Looking back at our investing history, our favorite (and best) investments were in products that:
- are the system of record for a specific data object
- serve as a data platform or workflow automation tool
- can be described as an API for [X]
If you’re curious about what sorts of companies can be described as “systems of record”, check out these terrific articles by Ajay Agarwal and Tomasz Tunguz.
Why does this matter? These startups accelerate the ability to build.
This could mean building products (engineering, product, design), building businesses (sales, marketing customer success), or building companies (finance, HR, legal, business operations). A consumer facing application could theoretically fulfill the above, but that’s less common.
If you are tech-positive, progress-positive… increasing the rate of change, unblocking barriers to creation, and making entrepreneurship and building accessible to anyone is really important.
autopilot.fund is a bet that we’re still in the early innings of unlocking productivity.
The questions we ask ourselves are:
- Is this a founding team so capable that others should be afraid to go against them?
- Is the product “infrastructure” in a manner of speaking: structured data, deeply embedded, sticky?
- Does the advent of AI exponentially increase or decrease their defensibility?
- Do they understand the problem better than anyone, and have special “founder-market” fit?
- Will they rest until they have dragged the world kicking & screaming into their vision of the future?