[manwithopinions]

They’re not really, it’s just the YC hype cycle. The business is selling insurance to other YC startups with some AI flair. They’re not even the first YC startup to do this, a previous YC insurance startup was acquired a few years ago for ~$1bn. So, they’re worth 3x the exit of the exact same company… because of what, AI? The fact that they’re cloning other software to release SaaS products is extremely bearish. Why are they wasting their time on this? A wildly successful $3bn startup would not spend their precious resources by launching a $10/m document sending SaaS. They’ll be doing down rounds soon enough. Could you imagine Paul Graham encouraging this?

[aleqs]

A big part of the US VC operating model these days seems to be just rebuilding existing products with slight changes, then pushing all of their other startups to use that version of it. This is only going to accelerate with AI. Why pay some company you don't own to do thing for you, when you can just copy the company (maybe even improve it in some ways), seed it with with your large existing user base, then have it do the thing for you (while also generating profit from other customers and rapidly scaling in users and valuation itself).

The reality is most of what most tech startups are doing is not actually hard and has no moat. The moat is in getting users/customers - connections/marketing/sales - product quality also matters of course, but there are plenty hyperscaler unicorns who's product is dogshit and vice versa.

[mlnj]

Listened to the founder on 20VC episode talk endlessly about sleeping and showering in the office and comparing their insurance company to Alexander the Great and Napoleon.

Silicon Valley is just so disconnected from reality.

[FridgeSeal]

Would pay good money to see Silicon Valley complete their disconnection from reality and drift off into the void. The rest of us would get some semblance of normality back if they did.