A quick US trip | Part I | A Tale of Two Cities

About 2 weeks ago, work took me to the US — it was a whirlwind few days. One of those 4 diff time zone trips where even jet lag doesn’t know what hit it.

I went for a conference, said hello to some investors (yeah, I need their money for the new fund), said hello to others (who won’t give me anything for yet another 3 year cycle), met many growth co-investors (current and future), spoke at 2 events, surprisingly met AI pipeline companies who are otherwise Indian finds hustling the streets of NY and SF. London was a nice 30 hr pit stop en route back home.

There were two sets of observations I thought I’ll share with the team and the ecosystem at large (if you’ve not figured this out, at Blume we share more than half the stuff, that we share with the team, with the ecosystem as well — let there be learning and views and wisdom imparted to as many as we can share it with)

Part I | A Tale of Two Cities

NYC: Tariffs Trump All else

Every VC meeting, every conference attendee, every deli smelt like Tariff-infused caffeine. The nature of NYC is to be embraced by the markets and this is all the market was about for the first week after the Great Trumpian announcement. It was very reminiscent of a trip in Sept 2008 when I landed over the weekend, where the GFC chaos was hitting its peak — Lehman collapsed Monday, there was a rumour that Goldman could be next and the Goldman event we went to had just guests the second half of the day; the hosts had all vanished back to office, to judge if there was truth to the rumour. Goldman didn’t go under and, of course, many institutions survived that mayhem. This was not about firms this time, it was about implications on countries, the geopolitics of the chess moves and trade and the macroeconomic fallouts and multi-decade shifts that were likely unfolding. It was clear that Wall Street was upset that they weren’t consulted but it was also clear (at least in retrospect) that the narrative on containing the chaos had started falling in place.

“The world, as we know it, will never be the same again. It is the most seismic shift in global economics, of at least our lifetimes” was the most magnificent dialogue of the 3 days :-).

The best house view that I got that week (Tue, 8^th Apr) from a Madison Ave penthouse office was that Trump should’ve acted more systematically. What should have been announced is a flat 10% across the board tariff enforcement with immediate effect, along with the release of the proposed tariff slabs against every other country. Then, a window of 6 months with a ticking deadline should’ve been notified, which would have forced every country to hustle to a negotiated end state. Instead the clock was running out of the 6 days period when I left for SF Thurs morning. This was the trickle down view from the powerful Wall Street lobbies clearly — most of this happened early the week after (except the pointed escalation with China which was always going to be the mainstay of this policy’s impact and the political statements).

SF: AI is the only language

One flies to the other coast and there was barely a mention of Tariffs over the 55 hours stay. Currently, there’s only one language in that Bay Area — it’s naturally AI. Even Airbnb has a play on it with a house in the shape of ​“A Eye”, as the ad proclaims from over the labyrinth of SF flyovers. The richly endorsed Enterprise-software-billboard-laden-101 was now displaying AI ads wherever the 50 mile stretch offered room for a banner.

A leading Valley VC told us the firm has done nothing but AI for 2.5 years now and they ignore all other pipeline and respectfully pass. Another told us all they had to do was sit on the other end of the YC and EF pipelines and wait for the best stuff to filter out. Stories of $1 mill to >$100 mill ARR stories are short term legends already. Interestingly, Consumer AI is a bit behind the expected curve in the market.

One of the things in Part 2 will be whether this also implies that there’s a gap for Indian founders to make a play, atop the LLMs. Application layers are being played aggressively but only in Enterprise use case makeovers or service marketplace rewrites. What about unobvious large American markets, in SMB, Consumer and verticals. I think its Game On.