Incumbents like Salesforce and Microsoft will likely dominate B2B AI because they own massive proprietary datasets on calling, email, and customer records that startups can't replicate. While startups innovate faster, that data advantage gives established companies a decisive edge.
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All right. Let's talk related. Okay. Let's talk because now you've, you're seeing this at HubSpot and at Sequoia and others about AI and who wins. I've thought about this a lot, two elements to it, but I don't think it's obvious who wins or comes in startups. It's obvious there's 1,000 startups. There's 1,000 flowers, but what's your nuanced learning from HubSpot plus Sequoia on who wins and in B2B, who wins in AI? Who benefits the most, or who benefits the most is maybe a better way to put the question, right?
I think it's the age-old, it's the startups are innovating and they're racing to get distribution and the bigger companies have distribution and they're racing to innovate. The twist this time is the data's very hard to acquire for a startup. So it's not just the innovation, but you need a proprietary set of data to do something cool with AI. And I think of HubSpot, for example, we've got the Zoom data, we've got the calling data, we've got the email data, we've got a lot of the unstructured stuff, and then we have all the structured stuff too. And if you're a startup breaking in and you want to do some amazing AI work, it's tricky with all that. And so I think it buys Salesforce, HubSpot, the bigger companies a little time. The other thing I think is a little bit different about this than other platform shifts is It feels like everyone has read and learned the lessons of Clay Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma, and the incumbents seem to be moving very quickly, whether it's Microsoft or HubSpot or Salesforce, you name it. No one seems to be sitting on their hands in this one. So I like, as I play on both sides of this, but in this particular case, I think the incumbents have a little bit more of an advantage than in most platform shifts.
