Independent consultant, EIR at Balderton Capital, and author of Kellblog.
Silicon Valley, CA
Joined December 2009
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Dave Kellogg retweeted
I get the premise of this post, but I respectfully and strongly disagree 👇
The numbers are true. Google sends more traffic than AI… And Google search traffic still converts exceptionally well.
But Google is just the last stop on a very long train to a final conversion. It conveniently gets the credit for the messy middle.
AI search platforms are not designed to send traffic. They are designed to provide answer summaries.
She is relying on traffic as the basis for her argument, meanwhile non-branded CTR is collapsing as the zero-click environment intensifies.
The only reason Google performs better than AI search is because of branded traffic.
Of course people are going to search directly for brand names in Google and convert. This is navigational search.
She’s downplaying the influence of brands being recommended in AI-answer summaries. Downplaying the messy middle where AI search has massive influence.
This strikes me as a great headline for the “it’s just SEO” echo chamber.
Anyone who is deeply in the trenches can attest… there is no world today where you can tell a client (or marketing exec) that GEO is a distraction.
Unless you want to be out of work.
New blog post: GEO is a distraction.
I looked at 12 months of GA4 data across 100 sites - more than 145 million sessions.
ChatGPT sent 0.62% of the traffic Google organic did. With all the other LLMs included, it's 0.73%.
While ChatGPT visitors converted better at 13.8% vs 3.02% for Google organic, Google still drove 27x more conversions than all the other LLMs combined.
And remember how we thought ChatGPT visitors would increase exponentially? Overall visits from ChatGPT have actually been declining since GPT-5 came out in August 2025.
I think GEO is a distraction. Google is the surface that's likely sending the most visitors to your business. Yes, AI is changing how people use the web, but the real opportunities are just emerging. I'd encourage you to spend time preparing for the agentic web - UCP, Universal Cart, WebMCP, intelligent eyewear and more!
The full post is here, plus a prompt you can use to brainstorm on what agentic search means for your business.
mariehaynes.com/geo-is-a-dis…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Don't DIY PII.
The $25 billion edition.
Meta ordered to pay $25 billion penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case cnbc.com/2026/10/21/meta-new…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
AI + Debt destroys Getty Images, files for bankruptcy today 4 years after valued at $4.8 Billion in SPAC IPO:
Public shareholders get $0.
By most measures the business itself was fine:
• ~$910M revenue run-rate
• 27% adjusted EBITDA margins
• 59% of revenue on annual subscriptions
• Editorial revenue up 9% last quarter
It was the debt and AI churn on consumer side of business that sank it.
At June 30:
• $2.1B of debt
• ~$250M of annualized adjusted EBITDA (Q2 x 4)
• $51.6M of cash
• Negative $122.6M of free cash flow in Q2
That works out to about 8x leverage on revenue that was down 4% in constant currency.
At 8x, the plan only works if everything goes right.
Instead:
• AI took the low end. Annual subscribers fell from 321K to 240K in a year, a 25% drop.
• Subscription revenue retention fell from 93.4% to 88.4%.
• The plan to fix the balance sheet was a $3.7B merger with Shutterstock. UK regulators required a sale of Shutterstock's editorial business. Getty walked away in July after spending more than $100M on the deal.
Three months later Getty signed the restructuring. The Getty family and Koch are putting in up to $533M and will own 100% of the company. $270M of unsecured notes get retired, and secured lenders get lower rates and longer maturities.
8x leverage can work when revenue is growing 10%. Getty's revenue was shrinking and its retention was falling, and a 27% margin couldn't cover that gap.
If you have venture debt or any other loan, track two numbers: debt as a multiple of real cash flow, and what that multiple becomes if AI takes your low end the way it took Getty's.
Still one of the greatest reminders on how to communicate in plain English and avoid jargon -- no matter how fashionable.
"Speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever."
youtube.com/watch?v=SmHl7hKl…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
.@a16z is a king-maker and everyone in VC hates it. The industries they invest in inevitably become hot.
I just got access to all the early stage deals (preseed to Series A) that a16z has done in the last 6 months.
With this data you can:
1. See what companies and industries the best VCs are excited about
2. Study the types of founders they are backing
3. See if there are select tech companies or universities that are creating these top founders
4. Analyze the co-investors that a16z is investing alongside of
Link to demo this tool in the comments.
Cc: @harmonic_ai
#HarmonicPartner
🤝 Paid partnership
Vista Made $3 Billion on Marketo. A HubSpot Shareholder Did Just as Well Without Lifting a Finger. | LinkedIn linkedin.com/pulse/vista-mad…
Nvidia-Backed Pigment Raises $250 Million to Take on Microsoft bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
The most contrarian thing a VC can do right now is stay on the sidelines!
Here's the dirty secret of late-stage AI investing: Just like nobody got fired for buying IBM years ago, nobody gets fired today for overpaying next to the top Silicon Valley VC firms. You get fired for missing the round everyone else got into. So everyone knows the price is crazy, and everyone wires anyway – sometimes multiple times a year or even in multiple tranches with different prices happening simultaneously. Imagine buying the same public stock the same day at 3 different prices! Textbook prisoner's dilemma: every investor makes the rational call, and the industry ends up overpaying.
We're paid to generate alpha, but if everyone is piling into the same rounds at the same prices, we aren't generating alpha. What most of the industry is doing right now is buying beta with a FOMO premium. Though I’m extremely bullish on the overall AI opportunity, I think a lot of this activity with 2026 high priced early rounds ends up out of the money. Real conviction sometimes means sitting out the round everyone else is fighting to get into.
Founders who are fortunate enough to raise rounds before the music stops, should totally do it if they can manage the dilution. But check if your new investors can truly help you with customers, exec hiring, or strategic decisions if they are just following others and building an investment portfolio including you and your competitors!
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Christina Cacioppo's personal site has a list of 30+ products she built that failed before starting Vanta (worth $4B+).
"The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars."
My second conversation with Christina Cacioppo (@christinacaci), Vanta's cofounder and CEO.
Charlie Songhurst says the best returns come from companies that are highly boring and highly complex, because fewer founders want to build them.
Vanta is one of those companies.
When we first talked five years ago, Christina told me about building the first version of Vanta in Excel.
Since then she has turned it into the category leader in security compliance. Now she is rebuilding it around AI.
We discuss:
- Why great software businesses got cheap
- Why Vanta eats the cost of AI instead of marking it up
- Why comp for top people is up 10X in five years
- What is over/under hyped in AI
- How AI attackers are changing security
- Vanta marketing + billboards
- Building trust in an era of low trust
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
4:17 Surviving the SaaSpocalypse
9:40 The AI Pricing Trap
16:17 Rebuilding Software for AI
22:43 Silicon Valley's Talent Wars
31:57 What's Overhyped in AI
38:39 Security at Machine Speed
47:16 Reinventing Software
55:37 The Billboard War
60:38 Rebuilding Trust in Technology
Seems to get forgotten a lot.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
Ken Griffin says AI is "almost certainly" in a bubble.
Back in 2024, @loganbartlett of @Redpoint told me how VCs actually play bubbles:
"From a pure incentive standpoint, your job would be to lean into it. Raise as much as you can, deploy as much as you can.
If you're right, you get to say, 'I told you so.' If you're wrong, you justify it as the mania of the markets. You hope enough people did it that it's forgivable.
That's what happened with the internet in '99, 2000, 2001. That's what happened with crypto. And it feels like that's what's happening with AI in some ways as well.
If everyone is saying something is true, and it's getting covered on CNBC on a daily basis, it's generally something I want to stay away from.
But bubbles lay infrastructure for enabling technologies. The internet was a bubble, and no one would argue it wasn't ultimately correct. It just wasn't a great investment at the time.
If you were in Google, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, you did very well. If you were in Lycos or Ask Jeeves or Friendster, you got totally wiped out.
Just because you're right on the tech doesn't mean you're right on the opportunity."
Dave Kellogg retweeted
This is a MASTERCLASS from Ramp’s sales team. They scaled to $700M+ with outbound messages like these. 6 things this cold email does SO well:
1) The subject line is "Follow-up to HumanX," a conference the CEO, João Batalha of Amplemarket, went to. It reads like a thread he's already in.
2) The first line is about his own LinkedIn post on HumanX. The SDR, Michelle, ties it to her first conference for Ramp that same week, so they have something in common before she pitches.
3) She brings up the history. Amplemarket has connected with Ramp a few times before, so the ask is a “revisit”, which is a FAR warmer start than a cold pitch.
4) She names the competitor they already use. "Brex was built for startups, but Ramp is built to scale" gives him a 1-line, HYPER relevant reason to switch over.
5) The greeting and the sign-off are in Portuguese ("Olá" and "Obrigado"). Love this. It adds a human touch to the email.
6) She spelled João with the tilde, while his LinkedIn just says "joao." A LinkedIn scrape would have missed that 10 times out of 10.
ONLY thing I’d change:
The length.
It’s a tad long. However, it works regardless due to all of the other factors at play.
Love this, and I recommend taking some of these for your own outbound campaigns.
Dave Kellogg retweeted
BREAKING WSJ:
Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of the military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine relied on.
wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
Dave Kellogg retweeted
While Altman is very shrewd politically, I think there is a fundamental issue at OpenAI in that he is, at heart, a YC consumer app guy, unlike Dario, who is an AI researcher
That’s why OpenAI keeps drifting back to consumer apps, because that’s how Altman can’t help but think about things
OpenAI's retreat from expensive side projects may be reversing as the company explores a deal to revive Sora while expanding its efforts in robotics, creator tools and personal devices.
Read more details: thein.fo/47l0mJR
