Coming off the heels of Go Restive,we wanted to share some of the top takeaways and observations we had. Go Restive, held in SF on Feb 5, was an event designed to bring together early founders and best-in-class experts to connect, exchange insights, and share best practices on building and scaling companies. With over 150 attendees, the event fostered meaningful conversations, fresh perspectives, and valuable connections.
We were thrilled with the energy and engagement throughout the event, and we also came away with some key lessons ourselves. See our Top 10 list of what surprised, inspired and intrigued us- we hope you’ll find it useful.
- The app layer has taken center stage. Whether it was echoed unanimously on our investor panels or the range of companies that showed up to the event – both the capital and the builders are flocking to this layer. As these companies grow and mature, later stage investors and mainstream users should expect the trickle of companies we’ve seen today turn into a flood.
- Consumer trust is high. Contrary to a lot of traditional media reporting, the NPS of tech products remains incredibly high. “Mistrust” is often a misnomer for “insufficient value proposition.”
- The trends and techniques within consumer marketing are being echoed in enterprise. All of our panels that focused on enterprise were building strong brands, doing so with consistency and a unique point of view, and showing up in hyper-targeted ways. Whether it was bespoke industry events, targeted dinners, or creating an echo chamber within the right communities, they followed a very similar playbook.
- Everything is an API. As agentic LLMs have advanced to mimic human interaction with websites (and, in some cases, interpret them), any interface that can be exposed to a human can be accessed by a machine, opening up vast walled gardens to innovation.
- Technology is advancing at an absolutely record pace. There has been more innovation in the past couple years than in the past decade, and products based on these emerging technologies are just beginning to hit the market.
- Everyone should be using LLMs. Whether or not you’re building a business with AI as a customer-facing component, the productivity enhancements, especially in terms of software development, that come from LLMs are too powerful to ignore.
- Capital is available for those with compelling value propositions. While the market is not as hot as it was in 2021, investors are keen to pour money into innovate teams–and not just ones building AI business.
- Corporate venture teams have emerged as a sophisticated path into big companies. We had three representatives from the venture teams of big corporations speak about how to best engage and partner. While the specifics of what they said may be expected (partnerships take time, they are built on relationships vs. transactions) the bigger note might be the degree to which these teams have spun up over the last ~5 years to be the most friendly port-of-entry for early startups to explore relationships within the broader entity.
- Regulation isn’t going away. While there will no doubt be an easing of some federal enforcement, regulatory power at the state level is unchanged, and may in fact react thermostatically to what is happening federally.
- Now is a phenomenal time to build. We outlined at the outset of the event many of our motivations for hosting it: new platforms are opening up new possibilities and new markets; AI are bringing costs down dramatically to scale teams and operations; and the tech is concurrently speeding up the time to launch and grow. This confluence is incredibly exciting. But we also experienced that directly by engaging with founders. They are driven by the possibilities of what is next. They are iterating and coming to market dramatically quicker than ever before. And we are here to support founders in that journey. Please reach out - whether you are planning to make the jump or bringing on your first customers - we’d love to partner with you!
