The Energy Is Back in Silicon Valley and This Time It Feels Earned

If you were building or investing in the early 2010s, during the era of soaring e-commerce valuations and “DTC everything,” you’ll recognize the feeling immediately. It’s familiar in a way that’s hard to describe unless you’ve lived through it.

Urgency.

Optimism.

A sense that something foundational is being rebuilt.

This time, that energy is coming from AI.

What’s notable isn’t just the speed of technical progress, although that alone is remarkable. It’s the shift in posture across the ecosystem. Teams are no longer asking, “Can we build this?” That question has largely been answered. The real question now is, “How does this become real infrastructure?”

How does it move from demos to workflows?

From experimentation to dependency?

From novelty to necessity?

That transition is where the next phase will be won or lost.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the 2010s, the companies that ultimately broke out were not simply the ones with impressive products. They were the ones that understood distribution early and embedded themselves deeply into how businesses already operated. Shopify did not win because of a single feature. Stripe did not scale on elegant APIs alone. Both companies built leverage by becoming infrastructure, not destinations.

AI companies are now at a similar inflection point.

The technology is undeniably powerful, and the demand is real. But raw capability is not enough. The companies that endure will be the ones that translate that power into durable adoption across enterprises, developers, and platforms, while staying grounded in responsibility, safety, and trust. As AI systems become more embedded in core business processes, reliability and governance stop being abstract concerns and become product requirements.

From a partnerships perspective, this moment is especially interesting.

AI is not something most organizations can adopt in isolation. It requires enablement, integration, and often significant change management. That reality makes ecosystems essential. Systems integrators, consulting firms, cloud providers, and domain-specific partners all play a role in turning AI capability into real outcomes. In many cases, partnerships are the mechanism through which AI becomes usable at scale.

We are entering an era where partnerships are no longer just a growth lever. They are part of the product itself. The quality of an ecosystem increasingly determines the quality of adoption.

That is what makes this moment so energizing. This does not feel like a rush for attention or a speculative land grab. It feels like a race to build something that lasts.

For those of us who have seen a few cycles, there is a quiet confidence in this phase. The ambition is real, but so is the discipline. The work feels consequential. And there is a genuine opportunity to help shape how this technology is integrated into the world in a way that is both powerful and responsible.

I’m excited about this new era. After a long stretch of noise, it feels good to be energized by innovation again.