Short excerpt from a YouTube interview (Jason M. Lemkin) discussing how AI is negatively affecting startups. The speakers characterize AI as "maiming" startups and probe possible drivers: faster-moving competitors, decisions to build vs buy, and speeding of internal development processes—framing the issue as a multi-causal growth slowdown that they intend to diagnose.
And AI is maiming them.
Yep.
So can you dimension that maiming a little more? Is it more competitors moving faster?
Yes.
It internal build? Yes versus build versus buy. Or is it the internal development process speeding?
Why are they all slow down?
Yeah. What's. What's driving this context? What's the.
It's probably compounding effects. First of all, one of the biggest. There's probably. There's probably two issues. The first two have. There's probably a bunch. But the first two have nothing to do with AI. One is too many didn't go multi product. If you listen to Tope. I don't know if you're with Tope for calendly, he's not telling you what's coming this year, but when you heard him say multi product, they're at well over 200 million. I don't know where they are. I don't know if they're past 300, but they're well over 200 million. Multi product is the game. Okay. Too many folks got to 100 million with one product. Too many. I call too many folks got to 100 million pretending they had a second product, but it was really an extension of the feature. Right. There are some folks like Parker Conrad that disagree with me. But although we'll do something with him on it soon, I don't actually think we disagree. But I think if your second product is smaller than your first, you're not multi product because it doesn't get you anywhere. If you get to 100 million and it takes you two years to launch a product that can only do 50 million, it doesn't get you anywhere. Right. It's got to be bigger. So too many folks didn't go multi product, pretended it was multi product. It was just a second feature. It wasn't a whole new product. Right. So that's root cause number one of the slowdown at 100 million. Root cause number two. And so the lesson learned. And it was funny. I was rewatching the chief product officer of Samsara, which is one of the most top 10 most. He said last year at Saster, you got to go multi product by 10 million in revenue. You got to go multi product by 10 million.
