Invest with Courage
If you spend any time on X or reading tech headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re living through a full-blown SaaS apocalypse.
AI is going to replace everything.
All software is a “thin wrapper around an LLM”.
Every business model is broken.
Pack it up, folks.
It’s…exhausting.
Will AI change everything? Of course. Does that mean there’s nothing to invest in, or that companies built over decades are suddenly worthless? Of course not. We’re in a messy transition, not an extinction event. And in messy transitions, the temptation is to freeze – wait for “certainty” that never actually shows up. As investors, we don’t have that luxury. Our job is to make decisions in spite of the uncertainty, and to do it with courage rather than fear.
Here’s how we’re trying to navigate this moment.
The True Norths (that haven’t changed)
When the world feels noisy, we like to come back to a few simple anchors. None of these are new, but they’re surprisingly easy to forget when everyone is screaming about AI.
1. Exceptional teams
We talk a lot about product-market fit, but founder-market fit still matters just as much.
- Do they deeply understand the problem?
- Are they learning faster than the market is changing?
- Would I want to be in a foxhole with this team if the cycle turns (again)?
Tech shifts. Moats erode. Great teams have a habit of finding new ones.
2. Solving real problems and delighting customers
This sounds obvious, but in hype cycles it isn’t. If you strip away the AI gloss:
- Is there a painful, urgent problem?
- Do customers light up when they describe how the product helps?
- Would they be truly upset if it were taken away?
Delighted customers are still the best leading indicator we have. They’re also the hardest thing to fake – AI or not.
3. A business model that makes sense
We’ve had a long stretch where “we’ll figure out the business model later” was considered a valid strategy. We’re looking for:
- A path to credible unit economics
- Pricing that isn’t completely detached from the cost to serve (including model and compute costs)
- A plausible route to durable gross margins, even as infrastructure and model pricing shifts
The technologies change. The math of a good business really doesn’t.
Adaptability, Humility, Curiosity
Beyond those true norths, there are three traits we think matter more than ever – for founders and investors.
Staying adaptable
We’re not in a “new normal”; we’re in a continuous re-normalisation. Models change, capabilities change, pricing from infra providers changes. What’s “differentiated” today might be baseline in 12–18 months. We’re asking:
- How quickly can this team ship, learn, and adjust?
- Are they locked into a single tech stack or GTM motion, or do they have room to move?
- Are they designing product and pricing with the assumption that change is the constant?
Rigidity is the real risk factor.
Humility
This is a hard one in our industry. A lot of what we “knew” about software over the last decade is being questioned. That’s uncomfortable and healthy. As an investor, humility right now looks like:
- Being willing to say “I don’t know yet”
- Updating your view as new information arrives
- Not assuming that because something has worked for 10 years, it must work for the next 10
The people who get in trouble in transitions are usually the ones defending old mental models long after the world has moved on.
Never lose your curiosity
We want to work with founders, teams and co-investors who are genuinely curious:
- How will workflows actually change inside a clinic, a factory, an accounting firm?
- How to harness AI to transform customer outcomes and 10x their experience?
- Where do humans still want to be firmly in the loop?
Curiosity is what turns fear into opportunity. It’s also what keeps this job fun.
How We’re Thinking About Investable Ideas in an “AI Everywhere” World
So what do we actually do with all this? Here’s the simple framework we’re using to think through opportunities.
1. New technology always creates new problems
Yes, AI will automate things. It will also create entirely new classes of headache:
- Data governance and provenance
- Security and abuse
- Evaluation, monitoring, debugging
- Compliance and auditability in regulated industries
- Just to name a few!
Every new platform wave spawns multiple categories whose job is basically “fix the mess the last wave created.” AI will be no different. We’re very interested in teams building real businesses around those emerging pain points.
2. Inertia is real
Adoption does not happen at the speed of demo videos.
It happens at the speed of:
- Procurement
- Risk committees
- Change management
- Individual comfort with new tools
And that speed varies wildly by industry, market, geography, etc. This matters because:
- Some segments will be disrupted quickly.
- Others will move glacially, leaving a lot of room for “boring” SaaS and hybrid models to keep compounding.
Part of critical thinking right now is being honest about who actually moves fast and who doesn’t.
3. Data: what stays private and inaccessible?
Not all data wants to be free. Some of the most interesting opportunities sit in spaces where:
- Data is highly sensitive or regulated
- Access requires deep trust, integrations, and time
- The value comes from private, structured, longitudinal data
In other words, there will be big winners whose advantage comes not from building the flashiest model, but from carefully earning the right to use and learn from the right data.
4. Execution as a moat (still!)
Execution has always mattered. We think it’s becoming even more of a moat. When powerful tools are widely accessible, the question shifts from:
“Who has access to the tech?”
to:
“Who can assemble it into a product, a go-to-market motion, and a company that actually works?”
We’re doubling down on:
- Teams with strong operating discipline
- Clear thinking about pricing and packaging in a usage-based world
- The ability to sell, onboard, support, and renew—not just demo well
In a world of abundance, execution is the filter.
Investing with Courage
Do we have all the answers? Absolutely not. Anyone who says they do right now is either selling something or kidding themselves. But we don’t have to choose between naive optimism and paralyzed pessimism.
We can:
- Hold onto a few enduring principles about great businesses,
- Stay adaptable as the ground shifts under us,
- Keep our humility and our curiosity intact, and
- Back teams who are navigating this transition with clear eyes.
The “SaaS apocalypse” makes for great headlines. In practice, we think we’re going to see:
- Some categories get compressed or re-priced,
- New categories emerge around AI-created pain points, and
- A subset of companies—old and new—build very real, very durable value by embracing change thoughtfully.
Our job as investors is not to wait for certainty. It’s to make the best decisions we can with incomplete information, grounded in first principles, and to invest with courage, not fear.
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