YouSaid · the spoken record

Alina Cohen

lines on the record: 21
first: 2017-08-30
most recent: 2017-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, fly.io. It's a smart CDN and load balancer that serves as a middleware platform. And Kurt the founder is just brilliant. I love him. I think that there's just so much potential for this platform. They've built out the hardest part already. And now it's just a platform for themselves and their partners to build out cool features. So server-side analytics, site speed optimizations, ad blocker blocking, and so much more. And so if you're a web developer, I would highly recommend checking out fly.io.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think having engineering centric founders who know their strengths and focus on building what people want over just solving technical challenges, this kind of culture trickles down to their employees and we've seen it be very successful.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three body problem it's this great Chinese sci-fi book translated into English and I won't give away too much of the plot but it's really cool there might be this whole market for Chinese sci-fi books translated into English coming up”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's still the big question. Currently, it's a really cool tech, but it needs to find good use cases outside of smart home control and telling you when the next Caltrain is coming. It's currently still a tech looking for embodiment, and that's why I think people need to go out and build those applications. I think that the reason they're making it into a platform is it's a bet on the creativity of other people, of developers. And that's why I started playing with it. If anyone's interested, I actually have a tutorial on how to bridge your Alexa to your Raspberry Pi or to your Arduino and I'd be happy to share that. I just, I really want to see what people build on this. And that's how you get this mass market adoption. You build cool applications for it.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Voice companies. We're really not sure yet, but it is a really interesting new platform, and it reminds me of the Facebook platform back in the day in that there's just so much greenfield opportunity. There's so much opportunity to leverage the growth of Alexa to grow your own app.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I thought it'd be really cool to strap a voice interface onto this T robot, you know, be like Captain Picard and say T Earl Gray Hot and have this T replicator make you a perfectly brewed cup of tea. And I was just surprised and really impressed with how easy the Alexa platform was to work with. I've developed for a lot of platforms before. This was by far the most straightforward development experience. And it got me thinking about voice as a platform as an interface. And it's sort of a special thing. It's one of the few interfaces that doesn't force an interrupt that you can multitask with. With just about anything you're doing, you can keep doing it and still be using your voice. And with everything else involving computers, you more or less have to stop what you're doing, pick up your computer, or your cell phone, and dabble around with it. And so it struck me as a cool new way to do things. And so I'm just kind of excited about it. I'm not going to come out here and say that we invest in.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've been building this tea robot. I'm kind of embarrassed to even be talking about it, but it's how I got introduced to the Lexa platform. It's this robotic arm that grabs a teabag and then steeps it at the right temperature for the right amount of time. So you can have that perfectly brewed cup of tea.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except you're one step removed from it. Well, I don't know if you saw today Facebook did another acquisition of an AI company, and I think that's a trend that we'll continue to see. It's actually quite interesting. Most disruptive technologies, they help startups disrupt incumbents. But with AI, it's a disruptive technology that helps big companies get bigger. It's this feedback loop where the best companies are able to keep getting the most data and keep building a better and better product and just becomes increasingly difficult for any new startup to come in and compete with that. As I like to say, it adds value in increments of billions and not billions. So if someone's startup is still in the process of making millions, it's probably not the right solution.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I agree that bigger data isn't always better data and that quality matters, but if you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison, having more of the top quality data is always better. There's just no AI system that doesn't get better when you give it more high quality data. At some point, you are going to hit diminishing returns, but you still get a return. And now you could argue that what if the point of diminishing returns is fairly early on, so startup doesn't need that much data to be successful. But if there's not that much data needed, there isn't much of a moat against the big companies or the fellow startups. And it's sometimes true that you can have a particularly artful model where you feed it less data, but the work that gets into making that artful model is akin to writing the software in the first place. And so, yeah, like in response at the limit of micro segmentation, data pipelining and building extremely complex models, tweaking the activation process, it just looks like writing software the old fashioned way.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data. Machine learning is a leveraged play on data, so it's the Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles of the world that are getting the most benefit from it. It's not the early stage startups. It's the companies that already have a monopoly and who are already generating all of this data. I'm too...”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, let's think about it as a black box. Let's say I have this person here, and in order to get this person to learn anything, it's not that I need to teach them some rules or give them a few examples. It's not even enough to give them a thousand examples. It's that I need to give them a thousand examples, millions of examples. And that's the current state of the art in AI. It's done a lot better because of the amount of data available, but nothing changes the fact that it's just relying on a really large amount of data to get anything usable out of it. And what you get is fairly narrow. It's very specific to what you trained on. So that doesn't feel very intelligent. That doesn't bring us any closer to the ability to reason, to create, or to do anything else that we associate with actual intelligence. And that's not to say that these neural nets and feedback loops aren't useful development tools. They can be, but they're most useful for the companies who already have the most and the best quality.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for me was the difference between what I saw the founders capable of and what the market was saying about this consumer app. I'd always been a little skeptical about the consumer app and just seeing how much of the infrastructure they'd built out, how it was already so much better than what the rest of the market had available, even though it wasn't even their main focus. With this particular case, it was just pretty clear.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as I mentioned, I'm really drawn to engineer eccentric founders. I think that when you're able to build the product yourself, when you're able to do the heavy lifting, I think you're also more flexible. Just it's a way of thinking about things. And I found that those people have tended to be the most successful in terms of being able to do a pivot, to restructure the company, because at the end of the day, they can go into cockroach mode and they can do the heavy lifting themselves. They can do all the hard work themselves”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think taking an acquisition is really a personal decision. Are you ready to be making this transition from being your own game master to being a player in somebody else's game? And that's not to say the answer is always no. I think there's plenty of times when a company can be more efficient within a larger company, but you have to understand what you're getting into. In the case of log DNA, they were going to gut a lot of the product and make it into something that was not what the founders wanted it to be. And things like that, there's always going to be opportunities. Most of the founders are so talented that there's just going to be acquisitions offered to them because of their secrets, right? Whether it's the deep technical knowledge, whether it's their PM ability. And you really have to make sure that you're comfortable, that you're ready to be taking this next step.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, when you're doing an opportunistic investing strategy, like we are at initialized, you don't always get to pick what you want to do. We don't have any strict rules around it.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had to say yes, it was a total no brainer. And so we were off to the races. We spent the next six months developing the concept, the fund model, and then on a plane together fundraising from LPs and developing those relationships. That's initialized. We kept the name. It's a very different model now. It's our full time job.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been the very first investor in Palantir, pretty much all of Sandhill had completely missed the boat on Palantir, and this guy had been there and he saw it early. He was just absolutely brilliant. And so I started up his Silicon Valley office and we invested in a number of great seed companies together. That was actually the path that led me to get to know Gary and Alexis. Some of the companies I invested in were part of Gary's portfolio, and we just had a ton in common. We both studied computer science. We both founded companies before. We like to work closely with founders and we tended to value the same characteristics and founders, just very engineering-centric founders. And after working together on a few companies over a couple of years, he told me he was stepping away from Y Combinator and he was ready to take this initialize, this part-time fund that he and Alexis had been running while they were full-time at YC and make it into a real industrial fund. And could I help him get it off the ground?”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then slice that image up and convert it into HTML and CSS. It would have to figure out what each div was, whether it was an image, a button, or text. If it was text, it would try to OCR. And then it would lay out all of this HTML and CSS for you. And as we quickly learned with computer vision, it's easy to get 90% of the way there, but the last 10% is nearly impossible unless you're at huge scale. And so it was pretty interesting tech, and Facebook approached us with an acquisition offer, which we accepted. After some time there, I was growing a little restless, and so I started talking to a bunch of people about what to do next. And I was introduced to Alex Carp, the CEO of Palantir. And he suggested something that sounded totally crazy to me at first. He suggested that maybe I should try angel investing. And I figured I'd give it a shot. And so he introduced me to this really special family office, this Finnish billionaire Poyo Zabud.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working for my competitors. And if you are even Facebook friends with anyone on the blacklist, you would see a totally different app. It's not how most companies we fund today operate, but there's this thinking in the valley that there's one right way to do a startup, that you launch it on TechCrunch, you have a press cycle, you network in all these parties, but really there's so many different ways of doing it. There's this whole world of incredibly valuable companies growing red under people's noses that you'll never read about in the press. And so building these apps, building these games led me to create the company that was acquired by Facebook. I was trying to graduate in three years and taking a full load of math and CS classes, so I needed a tool that would let me iterate faster than my competition. And I teamed up with a fellow Facebook developer at a hackathon. And we started this company around automating front end development. Our software would take mockups of websites. It could be in any format, a JPEG, a PNG. Just a picture you scribbled up on a napkin.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chart and then kind of just gave me this feel for games for all of these secrets that game developers that app developers have, reciprocation, time mechanics randomness, and all of these other things. Another one I made, Friend Facts, it had a different but equally powerful mechanic. In order to see what somebody said about you, for example, is Harry handsome, you would have to answer ten questions about your other friends, and people obviously love learning about themselves. It's the same game mechanic that makes quizzes so popular, except instead of just a reframe of what the person is saying about themselves, they learn what other people are saying about them. And it took off like crazy because of all these secrets around game mechanics. And there's so many different secrets like this across different industries, how to grow users, how to do SEO, how to run a tight sales funnel. And these secrets are so closely guarded that they're never shared with outsiders. Like back when I was making apps, I'd go as far as creating a blacklist of anyone who was”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While my career actually started from my love of computer games, I was really into gaming and middle school, and this one game in particular Runescape, it inspired me to start making my own games, start contributing to these open source projects, and through that, I actually realized that making games is so similar to making startups. You have to start with people, you point them to a goal, and you build something great with them. It's how you move from being a player in a game to a game master and controlling your own games. And then once you build the game, you get to the goal. You have to figure out how to get users. And that's what drew me to the Facebook platform. I made my first Facebook app and it was really silly. It was this hatching eggs game where you send eggs to your friends and then they hatch on the holidays. And it had this simple game mechanic around reciprocation. If somebody does something nice to you, gives you a gift. You want to reciprocate it back. And my app took advantage of that to grow virally. I wasn't expecting anything when I launched it in the App Store, but it ended up being at the top of the hot.”
2017-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source