The concept of “work life balance” is gone and probably never coming back. Some reasons: 1. AI. We can’t get enough of AI and so we’re way more attached to our devices than ever before. Which makes work just one tap away. 2. The AI opportunity. If you work in tech or any related field, you feel you have a generational opportunity, so you’re likely working harder than ever before to accomplish something you previously couldn’t. 3. Post COVID pendulum swing: after Covid, people leaned into the concept of work life balance to protect themselves from how consumed they were by their devices most hours of the day. We’ve now swung hard in the opposite direction. We’ll probably swing back at some point, but not anytime soon. 4. Email is a disaster. It’s filled with spam and cold outreach. The only viable way to communicate is messaging. The problem with messaging is that it completely hijacks our attention. Default notifications mean we get our messages immediately and social norms force us to consider responding immediately. This keeps us on our phones. And again, a tap away from work. 5. Wealth gap widening. We increasingly believe it’s harder to “make it” than ever before. And we also feel like time is running out. So we have to win while we still have time. 6. Side hustles. Mobile, AI, stocks, crypto, social media, etc — all of these have made it easier than ever to make money in more ways than one. In addition to our full time jobs, we’re increasingly pursuing extra curriculars on the side. What else?

Big news from @Lightspeedvp backed @ComposioHQ. We’re excited to announce that we are leading Composio’s $25M Series A! Congratulations to Co-Founders @GanatraSoham and @KaranVaidya6 and the entire team.

We're living in the most hyper capitalistic moment in tech history. Everyone just wants to get rich and no one is being shy about it. But your startup can’t outspend Meta and you can't convince people to join you using money. So what do you do? You focus on being a mission driven company. Just like always. In fact, I’d argue you need to lean on mission more than ever before. But what does this actually mean? First: it means having a clearly articulated mission that is both extremely ambitious and highly measurable in a simple way. Stripe’s mission to “increase the GPD on the internet” and SpaceX’s “making humanity interplanetary” are great examples. Next, you need to know exactly how your mission translates into a company strategy that everyone in your company can grasp. It should be simple and multi-step - but not too many steps. At Spotify, we used to ask, “what’s the simple 3 step plan for how this becomes a reality?” when debating big product strategies. You (and your company's key leaders) need to know how the steps translate into actual goals, ideally annual and then quarterly goals, and more specifically, OKRs. Everyone managing anyone else needs to know which OKRs their team is helping drive and why this matters for achieving the overall mission. Everyone in the company, including all ICs, need to both deeply know and believe in this mission. They need to know that if they do their job really well and really fast, the team will goals will be achieved. And if enough of the goals are achieved, the strategy will work, and the mission will ultimately be accomplished. It's not about having an exit strategy or hitting the next fundraising milestone so the team can sell secondary. It's about accomplishing the mission and knowing that if you do, the company will be insanely valuable. And then, of course, to beat Meta and others at hiring, you need to hire against this mission and make the it main reason why someone would want to join you. If you can't do that, you will not be able to compete against deep pocketed incumbents, and you will likely fail.

“What if this time is different?” Hearing this a lot lately.

The irony of this whole situation is that once AI agent use overtakes traditional web search, the web will want to be scraped. As one founder recently said to me: “eventually, if you’re not getting scraped, you will not exist.”

Where are all the consumer AI apps??? This is the question I posed to s-tier consumer investors @scottbelsky (Uber, Pinterest) and @stevejang (Coinbase, Postmates). We're almost 3 years into the AI hype the we're still all mostly just talking about ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. We explore the answer through the ways in which the entire consumer stack (input, memory, personalization, browsers, hardware) are being re-written by AI and how that may give birth to the consumer opportunity we've all been waiting for. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome and Introductions 00:43 The Current State of AI Products 02:48 Surprises and Challenges with LLMs 05:24 Future of Consumer AI and Personal AI 15:49 Memory and Personalization in AI 21:52 Potential Risks and Business Models 24:22 The Battle for User Data in AI 25:11 Optimism in AI Model Inference 27:00 The Role of Open Source Models 28:13 The Future of AI Hardware 28:54 Challenges and Opportunities in AI Hardware Startups 30:29 The Evolution of Consumer Hardware 38:36 The Reinvention of Browsers 46:23 The Potential of AI-Enhanced Browsers 47:54 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Many thanks to my good friends for joining me in this discussion 🙏

The browser sees everything. This is the reason we’re getting so many new AI-first browsers from The Browser Co, Perplexity, and soon OpenAI. So they can “see” data that they increasingly cannot scrape. AI feeds on data. It gets the data by automatically scraping the web. But scraping is no longer free. CDNs like Cloudflare are making scraping harder by blocking it by default, and others will soon follow. Startups like TollBit are empowering tons of large publishers to charge for being scraped, building a new open web economy. But consumers want AI. We can’t get enough of it. And as AI answers increasingly eat traditional web search, AI will be doing much more browsing on behalf of us humans (scraping). This creates a paradox: consumer behavior is shifting to AI, but AI is running out of fuel to meet the demand. So what happens? AI companies build browsers. As humans consume content with these browsers, the AI company can “see” data that is increasingly being blocked or monetized. The most interesting this about this strategy is that AI companies don’t even need meaningful market share or customer ubiquity for this strategy to work. They just need a large enough slice of all browsing to get a taste of most of the web’s data. It’s a whole new business model for the web and the beginning of a new browser war. h/t @scottbelsky @stevejang

The browser sees everything. This is the reason we’re getting so many new AI-first browsers from The Browser Co, Perplexity, and soon OpenAI. So they can “see” data that they increasingly cannot scrape. AI feeds on data. It gets the data by automatically scraping the web. But scraping is no longer free. CDNs like Cloudflare are making scraping harder by blocking it by default, and others will soon follow. Startups like TollBit are empowering tons of large publishers to charge for being scraped, building a new open web economy. But consumers want AI. We can’t get enough of it. And as AI answers increasingly eat traditional web search, AI will be doing much more browsing on behalf of us humans (scraping). This creates a paradox: consumer behavior is shifting to AI, but AI is running out of fuel to meet the demand. So what happens? AI companies build browsers. As humans consume content with these browsers, the AI company can “see” data that is increasingly being blocked or monetized. The most interesting this about this strategy is that AI companies don’t even need meaningful market share or customer ubiquity for this strategy to work. They just need a large enough slice of all browsing to get a taste of most of the web’s data. It’s a whole new business model for the web and the beginning of a new browser war.

When you talk to Ilya and @daniellevy__, it becomes clear very quickly that this is the most talented & inspiring AI team in the world. Zero doubt in my mind that they'll accomplish their mission. We at Lightspeed are very fortunate to be supporting the SSI team 🙏

TollBit is building the new internet economy.