8VC Annual Meeting 2017

At 8VC, we invest in technologies that transform antiquated processes in old-line industries. Law is one of the most entrenched. For decades, it resisted the modernization that swept through nearly every other corner of the private sector. 

Ontology was the silent word of the 2010s. Palantir built a $400B company on a simple insight: raw data alone isn’t enough to understand how a business operates. You need to map the nouns and verbs of a business—the objects, their states, their relations—on top of the data to navigate the intricacies of any operationally complex organization. The ontology was the grammar of the enterprise. Building an ontology is an immersive, painstaking process of extracting knowledge from the minds of experts across a company.

In economics, there’s a class of goods where demand rises as price rises. These are referred to as Veblen goods, named after economist Thorstein Veblen who coined the phenomenon of “conspicuous consumption.” For certain products, the price is the product. An Hermès Birkin doesn’t cost upwards of $20K because of the leather. It retails for this price because costing $20K is the point. The scarcity and price aren’t bugs, but the entire feature set. This is why “affordable luxury” is an oxymoron. If you make it affordable, you destroy the very thing that makes it luxury.

We recorded our AI Wave podcast a few weeks before the public market SaaSpocalypse. Since then, roughly $1T has been wiped from software and services stocks. The narrative: AI makes software easier to build and models are increasingly doing the work that renders SaaS products useless. So,software is dead?