Mike Mignano Says Startups Should Spend Aggressively on AI Models While Salesforce and Microsoft Begin to Constrain Token Budgets

The next wave of AI value creation will come from the application layer, not infrastructure, according to Mike Mignano, general partner at Union Square Ventures. Speaking on 20VC, Mignano laid out a framework in which startups that aggressively maximize token spend on frontier models—particularly for coding—can gain a decisive competitive edge over large incumbents that are beginning to cap AI budgets. Salesforce already spends $300 million annually on Anthropic tokens, just 3.8% of its developer salary bill, but Mignano predicts that Meta, Uber, and Microsoft will impose hard limits as cost awareness rises. He also argues that the infrastructure build-out is largely complete, drawing a parallel to the late 1990s broadband era, and that the real venture returns will now come from companies that "obliterate" existing business models rather than sell productivity tools. His most provocative warning: AI agents represent the deepest handover of personal agency to technology in history, and the question of "who is your agent working for?" will become a defining competitive moat for startups that credibly align incentives with users.

https://finance.biggo.com/news/f2893291e586f810