Episode
Ep 142: Understanding the AI Wave with 8VC's Alex Kolicich & Jack Moshkovich
- Published
- Feb 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3666
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- https://blog.joelonsdale.com/p/ep-142-understanding-the-ai-wave
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Summary
Advances in AI are occurring at a pace we haven’t seen before in Silicon Valley. How do we know what’s real versus hype? What does it mean for large software incumbents? And how are the top investors and builders thinking about the new possibilities? This week, we talk with two of my partners at 8VC, Alex Kolicich and Jack Moshkovich, who are on the ground working with the leading AI talent to get their perspective on what’s really happening. Alex Kolicich is a Partner at 8VC, where he specializes in IT and Bio-IT investments. Prior, he was a Partner at Formation 8 and worked alongside Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital Management. Alex was also an engineer and early-product advisor at Clarium, Palantir, and Google. Jack Moshkovich began his career at 8VC and helps lead our investment practice alongside Alex out of San Francisco, where he focuses on enterprise software. We begin with Silicon Valley’s most recent technological wave: smart enterprise. In 2013, we published our smart enterprise thesis , predicting the B2B software explosion that drove tremendous value creation over the past decade. Now, we’re entering the next landmark shift: the AI wave. Learn why AI is fundamentally disruptive (you can find our thesis here ), and the enormous leap from data retrieval to automated decision making and from linear to non-linear problem solving. Next, we dive into the six layers of the AI investment stack, and why we are focused on level five: the application layer. We dissect the tremendous opportunities for AI-native upstarts, as well as the challenges — and upside — for smart enterprise pioneers that can reorient around AI. Finally, we discuss some of the key questions in the years ahead: When and where will we see massive productivity gains in the economy? Will LLMs become…