What Big Tech Missed And How Startups Can Still Win
In a Nutshell
Alex built Amilabs on the contrarian bet that world models—AI trained directly on video, audio, and sensory data—will outperform LLMs on real-world tasks like robotics. To fund the massive GPU spend, he raised Europe’s largest-ever seed round of $1.2B, but warns the real cost is sky-high expectations, not dilution. His core advice for founders: pick a narrow problem yet keep an ambitious long-term vision, because big companies won’t take the crazy risks that startups must.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The real cost of a 1.2 billion raise is not dilution but expectations. Investors understood and agreed on the long-term vision, but the expectations created in the outside world are dangerous. If a company raises 20 million and does nothing for 2 years or people don't see anything coming out of it for 2 years, it becomes very hard to survive.
Alex and the speaker did the same YC batch in winter 2014. Alex was building Wit AI while the speaker was building Algolia. Alex has done four companies compared to the speaker's single company.
Wit AI was the first .ai domain. Buying .ai domains was very difficult at the time because .ai is an island off Australia. Alex found the domain and thought it would be cool to have it, but nobody understood it was a domain back in early 2013.
In 2015, Alex received an email from someone called Mark Zuckerberg. After half a second, he deleted the email without opening it, thinking it was a scam or spam. After about half an hour, he thought it might not be and opened his spam folder to find it was real.
The YC playbook states that if you don't want to sell, don't speak with anyone. As soon as you start a startup, you receive lots of offers to talk, but usually these are from corporate development of large companies who need to talk to everyone to understand the market and determine if you're desperate enough to sell for a low price. It's a very bad idea to waste time and attention.
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