Mercedes Bent

  • Digitizing Voice Buttons

    In the movie Arrival, there’s a scene where Ian reads from Dr. Louise Banks’ book: “Language is the foundation of civilization,” she wrote. “It is the glue that holds people together. It’s the first weapon drawn in a conflict.”  Arrival is based on Ted Chiang’s “A Story of Your Life” which is about the difference…

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  • The Missing Layer in the AI Stack: Authentication

    A few weeks ago in late March I hosted an event in San Francisco on the topic of “AI Agents” – what’s missing and what needs to happen for them to work. Erich Elsen, the cofounder of Adept, an early agent platform that raised $300M+, and Sam Partee, cofounder of Arcade.dev, spoke at our event.…

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  • Search is at War

    Defensibility in the Age of AI Search Search is at war. LLMs are quickly changing how consumers search. A lot is at stake, including the market caps of 2 of the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. Google (GOOG: $1.9T market cap) and Amazon (AMZN: $2.04T) each dominate different types of search: knowledge…

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  • Consumer Products and the Utility v. Entertainment Tradeoff: Be Fun, Be Essential, or Be Nothing

    I constantly see really smart people launch consumer products, get little to no reception, and wonder why. There are a ton of possible culprits.  One common one I see is that their product lacked a captivating hook that chooses a side: to be singularly entertaining or provide extreme utility.  It is my strong belief that…

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  • NIM Innovation: A Lending Mental Model

    Foreword: I’ve long been a mentor of startups in the Entrepreneurship and VC class at Stanford. Recently I was hosting several GSB students from the class who were working on a lending startup, and we got to “whiteboarding.” Well, napkin writing. I shared my lending mental model with them and realized I’ve never encapsulated it…

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  • The Screens are Marching Closer: How Tech Interfaces Evolve

    I’ve long had a thesis that “The Screens are Marching Closer.” The screens are marching closer means each successive iteration of tech interfaces will prioritize ease and intuition by bringing the screens closer to our face (and one day inside them with brain-computer interfaces). It’s what has me so convinced that typing into a chatbot…

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  • How AI is changing the rules of Consumer Engagement

    AI is changing the rules of consumer engagement. Many formerly dependable tactics for building consumer tech products are changing. Operators will need to “re-learn” how build consumer tech in the world of AI. Across our consumer portfolio companies and externally, here’s a snapshot of where I’m seeing key areas of change: 🔹 **Acquisition**– Who the…

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  • Writing a Book with the Product Management Hat On

    A friend of mine is about to embark on writing a book. He has a really unique story and set of qualifications that make this a no-brainer. It’s going to be a non-fictional health-related PSA that brings medical research and the patient experience together to help people cope with an illness. Besides thinking it is…

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