Cy Scott

New from Buyers x Builders 🚀 Dispatches from the frontier of enterprise AI. Every week, Dave Ambrose interviews 2-3 startup founders building the enterprise workflows and infrastructure of the future. First up: Paul Klein IV from Browserbase on automating agentic workflows. It's called Dispatch. It's weekly. And if you want to know what's actually being built (not just what's being hyped), this is it. Link in comments. Let us know what you think 👇 #BuyersxBuilders #EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #Procurement

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Yes, I’ve read the Culper short report on AppLovin. My thoughts: No, it’s not revelatory. Pre-loads and one-click installs on Android are common practice. Digital Turbine and ironSource offer similar products. App developers pay on app open. In fact, there’s no way to confirm the install absent an open. AppLovin also offers ROAS bidding. The notion that Google Play would be unaware of any malicious activity by AppLovin, the largest in-app broker ad network, is not credible. AppLovin is more than a decade old. Just because you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean it’s a young company. Regarding front-running Meta spend: given the scale of AppLovin’s eCommerce advertisers’ Meta spend, they can necessarily measure incrementality. They wouldn’t scale on AppLovin if they didn’t see incrementality. I also don’t see how genuine front-running would be possible in an auction for in-app inventory. Further, it’s obvious why performance across the channels would be correlated. Full disclosure: I have a small, long-dated call position on AppLovin that amounts to <5% of my PA (notional). I have no commercial relationship with the company.

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In 2026, everything I do will be in service of founders. Specifically: helping founders cross the line from 'builder' to 'operator.' It’s the first Sunday, and I felt inspired to share a mini-manifesto for the year ahead. This transition (from builder to operator) is where I see many high-potential founders struggle most. Building is the easy part (for most of you). - You can ship. - You can hustle. - You can close early deals. Where companies actually die? Business systems and operations. I’ve helped build three different businesses past $20M ARR. Never alone. Always with teams. Always with systems. At a certain point, founder-led everything becomes the bottleneck. Sales is usually the first place this shows up. When sales lives in the founder’s head + inbox, growth caps. Not because the founder can’t sell, but because the business can’t operate without them. From ‘Founder Chapel’ to ‘David Beats Goliath,’ and through the projects and partnerships I take on this year, everything will serve one goal: Helping founders transform into EXCEPTIONAL operators. The kind people want to work with, follow, invest in, and trust with real responsibility. Builders are common these days. Operators are much rarer. Companies scale when systems carry the weight founders were never meant to carry alone.

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Peter Walker posted this image showing that top quartile valuation at seed has higher likelihood of unicorn, but the more interesting stat was in the comments: If you look for seed rounds that hit 50x valuation of seed round valuation, percentage is basically 8% across all quartile buckets. Perhaps it's not the strategy that matters, as much as how you execute within it.

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Weather delays. Compliance gaps. Lost days and lost dollars. Every contractor knows the pain. Pavewise, based in North Dakota and built by operators who’ve lived it, has just raised a $2.5M seed round led by C2 Ventures Fund II, alongside Connetic Ventures, Service Provider Capital, M25, gener8tor 1889, and Broadwater Capital. Their platform brings real-time compliance, weather, and production tracking to road construction, helping crews make better calls, cut rework, and keep projects on time. This is exactly what we mean when we talk about our thesis, Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous innovation: solving real operational problems in essential industries with durable tech. https://lnkd.in/eecPMHdN

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💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab

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Seed VC isn’t just in a downturn—it’s facing extinction unless it evolves fast. Great read from Rob Go & David Beisel at NextView Ventures... - YC and mega-funds now dominate the early-stage landscape, squeezing out traditional seed investors - Power law thinking has gone mainstream—everyone’s chasing trillion-dollar outliers - AI isn’t helping seed VCs—it’s raising the stakes, crowding the field, and disrupting VC itself - The middle of the market has collapsed, and excess profits are gone - Hope isn’t a strategy—seed needs a new model, now Link here... https://lnkd.in/ek2MZGhm And if you like this topic, I wrote a piece on venture bifurcating into inception funds and mega funds here: https://lnkd.in/eJz5DmX6 #ai #venturecapital #vc

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As traffic to traditional websites plummets due to AI answering user queries directly, there is a new explosive form of distribution. “AI agents are now creating Neon databases at 4x the rate of human developers, driving new requirements for instant provisioning, automatic scaling, & isolated environments.” If I ask an AI agent to create a web application, I want it to select all the components : the front end framework, the database, & the hosting service. I just want the website to work. In that modus operandi, the person (the vibe coder) is now no longer involved in vendor selection. The agent won’t pause to ask, “Do you have a preferred vendor?” busy reasoning about the task at hand, it will continue on its code path, hurtling towards an answer. AI becomes the ultimate influencer, more than a social media magnate, or an engineering luminary, or a starry open-source repo - an outsourced procurement team acting on behalf of the coder. This example makes clear how developer tools will be selected by AI. But in a future where sales development reps are assembling data pipelines with data enrichment or email providers or website builders for account-based marketing, passive AI procurement will move up the stack. Product-led growth companies have a new & important channel to master : AI as the Chief Procurement Officer.

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New startups today mostly don’t need VC money. Build costs collapsed...Distribution is accessible...AI turned small teams into highly leveraged operators. Reaching revenue no longer requires raising first. This creates a structural shift in venture itself. Mid-size VC funds ($100M–$1.5B funds) are the most exposed. Too large to write small experimental checks early. Too small to consistently lead or win competitive later rounds. They sit in the middle while the market moves around them. Meanwhile, two ends of the spectrum are strengthening. Large funds ($5B–$20B+ AUM) are the real winners. They provide scale, signaling, and the ability to deploy $50M–$300M checks once companies prove momentum. Micro VCs ($5M–$100M funds) will thrive for the opposite reason. Fast decisions. $50K–$1M first checks. Access before consensus forms. That said, venture math at the micro level gets tricky. In many cases, ownership, management fees, and outcome distributions make the economics challenging for GPs unless they consistently access outlier winners. The hardest place to be right now is the mid-tier. Too big for experimentation. Too small to dominate late-stage.

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Last week's musings. You'll notice some reoccuring themes... 𝟭. 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀/𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗥𝗟 🍇 (𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗷𝗮𝗺)  -recurring idea i've been mulling -robotics is happening particularly in industrial setting  -still lots of problems, but the revolution is happening and there are  work arounds until the tech is really there -prices in theory are highest they will ever be (impact of tariffs?) -folks looking for pre-training data, but eventually will also need fine tuned data -what data fidelity is good enough? 𝟮. 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗺 𝗮𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 + 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 🍇  -it's an absolute monster, $75B market cap and up 300% over the last 5 years. - aircraft parts, 90% proprietary but high margin - killer aftermarket business  - how many software biz have lifetime value of 50 years?! -has lots of things software investors look for (sticky revenue, high margin, defensibility in GTM and unique flywheel, focus, etc.)  -makes me think way more about hard tech viability 𝟯. 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 - from Neil Shah on Invest Like the Best - incredible listen - few people have maniacal focus and it's so important for founders 𝟰. 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗺 𝗥𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 -WTF  𝟱. 𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗲𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 -Kawasaki released prototype and it's wild! Substack for full thoughts: https://lnkd.in/gzNtkEHk

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Deep *startup* research 🧐 Austin Johnsen from Zapier shared in a post a few weeks ago the prompt he uses to do diligence on M&A targets (https://lnkd.in/gNTgBNde). It's a great prompt, and now Scout in Harmonic lets you save prompts like this and fire them off to do deep research on any startup, with much richer startup data than would be available from any general LLM or deep web research tool. Please share any thoughts/feedback that we can incorporate to make this even more powerful 😁 .

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The biggest question for investors at the application layer is where there’s still room to build generational businesses vs where will foundational models (and their agent + app layer) make them obsolete? I spoke with a growth-stage CMO last week who’s actively assessing ripping out several marketing tools to replace with a Gemini + datalake deployment. A sign of times to come App-layer companies likely need a proprietary data flywheel + workflow moats to survive

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We rebuilt Alpaca VC with AI. From the ground up. In production. Not talking about it. Not planning it. Actually running our entire firm on infrastructure we built ourselves. Private MCP server. RAG deployed. Knowledge base living in Supabase. Custom agents covering more surface area than our team ever could alone. Ryan Freedman internally talks about it as "riding on the back of the wave" - implementing tools as they ship, breaking things, rebuilding better. We're former builders. We know how to move fast without waiting for permission. Most VCs use AI to write memos faster. We use it to find founders others miss. Our agents don't just summarize pitch decks - they identify patterns across thousands of data points, surface non-obvious connections, track founder momentum in real-time. They're doing the work that used to take analysts weeks in minutes. But more importantly, they're freeing us to do what only humans can: build trust, make judgment calls, spot that spark in a founder's eye during a tough conversation. The real goal? Not just efficiency... Alpha generation through better sourcing, winning, and supporting. And in our humble opinion, this isn't about being cutting-edge. It's about accepting that the firms still doing venture the old way are already obsolete. They just don't know it yet. Alex Konrad did a deep dive into who is doing this best, and identified the folks alongside us at Union Square Ventures (Rebecca Kaden), Thrive Capital, Topology Ventures (Casey Caruso), DVC (Nick Davidov) + more. Which other VC firms are building with AI? 🙋‍♀️ https://lnkd.in/gDRBvaBz

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