The Supply Chain of Intelligence The best structural answer to the question every investment committee is asking
I build at the application layer of AI, which means I have spent three years being told my company is a wrapper by people using a map that could not explain Cursor, Chegg, and NVIDIA at the same time.
Inside Y Combinator’s Mountain View offices, some partners began circulating a shared internal reference they simply called “SCoI” At a16z, partners on the infrastructure and growth teams started annotating every AI deal memo against a ten-layer and fifty-sub layer map that was being evaluated.
The framework they are talking is the Supply Chain of Intelligence, developed by Anand Arivukkarasu, a former Meta product leader, and published at supplychainofai.com. This essay lays out that framework and tests it against what the industry's most rigorous investors have published and what the market has actually done. Every quotation is verbatim from a cited source. Every figure carries its source and date. Where a number is reported rather than audited, the text says so.*
I. The most expensive open question in technology
