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One of the our job responsibilities as VCs is to 1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative 2. Evangelize our portfolio By posting a narrative (that mos

One of the our job responsibilities as VCs is to 1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative 2. Evangelize our portfolio By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC. It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML). All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company. Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result. [0] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html [1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/ https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/

noobermin 11mo ago
The only thing about this constant discussion about the metas and what not is that clearly everyone knows this, so who is this supposed to be for? I'm a peanut gallery member here, not a VC or a person who needs to appeal to VCs honestly, but then you can take my opinion as an unbiased third party... I could have guessed 1 and 2 are were motives for this kind of talk. But...clearly everyone else who actually cares about this game because it affects their livelihood or money is already aware VCs do 1 and 2, and unless you're exceptionally impressionable, it wouldn't work on you, no? I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  > who is this supposed to be for 1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade 2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs 3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis. > it wouldn't work on you... It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be. Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.
- bgwalter 11mo ago
  It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years. The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI". This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
  - alephnerd 11mo ago
    > This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet The comparison is from a business perspective, and I absolutely stand by the comparison with the early generation of Internet companies with the early generation of AI companies. Anyhow, the general public doesn't matter. It's capital (private and public) along with business cycles that create markets, and most of the public doesn't have the knowledge or the capital to make a difference.
    - piva00 11mo ago
      It's capital that can force markets to exist but without the public to consume it's just wasted capital if value doesn't materialise. The crux of the whole AI boom is exactly how much value it can materialise given the capital expenditure being absurdly astronomical, if it doesn't become the next trillion+ US$ market it will be a huge misallocation of capital.

noobermin 11mo ago

The only thing about this constant discussion about the metas and what not is that clearly everyone knows this, so who is this supposed to be for? I'm a peanut gallery member here, not a VC or a person who needs to appeal to VCs honestly, but then you can take my opinion as an unbiased third party... I could have guessed 1 and 2 are were motives for this kind of talk. But...clearly everyone else who actually cares about this game because it affects their livelihood or money is already aware VCs do 1 and 2, and unless you're exceptionally impressionable, it wouldn't work on you, no? I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.

alephnerd 11mo ago
> who is this supposed to be for 1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade 2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs 3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis. > it wouldn't work on you... It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be. Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.
bgwalter 11mo ago
It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years. The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI". This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  > This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet The comparison is from a business perspective, and I absolutely stand by the comparison with the early generation of Internet companies with the early generation of AI companies. Anyhow, the general public doesn't matter. It's capital (private and public) along with business cycles that create markets, and most of the public doesn't have the knowledge or the capital to make a difference.
  - piva00 11mo ago
    It's capital that can force markets to exist but without the public to consume it's just wasted capital if value doesn't materialise. The crux of the whole AI boom is exactly how much value it can materialise given the capital expenditure being absurdly astronomical, if it doesn't become the next trillion+ US$ market it will be a huge misallocation of capital.