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Inference Will Be $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Software Investors are F***ed | Naveen Rao

Oct 24, 2026 · 1:13:26

Naveen Rao, founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, argues that energy will be AI's biggest bottleneck and that the inference market will reach $10 trillion within 10 years. He explains that physical efficiency gains have stalled, so value comes from co-designing model, architecture, and hardware—why chips will not commoditize and Nvidia keeps the margin. He tells Harry Stebbings that pure software investors are 'kind of fucked' as SaaS fragments, with AI-plus-human outcome delivery replacing it, and that the bottleneck has shifted from creation to verification. Rao predicts robotics will be 100x bigger than agentic coding, open models will carry 80% of token traffic, and traditional VC metrics like market validation no longer fit deep tech.

Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins? | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value?

Oct 17, 2026 · 1:03:06

Harry Stebbings hosts Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, who argues agents are hard to build because models are non-deterministic, and value accrues to whoever controls context, harness and evals. Chase explains why model routing belongs in the harness for vertical agents but in gateways for horizontal tasks, why agent memory is unsolved after LangChain killed its memory product, and why vertical agents should start at the harness before post-training. He says inference and coding agent demand is far bigger than expected, that LangChain spends ~30% of engineering salary on coding tools — a figure he ties to Anthropic's valuation — and that open models mostly serve simple tasks, not core loops. He closes with his bull case for a $9BN Jev round and how Benchmark and Sequoia help founders.

The Untold Story of Higgsfield | Burning $4M a Month on AI Models | CEO, Alex Mashrabov

Sep 28, 2026 · 1:15:43

Alex Mashrabov, CEO of Higgsfield, tells Harry Stebbings his AI video company crossed $1BN in annualized revenue 18 months after hitting $1M, third-fastest behind OpenAI and Anthropic. He recounts burning $10M of a $16M seed before a camera-control pivot brought instant product-market fit, no paid marketing, and one customer growing from $99 a month to $6M a year. He argues Google and OpenAI will destroy $20 prosumer subscriptions, that proprietary models were a mistake — open weights earn 80%+ margins versus 20–30% closed — and that internal model spend tops $4M a month. He also covers engineers moving from Claude to Codex, moats as only outcomes and network effects, selling AI Factory to Snap for $166M, and his bet on $10BN revenue and $100BN+ scale.

Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee | How the SpaceX & Citadel Deals Went Down | Julien Bek

Aug 24, 2026 · 1:28:28

Julien Bek, a Partner at Sequoia Capital, says Sequoia wins by hunting with conviction, not waiting for inbound calls, and shares founder-reading lessons from Don Valentine, Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Alfred Lin, and Shaun Maguire. He highlights Leone's 'worst reference' question, Lin's warning not to mistake an outlier operator for an outlier founder, and Maguire's ELO method for calibrating references. Bek also explains how asking 'why' five times exposed a fraudulent founder, how his read changes by country (French/German references get 1-2 extra points; Americans get subtracted), and why he missed Anton Osaka of Lovable. On AI, he argues agents become the new customer, AEO parallels SEO, and the next trillion-dollar company will be software masquerading as services. He tells how his mother invested in Revolut at a ~$200M valuation, now worth over $100B.