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Comment by drdrek | Hacker News Reader

I've got AI fatigue as the next guy, but this is over correcting.

VC money is in a constant state of FOMO, this is nothing new. Companies dress up as AI, or web3 or web2, or fintech or what ever to more easily attract capital. If 57.9% of dollars went to AI startups this year is not because everything is AI, I would bet 25% are just companies that tacked AI on to an unrelated business model and its skewing the statistics. I'll promise you that 10 years from now 57.9% of VC funding is going to be in some other buzzword and its not going to be AI.

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Can confirm. I’m at a startup in a pretty boring space and we’re having lots of success just by bringing modern software into the industry, but we’re gearing up for a series A and we absolutely must include AI in our pitch deck. So for the last 6-8 months we’ve just been scrambling to find some sort of reasonable use cases for AI in our product, but in reality it’s not a differentiator for us at all.

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It's not dishonest. It's opportunity cost.

I mean. It’s just reality lol. We need money. We tailor our deck to what investors want to hear.

But why do you want them in your business and will have to cash them out someday? Why not organically grow and own your business?

Because that's simply not how business works

Not all businesses can survive that model.

I would argue that any business which cannot survive that model is a business that should not exist. If you can't grow organically over time with your profits, chances are you aren't making anything actually useful or worthwhile.

That’s pretty silly. Not every business can be started and reach profitability without upfront capital. Even if they did that doesn’t mean it’s bad for a company to take investments to scale faster. Economies of scale are a real thing

They have to seek vc funding to grow because one of their competitors will. If they don’t, they will lose the market to the vc backed hyper scaler.

…first of all, what about every business that isn’t software? Restaurants need to secure a lease and buy equipment. Manufacturing anything requires you to build a factory. Then, is it so far-fetched to imagine a software business that needs to write a bunch of code before it can start selling?

Theres a lot of conditions for this to be a good ideas, but - Typically you can grow at rate X, over time. If you raise enough money to buy someone else, you can grow at maybe 2X.

If you can raise money, at a low cost, which allows you to grow NOW, as opposed to grow later ? All things being equal, this is the better choice.

NB: This is a toy model, terms and conditions apply.

Because that’s not feasible for our product. It’s the whole reason investors exist in the first place.

Sounds like securities fraud

It would be fraud if we were lying about any of it, but we’re not. That’s why we’re trying to find AI use cases instead of just making up some BS.

SBF or Elizabeth Holmes or Madoff could say the exact same thing. I am convinced they thought the exact same thing.

There’s such an enormous divide between tailoring a pitch deck to the investor to highlight the things they want to see and outright fraud I don’t even know where to begin with it.

User describes dishonest ecosystem. Gets upvotes. Another user expresses empathy that they're trapped in said dishonest ecosystem (which is inarguably dishonest)? Downvotes.

Don't change HN.

I downvoted that comment because efficiency is a very specific term with a precise meaning in markets.

In efficient capital markets, a good business (they claimed to already be successful) would get funded without needing to add empty hype, don’t you think?

I did not perceive it as empathy fwiw

Market are efficient-ish which is probably as good as it gets, if your framework cant account for dishonesty its not a very useful tool to analyze human endeavors

A truly efficient market would be one where all public and private information is incorporated into price. There’s no room to beat the market in an efficient market.

Venture capital is definitely not an efficient market. But I’m not sure what your point is.

Maybe your sales pitch is that this can't be disrupted by AI yet...

I take it you haven’t been chatting with many VCs lately :-P. No such thing as something that AI won’t disrupt.

May it disrupt them too.

Have it monitor the entire operation in real time. Me and my way with words :)

Ditto.

Have you tried asking AI how to plausibly include some slides or bullets about AI in the existing pitch?

When you need a dash of convincing b******t, they are excellent generators.

If you can find nothing else, you can add a little irritating floating chatbot icon on your product(I am making huge assumptions that it has somekind of UI whether native or web or touch screen or something), which you can converse with to may be RAG stuff from some panel/tab and respond to questions.

I have seen way too many products suddenly becoming ProductX to now ProductX-AI by simply adding a RAG powered document conversation popup.

Yea that’s the thing we really don’t want to do. We’ve found a couple legitimate use cases, in all honesty. But they’re like marginal improvement type features not industry disrupting features.

In fairness, as a company, you pretty much have to jump on the next bandwagon a lot of the time even if you have doubts whether it's there yet or is going to be a splash in the pan.

My story is that OpenStack didn't really work out but, if you were serious about the cloud thing, you sort of had to hop aboard even if, in general, the landscape ended up playing out differently with containers.

OpenStack probably has more users right this minute than it ever did before.

Broadcom is to thank for that.

It’s definitely pretty big in telco but the original vision was probably bigger relative to how containers played out than it was originally seen to be.

And yeah probably a sizable way from VMware but not ready for containers momentum which is ironically not a small part of initial VMware momentum from physical servers.

Enterprise is pivoting now, and have been for about 4y.

Many went to Nutanix for virtualization and containerization, but many shops will stay virtualization-only for security and governance reasons for a long time.

Yeah this article is dumb, it is asserting that: Interest rates will never come back down, and AI is the last VC funded tech craze that will happen.

There is no way both of those are even remotely true.

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