Back in December I wrote about the fight to become the front door to the systems of record. In that post I wrote about distribution, who sits between the user and the data (and why sitting there is strategic). This post is an expansion of that post (and the 1 or 2 I wrote after about similar topics). What really should AI companies be racing towards? If systems of record won in the SaaS era (ie they had the durable moats), what’s the equivalent in the AI era? Of course the answer is still partially “the system of record”, where maybe you swap out “record” with something like “agents” or “work".” But let’s come up with something new :) Let’s start by looking at the SaaS era, and what qualities created durable successful companies. In SaaS, one main goal just about every company aspired towa

As always, these posts are more of a brain dump of “what I’m thinking” about…And lately I’ve been thinking about a pattern that keeps showing up when I study the biggest infrastructure winners of the cloud era, and what it means for AI companies today. Here’s the general idea: the biggest infrastructure winners of the cloud era monetized the core consumption primitive of the platform. In the cloud era, that primitive was compute, storage, and network I/O. In the AI era, it increasingly looks like tokens. Let’s unpack. When cloud computing first started taking off, the core primitive of the platform was very clear: compute. Everything that happened in the cloud ultimately boiled down to compute cycles running somewhere inside a data center. Storage, networking, and databases all mattered of

$NVIDIA(NVDA)$ I’m a perpetual optimist. It’s hard for me to see the world through any other lens! Sometimes I’m naive, but overall I think it’s a better way to live (and, generally, hard to bet against humanity’s resilience). One of the larger debates surrounding AI relates to the impact it will have on employment. One side (booo, the pessimists!) argues we’ll see a collapse in employment as AI takes everyone’s jobs. The other side argues some form of “Jevon’s paradox” - with massive positive economic benefits. Given my intro, I think it’s clear what side of that debate I fall on! There are many ways I’ve framed this in the past (I think I’ve even written about it in a prior week’s edition). However, I heard Jensen recently articulate it much mor

This week in enterprise software: Top 10 #SaaS #Cloud multiples as of today's market close $Cloudflare, Inc.(NET)$ $CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.(CRWD)$ $Palantir Technologies Inc.(PLTR)$ $Samsara, Inc.(IOT)$ $Datadog(DDOG)$ $Snowflake(SNOW)$ $ServiceNow(NOW)$ $MongoDB Inc.(MDB)$ $Veeva(VEEV)$ $HubSpot(HUBS)$ ImageThis week on Clouded Judgement: Q4 earnings season summary- M