2023 Semil Shah predictions

"opportunity in the chaos"

Historical portfolio and new investments

• founders finding opportunity in the chaos

• new investment opportunities - people are everywhere

• stark difference in base level quality of founders has gone up

Elon + Twitter - cultural ramifications

• obvious one: headcount

• non-obvious: BidSpotter auctions - selling high-end espresso machines

• where is the money going? people raised a lot, paid people a lot, plus gave equity for risk

Twitter the Product

• optimistic - feels like low-hanging-fruit to improve

• Paul Graham post about Twitter as a protocol

• Attempts to rebuild as a protocol - “promise of Farcaster is interesting”

• could something pop-up? totally!

AI

• existing/incumbent networks/products will add AI as a feature

• exception may be in search

• huge cost makes it unlikely startups will build new LLMs today

AI opportunity - McKinsey?

• proprietary model on their specific corpus of data

• compounding effects, faster information retrieval

• nine-figure business?