Growth investors today are either dragging right, exponential surfing, or supply-side investing. Each requires a completely different investing style and craft, and it's important to know which applies. Dragging right is traditional growth investing. You take a business with an established, predictable, repeatable go-to-market motion based on either consumer acquisition or enterprise sales reps/quotas, and the investors' job is to figure out whether it can scale. "Okay, this company has twenty reps- can it hire another forty? Will the LTV:CAC hold?" Greatness in evaluating this came down to understanding TAMs/market segments, the breadth of product-market fit, competitive dynamics (often gentle), and how to analyze spreadsheet data/customer calls for signs of potential weaknesses. This was effectively all SaaS investors had to do for the last ten years, and it was glorious. The entire growth investing industry as we know it today was built around this model of funding predictable g-t-m machines with a fairly narrow range of outcomes- and the skillsets that made someone great at it were all about g-t-m logic, TAM analysis, customer work, etc. Exponential surfing has been the dominant growth investing strategy of the last two years. Consider Anthropic twelve months ago- if you had complete access to the traditional customer data/analytics and spoke to all of the customers, you would find nothing to predict the massive acceleration it saw from December 2025-April 2026. It is literally a completely different game, and most (not all) of the AI companies with material revenue are playing some version of it- not only is their revenue growth hard to predict for investors, it is largely out of their hands as well, dependent on whether the latest models have emergent, high-value, fast-propagating use cases. Greatness here is still emerging, but as far as I can tell the two ways to have been early to the Anthropic inflection were to be using the products oneself (so you can feel the step-function in capabilities in real time) or obsessively tracking the coincident data (Openrouter, credit card panels, etc.) for signs of sustained acceleration. A strong silicon Valley practitioner whisper-network is perhaps the third way. What is definitely NOT great is using SaaS terminology metrics (Y/y growth, gross retention, LTV:CAC, ARR, etc.) to characterize this wave of companies. Yes, many of them are "growing faster than SaaS ever did," but also the base rate of them stopping on a dime (or even shrinking) is much higher. It's just a fundamentally different business model, arguably with no clear precedent. Supply-side investing has risen to prominence in the last 12-18 months. This involves investing in businesses that are pre-product, where the economic value of the product is crystal clear... if it can get built/produced at scale. Neolabs, semis startups, certain very ambitious agent starts, defense tech, robotics startups, etc. all fit this bucket. Greatness here is about understanding technical challenges and unlocks in granular detail, studying talent flows, gauging which teams have the right combination of research and commercialization chops, etc. The rewards for getting it right are enormous (see: pre-revenue Anthropic investors), but the diligence is, again, completely different. What is NOT great is talking to dozens of potential customers who all breathlessly assure you that they would love to buy chips 10x more efficient than Vera Rubins at half the price. That is about as useful as reading LOIs from those same customers to buy them by the billions- aka not useful at all. Referring to those LOIs as "CARR" is, well, fantastical. In supply-side growth investing, the demand side is obvious by definition. Again- there are great investors who will find ways to make money in all of these styles, but it has never been more important to understand which version of investing you're doing and to apply yourself to being excellent at it in a way that fits the game you've chosen to play, not to apply the techniques of yesteryear.