What’s after mimicry?
David Peterson

Happy new year and welcome back! Hope you all had a relaxing break. While this newsletter took some time off, we’ve been busy. Two term sheets out between Christmas and New Years. Phew. Excited to keep things moving in 2025.

And to all our friends and colleagues in the Los Angeles area, we’re thinking about you as you continue to deal with these devastating fires. Now on to the column…

I’m a sucker for a Steve Jobs keynote. And this speech from the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1983 is a classic of the form and eerily relevant for this exact moment in time. In the speech, he talks about the personal computer as a new medium of communication, comparing it to the radio and the television. He observes that “each medium shapes not only the communication that goes through it, but…the process of communication” itself. When a new medium arrives, Jobs notes, our first instinct is to copy what came before. Early television, he points out, was essentially just radio with pictures. But over time, as we understand the unique affordances of the new medium, and as people get used to what’s possible, the communication evolves.

This observation neatly ties into Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, "the medium is the message." While often interpreted to mean that the medium of communication influences how the message is received, I think it carries a broader implication: that, over time, the medium dictates the message. The content that succeeds in one medium often fails in another, and it takes experimentation and invention to figure out the message that will thrive. Indeed, to Jobs’ point, as television matured, new approaches were tested - multi-camera filming, live broadcast events, and new show formats (sitcoms, late-night talk shows, etc.) - that leveraged the power of the screen to engage viewers.

Today, we stand at the cusp of another potentially transformative shift in communication with the rise of AI. And we’re all desperately trying to figure out what the dominant “message” of this new medium might be. But I wonder if, just like Jobs observed, we’re still stuck copying what came before.

That’s certainly the thought that comes to mind to me when paging through the deck of yet-another-accounting-copilot, or reading the 50th funding announcement for an AI SDR in so many months. This can’t be it, can it?

Indeed, through this lens, even the somewhat radical idea of replacing an employee with an anthropomorphic “AI agent” and “selling the work” strikes me as hopelessly shortsighted. Not because the underlying technology isn’t impressive. Not because “agents” don’t have massive potential for impact. But because they’re so obviously mimicking the way the world used to work, rather than charting a truly new path.

Look, I genuinely hope that 2025 is the “year of the agent.” I’d love for my friend Gemini or ChatGPT to book my next flight for me. Certainly given the insanely impressive improvements in OpenAI’s “thinking” models. But my advice for startups is to leave the mimicry to the incumbents. Not to say mimicking what came before is necessarily bad. It’s a natural stepping stone. But the real opportunity is to take full advantage of the unique, weird, surprising capabilities of artificial intelligence. Lean into what makes AI different and new.

If you watched that talk from Steve Jobs linked above, you may have noticed that he was speaking to a room full of product and industrial designers. And he spent a large portion of his time pleading with the attendees to forgo jobs designing cars or buildings and come join the personal computer revolution instead. I think what he realized is that computers were hard to grok and good design could help the average person understand what made computers uniquely useful. Just like how the computer, with its invisible electrons whizzing about, was intimidating to people whose mental model of a machine had gears and pistons they could touch and feel, AI is similarly alien. And it will require just as much thoughtful design and purposeful invention to reach the mainstream.

Enterprise Sales in High Gear
It’s easier than ever to grow fast, but harder than ever to grow fast enough for long enough.

Am I Thinking About AI the Right Way?
Gil shares the four AI themes and questions he's thinking about.

The Venture Apocalypse
The venture world is deeply debating its future, but core principles remain unchanged.

No Sleepwalk to Success
Engineering success in a technical startup.

More blogs

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Nvidia’s broadening story. At CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pitched “gaming chips, robots, autonomous vehicles and a personal AI supercomputer” but all investors seem to care about is the data center business. “Nvidia’s data center segment alone is projected to generate about $113 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending in January—more than the projected total revenue of any other chip company this year, according to FactSet. So that business naturally gets a lot of attention… Nvidia’s second-largest business unit, graphics processors for gaming PCs, is on track to generate a little under $12 billion in revenue this year and is about a 10th the size of its data center segment. The company’s automotive segment is expected to grow to about $2 billion in revenue in the next fiscal year, though the company says total automotive revenue that year would be more like $5 billion if counting the data center computing necessary to power self-driving cars. Such lopsided business realities will keep data centers in the driver’s seat of Nvidia’s stock price for a long while.”

MIT’s list of ten breakthrough technologies for 2025 included things like Generative AI Search and Small Language Models (SLMs) but also things like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and cattle burping remedies. “The world’s herds of cattle belch out methane as a by-product of digestion, as do sheep and goats. That powerful greenhouse gas makes up the single biggest source of livestock emissions, which together contribute 11% to 20% of the world’s total climate pollution, depending on the analysis….Enter the cattle burping supplement. DSM-Firmenich, a Netherlands-based conglomerate that produces fragrances, pharmaceuticals, and other products, has developed a feed supplement, Bovaer, that it says can cut methane emissions by 30% in dairy cattle and even more in beef cattle. It works by inhibiting an enzyme in the animals’ guts, which ordinarily helps convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide produced during digestion into the methane that they burp up.”

US AI chip export restrictions spark fears in Israel. The outgoing Biden administration’s three-tiered system of AI export controls has placed Israel in the second tier, causing some in the Israeli tech eco-system to fear obstacles to AI innovation. “This move is expected to severely damage, possibly to the point of paralysis, the AI industry in Israel. "This will have a very significant impact on Israel," market sources said. "Limiting the country’s computing power is a major blow. These technologies are already embedded in millions of computers today. Every processor destined for Israel will need approval from a U.S. regulator, delaying research, data center construction, and the provision of cloud services. Every AI processor will require separate approval." In effect, the sources said, the Biden administration is designating winners and losers in the race for artificial intelligence: first-tier countries that will enjoy unrestricted AI computing power versus second- and third-tier countries burdened by heavy regulation. Companies in Israel will theoretically be able to purchase cloud services for AI needs from first-tier countries, but they will compete with 150 other nations for the same resources—some of which have far more financial clout than Israel.”

HOW TO STARTUP

Types of open source licenses. Paul Sawers of Techcrunch put out a review of the many types of open source licenses including MIT, Apache 2.0, GNU, Mozilla, and others.

Types of AI Pricing. Kyle Poyar put together a thoughtful overview of AI-first pricing models. It’s a lot more complex than most realize, and the range of options and flavors is becoming clear. “As AI agent businesses continue shifting away from seat-based pricing and toward charging for units of work delivered, they tend to encounter a nagging objection from customers: your pricing is too complicated and too hard for me to predict. One way I’ve seen folks navigate this objection: positioning as an AI “FTE” equivalent rather than a bundle of credits.”

HOW TO VENTURE

AI eats VC. Crunchbase released its report on 2024 VC trends, and, in news that will surprise absolutely no one, “AI” accounted for one-third of all VC dollars invested during the year. “Close to a third of all global venture funding went to companies in AI-related fields, making artificial intelligence the leading sector for funding. Funding to AI-related companies reached over $100 billion — up more than 80% year over year from $55.6 billion in 2023 — Crunchbase data shows…Funding to the AI sector in 2024 surpassed every year in the past decade, including the peak global funding year of 2021. Of those AI dollars, almost a third of all AI funding went to foundation model companies.The other two-thirds of funding went to sectors impacted by these new models. Infrastructure and data provisioning to manage and operate AI grew. Other leading sectors included autonomous driving, healthcare, robotics, professional services, security and military, Crunchbase data shows.”

CruxOCM’s CEO Vicki Knott shared her inspiring journey from growing up in rural Newfoundland to becoming a tech leader in the oil and gas industry on the latest What The Funk episode.

LightSolver’s CTO Chene Tradonsky, recently shared his predictions for HPC and quantum computing in 2025 with The Quantum Insider.

DUST Identity has been recognized on Built In's Best Places to Work list for the third consecutive year.

DUST Identity
Backend Software Engineer - APIs (Boston)

Groundcover
Senior Product Manager (Tel Aviv)

Reco
Field Marketing Manager (US Remote)

Vault Platform
Full Stack Software Engineer (UK Remote)

More jobs