Infinite Curiosity Pod with Prateek Joshi

Matt Turck is a Partner at FirstMark Capital where he focuses primarily on early-stage enterprise investing. He is particularly active in the data, machine learning, and AI. Since 2011, he has been organizing Data Driven NYC, the largest data/AI community in the US. Since 2012, he has been publishing an annual landscape of the data/AI industry, the MAD report. Earlier in his career, he was the co-founder of TripleHop, an enterprise search software startup that was acquired by Oracle. Immediately prior to FirstMark, he was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures, the incubation arm of Bloomberg LP, which he helped start.In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - AI going mainstream with ChatGPT- ChatGPT Plugins- Generative AI in the enterprise- AI startup landscape- "Copilot for X" products- What gets him excited about an investment opportunity- The moat of AI-infused businesses- GTM motion of successful AI startupsMatt's favorite books: All the books in the Incerto series (Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb)--------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Bob van Luijt is the cofounder and CEO of Weaviate. They build, maintain, and commercialize the open-source vector database called Weaviate. They've raised funding from amazing investors such as Index and NEA. He is the Chairman of Creative Software Foundation, a nonprofit located in The Netherlands with a sole focus on open source and creative software. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - What are vector embeddings - What's a good vector representation - What is vector search and why do we need it - What is a vector database and why do we need it - How does a vector database work in practice - Applications that use vector databases Bob's favorite book: The Creative Act (Author: Rick Rubin)--------Where to find Prateek Joshi:  Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, one of the best SaaS VCs in the world. They've invested in iconic companies such as Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva, Gusto, Box, and Bill.com. He was previously at Kleiner Perkins as part of their Green Growth Fund and has an MBA from Stanford. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Limitations of generative AI in B2B SaaS - Iterative AI vs Generative AI - How to solve the user engagement problem with AI - Coaching networks - Pricing model for AI companies - How to build a moat - How you invest in startups - GTM motion of successful AI companies - AI market trends Jake's favorite book: Freedom at Midnight (Authors: Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Jessica Leao is a Principal at Maverick Ventures, a global investment firm that has been investing in early stage companies for over 25 years. She was previously the founder and GP at The 21 Fund, a $2M seed fund building and investing in the next generation of startups out of Stanford Graduate School of Business. She's been the Managing Partner at the Dorm Room Fund, which is backed by First Round Capital. She's also held roles at Palantir, Fortress Investment Group, and Goldman Sachs. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - AI compute landscape - Trends and opportunities in AI infrastructure - "Copilot for X" business model - GTM motion of AI businesses - Using AI in legacy industries - How she invests in startups Jessica's favorite book:  Klara and the Sun (Author: Kazuo Ishiguro) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi:Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Leo Polovets is a cofounder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, a seed stage firm that has invested in iconic companies such as Robinhood and Flexport. Prior to Susa, he was the second engineering hire at Linkedin where he helped build the first versions of products like LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Groups. He then worked on payment fraud detection algorithms at Google, and was also an early engineer at Factual, where he built data cleaning, processing, and deduping software. And he has an engineering degree from Caltech.  In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - How to derisk a startup - PMF risk, market risk, and funding risk - How should enterprise SaaS founders think about the first 10 customers (choice of customers, how to find them, how to convince them)  - How should VCs think about providing feedback on pitches (why is it important and how to do it well) - Pricing mechanics - How should seed stage companies think about moat - AI-infused software applications - What gets him excited about an investment opportunity - GTM motion of successful seed stage startups Leo's favorite books: - A Guide to the Good Life (Author: William Irvine) - Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth (Authors: Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Brian Raymond is the founder and CEO of Unstructured. They provide open source libraries and APIs to build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, and production machine learning pipelines. They've raised a seed round from BCV, Mango, and Essence. He was previously the VP of Global Public Sector at Primer. Prior to that, he has held roles at CIA and the National Security Council. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - The need for data preprocessing - LLM use cases that are exciting - What AI use cases are useful to government agencies - How should startups think about building for the government - Building the user base for Unstructured - 4 pillars of the emerging tech stack for LLMs - Open source software Brian's favorite books: Chip War, The Main Enemy, Damascus Station, The Red Sparrow Trilogy--------Where to find Prateek Joshi:Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: http://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Ofir Zuk is the cofounder and CEO of Datagen, a platform that provides synthetic data to train and test AI models. They have raised more than $70M in funding so far with Scale Venture Partners leading their latest round. He was previously the cofounder of Click Frauds and has held engineering roles at Check Point and Squeeck.In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - The need for synthetic data - Different methods that are used to generate synthetic data - What role does AI play in generating synthetic data - Generative Adversarial Networks - Synthetic data vs simulated data - Measuring the performance of synthetic data - Fidelity vs privacy Ofir's favorite book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Author: Ben Horowitz) -------- Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: http://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Ala Shaabana is the cofounder of Bittensor, an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized machine learning network. He has a PhD in computer science and has previously held roles at Instacart and VMware. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Key metrics of the decentralized network: Maintaining the optimal amount of competition, Difficulty, Total TAO staked, and Sequence length - Challenges of decentralized compute - Making heterogeneous nodes work together - Bandwidth constraints - Security considerations- Mechanism to maximize utilization - Measuring the value of Server responses Ala's favorite book: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Author: Carlo M. Cipolla) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: http://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Vishnu Ram Venkataraman is the VP of Data Science and Engineering at Credit Karma. Over the last 8.5 years, he has built their Recommendation systems and Machine Learning infrastructure for their 120 Million members and growing. Before that, he has held leadership roles at Nykaa and Games24x7. He has degrees from IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad, two of the most premier educational institutes in India. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - How they build ML products at Credit Karma - Use cases of ML in finance - Challenges of building ML products in finance - Failure modes of ML models - Tackling bias in ML systems - Building reliability into ML systems - Maintaining product discipline as you scale - Advice for developers who want to incorporate ML into their products Vishnu's favorite book: Chip War (Author: Chris Miller) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Jill Chase is a partner at CapitalG where she focuses on AI, data, infrastructure, and devops. Previously, she was the cofounder of Nimble and the CEO at Interlaced. She got her MBA at Stanford and is a guest lecturer there as well. In this episode, we cover a range of topics including: - Delivery models for AI businesses (BYOML and MLaaS) - Your viewpoint on companies building AI compute infrastructure - Consumer software in AI - AI-infused software development applications - Cost structure of ML businesses vs SaaS businesses - Application companies vs full stack companies in AI - AI market trends - How do you evaluate investment opportunities Jill's favorite books: High Growth Handbook, Silent Killer (by Beverly Barton) --------Where to find Prateek Joshi: Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com Website: https://prateekj.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi