Investors at TechCrunch Disrupt did not shy away from admitting they are interested in mainly one thing: artificial intelligence.
Nina Achadjian from Index, Jerry Chen from Greylock, and Peter Deng from Felicis all spoke about the latest obsession in venture capital and how startups can stand out in a quickly crowding market. The environment is moving fast, Achadjian told the crowd, and companies are experiencing unprecedented growth.
“We spend an enormous, enormous amount of time really assessing the entrepreneur and how resilient they will be able to be in a moment where things are just rapidly changing,” Achadjian said. Now more than ever, founders have to lean into showing their passion and domain expertise, and remain honest about their product market fit, she said.
“There is so much demand from enterprise companies to try the latest and greatest AI, sometimes there’s false positives of product market fit,” she explained, “and you can get a lot of revenue with not having true ROI,” meaning customers who are getting their return on investment.
That leads another consideration VCs are looking for: an ability to pivot as the market twists and turns. “There’s a joke that, like, 1,000 startups die and that’s why being resilient is really important,” Achadjian continued.
Deng, who used to work at OpenAI, added to Achadjian’s statements. He said founders need to find their unique data flywheels that are going to separate them from the hordes of everyone pitching the exact same idea, especially since the enterprise companies likely testing their products are also testing out a few other competitors at the same time.
“If you’re able to go deep and really solve a true need for them,” in a way they cannot do themselves, then managing data is “wh …