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Back to 20VC: Why Robotics Will be 100x Bigger than Coding Agents | Inference Will Be a $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Why Software Investors are F***** Today with Naveen Rao, Unconventional, with Naveen Rao.

Are Pure Software Investors in Trouble?

Naveen Rao thinks hardware is the place to be over the next 10 years and is confident a pure software investor is in trouble. He does not think SaaS is going to be where margin is gained anymore, and he does not see software being a huge market in 20 years.

Hardware investing is quite hard and takes a very different mindset. The generation of investors now is not equipped to be hardware investors. A sugar high ran from the 2010 and 2011 timeframe until now. The pattern was to spin something up on an AWS cloud service, test the market quickly, try things out, and then go after a hundred million or $200 million market. SaaS was massive fragmentation of the market because the delivery mechanism became very easy and frictionless. Applications start to become more about the intelligence layer.

Grokipedia·Naveen Rao

Transcript

20VC: Why Robotics Will be 100x Bigger than Coding Agents | Inference Will Be a $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Why Software Investors are F***** Today with Naveen Rao, Unconventional ·

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

More from this episode

  1. Have Physical Efficiency Gains in Chips Stopped?Naveen Rao says physical efficiency gains in chips have largely stopped.
  2. Should I Trust AI Agent Decisions Yet?Naveen Rao says people should not trust AI agent decisions as much as human decisions in a lot of cases just yet.
  3. Why Are Big AI Model Companies a Data Problem?Naveen Rao says the big AI model companies are largely a data problem. Most of their capabilities have not come from advances in the model itself.
  4. Is Reinforcement Learning Less Efficient Per Dollar?Naveen Rao says reinforcement learning is more inefficient.
  5. Why Does AI Leave Developer Budgets About the Same?Naveen Rao says the share of developer salary that shifts to coding tools may stay roughly stable, because training people to judge good code is the hard part.
  6. How Much Bigger Will Robotics Be Than Coding Agents?Naveen Rao thinks robotics is going to be 100 times larger than agentic coding.
  7. What Did Naveen Rao Change His Mind About?Naveen Rao changed his mind in the last 12 months on the useful metric for progress in investing. Market validation is an old way of looking at it.
  8. How Did Naveen Rao Feel Meeting Steve Jurvetson?Naveen Rao walked into an early meeting with Steve Jurvetson nervous. He had heard Jurvetson was super smart and expected to be taken apart.
  9. Why Is Naveen Rao Excited About AI?Naveen Rao is personally pumped that AI is a tool and capability for asking much bigger questions about the universe.

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