This article is part of our Future of AI series from Imagination in Action 2025 Silicon Valley Summit — where founders, leaders, and investors explored what’s next for AI. Explore the magazine.
When NVIDIA announced that it’s putting $100 billion into OpenAI—which at a valuation of $500 billion, is now the most valuable startup in history—it signaled a new stage in the race to expand the AI ecosystem. That race is white-hot now. The global AI market had an estimated value of $233 billion in 2024, and is expected to grow to $1.77 trillion by 2032.
AI’s unprecedented pace of change is reshaping how VCs evaluate opportunities. For investors, one of the most critical investment criteria will be velocity—how fast can companies move? The dynamics that have powered previous tech innovation eras won’t be the same this time around.
How fast can you ship?
For founders seeking funding, one question cuts to the heart of today’s AI market: “Can you ship quickly?”
“The half life of a good idea, has shrunk from a few months to a few weeks.”
James Detweiler, Felicis Ventures
Those are the words of James Detweiler, a partner at Felicis Ventures. The reason is stark. “The half life of a good idea,” he said, “has shrunk from a few months to a few weeks.”
That compression is fundamentally altering the investment landscape. As software costs plummet and AI models democratize intelligence, the value of ideas themselves is evaporating.
Companies that can’t manifest their visions fast enough will watch their competitive advantages vanish in real-time. Being first to market, once the holy grail of startups, no longer guarantees success.
What matters instead? Patrick Salyer, Mayfield partner, puts it simply: “From zero to one, the most important signal is how quickly the founding team is learning.”
Totality over first-mover advantage
To Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha, the demand for velocity is eroding traditional advantages like being first to market. Rather, companies seeking investment must demonstrate the totality of their plan to develop ideas and fully flesh them out. New AI models or other fundamental advances in the technology may well be more impactful than being first to market.
“It’s much more about having the full, end-to-end workflow map and being very purpose-built,” he said. “It’s the totality of the pieces and on the go-to-market side. We really need to be delivering concrete ROI very fast.”
His advice for founders? Move away from horizontal, broad-market models. Those opportunities, which were once lucrative, are now “played out.”
Instead, pursue domain-specific and vertical models specialized for specific industries or functions, such as coding, security, IT, or chip design, to name a few. These targeted solutions can deliver the rapid ROI that velocity-obsessed investors demand.
Chaddha predicted that one of the biggest economic opportunities will be AI teammates. These agentic digital companions will soon be a $3 trillion market, representing what Chaddha calls a “once in a century opportunity.”
“From zero to one, the most important signal is how quickly the founding team is learning.”
Patrick Salyer, Mayfield
The talent wars
In this velocity-driven market, VCs are also on the hunt for companies stockpiling a different kind of asset: proprietary expertise. Indeed, talent has become so valuable that we’re seeing numerous multi-billion-dollar acqui-hires.
This dynamic is creating unexpected opportunities. For the first time in perhaps two decades, legacy enterprise companies are vulnerable to disruption on a much faster timeline.
Link Ventures managing partner Dave Blundin explained he thinks startups shouldn’t be afraid of taking on incumbents. Those companies’ businesses are outdated, and some actually want to support thriving startups around them that can bolster their own efforts.
Either way, he advised startup founders that they should pursue “blue ocean opportunities where the incumbents are weak,” particularly in agentic applications, which may soon dominate monolithic workflows.
The self-improving revolution
What makes investors confident this isn’t another bubble?
As UBS Global Wealth CIO for global equities Ulrike Hoffman-Burchardi put it, “AI is the first technology in human history that is self-improving. We’ve never had this before, so progress is much more rapid.”
That exponential improvement curve is already producing results that seemed impossible just years ago. Stories of startups generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in a few short years are no longer anomalies—they’re the new normal. That’s led many investors to believe we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.
For Chaddha, the implications are clear. AI represents the “most transformative thing in human history.”
As UBS Global Wealth CIO for global equities Ulrike Hoffman-Burchardi put it, “AI is the first technology in human history that is self-improving. We’ve never had this before, so progress is much more rapid.”
That exponential improvement curve is already producing results that seemed impossible just years ago. Stories of startups generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in a few short years are no longer anomalies—they’re the new normal. That’s led many investors to believe we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.
For Chaddha, the implications are clear. AI represents the “most transformative thing in human history.”
The new X factor
Looking ahead, the traditional costs and timelines of building tech companies are giving way to a new model—one that prioritizes speed, talent optimization, and domain expertise above all else.
The next generation of successful AI companies will look nothing like legacy SaaS businesses. Instead, expect vertically-integrated platforms delivering streamlined, end-to-end workflows.
In this landscape, “move fast and ship” isn’t just advice for founders. Investors are recalibrating their entire approach to keep up with the pace, integrating AI into their investment workflows or, as Detweiler even suggested, have AI make venture investments decisions.
The next round of successful AI efforts will be much less like legacy SaaS companies and more like vertically-integrated platforms providing streamlined end-to-end workflows.
Time, not capital, is now the X factor. The AI market may be racing towards $1.77 trillion, but only companies and investors that have internalized the velocity imperative will capture that value.
For founders who can master the art of rapid learning and execution, the returns could dwarf anything we’ve seen in previous technology cycles. But the window to move is measured in weeks, not months.
Founder Takeaways
Explore The Future of AI | This article is part of our Future of AI series from Imagination in Action 2025 Silicon Valley Summit — where founders, leaders, and investors explored the next revolution of AI. We explored how AI is changing scientific research, creating new startup economics, straining power grids, and challenging us to rethink everything from enterprise software to regulatory frameworks. Dive into the Future of AI magazine to see the full picture.
