Jaeden Schaefer

And so I think while every company has kind of added AI to their sales, like their pitch deck, basically for VCs, I think it's becoming a lot more selective on who's actually getting money, right?

You can't just put AI on your pitch deck and get money.

So according to one of the first interviews or kind of data points I got on what VCs are looking at as far as investing in AI companies today that maybe they weren't

in the past is from Aaron Holiday.

He's a managing partner at 645 Ventures.

And by the way, TechCrunch did a whole rundown where they interviewed a bunch of different people.

I'm grabbing some quotes there and also grabbing some data from the overall industry that we're tying together in kind of this episode in this report.

But Aaron Holiday, he's a managing partner.

at 645 Ventures.

And he says that the category is still getting the most interest are AI native infrastructure.

So that's vertical SaaS built on proprietary data, systems of action that actually complete tasks and platforms embedded deeply into mission critical workflows.

So basically, in other words, products that own something really essential.

And there's a keyword I think he said in here that I 100% agree with.

And that is, he said, AI that actually completes something.

So I think there's a lot of this, a lot of these startups that were like, hey, look, we have like a SaaS, we have a tool, and then we stuck ChatGPT on top of it.

And you could chat with ChatGPT and it can give you like ideas about what you're looking at.

In my opinion, that's very, I mean, basically, that's just the original SaaS.

It's not super interesting.

It might give you like

some ideas or help you like troubleshoot or you don't need their customer support as much.