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Daniel Waterhouse

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26
first
2015-11-25
most recent
2015-11-25
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Last one was actually Curious AI, which we talked about, which is, as you mentioned, a new AI company in Finland. And I made a decision in 40 minutes because the entrepreneur is extraordinary and the ambition of what he wants to do is very compelling.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Think Jordan Bolson probably the career highlights it's not an outcome but as a milestone becoming part of it's been fantastic.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think from a venture perspective, my current partners are people I take a lot from in terms of how to invest. I think from an entrepreneur point of view, I look at people like Daniel Lecker, Spotify,”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I actually long, I'm going to answer a different question. In terms of blogs and index, I actually long for some better content. There was a period when TechQuen started and wearing on Malik was blogging where there was great, consistent content. And now I think great content is very dispersed by author. And so you've got to dive into medium and find individual articles rather than one place to get some really good fix.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Okay, I mean, one of my favorite books I really like is The Brain that teaches itself, which is about the adaptability of the neuroplasticity of the human brain. We've got a lot of books on neuroscience and how the brain can readapt. If this gets damaged or the body changes in these new signals, there's a really fascinating book and it talks a lot about how we can continue to improve how our brain operates and how we learn over time.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Oh boy, I'm not sure we have long enough to go into that. I think it's, look, it depends on how AI is. Put out there, and AI is an algorithm, right? It says, I'm going to be calling it it rather than he or she. It's devised by the operator. And I don't know. I think we're a long way where suddenly the AI becomes self-aware and Switches on the nuclear bombs.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Very fantastic. And so that now applies to vision, to self-driving cars and these have unsupervised learning because there's no way you can tell them every situation they're going to expect. They need to learn from themselves. And so that's a very exciting kind of pioneering campaign that really wants to build in the next generation of AI because that then expands the number of problems you can solve using those algorithms, real-world problems like thread and trade by now are using existing methodologies to solve their real world problems.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Unsupervised learning a lot of AI studies supervised learning is basically where you have you have a training set and you teach the algorithm what good looks like and supervised learning is where you don't and the kind of the algorithm works out what good is on its own so”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Similar. And that's really fuzzy logic because you have to be able to match phonetics words that are spelt similarly but not exactly the same, the shape of the logo and a whole bunch of other things. And that's a great machine learning problem in terms of pattern recognition, phonetic analysis, et cetera. So those two things are real problems, very difficult to solve where it's not a linear solution where you can write a formula and solve it. It's a set of equations which don't have an exact answer, so you have to devise some pretty interesting technology to try and get to the good answer. Curious is really kind of the next step beyond that.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And this kind of goes, that's my really early career when I my first job when we were doing what used to be called operational research, which is basically how do you solve difficult nonlinear problems to find out the best answer. And every company now is sitting on complexity in what they know about their user and the data points they have. And in Tred's case, how do you abstract all the insights they have on people's tastes and then provide great recommendations to them? That's a real problem if you solve it, you provide a significantly better customer experience. And so that's a great computer science problem to solve. Trademark now, if you're trying to understand whether you can use a trademark, it's not really easy. You have to go to a trademark attorney who will spend quite a lot of time sifting through all the trademark databases to try and look at the things.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, look, I also did an investment in a company called Trademark Now, which is using machine learning for doing real-time trademark analysis. And so trademark now and thread you could put in one camp, which”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I do, I do. I mean, I think, well, I think there's a long way to go in consumerizing SMB software because I don't think there is much SMB software. And I think there will be then pockets of enterprise software which continues to kind of make the leap to be mobile first, to be much lighter. Easier UI driven tools as well.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Probably something like Slack, which probably is more of a grassroots effect going to enterprises than being the decision of the CTO that they're going to deploy Slack in the organization probably becomes more grassroots because it's such a super easy tool to use. So I think that's going to continue to impact the enterprise market, both big and small companies and provide opportunities for firms like us.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “We now see primarily often mobile first, but also just through cloud-based web products is the ability to deliver great software to small business owners who now realize that they can use it and are ready to use it because their internet natives now as well. And so this is a huge opportunity. And I think every small business owner will have their own bespoke software suite which sits in their phone in the next five years, Workable is doing that for recruiters in small businesses. And what then happens interestingly is those lightweight, super easy to use, but powerful tools actually start creeping up into bigger enterprises because they're actually much more functionally easy to use than the big old fashioned software suites that sit there. And so you see”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So what's fascinating and workable primarily targets SMBs? And that's that area in particular I think is fascinating. Up until recently, most small businesses have not had powerful software at their fingertips to help them run their business. That's been the purview of big enterprises who can buy big enterprise software tools.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think in Europe the balance is not too far kilter. I think if we look today, there's probably a little bit more seed kilter than potentially is there to find the great deals. A lot of people have decided they want to do seed investing or there's some very small venture funds coming up that are doing small checks where we spend our time, which is primarily Series A and a little bit of Series B, it's pretty balanced. And then perhaps at the moment, but maybe the market changes, the growth phase is getting more intense and there's maybe too much capital chasing the few really high quality deals.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The political agenda and different governments across Europe have done more or less to support the kind of venture and starter ecosystem and clearly globally we're in much further through the shift to everything moving online and this kind of technological cycle than we were 10 years ago, which means that the world is ready for the products that people are launching.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And I guess specifically in Europe. I mean, I think it's completely different, frankly. I mean, the actors in the industry are quite different by and large. The understanding of entrepreneurship and venture capital is completely different. So I think we live in a world where an age where entrepreneurship is very well accepted and regarded now as a career path, whereas that maybe didn't happen so much 10 years ago. And entrepreneurs now understand that this is a global opportunity where they can take it to the world, not just take it to their backyard. And the investors are keeping pace, I hope, and think in terms of their mindset and ambition. And so more capital, there's more smart people, there's more interesting companies appearing. It's become a bigger item on.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think it's important to have been close enough to what it takes to build a business so that you can truly empathize with entrepreneurs as they go on that journey. Now, whether you do that by having done it yourself in one particular field and one particular circumstances or whether you do it by having just been in enough situations and been close enough to them as a long-term investor, I think both of those things work. And so I think in our own ways with our different backgrounds, we were able to give a lot of perspective on what it really tastes to succeed. I've seen lots of different companies win and fail in how they've built their operations. And that gives me one way of helping companies who are now doing it think about it. And others in my partners have actually done it themselves in a very specific circumstance and they can relate those experiences.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, look, at the end of the day, we're operating our own firm as well. So I think to a degree we all have some different levels of operational experience. But one of the things I love about where I am and the problems I work with is we have that diversity because the reality is to build a successful venture firm and to be able to help entrepreneurs takes all sorts of different types of skills at different times, be it building our own firm, being advising entrepreneurs on how to scale firms, helping them raise money, helping them think about the exit, thinking about portfolio management. There's a whole bunch of different disciplines required and there isn't actually one person who can do that, I don't think. It's great to have actually all those perspectives. And we try very hard to give our companies, the portfolio companies we've invested in, the ability to tap into all those different types of expertise, not just the person who sits on them.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, to a degree. I mean, look, I think naivety with open ears and listening and adapting, but being able to not be constrained by conventional wisdom.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I can't think it's somewhere in between on both axes. And there's no perfect answer to this. And we back to all sorts of entrepreneurs who have been successful and they don't all look the same. But it seems to me that often there's a benefit of some experience because you've learnt some of the pitfalls of what it takes to build a business. But if you have too much experience, you maybe become too cynical or unable to take a leap of faith and kind of have blind ambition in building a business. And similarly, if you're completely rational, then I think it can be very hard to be an entrepreneur because being an entrepreneur requires you convincing yourself and other people that you're going to do something which, frankly, is highly unlikely to succeed. And so having a little bit of psychopathy or insaness seems to be helpful in”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I guess. I mean, I think I've learned to be less metric driven. I think as a kind of mathematician and then as something I'd call a finance step in some of my other earlier career, you become very obsessed just about numbers and data. And the reality is that's important, but there's a lot of human stuff that impacts whether companies are successful and there's a lot of market dynamics and understanding of how technology has changed the world becomes important. So I've actually tried to unlearn being just numbers and metrics driven, but it's still super important because if you don't understand your business and the drivers, then you're going to struggle to be successful.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “No, you know, there's always a bit of Chinese whispers. Look, I think it's kind of hard. That's a long time ago now, but ultimately, as a mathematician, you tend to be... Kind of reason structure in the way you think about things, and I think it's also kind of helpful in terms of understanding complexity. And sometimes the technical aspects, the business we look at. So I think it's hard to know. I think it's been helpful in appreciating technology and software solutions and then applying enough rigor and discipline in understanding markets and businesses certainly doesn't help you understand entrepreneurs. That takes a whole bunch of different experiences, but I think it helps in many regards.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Turned out to be a great backdrop to then get into venture capital. I started in the venture capital world in 2006 now, showing my age with another fund and kind of being able to spend a long time now doing venture, which has been fantastic.”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Sure. It's a bit of a random walk with a few lucky twists along the way and a few interesting moments. But I kind of started my career actually as a kind of research scientist with National Grid who do the transmission network for the UK and I was doing all sorts of kind of wacky modelling of the UK electricity network and doing a bit of what's now called AI, I don't think it was called AI then did a little bit of consulting, got trained in the world of business after being a bit academic and out of an amazingly lucky break in the middle of 1999 when I got to go and work at Yahoo for a few weeks which turned into many years and became my induction into the world of technology and all things online and that you know”

    2015-11-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source