[Weekly Retro] Observations on VC, AI Products and Creativity
#265 - Sep.2025
Weekly Retro is a short e-mail with a wrap-up of ideas from the week, interesting links I found, and food for thought before you head off for the weekend.
Happy Friday!
Here are a few observations about VC, AI, and creativity that I've been thinking about recently.
I'm not a VC expert, but as someone who's watched software engineering evolve this past year, here's what I'm seeing - happy to hear from people in this space.
- VC dynamics are changing. Today, AI companies are capturing +30% of all venture funding. Yet, the entry barrier for new startups to start running a business is getting low. Deploying a technology stack to serve customers has never been so easy and MVPs can be built much faster. Why would they search for venture capital if they can bootstrap their work? I believe in the next years we'll see VC flowing to more capital-intensive businesses and foundational services (e.g. hardware engineering? AI infrastructure? Robotics?) vs. small digital startups.
- Product offering overload. Lower barriers mean more products flooding the market. Expect 10-20X more offerings than last year. But quantity doesn't equal quality. Businesses will ship half-baked products with weak security as they race to experiment and get customers' attention. We will continue to see Consumer apps leading innovation while enterprise software plays catch-up.
- Curation becomes key. With more low-quality options, users will feel overwhelmed. We'll see more "aggregators" and curating services: trusted sources to curate and filter out noise. Marketplaces that create strong trust bonds with customers and filter what really matters will likely become the go-to hubs for people who want to escape from a chaotic market environment.
- Creative barriers are disappearing. I'm very curious to see how people who were previously unable to express their creativity, perhaps for a lack of technical skills, can now, through AI, break these constraints and build new things. The other day, my 6-year-old daughter was designing a robot app through voice commands with Claude Artifacts. It's like she had a magic wand, and coding disappeared. Her creativity led the process. Imagine this at a global scale!
📡 Tech Radar
- Google Stitch: Google launched a tool that lets anyone design app interfaces directly from text or image prompts, integrating with Figma and code platforms for seamless workflow.
- Hardware-AI Integration: Samsung is expected to announce smart glasses and XR headsets with on-device LLMs, blurring the line between hardware and agent-based software for real-world augmented experiences.
- OpenAI and Oracle: OpenAIs signs a $300B deal with Oracle. The funding covers more than half of the A.I. data centers that OpenAI plans to build in the U.S. over the next several years.
🙌🏼 News I was waiting for
Lossless Listening Arrives on Spotify Premium With a Richer, More Detailed Listening Experience — Spotify
Lossless on Spotify Premium is here. Lossless audio has been one of the most anticipated features on Spotify and now, finally, it’s started rolling out to Premium listeners in select markets. Premium subscribers will receive a notification in Spotify once Lossless becomes available to them. Whether you’re diving into a new album or revisiting old…
Lauren.Petersongroupsjr.com
👨🏻💻 Interesting links
Why might the Big Bang theory be in crisis very soon? | Aeon Essays
The current theory for the origin of the Universe is remarkably successful yet full of explanatory holes. Expect surprises
How to make your home and workspace fuel your creativity – The Creative Independent
A guide to changing where you live and work in order to nourish your creative lifestyle, written by Stephanie Diamond with illustrations by Carlos Sanchez.
🖋️ Quote of the week
“Between too early and too late, there is never more than a moment” – Franz Werfel
