NEA's Tiffany Luck on AI IPOs, personal agents, and the ROI reckoning
Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.
This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she's all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for "magic moments" in the consumer business.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year's AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend.
Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption.
How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider.
Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:51 Tiffany Luck's path from Lot18 to Amazon to VC
3:45 Magic moments: Waymo, healthcare, and the gap in personal agents
7:36 Privacy, security, and trusting AI with your life
10:39 IPO outlook: Anthropic vs. OpenAI on public markets
13:58 Compute, infrastructure, and where the value sits
15:41 What’s the ROI on tokenmaxxing?
27:07 Forward deployed engineers as a ‘Trojan horse’
32:49 Outro
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SaaStr 647: Scaling The Top SMB SaaS Companies: What It Takes with GGV Capital Managing Director Jeff Richards and GGV Capital Partner Tiffany Luck
The SMBTech economy is very different from enterprise software, and there is massive opportunity to capture it. There are over 400M small businesses worldwide. That's more than 90% of companies and 40-50% of GDP.
In this episode, Jeff Richards and Tiffany Luck, Managing Director and Partner at GGVCapital, share what it takes to win as a SMBTech startup in today's economy.
Full video with Q&A: https://youtube.com/live/pcgXYRMX2XU
Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.
Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform
Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976
Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/
Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh
Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8
SaaStr 589: The Secrets to Working with VC Associates, Scouts, Syndicates....and the True Gate Keepers to Venture Capital with Coelius Capital Managing Partner Zach Coelius and GGV Capital Investor Tiffany Luck
Fundraising with a successful VC firm is a huge goal for entrepreneurs, especially in the early stages of the business. But the path to a deal isn't always as straightforward as it may seem. During an enlightening session at SaaStr Europa 2022, Zach Coelius (Managing Partner at Coelius Capital) and Tiffany Luck (Investor at GGV Capital) share the secrets and lesser-known players in the world of venture capital. As Luck says, "There are many players in the VC ecosystem, and so your entry point to fundraising might be with any one of these players."
Full video: https://youtu.be/xKb4ORuFDSc
Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software.
Subscribe for weekly updates: https://www.saastr.com/subscribeform
Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976
Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/
Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh
Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8