Should investors deploy into fast-growing greenfield AI markets or into mature replacement markets?

Maor Shlomo · Nov 24, 2025

Investors are over-allocating to hockey-stick revenue startups and under-allocating to unsexy industries — finance, restaurants, HMOs — built end to end by entrepreneurs

Unless you know an industry very well from the outside it is very hard to judge whether a fast-growing company actually has a moat

46:16 20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI?

Julien Bek · Aug 24, 2026

The biggest venture outcomes will come from more mature markets rather than completely greenfield ones, so chasing the fastest-growing new markets is the wrong optimization

Outcomes crystallize over many years and the best companies stay private longer, so what ultimately matters is how much ownership you hold and how big the company gets — not short-term ability to attract capital

Scope: concedes greenfield companies may attract more capital in the near term

23:23 20VC: Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee: Lessons from Don Valentine, Doug Leone and Alfred Lin | How the SpaceX and Citadel Deals Went Down | What Sequoia Specifically Looks for in Founders with Julien Bek

Mitchell Green · Mar 7, 2026

The giant AI businesses will be companies started in the next two to five years in categories nobody can name yet, not the next call center company or the next Workday

In 1999 nobody could have named social media or Facebook, yet that became a $3T category; many of today's funded AI companies will bust

Scope: admits he doesn't know what those categories are

9:59 20VC: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is BS | Why China Will Win the AI War | Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist and are Tourists | Why Stock-Based Comp is the Hidden Sin of the Valley with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital

Gokul Rajaram · Mar 16, 2026

Platforms that create entirely new behaviours are both the biggest hits and the biggest misses, and betting on new behaviours rather than existing markets is what venture is fundamentally about

If the bet doesn't play out the company is screwed, but if it does it can be bigger than anything else — Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb-style home renting were all non-consumption markets

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Mamoon Hamid · Oct 21, 2024

The best place to invest in AI is application-layer software that supercharges the highest-paid, scarcest skilled workers, specifically doctors, lawyers and developers

They looked at the top 20 highest-paying US jobs; those workers are highly skilled, highly scarce and not being produced fast enough, so software that multiplies their output solves a specific acute pain point

6:20 Target high paid scarce skill professional labor as the best ai investment thesis

Mike Mignano · Jul 6, 2026

Investors should back companies that obliterate existing markets and business models rather than ones that automate existing workflows

Enterprise automation usually means selling to middlemen or making existing businesses faster, whereas reinvention — like putting a doctor in everyone's pocket instead of making medical practices more efficient — changes the model entirely

32:16 Back market obliterating reinvention not workflow automation

Tomasz Tunguz · Apr 21, 2023

Enterprise readiness is the most underexplored big market opportunity in AI — bringing these models to the Global 2000 in a form they will accept and buy consistent with how they have historically bought software

45:58 Enterprise readiness for existing models is the most underexplored ai opportunity

Harry Stebbings · Aug 24, 2026

Investors should deploy into the faster-growing greenfield markets because the opportunity cost of capital favors them

Our job is to play the game on the field, and capital placed in a much faster growing new market beats the alternative use of that money

23:11 Deploy into the fastest growing greenfield markets