open the floodgates for more IPOs or have the three of them basically sucked up all the public liquidity and actually the bar for going public becomes much higher, much harder? Like what actually happens for the rest of these companies?
Speaker 1I think it's a net positive. I think it's good impact liquidity for some period of time, three, six, nine months, but no, I don't think folks will shy away from the likes, meaning retail investors and mutual funds from Databricks, from Stripe, from Revolut, from Anduril and others, just because Anthropic's profile was that much more incredible. At some point there becomes a scarcity feeling. I do think there's going to be just like how there was what, 30, 40, 50 SaaS companies from Salesforce to CrowdStrike to Datadog to Zoom and Figma. You know, you're going to see probably double that number and hopefully all it, as we just talked about, 10 times the market caps or five to 10 times the market caps given these market sizes. And they're all going to go public in the next five to seven years. And there should be a demand for this new AI industrial economy, agent economy, if you will, of leaders across every single industry. And I think that's going to be a big thing. I think we'll see that. I do think the bar will come down. I don't know if it'll be internet era, $50 million in revenue or even no revenue and just eyeballs, but I don't think it also has to be a hundred billion in run rate growing 10X year on year, which is just a bar that can never almost
Speaker 5be matched. Rajiv, let's, I kind of bringing it back down because we're talking about the companies that are, we all know that are dear to us, but go to market tech. And obviously, Clay, you've been involved with Clay. And there's a handful of other companies, but go to market tech seems like it's a challenging industry to be in right now. I'm assuming all the companies that you're talking about on the AI that are growing massively, they're not in GTM tech. What is what's your personal outlook on on GTM tech? And how do you see GTM evolving? Whether it's with AI or without AI with SAS, pre SAS tooling, becoming AI native companies services? What do you see in the future? For go to market?
Speaker 1Oh, hot button topic over here. Okay. But in terms of the AI native, no, I think sales is a great use case. I mean, how many hours do SDR spend searching and building lists and figuring out who to prospect and then now trying to figure out who to email? I think the next step is the magical next best action, right? Figuring out what's going to work on what channel with what messaging. Clay's working on that and already has some good stuff cooking and Clay's growing incredibly fast. And so. I actually disagree. There are go to market AI companies also growing at breathtaking rates at the applied at the applied AI layer.
Speaker 4Yeah, I have Sam Blon from Monaco coming. They're doing really well. Is that is there ever going to be anything cool? And that's beyond just more emails, though, like everything now. And when it comes to go to market, that seems to be like ways to send a lot of emails that are slightly better than the last way to send a lot of emails. Like when you guys are. Studying AI and go to market that intersection, you know, when you think of like different ways that this might move the needle, other use cases come to mind, or is it just going to be like a new version of a CRM and new like spam cannon?
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, I think I think, you know, with Clay's viewpoint would be what I agree is that every year or two, there could be sort of a new and novel way to grow your business. Right. And and that could be experimenting with different channels. Like we talked about or getting more specific in terms of the content and the messaging. I do think there will be an AI native CRM. I don't know how critical a CRM will be when you have agents doing all the work, but someone needs some system to store data and just see how things track over time. And I love what Monaco is doing around that. I think dialing obviously is interesting and is doing a great job on parallel and power dialing. And now they have a full AI platform suite around that. And so this pursuit. Remember, sales. Sales and marketing is the largest budget line item for most companies, not just technology companies. Everyone's got to constantly figure out how to allocate those dollars more efficiently, whether it's marketing, doing ads or salespeople, reaching out to customers or going to events. And what's the ROI? There's this new and novel way is constantly to optimize just a massive set of spend. And and that's why I think it's it's a little bit written off. I know it's crowded, but I think there's a there's just a huge AI opportunity for it.
Speaker 3Awesome. Rajiv. Uh, thank you so much for being our guest on top line. It was incredible to have you. Yeah. Um, yeah, we're, we're, uh, we're, we're excited to have you. Would you, would you consider being our guest on the show again at some point in the future? Happy to happy to folks want to connect
Speaker 5with you, Rajiv, where, uh, where can they find your best way to connect or consume
Speaker 3more Rajiv content?
Speaker 1Just Rajiv at Sapphire ventures. Um, dot com. You can shoot me a note and I was happy to chat.
Speaker 3Awesome. Thanks so much. It was great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1Thanks. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 2Take care. If you are looking for more top line, check out the top line newsletter at top line media dot sub stack.com. That's top line media dot sub stack.com. Or if you're a video person, you can check out the top line newsletter at top line media dot sub stack.com. Or if you're a video person, check us out on YouTube. Top line dash media is what you want there. Have a delightful day, everybody.
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