Investors at TechCrunch Disrupt did not shy away from admitting they are interested in mainly one thing: artificial intelligence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nina Achadjian from Index, Jerry Chen from Greylock, and Peter Deng from Felicis all spoke about the latest obsession in venture capital and how startups can stand out in a quickly crowding\u00a0market. The environment is moving fast, Achadjian told the crowd, and companies are experiencing unprecedented growth.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe spend an enormous, enormous amount of time really assessing the entrepreneur and how resilient they will be able to be in a moment where things are just rapidly changing,\u201d Achadjian said. Now more than ever, founders have to lean into showing their passion and domain expertise, and remain honest about their product market fit, she said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is so much demand from enterprise companies to try the latest and greatest AI, sometimes there\u2019s false positives of product market fit,\u201d she explained, \u201cand you can get a lot of revenue with not having true ROI,\u201d meaning customers who are getting their return on investment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That leads another consideration VCs are looking for: an ability to pivot as the market twists and turns. \u201cThere\u2019s a joke that, like, 1,000 startups die and that\u2019s why being resilient is really important,\u201d Achadjian continued.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deng, who used to work at OpenAI, added to Achadjian\u2019s statements. He said founders need to find their unique data flywheels that are going to separate them from the hordes of everyone pitching the exact same idea, especially since the enterprise companies likely testing their products are also testing out a few other competitors at the same time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re able to go deep and really solve a true need for them,\u201d in a way they cannot do themselves, then managing data is \u201cwhere the important part is,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Founders should also have an answer for why their product will not just be a feature added into the foundational models, Achadjian said. It may be okay if a founder doesn\u2019t know if the model makers are working on a competor but they should have a hypothesis on how the business is defensible when pitching investors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Right now,\u00a0what\u2019s\u00a0working in AI seems to be three things, Chen noted: Chat apps, coding apps, and AI in customer service.\u00a0But there is still so much more change to happen\u00a0throughout every sector and industry.<\/p>\n
Deng is excited by AI-enabled marketplaces. Achadjian, meanwhile, thinks that this could be the moment for robotics, while Chen is curious to see how AI impacts SaaS and\u00a0othermarkets not yet directly impacted.<\/p>\n
As for what\u2019s not AI and exciting? \u201cPen and paper processes and digitize them,\u201d Achadjian said. There\u2019s a lot of blue-collar industries that, incredibly, still do many processes manually, she continued. But, they acknowledged even that is ripe for the opportunity to be automated by AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Investors at TechCrunch Disrupt did not shy away from admitting they are interested in mainly one thing: artificial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,5454,46,777,125,4541],"class_list":{"0":"post-194184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-investors","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-techcrunch-disrupt","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-venture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}