During the era of big data, data gravity was the core strategic imperative. Wherever the biggest dataset resided, customers ran their compute workloads that generated all of the profit and revenue growth for the last generation of data companies. Today, the battle is for AI gravity. Why? AI requires orders of magnitude more compute than other workloads,...

As software startups begin to sell agentic systems, the procurement process will change. Unlike classical software, where the application either meets the criteria (price, integration into other software, particular features) or doesn’t, agentic systems operate on a performance continuum. Here’s a recent evaluation table for Codestral, Mistral’s...

Large scale ETL (extract, transform, load) processes are a critical part of any data pipeline. They are responsible for moving data from one place to another, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a destination system. In the world of blockchain, these processes are even more complex. In web2, the engineering team building a...

Machine learning advances tend to evolve in bursts. Researchers publish a new paper with a newly discovered technique. It launches the industry forward & more researchers rapidly iterate to improve it further. Progress looks like this - a series of aS curves one after another. No one knows the time period between the rapid progress or the slope...

In a world where AI agents are 2.5-3x as productive as humans, which would parallel mechanical robots, how does a software company price? Building on yesterday’s post, pricing in software companies may change significantly when AI agents become the norm. The SaaS business model of the last 20 years for SaaS is a beautiful one. Annual prepaid contracts...

Pricing an AI product will be a defining question in software for the next few years. AI products offer productivity gains. But greater productivity may reduce the demand for seats over time, ultimately decreasing the size of software markets. We can observe the market trends today across some of the larger SaaS companies who offer AI pricing. ...