Danel Dayan is a Principal at Battery Ventures who focuses specifically on cloud infrastructure, big data, security, and developer tools, with a portfolio that includes companies like Postman, Databricks, ClickHouse, and Harness. He brings unusual hands-on M&A experience from Google where he led over 20 acquisitions totaling more than $2B, giving founders practical guidance on how large tech companies approach deals and strategic investments.

• A strong conviction that the traditional SaaS playbook is obsolete, urging founders to replace volume-driven demand generation with a focus on usage depth, gross retention, and unit economics early on. Notes that companies without a clear AI component are seeing valuation caps compared to the massive market cap growth seen by AI beneficiaries.
• Focus on the shifting economics of the AI stack, observing that while infrastructure currently captures the majority of the value, application margins are expected to improve as intelligence costs drop and smaller, open models become more viable. Highlights that the industry is moving from a training-centric phase to an inference-heavy reality where agentic workflows consume the most compute.
• Interest in the evolution of cybersecurity from manual service-based models to continuous software solutions. Specifically points to the rise of AI-driven pentesting and offensive security tools that can autonomously test every code change and application update in real time to close the gap between building and defending.
• Analysis of the changing M&A landscape, noting a current trend of acquiring elite research talent but predicting a return to buying defensible products and moats as the ecosystem matures. Highlights the rise of private-to-private strategic deals, such as Stripe acquiring Bridge, rather than just traditional exits to public giants.
• Monitoring the rapid maturation of the current vintage of AI companies, which are reaching IPO scale at an unprecedented pace compared to previous tech cycles. Tracks the convergence of cloud giants and model providers, noting how major players like AWS and Azure are seeing massive growth through capital expenditure and revenue backlogs.