Over the holiday break I read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. I learned two things. One, Steve Jobs cried a lot (he was a passionate guy), and two, the success of the iPhone came down to a tipping point. As I outlined in my last All Things Venture article. A tipping point in the context of VC and technology markets is the process of combining a readily available, undifferentiated product offering with emergent technology capabilities to create product market fit.

In the case of the iPhone, the readily available, undifferentiated product offering was the cellphone, and the emergent technology capabilities were a litany of things, but most prominently multi-touch screens, gorilla glass, and energy efficient CPUs.

Now why is this important? Why am I bringing up a piece of technology, that despite being less than 20 years old, is something we’re all very intimately familiar with? I bring it up because it offers an attractive parallel to where we are with AI. We truly are at the frontier of technology and every week, it feels like there is some new capability (i.e Anthropic computer use, OpenAI Sora release, Microsoft Phi-4 model release, etc.) coming to the fore. We live in a technological age where computers can see, they can talk, and they can listen. Computers are capable of driving cars and they are capable of passing the LSAT. You can ask a computer to create a five second video of a pirate fighting a dragon on a beach, or you can ask a computer to become your outsourced recruiter. The technology industry is hellbent on pushing the limits of what is possible, and there are no signs that the momentum in the industry is slowing.

So what’s next?

That's truly a trillion dollar question.

Link to All Things Venture: https://apexventurestudio.substack.com/p/sunday-grab-bag-random-vc-thoughts