Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

The advances of generative AI in the last year are extremely impressive. But as services like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Bard become more popular it is obvious that they are not all-knowing and cannot always give perfect answers (or draw hands with five fingers). However, as tools to help generate creative output they are already very,…

Founding a company might require a strike of brilliance, but building a company requires resilience as it will take a long time and be filled with challenges. That’s why I agree with Epidemic Sound co-founder and CEO Oscar Höglund’s quote from the podcast B2B SaaS CEOs: But being resilient is much more important than being…

For an ambitious startup that want to succeed, the first year is intense. With limited resources it needs to build something the world wants. It is also need to build its winning culture. While startups have organized themselves in different ways for some time, the dominant way for smaller startups until the pandemic was “everyone…

Ben Evans has created another of his annual ‘what’s going on in tech/media/Internet’ presentations called The New Gatekeepers. It’s a very good read, covering things like tech layoffs, content spend and media companies, venture capital and much more.

Despite the search for recurring revenue and predictability, the technology industry has a boom-bust-boom pattern to getting to long-term growth. The latest tech valuation boom reached zenith in 2021 and led to companies spending way more than normal on a bunch of things. As valuations have reset in 2022 and 2023 to normal levels, it…

With big losses in online video streaming, I thought something was likely to change. Disney reported Q1 2023 results, which included streaming (DTC) losing $1.1 billion dollars on $5.3 billion in revenue (-20 % operating marigin). In the last 12 months operating losses have been $4.6 billion and quarterly revenue grown 12 %, while costs…

Uber was one of the poster-boys of the high growth/high losses approach of growth-stage venture capital of the last 10 years. Therefore it is worth noting that Uber is committing to become GAAP profitable (which includes costs for share-based compensation) on a quarterly basis this year. Finally, we expect capital discipline will prove to be…

Tim Ferris interviews Bill Gurley, formerly of Benchmark. It is a long discussion covering a wide-range of topics interesting to a startup/finance/business nerd like myself. Bill makes a lot of sense, and not for the first time. Also available on Spotify.

Dallas Innovates has interviewed John Carmack about his new startup Keen (a nod to id Software’s Commander Keen games?) and its work in artificial general intelligence. He’s talking about doing it a bit differently from the AI mainstream (OpenAI et al). Often that it is not the way to go about things, but it will…

Higher interest rates have made technology companies care more about profitability, and less about revenue growth. One area that still remains in the revenue growth mindset (with major losses) is online video streaming. Netflix has become profitable at scale, but the others (Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, HBO Max/Discovery) are losing ca $2-4 billion each per year.…