Jason M. Lemkin and a co-host debate whether AI startups or big incumbents will dominate. Incumbents like Salesforce and HubSpot have a structural edge: they own years of proprietary customer data from emails, calls, and Zoom recordings that startups can't easily replicate, and they're already integrating AI into their platforms.
All right, let's talk related.
Okay, let's talk. Because now you've, you're seeing this at HubSpot and it's when 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 comments and startups, it's obvious there's a thousand startups, there's a thousand flowers.
But what's your nuance?
Learning from HubSpot + 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 that the age old it's the startups are innovating and they're racing to get distribution and the bigger companies have distribution, they're racing innovate. The twist this time is the, the data is 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 this 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 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.
