I Met 900+ Founders. Here’s What’s Working in the AI Era

Okay, let's talk about the Australian Tech Comp.

Giles and Penelope do such a wonderful job with that multi-month program.

So I got to spend a lot of time both with them and the founders in the program, and I think the highlight for me was I got to coach three of the startups in their semifinalist process.

And what was really interesting, three very different founders and very different companies.

We had Jane from Sova, King from AI Buyer, and Marcel from Travel Activated.

Wow.

Lots of good bets there.

Three wildly different, very interesting companies.

startups and here's the key thing when I look at them and what they're searching for to work on and what I look at the other 240 odd founders and startups in that Australian tech comp program here's the interesting thing I really think the theme for ATC this year was the search for differentiation And I think what we're seeing here is with AI, with competition, with sort of global patterns, macro, micro uncertainty, it really felt that this sort of early-ish startup, so this sort of seed to series A, sort of anything from startups to some established scale-ups were in this cohort.

So most of them were actually in revenue.

So that gives you a sense of where they're at.

So they're all like, okay, how do we sustain some sort of differentiation for the long term? How are we better than just using Claude? So that was a really big theme.

So which leads us to like, well, where are people finding answers? I think the obvious one right now that seems to be coming up and it looks to me to be quite strong is just building agentic first solutions.

So this reminds me of what Zoom did pre-COVID is they built cloud first and they had crazy success off the back of that.

They could scale during COVID.

So if I think about where we are right now, so you fast forward four or five years and What I think is particularly interesting is if you build anything, you should be asking yourself, is it agentic first? That seems like a pretty straightforward way to win.

Some nuances here without a doubt, proprietary data seems to be, if you can create some data that, you know, open AI cannot get their hands on, that seems pretty defendable to me.

So there's some interesting thinking on that end of the spectrum.

So if we go to the other side of the spectrum, I see a lot of startups thinking about bringing the human touch into play.

Things that are not as scalable, but highly differentiated.

So you've got like two crazy parts of this access.

You've got agentic data, you know, super high tech.

And then you've just got being extremely high touch in a human.

So it was really interesting.

That's where the answer for like, How do I create a long-term differentiated product that seems to be where founders are finding a lot of success at the moment? So that was interesting.