Charlie Warren
speaker
178 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 3 Jun
Charlie Warren’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Obsess over this from day one.
There's three main components here.
There's model costs, hosting costs, and those humans in the loop.
All three of them need a number, a trend line, and someone who owns them.
Be deeply suspicious of zero margin or negative margin pilots.
They're fine to learn from, but it's really dangerous to get hooked on those.
The core bet here is the more the product is built, the lower the COGS, the better the gross margin.
I call this AI operating leverage.
Okay, OPEX.
This includes research and development costs, so building the product, sales and general administrative, which is like finance, legal, exec salaries, pretty standard stuff here.
Operating income.
This is the revenue minus the COGS minus the OPEX.
you will be judged on your operating income in these businesses faster than you might expect.
Net income.
This is the operating income, less taxes and interest.
That's less important in the medium term.
So here's the actual P&L opportunity for these businesses.
Traditional services firms top out around 30% margins.
Pure software and agent companies have more margin, but often smaller TAMs.
The bet on these services companies is that that AI operating leverage gets you closer to software margins, say 50% plus, on a market that's two to three times bigger than software.
Showing 141–160 of 178 · page 8 of 9
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