AI Obsession: A Triangle Founder Goes to Silicon Valley...

I went on a biz trip to SFO and as you may have guessed, the groupthink/lemming trend has moved to AI, big time!

For my day-job at ReFiBuy (yes also an AI startup, I get it), I went out to Silicon Valley (or the Bay area as they seem to prefer) on a trip to visit a potential customer that was doing a Bay area tour to learn more about how AI is impacting. I’ve been at this a long time and at previous companies before Spiffy, all our core partners were there so have done at least 200 if not 300 trips. Oddly I haven’t been since Covid yet so it was interesting to see how much things have changed.

City vs. Valley and Triangle Hillbilly

As a founder born, educated and building in the Carolinas, it’s always interesting to see what they are up to out west. Over those hundreds of trips, I’ve always thought it was both intriguing and a bit ‘too much’ how a. high-tech/founding is what 99% of people seem to think about and b. how all those founders bounce around from one trend to the other. Sometimes this works, like SaaS, and sometimes, not so much like blockchain/crypto. Also it’s always been the case that the main activity is in the valley (Mountain View, San Jose, Menlo, Sand Hill, Palo Alto, and historically my only need to go to SFO is to go to a tradeshow or do some touristy stuff. Planning the trip, I thought it was interesting that all my meetings were in downtown San Franciso.

I should also say that when I’m in the Bay area, I try to really represent the Triangle well and when they ask where I came in from, I say the Triangle, they are shocked and I give them, “yeah I’m basically a Hillbilly out here”. Then I have to explain to them what a Gamecock is, tell them about THE USC, call the swimming pool a ce-ment pond, it’s a whole bit I do that is inspired by my mentor Richard Holcomb.

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Chugging Funneling the AI Kool Aid!

It was a short trip, basically a day and a half on the ground, with two longish Uber rids (SFO airport to city and back) and I only needed 2-3 interior trips and some walking around town to hit all my meetings. In maybe 90 minutes cumulative not in meetings in the outdoors, literally and basically to the point of being comedic or a real-live version of scene in Minority Report about how every 10 seconds you are bombarded with an ad message, every surface of everthing in and around San Francisco is covered with an ad about an AI company.

Every coffee shop - everyone’s talking about AI. Walk by a bus stop - everyone’s got an AI startup t-shirt on. For me, it was like literally between trips (admittedly a bit of an usual time due to Spiffy not being anchored out there at all and the covid years), but there was one sad Blockchain ad and one SaaS-ish ad, and nothing else at ALL but AI. Even bigger 10-20yr old co’s that have big brands like Stripe or Okta, or Hubspot, all THEIR ads were all about AI.

I thought - wow I have to write a blog about this it’s so bonkers. Then it occurred to me that you’d be reading this saying, sure sure he saw some AI ads, yawn. He’s being dramatic, how many could there be. I realized more than half way through my trip I had to take pictures of the ones I could capture - so this is only 60-75%.

Come with me on a journey, that I like to call “A Triangle Hillbilly’s Tour Through Silicon Valley’s AI Ads”. There are so many I decided to organize them by:

• Al ads - All AI ads organized alphabetically by company name

• Non AI ads - also alpha

Most of these aren’t interesting to me or in the wheelhouse, I already know of 5-10 co’s in the category and, to be honest, there are so many I quickly hit curiosity fatigue so I don’t have a blurb for each one or anything, but feel free to explore on your own.

c3.ai

codegen

Encord

exa.ai

Figma Make

fin.ai

hyperbolic.ai

North

okta (ai!) - this was from far away, sorry, but okta ai - come on!

orb - withorb.com

Posthog

I think this is yet another Pendo competitor, they had a two parter - second part is AI which is why they are here, they are ai native Pendo competitor. BTW, so is statsig that OpenAI just acquired for $1.1B!

note the LLM observability, thus it’s basically ai

promptql.io

sparkhq.ai

Stripe AI

Typesense 1

Typesense 2

Non AI Ads

Framer

Goriff (notice the YC S25 - that’s a thing out there, a huge badge of honor to be a YC company

Grayscale - The last Blockchain co in Silicon Valley? Def not, but feels like it.

Porter - The Kool-Aid drinking the Kool-Aid

This startup creates a DevOps that specifically targets YC startups. A company that exists to support pre-PMF companies in an accelerator. 🤯

Summary

That’s 24 ads, 20 AI, 4 non-AI. Spotted in one trip to the airport and 2 short walks in SFO. As a visitor I enjoy it, you can see what kind of crazy is going on over there. But imagine living in it, you never get a break. Startups 24x7. No family time, no hobbies, just startups 24x7. It isn’t healthy, it can’t be healthy. Also when the bubbles pop, it leaves significant carnage as we’ve seen in the past.

The Triangle’s startup scene benefits from being:

• A small part of our economy

• Diverse inside of itself (AI, Healthtech, AgTech, DeepTech, Biotech, etc.) - I realize that Silicon Valley has some startup diversity, but it was not on exhibit for this visit as illustrated)

• Those of us in the startup ecosystem go hard, but we have a life outside the startup world.

• Not having to see 50 AI company ads every 30 mins ;-)

Silicon Valley - interesting to visit- the Triangle, a great place to live and build.