Integration and M&A. “Gotta pace yourself, it's all about yo' breathing. You can have it all, it's all about your reason.” | All comments/opinions are my own.
Dallas, TX
Joined April 2009
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For my new followers, here’s the lowdown:
➡️ First act was in government. Middle East analyst for the State Department, pre and post 9/11. Ended up as POTUS 43’s Asian American policy surrogate.
➡️ Second act was an entrepreneur. Co-founded and bootstrapped @buzzshift in 2010. Sold it in 2016. Bought back in 2017 for an ungodly low sum. Sold it again.
➡️ Third act is CEO of a a growth stage agtech company @edengreentech. Vertical farming, but in a greenhouse. “Profitable unit level economics” is my mantra.
➡️ Bonus: I curate The 100 Best Rap Songs Of All Time playlist on Spotify. open.spotify.com/playlist/1K…
I tweet on all these things, and I’m right 50% of the time, 100% of the time.
Eddy Badrina retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Everyone is currently talking about AI loops. A loop is very good at the recurring part. It has very little to offer when a person needs to feel like someone actually showed up or cared for.
Observation from an old marketing hand: automate absolutely everything recurring and non-personal, but leave the final elements of hospitality and client interactions in the hands of humans.
I see AI marketing slop come into my inbox and in my feed, and it's depressing and discouraging. It's the exact opposite of "surprise and delight". We can do better, folks.
Zane just pulled 957K views arguing America can outbuild Shenzhen. The bottleneck he names is culture. We spent two generations telling talented kids that factory work was a fallback, and the industrial base priced that in. Can we build that culture back? I believe we can.
What you choose not to build, you eventually choose to need. That applies to careers too.
This Balogun red card kerfuffle feels like the most American thing ever. No one is even arguing the red card anymore. It’s pretty unanimous amongst my European friends that the card was unfair. But the issue at hand now is about precedent.
If the world has learned anything about America, it’s that we’ve banked on “unprecedented” for the past 250 years.
Happy belated July 4th. #usmnt
I'm recommending everyone I know to read this. Including my teenage kids. It's *that important* of a signal.
Eddy Badrina retweeted
BIG NEWS for Texas today! @NYSE is launching NYSE Texas in Dallas.
This will cement Texas' position as a national and global economic powerhouse.
Texas will be the financial capital of America.
If you are a marketing agency with a website dev service offering, you might want to jump on this one. If you haven't already.
🚨 New @a16z thesis: building websites / apps with AI
There's been an explosion of products that help users "vibe code" a web app from text prompts.
We dove deep on these tools - who's using them, how they work, and where they might be headed.
Our market map + insights 👇
Eddy Badrina retweeted
It's becoming clearer and clearer that we're looking at a seismic shift in the US's relationship with the world, between:
1) The US dismantling its foreign interference apparatuses (like USAID 👇)
2) Marco Rubio stating that we're now in a multipolar world with "multi-great powers in different parts of the planet" (state.gov/secretary-marco-ru…) and that "the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us" (foreign.senate.gov/imo/media…)
3) The tariffs on supposed "allies" like Mexico, Canada or the EU
This is the US effectively saying "our attempt at running the world is over, to each his own, we're now just another great power, not the 'indispensable nation'."
It looks "dumb" (as the WSJ just wrote) if you are still mentally in the old paradigm but it's always a mistake to think that what the US (or any country) does is dumb.
Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself.
Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of "allies": they don't want - or maybe rather can't afford - vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests.
You can either view it as decline - because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire - or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage.
In any case it is the end of an era and, while the Trump administration looks like chaos to many observers, they're probably much more attuned to the changing realities of the world and their own country's predicament than their predecessors. Acknowledging the existence of a multipolar world and choosing to operate within it rather than trying to maintain an increasingly costly global hegemony couldn't be delayed much further. It looks messy but it is probably better than maintaining the fiction of American primacy until it eventually collapses under its own weight.
This is not to say that the U.S. won't continue to wreak havoc on the world, and in fact we might be seeing it become even more aggressive than before. Because when it previously was (badly, and very hypocritically) trying to maintain some semblance of self-proclaimed "rules-based order", it now doesn't even have to pretend it is under any constraint, not even the constraint of playing nice with allies. It's the end of the U.S. empire, but definitely not the end of the U.S. as a major disruptive force in world affairs.
All in all this transformation may mark one of the most significant shifts in international relations since the fall of the Soviet Union. And those most unprepared for it, as is already painfully obvious, are America's vassals caught completely flat-footed by the realization that the patron they've relied on for decades is now treating them as just another set of countries to negotiate with.
Election night challenge:
Every time a state is called, drop and do that number of electoral college votes in pushups (🟥) or squats (🟦). Then take a shot of your favorite liquor.
R or D, they will both do your body good. Bonus: you won’t feel it until at least late tomorrow morning.
What Chris has endured here on X is sobering. The truth always comes out, and I’m so proud of the way my friend is handling such a stressful situation, not only for him but also his family and colleagues at Fort Capital.
Proud of you, @fortworthchris.
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Eddy Badrina retweeted
If you think the Trump shooting was staged, you're an idiot. Multiple reports have the shooter as dead, and the former president was hit an inch away from his brain. That's not a "staged false flag," it's an assassination attempt. And it's repulsive and undemocratic.
Science fair projects suck. Science fair projects are awesome.
I worked with my 14yr old over the last three days to complete a DIY science project. Watched him try and fail at building three different methods before he even got to test out his hypothesis. Hope, anticipation, then frustration. Rinse and repeat.
On his third try, he actually got the device in a place to run the test. He was thrilled - not necessarily about the outcome, but because he proved to himself that he could just do it!
Welcome to the land of growth-stage startups, son.
We fail, we learn, and we keep trying until we succeed, or at least test our hypotheses out. We do hard things here. And on the rare occasion, we even get patents for them.
(pictured below: a DIY Magdeburg Hemisphere).
