Deedy Das, Partner at Menlo Ventures
“The best businesses from the outside seem to be doing one thing, but from the inside the actual value is completely different.”
As someone who’s followed Deedy Das for a long time, I especially enjoyed having him with us at Icons. Deedy shared reflections from his journey from the founding team at Glean to Partner at Menlo Ventures, where he now backs some of the most exciting startups across AI and Infra. It was especially fascinating to hear his perspectives on building and investing at the frontier of AI.
The bottleneck in enterprise AI is organizational, not technical: Enterprise buyers are defensive, uninformed, and incentivized to avoid risk rather than adopt tools. This creates structurally slow adoption regardless of how good the technology becomes.
If thinking becomes a commodity, the next bottleneck shifts to the real world: When intelligence and software get cheap, the constraint moves to physical experimentation and infrastructure. AI can’t commoditize the physical world because it requires real-world feedback loops.
First-principles thinking matters more than a polished pitch: When VCs ask about moats or competitors, they’re testing how deeply founders think, not what they answer. Oftentimes, the best response to “Why can’t Google do this?” is “They can.”
The best founders are defensive of their equity: They ask “Why do I need this money?” before “Should I take it?” Raising only makes sense when there are specific offensive levers to pull. Otherwise, founders dilute themselves for optionality.
Deedy, thank you for your thoughtful insights and exciting stories!
Thank you to Silkroad Innovation Hub and Alma for supporting the event.