Charles HudsonFounder and Managing Partner, Precursor Ventures

Everyone’s Hyped on AI — But What About Tariffs?

3 May 2025 · 1 min

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Charles Hudson (YouTube, May 3, 2025) discusses how tariffs might affect startups and venture-backed companies. He notes that VCs currently view tariffs as clearly impactful for hardware and consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms but not yet for B2B SaaS or AI companies. He hypothesizes that tariffs could begin to matter for B2B SaaS if macro weakness causes customers to cut software spending, which would then surface in software company boardrooms and VC portfolios.

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And I wonder if that dynamic will shift sometime later this quarter where people are just maybe slightly less enthusiastic about AI and slightly more concerned about tariffs but we still don't yet have a big meaningful company that's in tech world in startup and VC world that's been like tariffs blew up my business right. I think if VC starts seeing that in their portfolio and the place I could see it Happen is actually B2B SaaS where companies are just like our business is down due to macro stuff and as a result we're going to buy less software I think until it starts to hit in boardrooms of software companies. I think a lot of VCs my sense is there's like this tariffs definitely impacts you if you're a hardware company, definitely probably impacts you if you're CPG. But if you're a B2B SAS or AI company to date the feeling has been kind of like maybe this isn't as big a deal for them.