1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: David Hornik, Lobby Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch our discussion to agents. I’ve been excited about agents for a very long time, and it’s great that it’s finally happening.

In terms of actually automating a huge amount of workflow, agents are perfect. The APIs are starting to be available to be able to integrate. You can do an enormous amount with agents.

This week, during NVIDIA’s earnings call, Jensen talked about these tens of millions of agents that are going to be running around all over the world and eating up the CPU horsepower. All of that seems completely reasonable.

From a startup point of view, how do you think about agents? What is defensible? What is worth building revenue generating profitable, sustainable companies on?

David Hornik: Same problem, right? Ultimately, the AI trend is the same as every other trend I’ve seen in software for the 25 years I’ve been investing. It may be more powerful in some ways, but it’s not different.

All we have to do is look back to the emergence of the internet and connectivity. Everybody said at that time, “Oh my God, everything’s going be reinvented.” Then everything started being reinvented. There was a bunch of economic value, and then there was a crash. Then it was like, “Wait a second, everything’s not going to be reinvented.”

In fact, they were wrong. Everything was reinvented. It just was a question of timeframe. Now if you look at it, the impact of connectivity has been, in my mind, the greatest impact in our lifetime of any technology, including AI.

So all these people who say, “Oh, AI is the most important technology of our lifetime.” It is not, because if you disconnected all these devices, AI would be meaningless. But because there is an internet and because we have a universe of connected devices, AI can be astonishing.

When the internet occurred, everybody looked at the problems that we’ve been trying to solve forever that we could now solve in a differentiated and better way. The answer was basically everything. Over time, everything was solved.

Take the example of digital calendars or online calendars. Then there were a bunch of online calendar companies that attacked the problem, and then you thought the problem was solved.

I represented When.com, a web calendar that was acquired by Yahoo. Bill Trenchard, now managing partner of First Round capital, created Jump Networks, the other first web calendar company acquired by Microsoft. Everybody thought the calendar thing’s been solved. Then Calendly came along and said, wouldn’t it be easier if you just had a more agentic way of figuring out when to meet with people, and suddenly there’s a new billion-dollar business.

I anticipate that the AI wave will solve this problem in an even more compelling way. It has the capacity to understand not only your calendar, behavior, and opportunities, but also the people you’re trying to meet with. It will keep track of things like, “Next time I’m in Boston, I look forward to connecting.” I copy my assistant Jenna so she can set aside a list of people in Boston and Washington DC. She does have that list.

But most people don’t have a Jenna. Even if you do have Jenna, will she remember it? Will I remember it?

With AI, when I put a flight to Boston on my calendar, it should be able to unearth all the people I claimed I wanted to see. More importantly, AI can figure out who I actually want to see. Suddenly, the calendaring problem that we thought was solved with Outlook, then with when.com, and then with Calendly, will be solved with calendar AI, transforming my life in a way we hadn’t imagined.

I believe that every problem we previously thought we had solved with software can now be solved with agentic AI. It will provide better solutions that understand the broader universe, some of which will eliminate the need for humans, but not all.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: David Hornik, Lobby Capital
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