AI Summary
5 min readWhat VCs Really Think About Personal AI Agents
OpenAI recently made progress on four of the seven unsolved Millennium Prize problems in mathematics—the hardest unsolved questions in the field. For Kanu Gulati, a partner at Khosla Ventures and an early OpenAI investor, that result landed differently than it might for most people. "As a pharma scientist, it does make me uneasy," she said. "The pace of advancements is mind-boggling." That unease points to a deeper question running through this VC roundtable: if AI can now solve problems the world's smartest humans cannot, what is left for startups to build that the big labs won't eventually own?
What Startups Can Still Defend
The panel—Gulati, Chris Farmer of SignalFire, and Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures, moderated by Menlo Ventures partner Dee Dee Das—largely agreed that the frontier models themselves are not the whole story. Farmer argued that raw intelligence is only one input. "How you apply that intelligence and how you give it context and permissioning is going to be critical," he said. Startups can build defensibility through proprietary data sets, specialized workflows, and trust relationships that the large labs cannot easily replicate.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Navigation Outline
- 2 (00:02) **Opening & Guest Host Introduction** - Dee Dee Das (Menlo Ventures) steps in as guest moderator, joined by panelists Kanu Gulati (Khosla Ventures), Chris Farmer (SignalFire), and Sheel Mohnot (Better Tomorrow Ventures)
- 3 (02:28) **OpenAI's Math Breakthrough & Its Implications** - The panel discusses OpenAI solving major unsolved math problems and what this means for startup investing
- 4 (06:35) **Where Value Flows: Beyond the Token Generators** - The panel debates which investment areas will retain value as frontier models improve
- 5 (11:09) **The Compute Advantage: Can Startups Compete with Labs?** - Dee Dee raises the concern that big labs' massive compute budgets create an unfair playing field
- 6 (19:13) **The Data Company Dilemma: Hype or Real Value?** - The panel discusses whether to invest in companies selling training data to AI labs, given their non-recurring revenue and customer concentration
- 7 (27:20) **What Makes a Great Founder in the AI Era?** - The panel discusses how the founder archetype is changing with AI-native teams
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
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Today’s show:
A personal AI agent that’s still invite-only just hit a $10 billion valuation. Guest host Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures is joined by Kanu Gulati of Khosla Ventures, Chris Farmer of SignalFire, and Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures to debate whether Instinct can beat Meta’s Muse, what they actually use their own agents for, and what breaks when everyone’s agent makes the same move.
Plus we’re also talking about OpenAI’s math breakthroughs, the Factory vs. Cognition fight, and whether SaaS is still worth funding. Catch the whole debate on this week’s VC roundtable.
Guests:
Deedy Das on X: https://x.com/deedydas Menlo Ventures: https://menlovc.com
Kanu Gulati on X: https://x.com/KanuGulati Khosla Ventures: https://www.khoslaventures.com
Chris Farmer on X: https://x.com/chriswfarmer SignalFire: https://www.signalfire.com
Sheel Mohnot on X: https://x.com/pitdesi Better Tomorrow Ventures: https://www.btv.vc
Relevant Links:
OpenAI’s 722 math manuscripts from an unreleased internal model → https://github.com/openai/math
OpenAI’s earlier Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize result → https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/
Pramaana Labs, the Khosla-backed startup turning tax rules into provable logic → https://pramaanalabs.ai
Logos Research, the Imperial College spinout verifying AI-written financial code → https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/articles/2026/logos-research-plans-to-make-ai-reasoning-trustworthy-in-high-stakes-environments/
EvenUp, SignalFire’s AI company for personal injury law → https://www.evenuplaw.com/
WindBorne Systems, the Khosla-backed weather balloon company Kanu mentioned → htt