#32 | Concentration, pivots, SaaSpocalypse with Patrick Salyer — Mayfield (68)

If agents are eating the systems of engagement, what is actually left to defend — and who gets to defend it?

The conversation covers:

• The SaaSpocalypse thesis in Patrick's own words — multiples from 7–8x to 40x to 2–3x in under a decade, the shift from systems of record to systems of work, and why he thinks fewer than a quarter of incumbent SaaS companies have the appetite to genuinely burn the boats
• Defensibility after the foundation models — why single-player workflows are fragile against OpenAI and Anthropic's distribution, why multiplayer workflows (governance, RBAC, iteration, judgment across stakeholders) may hold, and why two of the three classic data-moat pitches no longer survive first-principles scrutiny
• The pivot problem — Gigya hit ten million ARR and had to pivot, hit thirty million ARR and had to pivot again, and Patrick's retrospective conviction that both should have happened earlier; a useful frame for a market where capital is letting teams defer the question
• Professional services as differentiation rather than embarrassment — how Gigya ran services at ~30% of revenue, recurring and profitable, and why Patrick thinks the FDE renaming is obscuring a durable truth about trust
• Mayfield's own shape — seventeenth early-stage fund, ~$1.2B across the two vehicles, roughly 70% first-institutional-check, two or three investments per partner per year, and the deliberate refusal to index a category
• The battlefield promotion to CEO on Patrick's thirtieth birthday, five months of runway, a million-dollar monthly burn, and what he actually learned from Naveen Chawda about the difference between being founder-friendly and being useful

Patrick is a GP at Mayfield. Before investing he spent eleven years at Gigya, joining as the first business hire in 2007, becoming CEO at thirty, leading the company through multiple pivots and past a hundred million in ARR, and selling to SAP in 2017 for three hundred and fifty million. He now invests at seed and Series A in enterprise and AI, with board seats at Docket AI, Duplo Cloud, BigPanda, and Scrunch AI, and writes The CEO Field Guide on Substack.

Worth the hour if you think about where the defensibility actually lives.

Transcript

Frazer Anderson (00:00)
Friends, welcome and welcome back, I hope, to Edge Cases, the human side of AI. I'm Frazier Anderson. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Patrick Salyer, partner at Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most storied venture firms.

Now in its 58th year, Mayfield manages $3 billion in early-stage capital, and its most recent raise totaled over $1 billion across two funds backing companies from inception through Series B.

Before Mayfield, Patrick was the CEO of Gigya, a Mayfield portfolio company that pioneered the customer identity and access management category. He joined Gigya as one of its earliest employees in 2007 and was handed the CEO job on his 30th birthday. For the next decade, he led the company through three pivots, scaled it past 100 million in ARR, raised over 100 million in venture funding, and successfully sold the business to SAP in 2017 for $350 million.

Today, he invests at Seed and Series A in enterprise and AI, with a particular focus on AI native applications, and sits on the boards of Dock at AI, Duplo Cloud, Big Panda, and Scrunch AI. He's also one of the more thoughtful voices writing publicly about the transition from SaaS to agentic software, which we will definitely get into.

Patrick holds a BA in economics from Harvard where he graduated magna cum laude and was a varsity athlete. He lives in the Bay Area with his family. So now without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Patrick Salyer, partner at Mayfield.

Frazer Anderson (01:25)
So Patrick, in our world of high moving, high ego, high consequences startups, the battlefield promotion to CEO or to steward of a fund is ⁓ they tend to be the kind of stuff of legends fairly quickly. And you became CEO of a company under...

circumstances that I don't know you would have drawn up. So maybe we can go into that story because I had to ask.

Patrick Salyer (01:51)
Sure. Well, first of all, thanks, Frazier, for having me. I'm excited to be here today. yeah, so for context for folks, I previously was the CEO of a Mayfield portfolio company called Gigia. And I did that from, I was part of Gigia from 2017 to 28, or excuse me, 2007 to 2018. So it was 11 year kind of journey. You know, it was not your classic.

bring in an outside CEO or even start a CEO situation. I started as kind of like the first business employee when we're just a handful of people, three founders, kind of came into the business. Like many businesses do, we went through a pretty hard pivot early on. And I became kind of the GM of that new business, if you will. And I got a call on my 30th birthday, actually.

And at the time I was kind of putting together a business plan for my own startup. So I was kind of thinking about like going out and doing something on my own. And it was the founders and they said, Hey, it's going to be interesting day for you. We want you to be the CEO. And I go, why? What's wrong? And so we had actually at the time brought in a previously an outside CEO is an amazing professional. He's a, he's a public company CEO right now. But he had decided to kind of step down because we had had to go through this big pivot.

Frazer Anderson (03:00)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (03:01)
And for me, was like amazing opportunity. We had great backers, Benchmark Mayfield. You know, I was 30 years old, felt like why not? So I took the role after talking to my wife and quickly realized it was not a simple situation. We had something like five months of runway. We were burning way too much money, almost a million dollars a month. So you can kind of do the math and ⁓

Frazer Anderson (03:22)
Easy.

Patrick Salyer (03:25)
I was kind of in charge of people that previously were managing me. And so let's just say like those first couple of months were not trivial and easy. But you learn the most I think under fire, know, never never failed to take advantage of a crisis. And so we went on by the way to have a pretty incredible year. We went kind of like one million ARR to five to 12 successfully raised money and then and then it wasn't smooth sailing from there. at least got at least got the company off to a good start. So

Frazer Anderson (03:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (03:53)
Kind of an intro and I was the CEO for the next kind of seven or years until our successful exit to SAP. So yeah, interesting start to a entrepreneurial journey.

Frazer Anderson (03:58)
Yeah.

Tremendous. Well, I think it's probably good for us to just go back a little bit to the role that you're in today with Mayfield. And I think it would be helpful for the audience just to give a little bit of context on Mayfield. It is, I think in a lot of ways, almost the archetypal Silicon Valley venture fund. mean, it is a lovely office in which I've been hosted by yourself right on Sand Hill Road. You raise funds that...

always seem appropriately sized, or really passionate about early stage investing, passionate about investing in things that really are more a function of, as far as I can tell, the developments in technology as opposed to the current thing. So would love for you to talk about, I think, the history of the firm, and especially in the context of this AI moment we're having today, which feels different than everything else, not in terms of human excitement and

technological breakthroughs, but in terms of the scale of capital and what it means for our business, would love to understand your journey of learning the craft in such an august organization that spans several iterations of what our business is.

Patrick Salyer (05:09)
Sure, absolutely. yeah, so as you alluded to, Fraser, I'm currently a GP at Mayfield. Mayfield is a 55 plus year old early stage venture capital firm here in Silicon Valley. So was kind of one of the first in existence. And it does have a pretty storied history, something like 500 investments of which 125 have IPO, 230 have M &A plus. So we work with some really great founders. What's really been core to the DNA of the firm is

investing at those earliest stages. So I would say ⁓ roughly 70 % of our investments were the first institutional check into the company, whether that's kind of a pen and paper idea, most of them are pre-revenue, most of them are just teams. We of course invest in series A and series B as well, but the roots is really kind of working with a small set of fantastic entrepreneurs that have deep insight and kind of coming alongside leading rounds.

joining boards and kind of committing to working with that team for a decade plus. And one thing I'll just, from a personal standpoint, we just talked a little bit about my battlefield promotion and my role as a CEO. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the role that Mayfield had played on my particular board and throughout that journey that really led to, I think, a successful outcome and helping me as a first time CEO. I had Naveen Shada, who's our managing director on my board. He was a three time founder and entrepreneur before becoming an investor.

So he brings that DNA values into how he's kind of brought the firm along to work with founders. And so for us, we have a lot of values, right? It's like loyal to a fault. Once we're in, we're all in long-term commitment. And how that translates in, think into the business is we probably do a little bit fewer investments and maybe some other firms, but we only know how to do one type of investment, which is like fully committed to that founding team, right?

Frazer Anderson (06:52)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (06:53)
⁓ And that's not to say we don't have a lot of capital. We've just raised our 17th early stage fund. We have an early growth fund as well. So we've got quite a bit of capital to deploy across both, but it's kind of that core DNA of like, we're not gonna do a huge number of investments. Each partner might lead two or three a year, ⁓ but those are projects that we take really seriously and we have this long-term, highly convicted, highly committed approach to investing.

Frazer Anderson (06:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Could you talk about the scale of the two vehicles you're managing now? Not that the quantum of capital lends credibility. I you've made it onto the edge cases podcast, so you're doing something right. But just so the viewers have a sense.

Patrick Salyer (07:30)
Yeah, our quote unquote early fund, which again is part of that inception stage investment, but also series a fund is about a $575 million fund. And then we have what we call our early growth fund, which can do either series a prime type type investments or series B investments, lead or co lead or follow. And that's about the same amount. So between those two, we've got about 1.2 billion in capital.

Frazer Anderson (07:51)
Okay.

Tremendous. And I had a different way I wanted to take this conversation, but I'm afraid, you know, I do these conversations as much for myself as for anyone who's listening. So you mentioned that part of the reason that you're at Mayfield is because of Naveen's role as an amazing board member in allowing you to be successful, making ⁓ Gig Yeah! successful, especially during the hard times. Having met Naveen a few times, he obviously has immense gravitas.

tremendous credibility, just a total sort of been there, done that guy. And I think for a lot of people that like our business, there is a romance to being able to help founders succeed, help people achieve their dreams without the responsibility of actually having to operate the company. And how I have observed that play out a lot of times is folks providing a lot of generic advice and certainly

Patrick Salyer (08:43)
Mmm.

Frazer Anderson (08:45)
relishing the fact that they're not responsible for anything. And so when you think about the example that was set for you of being an excellent board member at a steward of capital in Naveen, what are the things that you take away from that experience now that you sort of serve his role with other entrepreneurs? And if there's a story or two that you feel is emblematic of the help you received and why you hold that time in such high regard.

Patrick Salyer (09:10)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's a bunch of different things. Like, first of all, you know, startups are a series of ups and downs, right? Everyone says that, but it's just the reality. And there are going to be near death experiences. And my particular company, Giga, we had several of those. And for sure, the company wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for my great investors Mayfield and benchmark and others, just stepping up those critical times. I think it comes from two things. One is like,

Knowing that in those moments, you have kind of a core board member and partner that has, think, sort of like anchoring to help you kind of get through those times. So you can bring kind of the bad news to the table and you can know they're going to be a thought partner to help you kind of get through that. And in cases, by the way, sometimes that means capital.

Frazer Anderson (09:51)
Yes.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (09:57)
as

well, right? And so it's both sort of like the anchoring advice we're going to get through it. It's like not if, but how is kind of a core value that we brought into that company, but also like stepping up, like let's actually help the company get through this moment, right? I think that that, and we had that experience by the way, like as an example, when I became CEO in that moment, both our existing investors had stepped up and give us capital to help get through that, you know, through that pivot that we were going through, right?

Frazer Anderson (10:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (10:23)
So that's a big one. would say like an additional thing to think about is like as a first time CEO, we think a lot about like, how do we help the founding team in particular like CEO grow because companies will only grow as fast, I think as their CEOs in many ways. And by definition, it's kind of weird. The CEO is the only one that can have never done their job before in a certain way, right? The founding CEO. So I was in that position, right? And I made a lot of mistakes and just sort of

Frazer Anderson (10:43)
Yes.

Patrick Salyer (10:50)
helping me grow. And that wasn't necessarily always direct, although often it was, right? Like which from like our board member style, Naveen's style, was like, what is the really the only one, two or three things that really matter at this moment help bring that to bear at any one time? And then helping in whatever way, which usually is like sometimes an introduction, sometimes it is advice, sometimes connecting you to the right person to actually execute on that, right?

And that also meant giving me a coach right along the way, which we can talk about. anyhow, it's sort of those are kind of some of the ways that it comes out. And it's not always like spending the most time. It's not really being founder friendly. It's really like helping align with the vision and what the entrepreneur is trying to do and then get through those kind of like crucible what you might hear like so critical. I believe in as well like these crucible moments, right? It's really critical.

Frazer Anderson (11:38)
Yeah,

tremendous. So I would love to go back to your growth as an operator and as a CEO. And I think maybe to set that up, if you wouldn't mind, because your background, to me at least, maybe at the outset is very conventionally successful. You were educated here in Cambridge. I believe you went into consulting and I always find it interesting what makes somebody that could have sort of a life on Wall Street.

go and sort of raise the Jolly Roger and go to Silicon Valley. So curious how you found yourself in the Valley and then how you evolved from an employee who probably had a sense that maybe they knew, that maybe had a sense they had some decent ideas about how to run the company, but now you sort of get the gift that maybe you didn't actually want. So maybe you can talk through some of those things.

Patrick Salyer (12:24)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, my career was a bit, you know, for a while, I wandered a bit, but then found, you know, I think a couple amazing situation, and I believe relationships compound and experience compound. So when I found those relationships and experiences, was not I was not one to want to jump to the next thing. It's like, wow, how can I continue to grow in that? And so yeah, I started my career in consulting, which is a pretty classical thing to do out of

Frazer Anderson (12:35)
Thanks a

Patrick Salyer (12:48)
out of undergrad, I went to Harvard and kind of went from there. One thing that was super cool as I consulting was I realized there were these set of skills that maybe didn't show up in academia, that all of a sudden became really important. And some of those was like emotional intelligence, being able to read a room, it was coming up to a quick conclusion, being able to communicate ideas, support them with data, all this sort of stuff that ⁓ frankly, it wouldn't help you that much in the classroom, but suddenly became

Frazer Anderson (13:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (13:16)
critically important. So that was a big one. I was always entrepreneurial sort of in nature. My dad was an entrepreneur, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. So the idea of moving out to the Valley was like, and being kind of in the mix here made sense to me. I was sort of lucky. I worked on a couple side projects that were bootstrapped and did fairly well, but weren't going to become big things. And I felt like I needed to get educated and kind of be in the professionalism of the Valley. And so that's where I just got lucky.

Frazer Anderson (13:41)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (13:42)
to be an early employee at this company, Gigio, where I became the CEO. And it was more luck than anything else, to be honest with you. These were like, there were three Israeli founders that were all technologists. They wanted to hire a business person. They tried to hire one of my good friends. My good friend said, you should talk to Patrick. I met these guys in a dingy lobby of ⁓ a hotel, one of those hotels on El Camino that wasn't the nice hotel because they didn't want to pay. I didn't even think they were staying there because they didn't want to pay for the room, but they thought it was reasonable to stay at.

Frazer Anderson (13:48)
OK. Yeah.

Yeah.

Love, love.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (14:11)
⁓ I took the job and they for sure tried to fire me the first week. I mean, these were, these were like intense. They're over your shoulder. It was a kind of the BD sales job, but I 10 X every metric that they were trying to achieve. they've after that, they were like, okay, this guy's not an idiot. He knows what he's doing. and then, and then I think the cool thing about that culture is it's not about what you've done is what you can do. So my mental model became do my current job super, super well, but then

Frazer Anderson (14:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (14:40)
do whatever someone's not asking me for and like do that next job as well. And so that's how I got, I think, increasing responsibility over that two, three years, ended up running the new business that became the business that we bet on and how I became the CEO. So that was, you know, the right place, right time, but even more than that, it's like, I worked with a set of people that believed in, believed in me, believed in experience does count for something, but it's also what can you do and believed in growth. Naveen and...

Frazer Anderson (14:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (15:06)
And my other board members, I think, had that same framework. And I was really fortunate to kind of grow from that.

Frazer Anderson (15:12)
And how do you tell what people can do? Do you have a framework or is that intuition?

Patrick Salyer (15:18)
Hmm. What a wonderful question. I, ⁓ I think a big part of it is what has someone done in the past? And that doesn't mean by the way they have to be like a second time entrepreneurs hold a company for a billion dollars. that, is a great data point, right? ⁓ but literally I think the slope and trajectory. like early on when I was hiring as an operator, I hired a ton of salespeople. I hired a ton of people out of school.

Frazer Anderson (15:31)
Nice. Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (15:43)
And the thing I would look for is excellence in something, right? Often it was athletics. Sometimes it was, you know, it could be, I mean, literally it could be they built a club or they built a small business on the side, something that showed some entrepreneurial initiative and leadership and excelling. And I think you have to see that. And then in someone's career, you often, I think have evidence points to that as well, of course, right? Past performance predicts future success. So that's a big one. And then rate of learning.

Right. So for me, as a founder, you don't need to know all the answers. I mean, you definitely need, I think, insight around the problem you're solving. But what's more important is you know what questions to ask and who knows the answers. And can you surround yourself with those people? Right. And whether they're an advisor or a team member, a board member, whatever it is, a coach. And so that's also what I think we really are testing for is that slope of learning and how does someone learn? by definition, you won't know, you know, most of everything you're trying to achieve in the future.

Frazer Anderson (16:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. I would love to double click on pivots a little bit too. You know, we seem to be in a, I mean, it's certainly strange from my perspective, the market environment that we're in, you know, typically in my experience doing this, you meet a team, the idea of seems credible, the people seem credible, you give them some money and then, you know, half the time they pivot, half the time it works and they keep going. And the scale of success is really the

more of a product of the learning rate of the team and the tailwind of the market they've chosen. Today, a lot of teams, if they are legible to capital, don't seem to need to pivot. They just get more and more money. And they don't need to demonstrate some kind of commercial traction to get the next round. But at some point that will stop and there will be a lot of pivots to be done. And there are always pivots happening.

How did you approach some of the pivots or, I don't know if it was like curious what your perspective was on the first pivot at Gig Yeah, because presumably that was the first time you'd signed up for something that was sort of like, oh my goodness, this isn't gonna work, is it? We need to try something new. And how you think about coaching teams through pivots today.

Patrick Salyer (17:45)
Yeah,

I think it's such an important question, especially for this mo it's always been important, but it's important this moment in time because the rate of change, I don't think has ever been higher. And I'm not sure it's going away. So I think it's a critical question. And for context, we went zero to 10 and had to 10 million ARR and had to pivot and then went kind of zero to 30 and had to pivot again. so

Frazer Anderson (17:54)
Yeah. Nah.

Patrick Salyer (18:09)
It was the one thing I would advise is do it earlier. And the question is, why did it take us so long? Right? I would think one was a was a market change. And the other was frankly, not finding real PMF, even though we were at 30 million ARR. ⁓ The market change, we just couldn't anticipate something material change that required us to start over. And then the 30 million ARR maybe more interesting for folks, which was like, our churn was too high in that business. And

Frazer Anderson (18:22)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Salyer (18:34)
The thing about churn is if you have a wave behind you and you're riding that wave, it doesn't show up until you're like over 20 million ARR. And it's just like the mathematics of it, right? Because if you're going like zero to five, five to 15, you don't, that churn amount from zero to five, maybe you lose a million ARR, it just doesn't matter that much. But once you lose five or six and you're trying to double, the math really starts to slow down the business. so, so what does that mean, I guess, in terms of like the advice I would give?

Frazer Anderson (18:42)
Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (19:02)
One is I think in this moment in time, it really benefits you to first principles really understand you have PMF like true, true PMF. And that's like a massive need you're solving. And that that that need is like, it's not just a nice to have, it's like a must have. And if you rip this product away, the customers would be like terribly upset. And, and it's not, you know, it's not something you can fix with better customer service or

Frazer Anderson (19:22)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (19:27)
you know, FDEs, it just works, right? And, and so that why that's especially important today is not just so you don't hit 30 million ARR and have to start over. It's because the rate of growth expected from follow on investors has never been higher. And so you can you can again, strong arm your way with like, good, good sales techniques, etc. to two, three million ARR, but very hard to do it to 30 to 300 million. So I think that that's a

Frazer Anderson (19:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (19:53)
That's a core thing. So take your time really, really fine PMF and repeatability on the go to market motion. Cause it's one thing to have a certain ICP that might, you know, buy your product, but maybe that's a local maxima, right? There's a lot of companies that will get to five, 10 million ARR, but like you then have to cross the chasm to larger customers or whatever it might be and you never get there. So making sure whatever that need is and that ICP, there's repeatability that you can, you can kind of bring to market and to kind of finish that story.

We, again, 30 million ARR, we had to actually really redevelop the product. Now it wasn't a full pivot. was kind of extension of the product. But that new business went from a zero to a hundred million run rate in five years. And gosh, I would have probably four or five years. I would have loved to start from zero and do that from the beginning, but we had spent five years kind of working on some other stuff. So if we could do that in the beginning, man, it would have just been a different outcome for the company long-term.

Frazer Anderson (20:36)
you

Yeah. Loved the SASpocalypse Survival Guide. 100 million AR business selling for 350 million. I'm sure at one point felt way too early. Now maybe it's just about right. Could you talk me through your perspective on sort of SASpocalypse and does this feel oversold to you?

Is this something that you anticipated? I think there were some group of people that said, know, SaaS is cooked, you the moment they used Chat Cheap BT to do some kind of a code completion. But the sort of public market seemed to have woken up to this, you know, dynamic, you know, maybe in the last couple of months. But, you know, we'd love for you to expand on that essay.

Patrick Salyer (21:26)
Yeah. And this is something I put out on LinkedIn around just everything that's happening with with with cloud heating, SAS and SAS multiples going down and it's I have a lot of empathy if you're like a SAS operator today, not just because I was one but like, man, there's been thrashing over the last six or seven years, right? When I was operating, you have these long term multiples that were like seven to eight times revenue and those are pretty consistent, you could maybe be above that 1010 times plus but you wouldn't be below five and there's just a range and

my company got sold in terms of like gap revenue, like right in the median of that. And our growth rates were were okay, given we had one business shrinking anyhow. But then like three years later, the end of 2020 21, the multiples were like 3040 50 x and I would just like it was it was one of these head spinning moments where it just couldn't as a past operator who had seen these long term I couldn't make sense of it right and we we just thought they were here to stay maybe but

Frazer Anderson (22:08)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (22:20)
You know, fast forward three years from then and you know, we're sitting at two, three times revenue. So it is sobering. ⁓ is it here to stay? mean, look, I think, I think markets are pretty rational in this moment in time. And what there is, is a massive shift where we've gone from, you know, systems of record systems, engagement, SAS, those things being the work product that humans would use and interact with on top. And now because of AI and agents, it's really about now automating work and, ⁓ and augmenting work and.

The exciting thing is that's 10 times the market size if you just look at like the TAM and that's also very much Greenfield markets. The challenge is because of those tools, code is commoditizing and the value is maybe arguably moving from the systems of record, you know, up to these systems of work that are kind of emerging. So.

So like, I think a little bit is throwing the baby out of the bathwater. Like, will these things go away overnight? I don't think so. People aren't going to rip out ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, kind of some of these things. But do I think the real value is moving to the agents that will sit on top? I absolutely do. And I do, I think all of these systems of record will build out agents that are best in class, they'll get adoption. I don't think so. I think it's a very challenging first principles thing to do.

Frazer Anderson (23:32)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (23:32)
And so,

⁓ no, I don't expect that to change much in the coming months and quarters here.

Frazer Anderson (23:37)
How do you think the adoption of agentic solutions for legacy software or more companies that have some scale that's sort of a SaaS, how do you see that playing out? Because I think culturally it always ends up being a big problem. And maybe that is more of an impact of perhaps less kind of high agency CEOs, but it's like, how do I recruit these people?

Where do I find them? And if I hire this AI person, can they solve my problem? How do I identify the right AI person? What are you seeing within companies? Because I would say I hear it both ways, but I see at least the early stages, it's a real problem culturally to try and get the talent into the companies. And then I would say with more mature companies, hear, it's actually helping us do things faster and we can use agents to build agents. What do you see?

Patrick Salyer (24:22)
Right.

Yeah. First of all, think let's talk about the strengths that an existing SaaS company might have. I think they have distribution today, which is not trivial. Distribution is a huge thing you have to achieve. Theoretically, they have data. They have the context within the organization. And they have access to the end user, which can be useful. What is the problem? think there are many. You have this long list of requirements that your customers are asking you for.

Frazer Anderson (24:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (24:47)
that have nothing to do with these agentic software that you want to build. But that itself becomes critical. You have this pricing model that's probably SaaS seed-based, which kind of holds you back. And then on top of that, you just have all this legacy code that you have to just maintain and manage. And you have a team that wants to refactor that won't lead to any. It's just, OK, that's kind of the default. And then you have a whole engineering and product team that maybe hasn't figured out what agentic coding

really is, which means they're probably coding at one fifth of the rate. Right. And so how do you transform it? The only way I think it happens is from the top down. It's, think leadership has to realize this is a fundamental change. This isn't like a, little SWAT team that you're going to build on the side. have to like really like burn the boats and go all in. Right. And so evidence that I'm seeing of that are

Frazer Anderson (25:18)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Patrick Salyer (25:36)
teams that are willing to actually like literally look at if I've got 100 engineers, like what, even if there's only 20 that kind of know how to do this stuff, like I actually just need to get down to that, to those folks that really are using agents that know how to build this way, et cetera, right? They need to think from a product perspective. It's not your traditional like PRD moving through the life cycle, right? This is going to be a lot more dynamic. And then they have to realize that like all that SaaS business means nothing. It's like gonna, it's valued.

Frazer Anderson (25:44)
the other.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (26:04)
below your cap, your capital stack, right? So you preference stack. So you literally your only goal should be building these agents getting adoption of your existing customers and moving them over. And if you don't, the company really isn't worth anything per se. So you have to like come to this conclusion, even though you're eight to 10 to 12 years in that you're literally starting over, right? And I think that is a it's not for the faint of heart. I think probably less than a quarter of companies will have the ability wherewithal desire.

Frazer Anderson (26:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (26:33)
courage to kind of do that. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I have a ton of empathy, by the way, for this situation, but I think it is a really challenging thing for founders to do in this moment in time.

Frazer Anderson (26:39)
Yes.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned, you know, finding that let's say you have 100 engineers, finding the 20 that know how it works. It's what is interesting is because the consumers of tokens, it tends to be one these things where the more you use it, you use it more and more and more. It's a little bit reflexive. Just having the, having the insight and the

and the transparency to what people are doing inside the organization, how many tokens they're consuming, how many queries they're writing. It's so important today. And not just for SaaS companies, I think for legacy companies as well. I think a lot of folks are trying to experiment with various POCs here and there, but getting things into the organization and just

Patrick Salyer (27:12)
Good.

Mm-hmm.

Frazer Anderson (27:29)
having a level playing field so you can see who self-educates is extremely important for finding leadership in this time.

Patrick Salyer (27:34)
Yeah, agreed. And I think it's not just for engineering too, right? Like what I'm hearing from at least our AI native companies is they're seeing non-technical individuals start to become like four to five to eight times more productive by using things like Cowork and Ultanclaw and some of these things. So that to me is a really fascinating pattern as well, right? Like you just need to hire fewer people in these other areas or just more people with more agency. But what does that look like exactly? I don't.

Frazer Anderson (27:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (28:01)
I think it's, know it when you see it, but how do you evaluate it? You know, it's kind of a different question that I think is an unsolved problem.

Frazer Anderson (28:03)
Yeah.

And have you gotten any pushback on the sort Sasspocalypse essay? Curious if there's sort of credible counter arguments that you think are worth sharing or is it tended to be a lot of commiseration?

Patrick Salyer (28:18)
it's more the latter. I do think there's reasonable pushback. Like if I had more time and energy, I would, I would certainly go, there's opportunities, say in the, in the public markets of like those that won't be thrown out, you know, the, like there, the, the companies that will succeed and make it through. But like, it's interesting. It's just, I think there is an acknowledgement that like, this is kind of a one way street right now, like in terms of what's happening with agents and AI and, and an automated work.

Frazer Anderson (28:41)
Yeah. When I think generally when you look at any of the companies that have really succeeded in technology in the last 30 years, you almost always see pretty damn strong network effects somewhere, either in the go to market or the way the product works, or if they go multi-product, the kind of network effect between using multiple products from the same vendor. And you've written about making

Patrick Salyer (28:48)
Mm-hmm.

Frazer Anderson (29:04)
making products multiplayer as a super engaging and defensible mode, which I love and sounds very smart. I'm curious where you're seeing it successful and if there are frameworks you'd use when you're speaking to entrepreneurs who are kind of, because you're gonna have to start somewhere solving a thing, but that you'd work with to get them moving in that direction because I think it's.

Patrick Salyer (29:23)
Yeah.

Frazer Anderson (29:28)
There is so much software out there. There are so many wonderful, sexy point solutions for every single thing you could think of. It becomes hard to get people, I think, to compromise any functionality in order to have it be multiplayer, especially when the network effects are not present just yet.

Patrick Salyer (29:34)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I would say these are evolving thoughts because things are moving so quickly. In fact, I like it written like, so I'm investing in AI applications, which is often AI agents. And, and, I had written a thesis back like end of December, early January that I literally had to rewrite like last month. And so I do think it's, and I'd love your thoughts, Frazier, but like for context for folks, you know, you take a step back, ⁓ with everything that, ⁓ is, is being released.

Frazer Anderson (29:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (30:10)
with these models and Claude and Claude Cowork and OpenClaude, it's like, we're starting to see that like things, AI agents that we thought were pretty defensible six to 12 months ago are no longer defensible. And so trying to think through a framework of what can exist in a world where every knowledge worker will have OpenClaude or Claude Cowork on their desktop to automate work, right? That's kind of the thing I've been wrapping my head around.

And I think there are some frameworks. do think there is some optimism you can have. Now, where is there a lack of optimism or where should you be concerned? Where is there yellow flag? Things that are single player nature, meaning like I, as a knowledge worker, control this workflow on my own. Right. And those are usually things that are, things that are limited in terms of scope, in terms of workflow, you don't need other people involved, et cetera. They're pretty, it can be relatively simplistic. They can be added as a skill into cloud cowork.

Those are challenging, think. And those things can take off really quickly in this moment in time, but I really wonder how defensible they are in the medium to long term. Now, what's the opposite of that, right? The opposite of that is what I'm calling things that are multiplayer in nature, within the course of your work, you're going to have to involve different stakeholders to complete some sort of embedded workflow. So there's probably a more complex process.

Frazer Anderson (31:04)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (31:27)
Within using multiple stakeholders, there's usually judgment that comes into play. There's usually iteration within that workflow. Often it changes. You have things that matter then like governance, role-based access control, obviously security matters. I believe those are the types of things in this moment in time that will be more defensible in nature. This leaves data out, by the way, that we can maybe as a separate topic that I'm still kind of trying to figure out myself, but like.

just more from the embedded workflows. think that's a reasonable framework to be thinking about right now.

Frazer Anderson (31:58)
Yeah, no, I like that. I think the access controls and what whose agents have access to which data are going to be extremely important because especially in the enterprise, there's just so much information that needs to be siloed. So certainly there, I do think versioning control when you just have a bunch of people using their own LLM of choice is a bit of a nightmare. It's funny how

I think one of the reasons that teams are getting smaller is because when you can work at the speed of one person with an agent, it becomes so frustrating to collaborate because you're no longer used to things taking this long ⁓ to kind of get feedback and you just want to get going and you're used to talking to your agent who moves really fast. On the data side, I'm thinking to that myself as well.

Patrick Salyer (32:28)
Mm. Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Frazer Anderson (32:43)
are almost certainly certain types of data, which will remain valuable. And if you can contextualize them the right way, they will be valuable in kind of a vertical SaaS application. But I do think an increasing amount of data is just not going to be that valuable. I think, especially with, at least, I know, I use my own example of like the CRM is the sort of half-life of business data is pretty short-lived.

Patrick Salyer (33:11)
Hmm.

Frazer Anderson (33:11)
And so I think a lot of, I think there's a lot more declared confidence about the durability of systems of record than there really ought to be. Unless it's some kind of physical data, health data. I just think notes and past conversations just aren't that useful after a few months, frankly.

Patrick Salyer (33:30)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I agree with that point. I mean, I historically saw two pitches, maybe three different pitches around data motes and two of them, I'm not so sure will continue to exist. Like one is what you were describing, which is the context within the organization. I think that every app can get that basically every AI agent. And so yes, it requires integration, but those integrations are getting easier. And so, so I sort of take that one off the table. The second is.

I can get some sort of proprietary data that I get through some partnership or access to something that no one else has. think the problem with that is the research labs are buying and creating every form of data that exists on the planet. In fact, they're creating data that doesn't exist on the planet. So, and they have billions of dollars of budget just dedicated to this particular topic. So for example,

Frazer Anderson (34:17)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (34:24)
If you have some insight of like how your agent can crawl SAP to enter and extract data, well, guess what? They're buying that information through these RL Jim companies and they will be able to do that very, very soon. that in itself, when they're doing licensing deals, whatever, that's going to go away. And so what is left? It feels like, I think there can be data that gets created within your product.

Frazer Anderson (34:33)
Yes.

Patrick Salyer (34:48)
If you, that makes sense, like spit out, maybe it's some of the decisions or logic or reasoning that really is unique that allows that particular workflow or process to, to be more effective. Um, and, and, and maybe that in itself will be defensible in some way, but, I don't know what it appears to get your thoughts, but like, cause this is again, I'm wrestling with this because this was, everyone said data two years ago. Like that was the thing you needed from.

Frazer Anderson (34:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I think the product level data is compelling, but I think then you just have to accept, you have to accept that the market just isn't going to be as big as you think it is. You have to be fairly niche. And there's really only a certain kind of customer that is worth having at that point. It is like a Fortune 500 company where the ACV is big enough.

Patrick Salyer (35:22)
Mm.

Hmm.

Frazer Anderson (35:33)
the sort of enterprise risk culture is robust enough that they're not going to switch for very long. And if you can get incrementally better, you can sit with that customer. But then how big is the company really going to get? I think it's going to be very hard to very hard to build a trillion dollar company, probably very hard to build a hundred billion dollar company at scale with that kind of moat that's defensible. But, you know, I think again, it's, it's one of the luxuries of doing early stage and

Patrick Salyer (35:56)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Frazer Anderson (36:01)
why I love early stages, you can still build a very good business finding those opportunities if you pay the right price going in. And I suspect you're going to have a lot of rather successful, fairly capital efficient sort of product or customer data defended companies with very, very small teams. Because I do think the fundamental economics of startups obviously have changed with sort of fixed.

going into variable costs. does make it a lot easier to run a profitable business, not at the same scale as SaaS, not at the same margin structure, but an exciting time to find a lot of these business opportunities, I would say.

Patrick Salyer (36:35)
Yeah, I think I really agree with what you're saying. I mean, and this is one of things I'm also thinking about and struggling with, which is if we described some of the attributes that will create defensibility, we've been talking the last five minutes or so, it does lend itself to a lot of vertical AI applications and agents. And the key thing there is like, is the TAM, how, and not from like a theoretical, like top-down perspective, but I actually think from like a,

like first principles bottoms up perspective, like how many companies in the world are there? What will they pay for this technology? How fragmented is this market and how like tractable is going after these customers? What's a reasonable market share to achieve, right? And everyone has the examples they point to, Viva, et cetera, but there are a lot more examples in SaaS that didn't work, right? Like then there are that worked. And so what's different now, I mean, and this is what I keep challenging myself. I think what's different now is you can go after

Frazer Anderson (37:01)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (37:29)
a lot of the work, not just the software. So these software budgets are not the right way to look at it. think that that's one. Two is it does feel like some of these under penetrated verticals for technology, like legal is an interesting example. Like all of a sudden within three or four years, it seems like all of them will adopt. So like maybe the rate of growth can be much higher. And then

What we would call like the layer cake, like you can layer in, think, just lots of different functionality once you get into these customers to be like a full operating system, which then I think it's much more strategic. So maybe that's what's different, but I'm curious your thought. But like, think there might, that's going to be a key thing that I think we, everyone's going to have to wrestle with in this moment.

Frazer Anderson (38:07)
Yeah.

Yeah. No, I think to your point around vertical sauce, you get the kind of legacy vertical sauce where fundamentally you go after labor budgets. I think a lot of the obvious ones have been competed and are being very robustly competed. So less interesting to me today for the vertical sauce use case. I like the vertical sauce company that is solving a product that has been solving a problem that has been created by this AI proliferation. Then you end up with like the same Tam issue because like

Patrick Salyer (38:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Frazer Anderson (38:36)
by definition, it's a small market and it's really going to be anybody's guess how big the market can actually get. But I think if you're early, there's places to be in it. I don't know, one example at least that I've been invested in is a company that generates better GPU kernels. mean, that's only interesting because of AI and there are not a lot of people doing it yet. you know, the question will be how big is the TAM customer concentration? All those elements.

And then the other place that I'm spending more time personally is just, it's like AI plus something else. You know, whether it's AI plus insurance risk capital, and it's a segment that is under insured because of changes in the economy due to AI or it's capital markets, XAI in a segment of the economy that needs more capital or needs risk to be redistributed because of AI or it's ⁓

Patrick Salyer (39:07)
Hmm

Hmm.

Frazer Anderson (39:30)
It's AIX energy, which is now more valuable because of AI and we need more electrons to turn into tokens. So I think AI combined with something physical or I don't know where you put capital in that, but something other than just other electrons, I think is a, is that I'm finding interesting, but you still have to have the tailwind or else you just don't sell very fast.

Patrick Salyer (39:41)
Yeah.

Great.

Yeah.

Yeah, I do think thinking about early stage opportunities, which I think is the right frame of reference, because a lot of the horizontal and vertical, agentic applications are sort of well-funded, right? Like, I do think the physical world as we move to these multimodal models and being able to apply some of the technology to those spaces are some of the more interesting ones. And they don't all have to be ⁓ hardware, right? I think it's kind of the key point. So ⁓ very interested in those areas for sure.

Frazer Anderson (40:20)
Yeah. Are you spending time in robotics? Like that, that has been the other thing that has become very popular to invest in and the sort of it's, it's AI proof in some sense. I'm, I'm rather skeptical that a lot of those companies are going to make money. I feel like it's too hard, but I'm curious if it's a space that you're seeing interest. Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (40:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, as a firm we are and

we do have we do have investments in that one recently announced was Rota AI that's building a model and a vertical and vertically integrated ⁓ robotics. I do think they're going to be plays there. They're going to be capital intensive, you know, so that requires its own approach to the market. But I also think the Tams are kind of massive and very large. So yeah.

Frazer Anderson (40:55)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You tend not to have market risk with the right robot because it's, it's sort of awesome. Yeah. Cool.

Patrick Salyer (41:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other thing in terms of defensibility that's maybe obvious, maybe not like is just around distribution. And I think it's worth thinking about in this moment in time, because if you, let's play it out, right? You have, you're competing essentially in some way with Anthropic and OpenAI and they're at billions of run rate, 30 billion run rate. So the question is, what moves the needle for them? Cause they'll have infinite capital and infinite resources.

And as far as I can think about what moves the needle is, is, is something very, very bottoms up, like use my API or put cloud cowork on your desktop. It's something I can. Can get distribution that way, or they're going to go massive deals with fortune 100 companies and fortune 500 companies spending tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. What does it move the needle? It's actually kind of where SAS lived, which is like 50, 100, 200 K.

Frazer Anderson (41:54)
you

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (42:03)
ACVs right like going after a role or persona or whatever it is and the SME company anyhow, I actually think being thoughtful in this moment in time of like what you know what requires a sales team not too much friction just enough that will actually be pretty important and defensible. Right now that by the way is agnostic to any vertical horizontal physical AI whatever but an important piece we think right now.

Frazer Anderson (42:18)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I like that. I also think given how intuitive these tools are and that you can basically hook up an LLM to any thing and in pretty short order, you won't just be able to say, hey, how do I use you? You can literally just talk to it and say, how do I use you? What do you even do? I do feel that with the right market structures, this will be the great era of B2B2B and that channel partnerships should

Patrick Salyer (42:50)
Hmm.

Frazer Anderson (42:53)
be successful because the products are just so intuitive. And especially if it's one of these markets, one of these, you know, not niche markets, but not in non-obvious Tam where everybody knows each other, it can be interesting places to play. know, also curious how you think about professional services as a way to improve stickiness, you know.

Can you afford to have professional services in a world where software is free?

Patrick Salyer (43:19)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this has been such an interesting Renaissance for me because because when I was an operator, at Gigio, we had a reasonable size professional services business. It was probably 30 % of our revenue and we use it as a completely a differentiator versus our competition. ⁓ and what we found was that customers were just willing to pay. It did not take away at all from subscription. Not only were they willing to pay, they actually like desired it and it came from a different budget and

we actually were able to carve it out. So a lot of it was recurring. So we'd say like, look, we're going to put an expert within you, like within your company for three years, you're going to pay this much, it's use it or lose it. And it was profitable. so it increased the value of the company. And so yes, it's becoming in vogue, I think, in this moment to change professional services to FDEs and then dropping them in because it was a necessity in some way of the, of getting agents to work. But I,

Frazer Anderson (43:59)
and

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (44:10)
personally believe it ends up being a pretty big differentiator. It's not something people should shy away from, but I think there are tricks to make it recurring, make sure it's profitable because companies will pay for it. The fall points I see with entrepreneurs is a fear or an unwillingness to charge properly for it, which I think is a massive mistake. I also see an unwillingness to sort of brand it. Like you have to give it its own brand differentiation and then also to push it off to make it post-sale.

Frazer Anderson (44:25)
Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (44:35)
because they're afraid that it's going to slow down deals or whatever else. And I've actually seen quite the opposite. It can actually differentiate and move things further to close. So yeah, I think it's pretty important.

Frazer Anderson (44:46)
Yeah, I mean, think trust remains scarce and there's nothing AI has done to improve trust. know, I think always looking for the existing scarcity or the new scarcity when there's all this other abundance. And I think special services do check a trust box if branded correctly. I do want to zoom out before we move to quick fire and ask a little bit about sort of Mayfield's philosophy going forward. You know, I think

Our industry is so dynamic, probably most firms are on their first, second or third fund. So many people in our business are trying to build something. They're trying to build a firm to get to this place. And of course, investing in great companies along the way is what you do. And it's how everybody makes money and it sustains the firm. Mayfield has a formula that has worked. There have been evolutions, I'm sure evolutions of the partnership.

How are you thinking about the job of sort of firm building to the extent you are? You know, what are your ambitions for the next five years? How do you think Mayfield looks on the other side of at least the next few years of AI led transformation? You know, how do you think about some of these things?

Patrick Salyer (45:53)
Yeah. Okay. And the firm has a story to history. And I think the key is to really internalize and learn from what's worked, but also know what got you here won't get you there. And the world is changing. So I think we have to hold those two things in tandem and then know what our core business is and don't chase the core business of other folks. That's, I give this advice to any entrepreneur, like know what your differentiation is, what you're the best in the world at, and hopefully focus on that. And then, and then if you do that, good things will happen. So we know our core.

Frazer Anderson (46:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (46:20)
which is our core is early stage investing. And if I even have a core below that, it's that first institutional check into the company to be like a main core partner for a select group of entrepreneurs. And so one is we need to make sure our product is really, really good at that. And that's keeping the DNA of the partnership here, very entrepreneurial, very operator kind of focused and remembering kind of the values that got us here. then not thinking about the other things that we could do, right? Which is maybe, right?

many small seed checks or just kind of spray and pray or maybe do later stage rounds, right? So one is let's focus. And I think that that's absolutely critical. At the same time, I think there's stresses on the business model, meaning like that model required a partnership with a smaller group of entrepreneurs come in at a valuation that makes sense with a check size that makes sense for your fund size and an ownership level that at the end of the day creates great outcomes, which I think we've been able to have as a firm.

And so I think just being thoughtful in this moment in time, especially when there's risk on and there's competition, there's a lot of capital, there's pressure on valuations, which are, we don't need to do all the deals, we just need to do the right deals and make sure we know where to take risk, right? And so where we've kind of settled, and at this is my perspective, is focus on people first. I mean, that's your one constant.

And then take, you you can take things like product building risk, you can take revenue risk, because those are all things that will be solved by the people. You can even take some market risk, by the way, because there can be some pivot and changes along the way. And so maybe be able to pay a reasonably high price, but ensure you get sufficient ownership to be that long term partner that's highly aligned. I mean, and that's kind of been the been the core of the business, but knowing there's other things that have to change like

Frazer Anderson (47:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (48:05)
There's a new set of entrepreneurs that maybe don't know us, right? Cause they haven't been around for 55 years. So like, how do you get in front of those? How do you, how do you be part of those networks? How do you stay relevant to that? And there's, there are, there are questions that need to be solved to continue to maintain, you know, the business that, that we've done well at.

Frazer Anderson (48:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

tremendous. Well, come visit because I can get you in front of many, many talented entrepreneurs who are very young and, you know, may be less familiar with you, but, but it could certainly use the help. So I, I, I know there's a bit of a no crossing the, no crossing the Mississippi River Valley ethos, but the weather is fine here. You're a, you're a very good writer. Your drawings,

Patrick Salyer (48:34)
Love that.

Frazer Anderson (48:48)
are descriptive if slightly less elegant. Where does the information and inspiration for creativity come from? Is there anything in your information diet that would surprise me?

Patrick Salyer (49:01)
Thanks for the comment on the drawing. By the way, that was somewhat out of necessity. Believe it or not, I don't have a huge team behind me supporting these elegant drawings. I'm just doing them by hand. that was, ⁓ okay. Yeah. No, you know, I just think I do seek to constantly learn and I learn from two sources. One that I think everyone does like podcasts and from others. And I think there's never been more information out there.

Frazer Anderson (49:10)
Yeah, it was obvious that you did those drawings.

Patrick Salyer (49:25)
And then I learned so much from meeting with entrepreneurs. mean, the greatest joy in this job is all the time I used to spend with customers, I now spend with these entrepreneurs that are spending time with customers in the market and building and I learned so much. honestly, almost everything I end up coming to a conclusion with isn't my own thinking. It's like something I've learned from, I mean, 100 % of it, I think from someone else and almost always entrepreneurs that are actually doing the work. So yeah, it's as simple as that.

Frazer Anderson (49:52)
that. All right, are you ready for ⁓ some some rapid fire questions? All right, who impresses you?

Patrick Salyer (49:56)
Yes, let's do it.

Frazer Anderson (49:59)
The Robin Fire questions didn't have to be Robin Fire answers.

Patrick Salyer (50:02)
Yeah, look, I'm.

Who am I learning from? I mean, like, look, I'll say like people that I don't know that well, like I learn a ton from so many podcasts out there. And also like on Twitter, like Aaron Levy, think is like such a grounded thought leader right now in terms of, you know, CIOs. I learned a ton from my partners, but also learned a lot from other VCs like Roy Driscoll. I think he's been in the business so long. I think he's super measured. Yeah, the list is long, but I would just say like,

I just, there's so many people out there that have done amazing things. And I'm actually humbled by it. Like I think it's, it's, it requires you to be, this is not short at all. you have to edit this out, but I think to be an entrepreneur or an investor right now is an act in humility because there's never been more awareness of what other people are doing. And they're always by definition, unless you're at the very, very top, there's always someone ahead of you.

Frazer Anderson (50:41)
No. ⁓

Yeah.

Patrick Salyer (50:56)
So there are so many people that impress me and I think it's more the art of being learning from them, but also being on your own professional journey. And that's sort of the thing I found is kind of the state I'm constantly in.

Frazer Anderson (51:10)
That's a very good answer. What piece of media could be a book, podcast, article, essay have you gifted or shared the most?

Patrick Salyer (51:16)
The hard things about hard things is one and on, yeah, let's just stick with that. Because I think it's just such a grounded like real view of being an entrepreneur.

Frazer Anderson (51:26)
What skill do you spend the most time developing non-work related?

Patrick Salyer (51:30)
playing basketball actually. I played for 35, 38 years and I coach and I still play in two leagues and it's my love outside of work probably and my family of course, my wife.

Frazer Anderson (51:47)
How do you cultivate like flow states or states of focus to the extent you do?

Patrick Salyer (51:52)
Yeah. I try to start every day relatively grounded, which for me is like, have a set of like principles and values and things I'm trying to accomplish. actually just try to read it over and then just start my day, like pretty centered. and then I try to just have chunks where I'm actually not, I'm actually doing work. Like I know that means just like not answering email, not in a meeting. and I'm reasonably okay at that, although it ebbs and flows.

Frazer Anderson (52:15)
⁓ What fascinates you today?

Patrick Salyer (52:17)
just the rate of change of these foundational models and how they're going to change the world. I I'm just, I moved from ⁓ just a state of odd excitement to a little bit of abject terror of like what this all means. And to me, it's just what a time to be alive.

Frazer Anderson (52:32)
Amazing. Patrick, thank you so much for the time. I know everybody will enjoy listening to this as much as I did. How can our listeners learn more about you, get in touch if they want to, pitch you an idea? Where can folks find you?

Patrick Salyer (52:46)
Yeah, so best places probably start on LinkedIn. So I'd love to connect with you. I put out a lot of content. I also have a ⁓ sub stack. You can find a link on my LinkedIn, which is the CEO field guide, I call it, which is just more like advice for entrepreneurs and CEOs, kind of the advice I wish I had.

Frazer Anderson (53:04)
Awesome. Patrick, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to seeing you next time at West, and it's been a pleasure.

Patrick Salyer (53:09)
Thanks, Fred. We really enjoyed it. Thanks again for having me.