This reminds me of a time when 'API' has become a hot term. Every company would ship an API. I think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and I think even Google at some point had nice public APIs. This was the era of RSS and semantic web as well... until most realized there's no easy way to serve ads or control UX, making APIs great for customers but bad for business (unless the API is your product of course)
Given this, I'm not sure what business purpose there is to ship an MCP API like this, aside from goodwill and exposure.
I think the MCP will take off because it can inject ads. Lets say a ecommerce store exposes an MCP so you can order your stuff with a prompt. The MCP can still rank and serve results based on paid ads. Now I am sure people will figure out a way to ignore paid results with prompts, but that is really no different than ad blockers today. It will just be an arms race of prompts filtering and MCP vendors figuring out how to get around it.
2021-2022 was a total blip on the screen zero interest rate era thing.
i'm not seeing considerable slowing of new startup development, quite the opposite actually w/ AI. this is for a few reasons:
- accelerators are filling the gap; the accelerator model is actually quite efficient in the early-stage spectrum (it needs some further innovation). there are a huge number of AI accelerators and programs now; and further
- most of the capital going into VC is just being further concentrated into the large Multistage firms like A16Z, Accel, Sequoia, General Catalyst, etc... all of these firms are realizing they need to win deals as early as possible so have multiple seed programs: accelerators, incubations, scouts, fund-of-fund allocation, geographic funds, university focused sub funds, etc...
- overall great founders & startups are truly just exceptional so statistically there just won't ever be that many. venture will always be a cottage industry of sorts. in this form - "venture" equates with "growth"; there can only be 1 category leader by definition and venture is meant to capture this. 2021-2022 overall venture market was too big.
- AI is making startup creation many multiples more efficient. we saw this w/ the advent of the cloud, where startups used to need $2-3M "to buy servers" and 2-3 years to ship a product in 2010, by 2015-2020, they really only needed $3-500k to get a product to market. we're going to see that number come down considerably (unsure if it will be 30-50k, but definitely a lot lower).
- we're also seeing the new wave of the 10-person unicorn (billion $ company); these companies will raise a lot less cash, so will result in higher multiples on the original investment.
- i think the overall distribution of returns will look different on a portfolio basis in 2025-onwards. with power law, we expect to see super long-tail concentration on the 1-2 companies that yield 99% of the return to a portfolio, but i suspect we'll start to see some mitigation of that effect with more companies yielding positive outcomes. this might mean that there's less of a reliance on portfolio construction to generate risk-adjusted returns and that there could be more of a democratization of early-stage investing where we see 10-100x the number of startups and founders. that warrants a longer analysis, but as someone just bullish on startups and everyone being a founder that possibility is very exciting to me.
If you are a profitable unicorn who can raise money in the private markets when needed, is there really a benefit to going public? Maybe I am missing something, but going public doesn't really seem to be as important as it used to be.