Fordel StudiosWhat startups want from OpenAI
What Happened
Marc Manara, OpenAI’s head of startups, says the reality of AI has advanced far beyond ideas and experiments. AI-native companies are hitting $200 million in annual recurring revenue, and product cycles have shrunk from two-week sprints to single days. And OpenAI is helping. Today on TechCrunc
Our Take
This is the shift nobody talks about publicly. When your AI company hits $200M ARR in what—2 years?—the "innovation" conversation flips. You don't want more research papers. You want API stability, lower costs, and predictable compute. OpenAI gets this because they're eating their own dog food with their own applications.
The two-week sprint to one-day cycles thing is half real—it means you're iterating prompts and fine-tunes faster, not actually shipping product faster. What startups want is permission to stop pretending they're building something novel and just go make money.
OpenAI's playing matchmaker, not evangelist.
What To Do
If you're shopping APIs, ask about deprecation timelines and cost roadmaps, not feature announcements.
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