Hey there!

It’s Sparsh here!👋 

The rules of investing, building, and operating a business are being rewritten in real time. AI is no longer a trend you track from a distance. It is showing up inside companies, inside portfolios, and inside industries that thought they had more time. 🗃️ 

If you are a founder or an investor, the moves you make in the next 12 to 24 months will matter more than most decisions you have made before. Here is what is actually happening. 📌

Let’s dive in to know more.🚀

🤖 When Your Boss's "Staff" Are All Bots

A real employee recently tried to escalate a work issue. They messaged the chief of staff. No resolution. They went to the head of operations. Still nothing. Only later did they find out that both were AI agents their boss had quietly set up, named, and deployed as team members inside a 50-person org. 🏢 

The boss was treating them like people. The real employees were being managed alongside them. 🧑‍💼 

This is not a thought experiment. It is already happening.

And for founders, the implication is direct. The operational structure you are building today may look unrecognisable in 18 months. If you are evaluating a company to back, ask what percentage of its workflows are already agent-replaceable. That number matters more than headcount right now. 📌

📊 The Number That Rewrites the Benchmark

The old gold standard for a generational startup was "triple, triple, double, double." That was the target. That was what made you a winner. 🏆️ 

We are now watching 10x compound, year over year, become the expectation in AI. The bar has not moved. It has been demolished and rebuilt somewhere else entirely. 📌

💉 AI as a Research Partner, Not Just a Shortcut

An Australian entrepreneur's dog, Rosie, was diagnosed with cancer. He was told there was not much to be done. He disagreed. 🐕️ 

Using ChatGPT and Google DeepMind's AlphaFold, Paul Conyngham sequenced the tumour DNA, modelled the protein structure, and identified the specific mutation. He didn't do it in a vacuum; he used the AI to "bridge the gap" so he could collaborate with researchers at the University of New South Wales to manufacture a custom vaccine. 🧬 

The regulatory process was harder than the science.

Now zoom out. GitLab founder Sid Sijbrandij is doing something similar for his own rare cancer — applying "founder-mode" intensity to his health.

AI is collapsing the distance between domain expertise and domain action. A determined non-expert, armed with the right tools, can now operate at a level that previously required institutional resources. 📌

🗂️ The Hidden Asset Nobody Priced In

Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, had players capturing real-world street footage for years. Today, that footage is a goldmine for AI companies building autonomous delivery bots that need to understand sidewalks and signage. 🗺️ 

The same shift happened with Handshake. Once seen as just a college job board, it was revalued when AI labs realised its user base was the perfect source for RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). They weren't just a job board anymore; they were a high-quality data factory for training the world's smartest models. 📊

The question worth asking about every business you own or back right now:

🏗️ Services Are the New Software

For years, the mental model was fixed. Software: high margins, scales infinitely, back it. Services: people-heavy, margins compress, avoid it.

That model is breaking. ⛓️‍💥

Here is the shift playing out right now across PE and growth-stage deals:

If you are still discounting service-model companies on principle, the underlying reason those businesses were undervalued is being directly addressed. The thesis has changed. 📌

🔍 The Visualisation for Every Investor

Andrej Karpathy’s map of 143 million US jobs reveals a critical nuance in AI disruption:

1. 🔴 High Exposure: Admin, customer service, and even software dev.

2. 🟢 Lower Exposure: Construction and roles requiring physical dexterity.

3. 🎯 The Caveat: Exposure does not equal elimination. For roles like coding, AI increases productivity, which often spikes demand for the output.

   
   Don't ask if AI can do the job; ask what happens to the market when the output becomes 10x cheaper. 📉 

🧭 The Single Biggest Opportunity

The "AI Agency" wave is the new SMMA, but with higher stakes and larger margins.

• 🎯Verticalise: Pick a non-native industry (e.g., HVAC, Law, Dentistry).

• 📚Specialised Alpha: Master the specific AI tools for that niche.

• 🤝The No-Risk Audit: Use their own data to demo cost-cutting or revenue acceleration.

• 💰Repeat & Scale: Turn one implementation into a case study to sweep the vertical.

The window is open for the first movers who stop "learning" AI and start "applying" it. 🪟