The post insist 2 to 4 million ARR in 1 year is the new norm. My guess its meant for their own investors and get founders to undervalue their achievements (Or learn to get creative with what ARR means).
Client will go around saying they need an app or a thing and they reach a no-code company who promise they can deliver a working MVP at sprint 0 (~2 weeks). They charge a lot of $$$ and promises what would be construed at 24/7 support. If they get the contract, the "consultants" are worked to the bone in the beginning because managers need to hit their marks, make their C-suite happy, and ultimately try and keep the client as a long term paying customer.
This isn't anything out of the ordinary but I just had to rant that no-code is BS but it's still a flourishing market.
Tech company: we made you a tool that allows you to increase energy flows into your closed systems AND decrease their entropy!
Software engineers: thank you for increasing the demand for manual entropy management and getting our pay to new heights while proclaiming our demise as a class.
> Startups are working faster than ever, and both businesses and consumers are demonstrating high willingness to pay for new products.
..I feel like the focus was more "offering (generative) AI features" than "built with AI", as in startups being AI forward for their ICPs are building businesses faster than the incumbents who are still trying to figure out how to wedge AI into their tech debt laden product landscape.
Did these portfolio companies just get the UX right? That would mean their entire portfolio, across industries, just happens to be filled with exceptional designers of products, who all simultaneosly cracked the UX for their respective industries.
A simpler inquiry:
What if the cause of this revenue growth is not on the startup/VC side but on the buyer side? Why are more companies rushing out there willing to spend more than before?
Here we have some candidates to consider: FOMO, labor efficiency, excitement.
Now, we have economics (behavioral and regular) to form a causal narrative; we have loss aversion and job cuts as incentives.
So, based on this post can we say this is a better time to start a startup than before? I don't think so.
Can we say that if you do start one with the same odds of success as before, grow it to a VC happy size, and have AI somewhere in the offering, you'll probably have more revenue than companies of a similar size from a few years ago? Yes, I think we can say that.
The main claim in the post: Their portfolio companies have shown an improved rate of accumulating revenue ever since LLMs took off.
Weakest part of the post: No attempt at explaining how or why a LLM affects these numbers. They allude to 'shipping speed' and 'product iteration' but how an LLM helps these functions is left unexplored.
Also, nothing about sampling bias, size or spread.
Overall: Probably meant to be a confidence boost to the sleep-deprived founders out there.