Show: Training Data · Publisher: Sequoia Capital · Host: Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
Episode URL: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI3016010881.mp3?updated=1745259699
Publish date: 2025-04-22
Duration: NAs
Default source credibility: HIGH — Sequoia partners interview frontier-lab founders + F500 AI buyers. VC-hosted — portfolio-company framing on recommendations; named guest metrics stay HIGH. Peer-tier to No Priors in quality.
- AI agents targeting narrow problems are currently successful, as seen in sectors like policy renewals and trucker brokerage.
- AI pricing models are evolving from activity-based to outcome-based, with a focus on aligning with customer value.
- AI companies face challenges in cost management, especially with third-party API costs and LLM costs, impacting margins.
Extracted quotes
| # | Credibility | Speaker | Org | Timestamp | Topic | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HIGH | Manny Medina (Founder) | Paid | 12:57 | 02-corporate-tools | So I’m seeing four things stick in the landing with aplomb, with gusto. One is clearly charging by activity. The other one that I’m seeing more is charging by workflow. When you string a number of activities and you say, this workflow is cost this much, like a document review, right? Because then you can separate documents that are small from documents that are long and complicated because they have different consumption patterns. |
| 2 | HIGH | Manny Medina (Founder) | Paid | 17:55 | 02-corporate-tools | A lot of what I’m seeing selling is the vast majority of AI agent companies are doing POCs right now. I mean, they look like contracts and they look like their money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, every company in the planet got an AI mandate. So somebody in that company went and, you know, pursued some software and then they bought it. and they bought it as software and as a trial. Vibe revenue. |
| 3 | HIGH | Manny Medina (Founder) | Paid | 27:27 | 02-corporate-tools | So the problem that we have right now in cost mode is that because everything, all the activity of the agent goes down through this evil framework that acts as a proxy before the token goes to the LLM, you don’t know who’s incurring what cost. You don’t know what customer is profitable to you, what customer is negatively impacting your margins. You don’t know what agent is doing a good job, what agent isn’t. |
Per-quote detail
1. Manny Medina — Paid (12:57)
So I’m seeing four things stick in the landing with aplomb, with gusto. One is clearly charging by activity. The other one that I’m seeing more is charging by workflow. When you string a number of activities and you say, this workflow is cost this much, like a document review, right? Because then you can separate documents that are small from documents that are long and complicated because they have different consumption patterns.
- Credibility: HIGH — Named exec at identifiable org with specific claim about pricing models.
- Topic tag:
02-corporate-tools
2. Manny Medina — Paid (17:55)
A lot of what I’m seeing selling is the vast majority of AI agent companies are doing POCs right now. I mean, they look like contracts and they look like their money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, every company in the planet got an AI mandate. So somebody in that company went and, you know, pursued some software and then they bought it. and they bought it as software and as a trial. Vibe revenue.
- Credibility: HIGH — Named exec at identifiable org with specific claim about AI agent companies doing POCs.
- Topic tag:
02-corporate-tools
3. Manny Medina — Paid (27:27)
So the problem that we have right now in cost mode is that because everything, all the activity of the agent goes down through this evil framework that acts as a proxy before the token goes to the LLM, you don’t know who’s incurring what cost. You don’t know what customer is profitable to you, what customer is negatively impacting your margins. You don’t know what agent is doing a good job, what agent isn’t.
- Credibility: HIGH — Named exec at identifiable org with specific claim about cost management challenges.
- Topic tag:
02-corporate-tools
Extracted 2026-04-14T20:25:55 via scripts/podcast_mine.py (MLX mlx-community/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-4bit).