Joe Schmidt
Joe Schmidt is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on software, fintech, and insurtech investments. He is best known for co-authoring the Lighthouse or Landgrab framework, which maps enterprise AI sales strategies based on buyer exposure and whether proof travels within a market. Prior to joining a16z, he served as VP of Business Development at Ethos and was previously an investor at Accel.
“Participants: Alex Rampell, Joe Schmidt, Keith Peiris”
Source→“"What Stutt said was, hey, AI is actually quite good at basically having conversations with people. It's very good at looking at information internally and basically doing this process end to end... they were able to go out to the mid market and just basically show the math and be like, would you like to have this solution? Yes or no."”
Source→“"They just did a fantastic job of winning the right law firms for this very new, very theoretically high risk initiative where you're augmenting your human workforce with AI capabilities... when they won the first kind of few critical lighthouse accounts inside of their market, like that proof traveled like big time."”
Source→“"In the piece, you talk about Hebbia and Harvey as classic lighthouse examples."”
Source→“"Decagon has done an amazing job at this. Like, I think they go in, they basically evangelize that they're doing customer support better than anyone else. And then they're very good about saying here are the benchmarks that we are signing up to hit and then they hit them."”
Source→“"They sell into the insurance space... a lot of their customers are some of the biggest insurance companies in the world. And it's because they're very comfortable with like, okay, here's an AI solution that's built in a governance-first form and fashion. And then they work with forward-deployed teams to get it up and running."”
Source→“"We were big investors in Cursor and everyone saw how that played out."”
Source→“"There is a very set number of people who are buying that kind of autonomous software and a certain number of car manufacturers and so on and so forth in the world... these are huge ACV opportunities and they've obviously — I think they're arguably the best in the world at doing that."”
Source→“Joe Schmidt just wrote a piece called Lighthouse or Land Grab, which gets into the two dominant playbooks he's observed among enterprise AI startups. ... They sell into the insurance space... a lot of their customers are some of the biggest insurance companies in the world. And it's because they're very comfortable with like, okay, here's an AI solution that's built in a governance-first form and fashion. And then they work with forward-deployed teams to get it up and running."”
Source→“"The y-axis is really what we called the buyer's exposure... There's the exposure of making a mistake with the solution that you buy. There's also the exposure of the solution inside of your company... And then the x-axis is whether or not proof travels in any given market. And so if you think about the top right would be proof travels in this market and it's high buyer exposure and high buyer risk... that's a lighthouse market. And the bottom left would be low proof traveling, but also low buyer exposure. And that would be a land grab market."”
Source→“They just did a fantastic job of winning the right law firms for this very new, very theoretically high risk initiative where you're augmenting your human workforce with AI capabilities... when they won the first kind of few critical lighthouse accounts inside of their market, like that proof traveled like big time.”
Source→“In the piece, you talk about Hebbia and Harvey as classic lighthouse examples.”
Source→“Decagon has done an amazing job at this. Like, I think they go in, they basically evangelize that they're doing customer support better than anyone else. And then they're very good about saying here are the benchmarks that we are signing up to hit and then they hit them.”
Source→“They sell into the insurance space... a lot of their customers are some of the biggest insurance companies in the world. And it's because they're very comfortable with like, okay, here's an AI solution that's built in a governance-first form and fashion. And then they work with forward-deployed teams to get it up and running.”
Source→“We were big investors in Cursor and everyone saw how that played out.”
Source→“There is a very set number of people who are buying that kind of autonomous software and a certain number of car manufacturers and so on and so forth in the world... these are huge ACV opportunities and they've obviously — I think they're arguably the best in the world at doing that.”
Source→“It sounds way more sexy to sell JP Morgan Chase than the, you know... Too few people are willing to pick up the phone and willing to get out on the plane and willing to get in front of those customers right now because they feel like, oh, this is like this new category moment. I have to go to JP Morgan Chase to sell my deal.”
Source→“Why, you know, basically the last 12 years before 2024... you saw so much PLG is just kind of where we were in like the software innovation cycle... going from cloud to cloud for CRM, like, I don't care if the button is green or blue. I don't care if there's like one little feature difference. I'm not going to switch.”
Source→“What Stutt said was, hey, AI is actually quite good at basically having conversations with people. It's very good at looking at information internally and basically doing this process end to end... they were able to go out to the mid market and just basically show the math and be like, would you like to have this solution? Yes or no.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.