Databricks

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.

Atlassian CEO: Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models

Oct 12, 2026 · 58:55

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes tells 20VC that AI agents will not replace software interfaces — design becomes the key differentiator in the AI era, and 'headless' software is a 'brainless bet'. He frames Atlassian's Teamwork Graph as the enterprise context moat, kept fresh per company like Google's web index, served by an internal AI gateway doing model routing to cut token costs. Atlassian uses no Chinese models in production, though open models face no pushback; 'the jury is really out' on specialized models, most of which he calls fine-tuned Chinese weights. He predicts inference costs fall sharply, AI provenance stops mattering like film color grading, and value shifts to 'imagination asymmetry'. He closes on young founders tapping out and 'wage peace on yourself'.

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.

ClickHouse CEO: AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern

Aug 31, 2026 · 1:05:57

Aaron Katz, co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse, tells Harry Stebbings the AI cycle is 'just getting started' — revenue growth is unprecedented, but the biggest risk is revenue durability because agentic apps have low switching costs. He accepts lower gross margins if expansion is possible, measures AI token spend by ROI, and predicts agents will have identities, budgets, and pick their own infrastructure. He argues open-weight models won't win the enterprise over trust concerns, and sees enterprises moving back on-prem. ClickHouse revenue went 0, 12, 50, 200, finishing north of 500 this year, with >200% NDR; Katz would take the under on $1B ARR by December 2027. He calls the $2B Series B with no product the priciest round; revenue concentration matters — AI customers are under 12% of revenue.