FT: “Move over, copilots: it’s time to make room for the AI agents. That has been the message from the software industry in recent days, as some of the biggest companies have lined up behind the latest idea for how to turn generative artificial intelligence into a staple of working life…The latest wave of AI agents are designed to go further and take actions on behalf of users…If the industry’s claims prove true, the move from AI assistants to agents could also open the door to a far more disruptive phase in the evolution of generative AI, both for workers affected by the technology as well as software companies themselves. Behind the spread of agents — also widely referred to as “agentic” systems — lie a number of advances in the underlying technology since the first generative AI chatbots.”
Andrew Chen on bad pivots: ” If a product isn’t working, retention sucks, rarely does adding more social features help — no matter how buzzy the features are. And no matter how many notifications they might fire off. The opposite of love is ambivalence, not hate, and similarly the opposite of PMF is low retention. So usually if you add secondary/tertiary features to a leaky experience, people generally won’t engage with them. If you add sharing and invite features to a leaky product, your users won’t be excited either. A better pivot is to do the strong-form version, and make the new the main thing, not add them as features.”
WSJ: “A few years ago, $100 million in annual recurring revenue was often enough to set cloud companies on the path to larger late-stage rounds at lofty valuations and perhaps even an initial public offering. Institutional investors viewed it as the mark of businesses that could keep growing and deliver a significant return. Then the goal posts moved. Higher interest rates and slowing growth for software businesses have pushed institutional investors to raise their sights to $300 million in ARR, according to Asheem Chandna, a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners…Fewer than one in 1,000 enterprise software companies backed by top venture-capital firms achieve $100 million in annual revenue, according to Chandna, who sits on Rubrik’s board.”
TechCrunch: “In May, LinkedIn launched three puzzles through LinkedIn News, like a knock-off version of New York Times games. There’s the logic puzzle Queens (my favorite), the word game Crossclimb (pretty good), and the word-association game Pinpoint (not a great game, but whatever). LinkedIn is adopting the classic tech strategy of seeing what works for another company and then trying to replicate that success, even if it might seem odd to play games on a professional networking platform. But it’s no wonder why NYT Games has spurred this inspiration. In a way, The New York Times is a gaming company now — as of December 2023, users spent more time on the NYT Games app than on its news app.”
