Back from San Francisco (S10E02) Back from San Francisco. S10E02.
S10E01 was the robotaxis. S10E02 is the coffees. Between two redwood contemplations, I had a lot of coffees with old contacts: former founders, Epitech, Telecom, and LIP6 people.
That was the point of the trip: take the pulse from senior SWEs, SREs, CTOs, founders, and adjust how I think about angel investing.
This is what unsettled me most.
- Everyone wants to work at Anthropic or OpenAI.
The talent pool that would have considered Google or Meta 10 years ago now points at frontier labs. Experienced founders and CTOs I could easily imagine starting again are in hiring loops there.
This is the main difference with Paris.
Will that still be true post-IPO?
- Senior SWEs are now product engineers.
They serve product, growth, marketing, whatever needs shipping.
You need to be good at code and architecture. You also need taste. And people skills.
Product differentiation is accelerating. Tech no longer differentiates enough. Product does.
Paris has taste. That could put us in a good place.
- CTOs are coding again. A lot.
The code inflation question is real. Full-LLM codebases will raise hard questions. LLMs love adding code. Refactoring is harder.
That is a question for the future. The present is already busy enough.
- Founders sound resigned about lab velocity.
This was a few weeks after Claude Design shipped and Codex accelerated. The common belief: if the TAM is above $1B, the labs will eat it.
Building DevTools means competing with Claude Code and Codex. Hard.
The better move is to use them as leverage.
That is starting.
- Agentic companies are tired and excited.
New models ship every quarter from frontier labs and China. Every release forces teams to reassess agent quality. A prompt that worked on Opus 4.6 will not produce the same result on 4.7. Even less on 5.5. And then Qwen enters the room.
Lots of work ahead for evals.
- Token cost arbitrage is now a CFO topic.
Why let a frontier model handle prompts that could maybe run on a small model in a closet?
Silicon Valley is in a rupture period.
“The labs take everything” is one version of the story. The other is more practical: the quality of iteration outside pure tech is accelerating.
The opportunities to accelerate are exceptional.