The Flex - April '23
The Flex - April '23
A collection of topics on tech and the startup industry brought to you by Flex Capital.
Our Latest Thinking.
Since 2015, nearly 400 Dual Threat CEOs have raised funds on AngelList. Shockingly, returns are at least at party, if not materially better than the top-tier firms.
When we started Flex Capital in 2019, we knew that Dual Threat was a material differentiation to incumbent VC firms. But what are Dual Threat CEOs?
We explain the differentiation in our latest blog post:
We also wrote a thread about this on Twitter.
What Matters Now.
Safegraph CEO & Flex Capital GP Auren Hoffman hosted Elad Gil on World of DaaS. Tune in for an incredible episode 👇
📉 Why 2024 could be even worse for tech
💸 Will dual-threat CEOs take over VC?
🔍 How to spot a good business early
💼 Early stage tactical advice - updates to High Growth Handbook
🎧 Audio versions are available here. World of DaaS is a weekly podcast for data enthusiasts. For more episodes, visit https://www.safegraph.com/podcasts.
Diving Deeper.
What if AI could prompt itself?
While the current AI hype surrounds large language models (LLMs) generating specific results for single tasks or prompts, the conversation within the AI community is rapidly shifting towards AutoGPT. This open-source project has gained enormous traction within the developer community over the past month.
The technology leverages OpenAI's advanced AI models to perform tasks by autonomously interacting with other software and online services.
Thanks to AutoGPT, the next iteration of AI could go beyond the ability to prompt and move towards a state where AI can recursively update its own task list using learnings from previously executed prompts.
This could be the basis for autonomy in AI. "Agents" could take on operational heavy workflows that would otherwise involve human interaction and execute multistep processes without assistance.
For example, prompting AutoGPT to plan a family holiday by giving it a subset of constraints (such as destination, budget, and dietary restrictions) would enable AI to autonomously search for hotels, book restaurants, flights, and even suggest family-friendly activities for the week.
The Non-Obvious.
Chris Miller is the author of “Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology” (NY Times Bestseller), and here he posits that the true moat for some of the most valuable semiconductor and semi-equipment manufacturers is their ability to wrangle highly complex supply chains and integrate those disparate technologies to make magic happen.
Apple has a number of compounding moats that span across software and hardware capabilities, but one could argue that Apple’s biggest distinction relative to upstarts is its ability to manage a highly complex global supply chain.
We’ve long admired middleware companies because they obfuscate a previously complex integration and operations workflow for their customers. Apparently, middleware for atoms maybe a bigger relative advantage than middleware for bits.
See you next month 👋