If you have driven Highway 101 between Palo Alto and San Francisco lately, you have seen them. The billboards. One after another, rising over the traffic, each advertising a technology company in language pitched to a very particular audience.
My husband is a retired carpenter. He built beautiful things with his hands for a living, and he is one of the sharpest people I know. As we drove north last week, he looked up at a row of them and asked what they meant. “Agents don’t work without evals.” “Own your nines.” “Compliance that doesn’t SOC 2 much.”
I could translate every one. That is my world, and I know it well. Evals are how you measure whether an AI agent is actually reliable enough to trust in production. Your nines are your uptime guarantees, the difference between a service that works 99.9 percent of the time and one that works 99.999 percent. SOC 2 is the security compliance standard every enterprise software buyer asks about. I explained each one, and he nodded, and then he said something that has stayed with me. “So why don’t they just say that?”
It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than it first appears.
The Jargon Is Doing Exactly What It’s Designed to Do
Here is what I want to be clear about. These billboards are not a mistake. They are not the work of marketers who failed to communicate. They are, in fact, a precise and deliberate strategy, and understanding why is the whole point.
As NPR reported in March, the inscrutability is intentional. Mike Bilodeau, head of marketing at the AI infrastructure startup Baseten, described the approach as an “if-you-know-you-know” play. The billboards sit in the most public space imaginable, the side of a freeway, but they are aimed at a narrow, technical audience: the engineers, founders, and enterprise buyers who can read them fluently. To that audience, the jargon is not a barrier. It is a handshake. It says we speak your language, we understand your problem at the level you understand it, and we are not going to waste your time explaining the basics.
For a company selling infrastructure to other technical companies, that is a genuinely smart move. The billboard is not trying to reach my husband. It is trying to reach the person three cars back who is a VP of engineering at a Series B startup, and to that person, “agents don’t work without evals” is not gibberish. It is a sharp, credible articulation of a real and current pain point. The message is exclusive on purpose, and the exclusivity is the value.
So I do not read these billboards as a failure of communication. I read them as a market talking to itself, in real time, about what it currently cares about. And if you know how to read them, they are one of the best free pieces of market intelligence in the Bay Area.
Reading the Billboards as a Signal
This is where fluency becomes genuinely useful, and where I think the more valuable observation lies. When you can decode the jargon, the 101 corridor turns into a live dashboard of where technical attention and capital are flowing.
A few years ago, the billboards were about data pipelines and observability. Then they were about developer tools. Right now, an enormous share of them are about the unglamorous but essential machinery of making AI actually work in production: evaluation, reliability, security, and compliance. That shift is not random. It tells you that the industry has moved past the question of whether AI is impressive and squarely into the question of whether it can be trusted, measured, and deployed responsibly at scale. The billboards are advertising the answer to a problem the whole industry is currently having.
That is a signal worth paying attention to, and it happens to align closely with where we spend our time. Reliability and trust in AI systems are not marketing concepts to us. They are the central challenge in every critical industry we invest in.
Fluency Is the Tool. Clarity Is the Discipline.
None of this means jargon is always the right choice. The skill that matters is not simply being able to read the language of the room. It is knowing exactly when to use it and when to set it aside.
Inside our world, precision is a virtue. When I am evaluating a founder building AI infrastructure, I want them to speak in evals and nines and latency and throughput, because that vocabulary carries real meaning and using it fluently signals genuine command of the problem. Vagueness in a technical conversation is a red flag, not a courtesy.
But the founders I am most convinced by can do both. They can go deep in the technical language with an engineer and then turn to a hospital administrator, a utility operator, or a grower and explain the same product in terms that land immediately, without condescension and without hiding behind the vocabulary. That range is rare, and it is one of the clearest markers of a founder who truly understands their market rather than just their technology. The buyers in critical industries are brilliant at what they do, but they are not fluent in startup, and they should not have to be.
So when I look at those billboards, I do not see noise, and I do not see a barrier. I see an industry signaling to itself, in a shorthand I happen to speak. The real skill, the one I look for in every founder we back, is knowing that the shorthand is a tool, not a destination, and being just as compelling the moment you step outside the room where everyone already speaks it.
As for my husband, we did find one billboard we both understood, and we both smiled at it. There is a lesson in that too. The message that reaches everyone is not a lesser message. Sometimes it is the hardest one to write.
What is your favorite Bay Area billboard?
