#205 The 2nd Wave of Generative AI with Sailesh Ramakrishnan & Madhu Iyer, Managing Partners at Rocketship.vc

25 snips

May 9, 2024

Guest

Madhu Shalini Iyer

Guest

Sailesh Ramakrishnan

Sailesh Ramakrishnan and Madhu Shalini Iyer, managing partners at Rocketship.vc, dive into the vibrant world of generative AI. They break down the evolving landscape of startups, from foundational models to innovative applications. The duo emphasizes a data-driven approach to venture capital, highlighting how data shapes investment strategies. They also discuss the importance of evaluating company quality against various metrics and explore the macroeconomic shifts affecting the tech sector. A compelling look into the future of AI awaits!

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INSIGHT

Generative AI Company Categories

Generative AI companies can be categorized into three buckets: foundational models, supporting infrastructure, and applications.
Rocketship.vc is most excited about the application layer, where generative AI becomes integral to solutions.

ANECDOTE

Algorithmic Investing Examples

Rocketship.vc's algorithms identify innovative companies using generative AI in various sectors.
Examples include fintech, manufacturing (e.g., jet engine repair), automatic coding, and creative fields like art and music.

INSIGHT

Data-Driven Investing

Rocketship.vc uses data-driven investing, analyzing company metrics, founder qualities, and market trends to define "good" companies in various ways.
They emphasize trusting counterintuitive data insights, which led them to early investments in 15-minute delivery and global expansion.

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Speedily adopting new technologies can give your business a competitive advantage, but with so much happening in the world of generative AI, it's difficult to know what to adopt. In this episode, Richie chats to two venture capitalists to get their view on the global AI landscape, where we are in the AI hype cycle, and how to adopt AI tech. Beyond this, we explore Rocketship.vc's use of data and algorithms to make investment decisions in early-stage startups. If our previous episode’s deep dive into 2024’s data & AI trends with VC Tom Tunguz got you excited about how investors are looking at the market at the moment, then this episode is sure to do the same. This time, we have twice the insight, thanks to our two guests.

Madhu Shalini Iyer is a Managing Partner at Rocketship.vc, a Silicon Valley based fund investing globally. She was the Chief Data Officer of Gojek and helped grow the business into a $10 billion unicorn. In addition to being a board member, she started the Singapore office and played an active role in the strategy, new business development, and ‘data as a competitive advantage’. Prior to Gojek, Madhu was part of the founding team of Intuit’s Quickbooks Lending Platform. As the data science leader at Intuit, Madhu helped grow the platform to $300 million and holds 2 patents in the areas of user data augmented algorithms for financial inclusion. Madhu was also the Chief Data Officer for Ethoslending. There she built the underwriting platform and was responsible for all b2c revenue, resulting in $65 million gross market value per month. Madhu was further responsible for building and running the marketing team. Prior, Madhu was a partner at a $150m private equity fund, Stem Financial, in Hong Kong. She started her career as a senior data scientist with a leading think tank in Menlo Park, CA.

Sailesh Ramakrishnan is also a Managing Partner at Rocketship.vc. Prior to Rocketship.vc, Sailesh was CTO and co-founder of LocBox (acquired by Square), a startup focussed on marketing for local businesses. Sailesh worked with Anand and Venky at their previous startup Kosmix, and continued on to Walmart as a Director of Engineering at @WalmartLabs. Before jumping into the startup world, Sailesh worked as a Computer Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. Sailesh earned his Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Madras, his Masters degree in Construction Management from Virginia Tech and another Master degree in Intelligent Systems from University of Pittsburgh. He was a Ph.D. candidate in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Michigan.

In the episode, Richie, Madhu and Sailesh explore the generative AI revolution, categorizing generative AI tools, the impact of genAI across industries, investment philosophy and data-driven decision-making, the challenges and opportunities when investing in AI, future trends and predictions, regulatory and ethical considerations of AI, and much more.

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