This episode is a rebroadcast of Auren's appearance on the GTMnow podcast 

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Auren Hoffman (Flex Capital) joins the GTMnow podcast to share some of the most contrarian takes in tech today, from why AI moats are gone, to why your next VC meeting will be with a bot, to why AI is secretly going to trigger a baby boom.

In this episode:

• Why Auren runs 500+ AI agents to source deals, and what that means for founders raising capital
• The "agent-to-agent" meeting prediction: by end of 2026, first VC conversations will be fully automated
• Why every software moat has been "blown up" and what Salesforce, LinkedIn & DocuSign need to do to survive
• The OpenAI x The Hustle acquisition breakdown: why it's the smartest (and cheapest) distribution play in AI
• Why missing a great deal is 10x more painful than making a bad one, Auren's honest VC mistake framework
• The baby boom thesis: why AI, IVF, self-driving cars & cheaper energy could reverse the fertility decline
• Why companies won't sign yearly SaaS contracts anymore, and what that means for every B2B founder

Auren Hoffman is the founder of NQB8, Flex Capital, SafeGraph, and LiveRamp. He's an early backer of Replit, Perplexity, Rippling, Vercel, Coinbase, Chime, and AppLovin.

Max’s socials: 

https://x.com/hackitmax

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/

Auren’s socials:

https://x.com/auren

https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/

https://auren.substack.com/

GTMnow: https://gtmnow.com