Earlier this year, "tokenmaxxing" was the buzzword dominating Silicon Valley. CEOs were urging their teams to push AI usage to its absolute limits. But then reality set in. Uber reportedly burned through its entire annual AI budget in just a few months. Some companies cut back on Claude licenses for certain departments, and Meta scrapped its internal leaderboard entirely. This growing tension between hype and actual return on investment is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck focuses her energy. She began her career convincing businesses that e-commerce was the future, and now she's fully invested in AI—particularly the potential for creating "magic moments" in consumer-facing companies.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

- What the shift from tokenmaxxing to ROI means for how companies measure their AI spending. - Why forward-deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption. - How enterprises are mixing and matching different models rather than committing to a single provider. - Why Tiffany believes value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer.

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