Future Shock<\/a>, that explored the psychological disorientation that can occur as a result of rapid technological change.<\/p>\n\u201cThis feeling of overwhelm, that if things keep changing, I can\u2019t learn fast enough to keep up with the system,” he said. “But the way you keep up is actually by giving up on trying to understand everything at that level of detail.\u201d<\/p>\n
He then shared his barbell strategy for surviving the next five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a high variance environment where things can change a lot in unexpected ways, you should just YOLO big things that might work, because even if you fail, your tried-and-true plan could also fail. So there\u2019s no point playing it safe, might as well be ambitious,\u201d he advised. \u201cOn the other hand, as things get riskier, you\u2019ll need to build up safety and reliability support to counterbalance.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said hunter-gatherers lived in the same situation we\u2019re wandering into, a world of forces more powerful than themselves and beyond their control. Not only was it spiritually, emotionally and intellectually beneficial to be in a tight community, but also economically sound. When you store meat from the hunt in the bellies of friends, they\u2019ll be around to help when you find yourself in a tough spot.<\/p>\n
Futureproofing AI bets<\/p>\n
Back in San Francisco, at a Michelin starred restaurant where the meal was served community style making dining optional, AI unicorn Honeybook gathered the press to discuss how AI is birthing a new breed of one person startups and solopreneurs.<\/p>\n
It was here I had a chance to talk with Jeff Crowe, managing partner of Norwest Venture Partners, who told me the story of a 20-year old founder that landed seed funding to create text-to-sheets, text-to-deck apps right before ChatGPT made it a feature. This led to the question, how can VCs futureproof bets to prevent obsolescense in the age of AI.<\/p>\n
He said the first thing to look at is product. If it\u2019s a thin wrapper around a core, it\u2019s hard to futureproof as the LLMs eat their way further into the application layer. \u201cIt\u2019s how venture capital looked at personal software in the nineties and said what\u2019s the differentiation if Microsoft moves into the space. Thirty-plus years later, it\u2019s a similar phenomenon in AI products, where OpenAI, Anthropic and others keep adding functionality.”<\/p>\n
As far as defensible moats, he looks for product capabilities not easily disruptable like those with domain-specific data, integration with large enterprise systems, and bespoke distribution tied to supply chain. If it\u2019s a product that\u2019s been around longer, he looks for how fast it\u2019s pivoting to AI, driving into core functionality as well as operations including development, customer support, sales, marketing, HR and finance. Because if operations aren\u2019t futureproofed, competitors can gain a superior cost structure and become more capital efficient and profitable. He looks to see whether customers are adapting because some are going to get accelerated, and others obliterated, with risks that have nothing to do with the core business. Lastly, he looks for a culture that\u2019s nimble and can move exceptionally quickly.<\/p>\n
A fan of young talent, Crowe believes hiring AI-natives is the best way to transform an organization, because their rate of change is less than a worker whose baseline is pre-AI.<\/p>\n
Embracing AI workers<\/p>\n
Across town, Initialized Capital was hosting its own press dinner, introducing their portfolio of agentic startups deploying digital workers.<\/p>\n
Runway cofounder Siqi Chen told me from the moment he launched his startup in 2020, he knew they\u2019d never have more than 100 people, because they had early access to GPT-3 and knew they could scale faster with AI, than headcount.<\/p>\n
In contrast to Crowe\u2019s hiring strategy, Chen said, Runway is hiring only senior talent. \u201cThe profile of how we hire is quite different today than it was even three or four years ago. It\u2019s staff or principal level only at this point, because junior stuff can basically be done by LLMs today.”<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing non-technical people contribute on a technical level like never before– tagging a robot to write the code for a bug–that\u2019s just magic,” he said. Runway uses bots for everything, from qualifying leads to reviewing documents.<\/p>\n
One of Initialized other portco commented that they deployed AI in Slack for IT support under the name of Paul, not AI Paul. A bit head-spinning to think you can be chatting with an AI colleague and not know it, even if they are funny.<\/p>\n
Initialized Capital\u2019s managing partner Brett Gibson said it\u2019s the natural progression of where we\u2019re heading.<\/p>\n
I asked him whether this was the end of the app economy. He replied, \u201cSoftware is going to trend towards being generatable. There are going to be a lot of apps you still want a relationship with for a variety of reasons, because they have other people on them and you\u2019re collaborating, or perhaps the AI itself has a personality you want to interact with. It\u2019s not going away, it\u2019s just going to have to adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what about humans, I asked, what\u2019s next for humans?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe one thing that makes me very hopeful is that if there\u2019s anything AI is very good at, it\u2019s personalized education. And so hopefully, that will be the path for those feeling left out. People should follow whatever they\u2019re interested in and curious about because a high agency person using high leverage tools are going to do something cool and that\u2019s valuable,” he said.<\/p>\n
AI gets the last word<\/p>\n
Back at AGI House, hanging out with hashtag inventor Chris Messina, I asked what advice he would give Gen Alpha on where to focus their energies, considering how pandemic losers have become AI winners, with ballet dancers, hair stylists and bartenders the few trades AI can\u2019t replace.<\/p>\n
\u201cVCs are over, SaaS is over, everything that\u2019s been going on for the last 10 or 15 years kind of doesn\u2019t really make sense anymore,\u201d he replied. \u201cIf you really want to invest in the future, it\u2019s about having a perspective, being able to bring people into that and creating movements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Echoing what Chen said: “There\u2019s only one Mr. Beast–and so if you develop relationship as a brand, that becomes sustainable value because AI cannot replace brand.<\/p>\n
Or can it?<\/p>\n
ChatGPT, may have no defensible moat as an AI assistant, but as a cultural icon with an estimated 1 billion followers<\/a>, it remains pretty much untouchable.<\/p>\nJust like the city from which it came.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AGI House garden gala featuring a conversation with Mantis Capital General Partner Jeffrey Evans, Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[41793,182,181,507,3195,12434,41794,160,1283,41795,74,41792,11969],"class_list":["post-55207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agi-house","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-founders","tag-grimes","tag-investors","tag-openai","tag-sergey-brin","tag-technology","tag-twitch","tag-vc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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