Most VCs are chasing AI deals right now. Will Quist, Partner at Slow Ventures, thinks most of them are chasing the wrong thing. With somewhere around $1B deployed across pre-seed and seed, Will makes a direct case that the shift from client-server to SaaS was more economically disruptive than anything AI is doing to software today, and that building a defensible company in this environment requires the same fundamentals most founders skip.

Will walks through the logic-chain framework Slow Ventures uses to decide whether anything is actually venture-backable: is the hypothesis novel, falsifiable, and objectively valuable if true? He applies that same test to the current AI wave, separating structural arbitrage from deals that are just riding a spread until it closes. He closes with a point almost nobody in the room is making: why selling software is sometimes the worst financial decision a software company can make.

Topics discussed:

• Novel, falsifiable hypothesis framework for venture-backable ideas

• Why AI SaaS is incremental, not transformational disruption

• Structural vs. spotted arbitrage and why only one compounds into enterprise value

• "Leverage is leverage" mental model for evaluating startup valuations

• Valuation gravity: pricing rounds so 24-month milestones are actually achievable

• Fast boil vs. slow boil deals and where early-stage returns actually come from

• Why complex customer relationships and proprietary data sets may outlast pure AI plays

• Growth buyouts and vertical integration as higher free cash flow alternatives to selling software