Samir Kaji
speaker
769 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 28 Jul
Samir Kaji’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 — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Companies, when you say they go on a path that might not be congruent with the seed model, maybe walk us through what you mean by that.
Right.
So then basically you get the squeezing from both sides.
You have one model, particularly with YCE, the number of companies that because of the valuation, the quantum of capital, those companies are often raising from inception that are incongruent with the seed model and the bigger folks that are acting as this mega brewery, if we extend the analogy.
can come down to the seed level, but the check sizes are much greater and it's really more of a life cycle sort of bet that they're making that they can put large amounts of capital into these companies over time.
Yeah, what were some of the other observations?
You mentioned, obviously, this YC mega fund sort of dynamic that makes it tougher for a seed investor to actually be successful the way they might have been 10 years ago.
Maybe go through some of the other observations you had.
When we think about investing in AI, and I do want to go into sort of the next, because this was a series of, one of which was like, okay, there's a crisis here potentially for a lot of people that may struggle with the business model that has evolved so much over the years that what worked before is not going to work now.
And we'll go into what do you do, right?
Because I think that's the obvious question of like, how do you succeed and thrive in an environment that's fundamentally changed?
But going first to AI, so I think about AI infrastructure.
So whether it's a company like Anthropic or OpenAI or any type of company that's really building fundamental infrastructure, those tend to be very capital-intensive businesses.
that's actually not a good product market fit between a founder going to a seed investor when they may need $100 million fairly quickly and often even beyond that.
That leaves then the AI application layer, which you do have companies that can go to a seed manager, but it does appear that there are so many companies that are effectively doing the same thing, and it's hard to gauge the stickiness and really the long-term potential durability of those companies.
And so...
How do you navigate in a world where AI infrastructure probably off limits and doesn't really make sense for a lot of seed investors?
And now it's the application level.
It's a really interesting point because I do agree, and you mentioned some companies that are the application layer, whether that's Cursor, Windsurf, Harvey.
These are all of these that we've heard of that have broken out and shown some level of not only scale, but durability and distribution.
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