Our 2026 LP Meeting

Key claims

• Slow Ventures’ overall AI market positioning is “neutral to short AI beta, long the alpha” — meaning they pass on raw capability plays and infrastructure races in favor of differentiated applications that capture durable, non-commoditizable value.
• Normal companies spend approximately 3% of revenue on software but approximately 25% on labor and approximately 10% on services — which means the AI opportunity in services and outcomes is roughly 10x larger than the pure software displacement thesis.
• The data diseconomy: small businesses with $1–2M in revenue can sell company data for 10–50% of their revenue (sometimes more than 100%), while large enterprises capture far less proportionally — Spirit Airlines has $5B in revenue but its data was sold for only $10M (0.2%), illustrating that data value concentrates in granular, intimate business operations, not scale.
• The four things Slow is long: selling outcomes (not SaaS), second-order effects of AI where trust and attention are scarce, AI supply chain edges (picking bottlenecks), and post-AI builders — founders who are rangy, commercial, and technically capable all at once.
• The four things Slow passes on: infinite capital consumers, paying for legibility (businesses that charge for making AI outputs interpretable rather than creating real value), raw capability plays (commoditizing fast), and “trades dressed as investments” — positions with no durable moat.
• When effort becomes free, systems built on effort break — AI doesn’t create more attention or trust, but it creates infinite demand for both, which is where durable value sits.
• Coherence is Slow’s primary organizational signal in founders: one choice and one point of view on technology, go-to-market, org chart, and talent — founders who have synthesized a view rather than hedged every decision.

Notable quotes

“TL;DR: neutral to short AI beta. Long the alpha.”

“Normal companies spend ≈3% of revenue on software vs ≈25% on labor and ≈10% on services.”

“Small businesses ($1-2M sales) will routinely sell company data for 10-50% of revenue. Sometimes even >100%!”

“When effort is free, systems built on effort break. AI won’t make more attention or trust, but it creates infinite demand for both.”

“Software can do work now, and that’s easier to sell than workflow.”

“Coherence is everything: one choice/one POV on tech, GTM, org chart, and talent.”

How it connects

• Yoni Rechtman — author; partner at Slow Ventures writing from their 2026 annual LP meeting
• Slow Ventures — the fund whose investment thesis and portfolio philosophy the piece articulates
• Venture Capital — the industry context; this is an LP-facing articulation of a fund’s market view
• SaaS — the model Slow is moving away from in favor of outcome-based selling
• AI — the technological context driving the entire thesis; the “beta” being shorted is AI infrastructure commoditization
• Go-To-Market — the central strategic question: selling outcomes is a GTM shift, not just a product shift
• Data — the data diseconomy insight about small business data value is a key investment signal
• Attention Economy — the scarce resource AI cannot manufacture and therefore where durable moats form