Does moving fast as an AI-first company confer a durable competitive advantage over slower adopters?

Scott Farquhar · Oct 9, 2023

Experimenting now rather than waiting for the paradigm to settle is not wasted work, because the knowledge of what doesn't work cannot be bought later

Once Uber worked out the exact way to order a car, competitors couldn't catch up; you can buy your way into what works but still have to walk the random walk to learn what doesn't

25:33 20VC: Atlassian Co-Founder Scott Farquhar on The Biggest Lessons Scaling Atlassian to $50BN Market Cap; The Four Roles of the CEO, The Funding Round That Net Accel $6BN, The Regrets of Omission and Commission & The Honeymoon Cut Short

Mike Krieger · Mar 3, 2025

Startups should not wait for models to be perfect; they should build now, be frustrated by current model limits, and aggressively test each new generation

The companies that capture model generation shifts are the ones who have been beating their heads against the wall in a space and have accumulated context and knowledge, not ones that start the day a capable model ships

8:02 20VC: Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: Where Will Value Be Created in a World of AI | Have Foundation Models Commoditized | When Do Model Providers Become Application Providers | What Anthropic Learned from Deepseek

Kieran Flanagan · Jul 11, 2025 · hedged

Non-AI-first founders are most likely not moving fast enough on AI deployment, and there has never been a better opportunity to be in the first-mover group

First movers capture all the leverage benefit from AI, and AI-first companies are already moving far faster than non-AI companies

65:11 First movers on ai capture lasting leverage advantage

Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024

Only AI-first companies will win, where AI-first means the majority of total or new revenue comes from an AI product plus internal use of AI for productivity

AI-first companies are more capital efficient, provide more user value and have a faster adoption curve; internal AI use will simply become the required status quo, just as having an Instagram account doesn't make you a social media company but is table stakes

58:08 Only ai first companies defined by majority ai revenue and internal ai use will win

Aaron Levie · May 22, 2024

Companies that fail to get across the current AI transition before the existing order breaks apart will simply be out of business, and making that stake explicit is the only alarm a team needs

Everyone reading tech news understands the period we're in, but not everyone understands what is actually on the line for their own company

30:23 Failing to navigate the ai transition means going out of business

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

In AI, speed determines who wins rather than company stage — startups, scale-ups and incumbents are all equally placed if they can innovate fast.

Speed, agility, focus and urgency are the differentiators, and HubSpot has deliberately adopted them.

35:45 Speed not company stage determines ai era winners

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

Organisational urgency comes from faster cross-functional decision-making with clear accountability, plus internal AI fluency across every function.

At a company like HubSpot all work is cross-functional, so speed depends on who owns the decision and how potholes get solved; and the more conviction employees build using AI daily, the more conviction they have educating customers onto AI.

36:32 Faster cross functional decisions and ai fluency drive competitive speed