The latest Venture Capital & Startups 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.
AI is enabling a new class of profitable, capital-efficient software companies that venture is ill-equipped to fund. The author proposes a hybrid structure—priced equity plus revenue-share repayment—to capture durable mid-market exits while delivering faster, more predictable LP returns than traditional venture.
AI agents' full autonomy in both offense and defense will reshape software security and corporate innovation. Incumbents face structural incentives to keep humans in the loop—risking catastrophic failure—while startups, with nothing to lose, will fully automate and disrupt.
Bell Labs achieved epochal breakthroughs because it combined patient capital from AT&T's monopoly rents, a concrete mission with bottomless technical depth, and direct manufacturing scale—conditions that modern antitrust, capital markets, and VC structures have made illegal. Recreating such institutions requires "synthetic rent" without the predatory monopoly, a structural puzzle we've largely abandoned.
Vertical software incumbents face existential pressure from AI-native competitors but have mostly opted for defensive bolt-ons rather than transformative M&A. The article argues that an acquisition wave is imminent, outlining why incumbents have delayed, what founders should build to become acquisition targets, and how the industry's "Incumbent Adoption Cycle" predicts the timing.
a16z's latest State of Markets reveals compressed valuations for horizontal B2B (2.7x revenue), a stark bifurcation between high-growth startups (500%+) and mature ones, and a unicorn cohort split between aging, unprofitable low-growers and young AI-native companies. Growth now determines valuation multiples far more than profitability.
Open-weight AI models are replicating the Linux-to-Unix transition: closed labs' capability and cost advantages eroding rapidly, forcing both startups and investors to rethink infrastructure moats and funding paths. The bottleneck shifts from building capability to knowing what to build with it.
Software valuations whipsawed while retention held steady at 109% NRR; consumption-based pricing outperformed, and vertical software suffered disproportionate multiple compression despite stronger fundamentals—likely due to overgeneralized AI-replacement fears in knowledge-work sectors, creating pockets of undervaluation.
Fluent's investment thesis on global health: proven business models (AI primary care, D2C, home care delivery, practice software) working in one geography are being replicated across borders and sectors, with AI and localization as key multipliers.
A Wealth of Common Sense (34) · Saastr (24) · Earnest Sweat (15) · Newcomer (14) · Lenny's Newsletter (14) · Sammy Abdullah (14) · A16Z (14) · Continuations (11) · Kyle Harrison (9) · Antler (9)
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