All 20 Data & Analytics posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
Analysis of 44 software earnings calls reveals AI is now a core deal driver for enterprise SaaS, with embedded AI features, agent infrastructure, and proprietary data moats fueling record growth, margins, and velocity across the sector.
Ben Yoskovitz launches Candor, a synthetic user research platform, and reflects on the gap between building product with AI and actually launching it—the critical work of onboarding, positioning, segmentation, and distribution that code alone cannot solve.
Snowflake reaccelerated to 37% growth at $6B revenue, driven equally by AI products and core consumption acceleration, while deliberately cutting gross margin 2 points to fund AI infrastructure and offsetting with operating expense discipline.
OpenAI claims an AI system solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem in four days—but the announcement sparked fury over whether the company accessed rival researchers' private work via Codex, industrialized their years-long research direction on rumor alone, and manipulated credit attribution in a way that exposes deep structural conflicts when AI labs double as both research tools and competitors.
Long-horizon agents fundamentally change AI workload properties, shifting compute, memory, and power optimization from dense training/chat inference to distributed execution: CPU:GPU parity, flash-based state storage over HBM, and aggregated megawatt pools over gigawatt campuses.
Meritech's August 2026 software industry analysis shows AI tailwinds driving valuation divergence, with growth-adjusted multiples now near pre-ZIRP levels but concentrated in fewer companies; market rewards growth 4.1x more than profitability, and few horizontal SaaS vendors trade at premium multiples without demonstrable AI-driven acceleration.
Only seven public B2B software companies grow faster than 30%—a 90th percentile threshold now instead of median. A stark two-tier market has emerged: AI-native startups doubling/tripling, and public companies clustered in low-to-mid twenties, with consumption models and usage-based pricing, not headcount, driving the winners.
Box reported $1.29B ARR with 17% billings growth and 106% NRR by repackaging around AI governance—charging competitors' agents for content layer access with inference costs borne elsewhere—yielding modest but meaningful repricing momentum and operating leverage.
Saastr (4) · Conor Witt (3) · A16Z (3) · Sammy Abdullah (2) · Saanya Ojha (2) · Tomasz Tunguz (1) · Turner Novak (1) · Climate Tech VC (1) · Clouded Judgement (1) · Akash Bajwa (1)
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