YouSaid · the spoken record

Ethan Kurzweil

lines on the record: 52
first: 2024-12-06
most recent: 2024-12-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Now countervail that with all this excitement around AI and you kind of have the current moment where it should just feel like a sort of post-2000 era bubble. That's what it should feel like if you take the like financial flows that's where we should be and we're not because there's just excitement about what technology can do in the cycles are getting faster and faster. It's like people don't feel like it's 10 years away now. It's like almost here.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in theory, it should be a lot harder because there's so many more alternatives for where to put your capital these days that are appealing. There's macro big tech that's taking advantage of a lot of the trends that we're talking about, not just startups. And there's risk-free treasury bonds.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I have seen some systems now that have sort of like some robots on it have like kind of human-like characteristics and walk upstairs and carry things and pick things in a warehouse. And so because it's hardware, there's less of an exponential to that. So it's more a blocking and tackling around the sensors and what's the cost of the particular parts that go into that. But cars now drive themselves. So that's a big step change versus what we used to have. Drive themselves in like difficult environments with rain and So it's coming. Now, how soon and which industries is it going to hit? That's a hard one.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we'll still stay on top of the systems. We're not going to tell the systems what to do, like what challenges do we want them to solve? What's the problem space that we want them interested in? What success look like for these systems? I said there's like there's real work that as we move higher and higher up and we do less of the grunt work. That's the sort of pattern as it's been existing today.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Probably at some level there will be systems that aid people. But I still think what tends to happen, I'm not the 50, 60 year out. I'm the sort of five year out. Okay. But let's go with that time horizon. Yeah. We tend to as humans kind of move up the stack. We still have to do the creative work. We still have to guide the AI systems. We still have to sort of harness the tech that's coming out of them. Figure out how to apply it”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good at people say the same thing about VC, by the way. It happened for many years, you'll be able to put this. Data into a system and it'll be better. In the entry”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm the wrong person to ask because we back as a good, even as a good venture capitalist, we back so many losers. Like it's just an occupational hazard of the job. Now, you asked about froth, though. And so that's the sort of like perception disconnect of like what's the reality of a particular tech? And I think you have to go to the source. You have to see what impact is this having, not what are other people saying about it? What are these kind of second order effects? Does the entrepreneur look the part in some way or are they kind of playing a role that makes their impact seem great? But like, what's the impact of the technology and kind of like have blinders on for the noise that's out there in the ecosystem? Because that's another impact if everyone more and more VC-like thinking is there's more and more hype around really exciting tech. Some of it's real, some of it's froth.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's 100% what you're pointing out is true and it'd be interesting to do root cause analysis like are we to blame for that But first of all, is it a bad thing or not? It's certainly happening. And I think the cause of it, I would say, is, well, I think there's probably a number of psychological causes, but there's been this democratization of access to private assets that's happened over the last 10 years too. We haven't talked about either, where rather than trading, you know, used to be you traded stocks, then it was sort of you could trade IPOs. And now there's some access for Main Street consumer to private company assets as well, more typically venture-vetted. And there's investor protection laws, but not the move has been towards more and more and more democratization. And so the VC way of thinking is just seeping into more things. Is that good? Is that bad? There's probably pros and cons.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. People having real money on the line does create a more purist system that it's sort of hard to replicate with any other approach, similar to how the stock market sort of works. And in theory, gives you kind of the right price of every particular asset that's listed. So I think for prediction markets, that incentive is hard to replicate any other way. Should there be prediction systems? And there's a policy question that I don't know.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. I don't know. I mean, I think that probably, I believe that system had the best way of taking stock of kind of all the known universe of information that was out there and distilling it down into, okay, what does it mean for a particular event like the election? So that's kind of cool. Now, is it legal? I don't know. It sounds like maybe not because somebody's going to jail. Somebody's might face criminal prosecution about that.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People forget, and then something that counters that, a counterfactual comes out, and then everyone kind of hones in on that. And that period where people are forgetting about it, that's the trough of disillusionment, where the beginning of that is the trough of disillusionment period where there's a lot of prognostication about how this technology didn't deliver. Then people forget something does deliver and then move on to a new cycle. And the expectations get high again that probably can't be met.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speech recognition was probably a wall where people thought AI, you'd be able to talk to AIs. In the 90s, that was one of the eras of AI where my father was involved with. In fact, he named one of his companies Kurzweil AI, an AI stood for applied intelligence, not artificial intelligence, because it was a bad word to say AI and have it mean artificial intelligence because it felt like it was under delivering on an artificial intelligence. It was more applied than the AI that we think of today. And so that was an era where Discreet things”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managing the IP, the rights of that, the privacy. You might for a base level want an AI trained on a corpus of data that's pretty basic, but then the Taylor Swift of data, the really advanced IP holders, you want to pay more, but then you want to get some of the money to the people that created that IP that made that AI even better. That's hard to do right now, but maybe not yet solved.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's a lot of second order effects of AI that we could make investments to make better energy usage being one of those or helping create the primitives to allow developers easier access to some of the more advanced functionalities of AI. There's a whole side theme that's maybe orthogonal to your question around the provenant, like how it don't really know what data has been inputted into an AI system is relevant to your answer. So it could have stolen some content or it could have like who knows what trained it to provide you with that particular thing that it said. And so there's a whole side theme of like, okay, how do you make that okay for the people that made the actual IP that that AI was trained on? So that's another kind of side theme of AI that I think.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wow of the WayMo experience is greater than the wow of the Lime scooter experience. Yeah, it is. There's a lot less risk of death. Well, I mean, maybe if you think the Waymo might crash, but they don't. No, it”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have virtual reality gaming could be a thing. Virtual reality messaging communication, working in virtual reality. Before I was a venture capitalist, I worked at a company called Linden Lab, which is a company behind Study Life, you remember?”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Edit the flow on a website, personalize a page, be able to engage with their customers directly on the website without having to code anything. And so I think there's this democraizing aspect of the internet, of cloud computing, AI is a part of this, that's going to give more people the ability to be more creative, and that's going to have a kind of second order impact on just the kinds of things we're going to be able to do, even for little niche audiences”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that a normal business user or even a consumer can now create an intelligent system doesn't have to be a coder necessarily to be able to write a complex kind of logic flow and be able to build an application or a messaging tool or something for a business context. I think that's pretty powerful. I mean, I've always been interested in the democratization of tech. Like even cloud computing had a democratizing impact because you could give lots of people logins to a system and let them have impact even if they weren't technical. You could let people kind of”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to think it's a hard one beyond the AI Rubicon. Let me think about that. I mean, I think the democratization of tech broadly, this is aided by AI but not principally.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably, yes. It's really hard to start a company and have it be successful and have it. There's so many things stacked against you. So what are the things you can do to remove all the unknown obstacles that might come up beyond the really hard ones of like, will you deliver the product on time? Will the product, can you deliver it for a reasonable cost? And we'll have an impact on the market. The regulation that kind of is another curveball that you might have to answer to, that's an impediment. That's a blockage that serves at the cost of innovation for sure. And so I think what probably has an impact just maybe using crypto as an example is clear regulation and lack of uncertainty where you have a sense of what are the rules going to be, not that we'll apply these arcane tests and we don't know exactly how a court will interpret it, but like exactly do these six steps and you'll be fine. That's taking out any”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one where the administration probably matters a lot. I have been pro crypto for certain use cases in the past, thinking about what's the infrastructure layer needed to make crypto a part of the financial system. And so that's the security, the protocols, the permissioning, the privacy, all that kind of stuff, I think is really necessary because crypto is still such a wild west to where you have to be pretty deep in it to benefit from it. And so I still think there's that like bridge technology to make it useful for kind of everyone in their everyday lives, like the Coinbase is kind of wallet type software for everything else. And it's probably true to the extent you can kind of read the tea leaves on these things that the current administration is a lot more friendly there. At least that's the messaging. How will that manifest itself in policy? No idea. But right now, a lot of people are scared of this space because there's a lot of uncertainty around it.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not with an early stage founder. Now, in a growth context, it's tremendously important. Because if you don't have the option to exit for billions and billions of dollars, you can only go public. There's a pretty narrow set of criteria you have to meet to be able to go public. So then it's a pretty material thing. We're at chemistry focused on the earliest stages. Is this technology going to get out and have an impact? There, you just kind of take a flyer. You kind of assume that if it does, it'd be valuable in any kind of context, whether it's in an M&A one or some other exit.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a ton, but there's no question that the current administration, not just here, but in the EU and the UK, where remember any global merger now has to get through basically three antitrust bodies has been really a lot tougher than any administration we've seen Democrat or Republican in the past. So do you, when you're getting, when you're sitting with an entrepreneur and getting excited about some big dreams for tech, are you thinking about, well, I wonder what Lena Khan's thinking about, the consolidation of the market for design tools? No, not at all. But is it probably a good thing for entrepreneurs' options to be able to exit their business and our business, which relies on that? Yeah, probably it is.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's people that are prominent out there that advocated for this or for or against it, that are have their passionate points of view about why the new administration is good or bad at the kind of surface level day to day, this felt like, okay, you know, there's a change coming. And there's just not a lot of translation between that and the day-to-day of venture capital because, you know, technology is this force that sort of plows through market cycle, plows through market cycles, technology administrations, unless you're in a very highly regulated industry. You know, crypto, for instance, or something like that, I feel like in my circles around how is AI going to be commercialized for business and consumer, it's not an event that people are as focused on as perhaps the most prominent personalities of.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That some of the companies that have been hyped to fulfill on this promise of completely human-like, lifelike understanding, reasoning abilities, and emotion won't quite fulfill on that promise right away. And we'll have to wait another 4.9 months for that Longer, a couple years.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we will be in a disappointment about what AI brings hype cycle in about my calculations 2.6 months from now. And then we will come back out. That's a very precise estimate. And then we will come back out from that and then it will start.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, your names, that's sort of what I said, and that was the debate we had. But it got the substance right. But yes, to your question, AI, and it's maybe made me both more.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so a confession. The book that the podcast that I just mentioned is written about was my dad's book. But you're a loot. My father, AI technology futurist, has been thinking about AI for about 65 years is what he would say. And large language models for 40, because that's his field to his pattern recognitions. Being able to recognize patterns and apply them to language. That was one of his first companies with that. So I was debating with him. He thought it was great. And I said, I think the podcasters aren't as good as Tracy and Joe”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they tried to make it personable and it just fell flat. And I think that's a little bit what's missing today. But AI will get better. Not as good as No odd”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, someone I know well had it read an entire book and generate a 12 minute podcast on that book. And it was not, it was, I totally agree.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will the consumer applications, the companion apps are probably the coolest, right? Now, they're not very, very realistic yet, although they're sort of getting up there in that they start to emulate real people in the world and can do it. I think there should be a Tracy character app that's out there in the public and could. In fact, with Google's system, you can actually create a whole podcast from a notebook that used to submit it.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, in this area, there might be a few more, and I think open source, there's no open source cloud computing provider. Someone's got to plug in the hardware, air condition the data center, make the networking work. With large language models, there are open source models that are going to get to be pretty good. And so I think that's another element here that's a little different from the cloud era, what probably allows a little more fluidity than even you have among clouds. But there's not going to be dozens and dozens of models. Because to be performant, to be human-like, be able to provide people with responses that make sense, that have emotion, that really fulfill on the promise of what AI can do, there's only so much money that can, there's so much money needed to that there's not that many companies that can capitalize on it.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a really good question. I think the lock in is not too dissimilar from the cloud era, where you could switch off of one cloud computing vendor from one to the other. But there weren't that many of them.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On top of that error, how do we take that tech, take those abilities that the amazing researchers at OpenAI, aided by Microsoft and others, have built and make it useful to the end consumer and to the end business user? I think that's where we're going to see kind of this new era, kind of like we saw with cloud computing, where there were a few early entrants in HR tech and financial applications and things like that, and then this explosion of cloud computing applications that disrupted the status quo.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our view would be that the foundational layer, like the model layers that a lot of people build on top of or that we as consumers use for sort of our basic kind of chatbot style applications is going to go to the big players plus maybe one or two new entrants. And that looks like that game is sort of established. I mean, I don't know if you count OpenAI as a separate company from Microsoft, but they're clearly around to stay. And maybe there'll be one or two others. But that's not, in our view, a humongous startup opportunity because there's such amazing capital investments that need to be made there.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thin layer ones are not that radically different. Think of it as a small incremental tax on top of their Amazon web services bill that they would already be paying. And the technology is so good. It's so performant. It's so available to everyone that most of the companies we look at because we believe in the lean startup and most startups that can be built on that kind of technology will build on that kind of technology. It's not a huge tax and cost. The huge tax and cost comes when you try to sell it and you scale up the go-to-market operation, the sales and marketing. But the tech itself, there's only a handful of companies where that's a real barrier to entry. And there are some.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The deep tech founders who are doing what you're saying, where a lot of the check goes to building the core technology, you have to believe then in the business outcome being so great that it's worth it. It's worth this huge R&D investment or this huge investment in training specialized models.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build on some. Generally, for us, it's being built on a model. They're not using the sort of bare metal of the GPU. There's puts and takes there. But the more you invest in that, the more you've got your own technology that's more defensible. So a lot of times we're seeing open source. So a lot of times we're seeing not a lot of money go towards that. But they're deploying open source tools, or they're built on models that are freely available to anybody. And so it's a question of can the founder or the entrepreneur make a process improvement or productize commercially available technology to everyone in a radically different, unique 10x better way, so much better of a user experience.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this interesting kind of two countervailing forces because the more of your check that goes to Attacks like an NVIDIA tax or an open AI tax”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, it comes back to what impact will it have in the market? I don't think about AI as a category so much. I think about AI as an enabling tech just like cloud computing or mobile or mainframes back in the day or data center technology. It's just a way of building tech that can potentially allow an entrepreneur more weapons to be able to deploy. But there's nothing inherently like the end user that's using a finance application or that's using a communication app at the end of the day. They're using that app because they want to do something with it. They want to communicate. They want to run their expense reconciliation process. They want to do X, Y, or Z. There's nothing different about AI that makes that any bit of a different analysis than we had before around what is the impact that that particular product is going to have in the world.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so if you back up from that and think about a due diligence process, you don't necessarily need to spend as much time questioning the entrepreneur's ability to deliver. And there is this maxim that like most entrepreneurs will build what they want to build just is that the right thing and is the timing right. With the AIR, you get that on steroids. Most products can be built the way the entrepreneur says them. Now, will they have the impact that the entrepreneur thinks they'll have? That's still a question that we have to answer when we make our judgments.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not terribly. Honestly, old school SAS often had a data element to it that's somewhat similar to AI, how they harness data in the application. What's different now is you can apply a frame of reference of what's possible that's just much broader. That's just much more interesting, that's just much more potentially transformative to business users or consumers. That's a little different. You might not be as skeptical about a founder's ability to deliver. There's this whole democratizing element to AI. Just riff on that for a second in that you maybe don't have to have the most ultra specialized skill set of engineer to be able to deliver something pretty transformative.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes it radically different and exactly the same all at the same time. So what do I mean by that? Radically different in that the entrepreneur can now promise pretty incredible things. You can talk to a system and get it to code for you is something that three or four years ago you would have said like, sure, good luck with that. You need some engineers on your team. You can now make promises like that. But ultimately, the way we're evaluating companies is thinking about the end market that they serve, the business user or the consumer, and how are their lives made better? How is this process improved if you're making a consumer video editing app? How is that awesome for consumers to use? And so you start with like the question of can the technology deliver what the entrepreneur says, that's radically different. And then you step back to, hey, is this a good business opportunity or not? Is this something that people will pay a lot of money for?”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We make the right number of investments. We have to make the right investments and we have to get a few right. Maybe there's a little luck involved. But if we do that right, that will outperform. We won't water it down with bad investments later.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the phase of security, your typical kind of series A and Series B investment, maybe the median fund hasn't performed, but there's always been outlier funds throughout that period. If you looked at all of the asset class writ large, including all the growth checks, the leader stage investments, the sort of pre-IPO rounds that came on, that asset class has really underperformed over the last five years. So we were sort of orienting around, we give you exposure to just the early stages and we don't want to do anything else. We formed the firm just to do that.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yeah, good question. So it's different in two respects for us because we were a new entity too. And so we had a whole bunch of vetting around, hey, what's our track record and experience? Do founders want to work with us? Because this whole premise was on we're going to bring the individual personal service back. We need to be able to say our personal service is good. Like you want to work with the chemistry team because we're known for that. So there was a lot of vetting around that. There were LPs that felt like the asset class had under-delivered. Those were generally came into conversations very skeptical. And our argument to them, and some of them invested, some of them didn't, but our argument to them was, look, that's true writ large. But by having exposure to just the earliest stages of the asset class, going back 40 years, that phase of the market has always performed. If you took a slice of the venture market and looked at just early stage investment,”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that we would have a good sense of where to spend our time without the resources and without the brand magnets of other firms, and that it's a small community. We could get our brand out there pretty quickly to folks that are used to identifying those patterns and referring those deals on to us.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not wrong, but it's not the only way to practice venture. There are definitely advantages to scale, but I think it comes at a cost of being able to focus uniquely on companies that are at this inflection point moment, this pre-inflection point moment where they're about to take off. Because when you have a lot of capital to manage, you're going to make decisions that aren't necessarily about how do I find that company that needs a $3 to $7 million check at that moment, you're thinking about how do I move the merchandise, move the money that I have in the system. And so it may be appropriate to make that investment, but it may be appropriate to make a whole host of others that are a cross-purposes with finding the one defining company of that era. And I think for us that have been experienced at working adventure firms and identifying the patterns that lead to that, we felt like we could pick those out pretty well.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the way that kind of as the asset cuts got institutionalized, you lost a little bit of the personality and the personal relationships. And we felt like it didn't have to be that way. There's nothing bad about the way venture used to be practiced. And that really just became so missing that we felt like, okay, we'll go do this.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world does not need a new venture capital fund. That's the last thing the world needs. That was the last one, even before Kevin's. We were oversupplied on venture capital funds. But the world does need the right venture capital fund. And I'll get to why we launched chemistry in a second. But I do think the effect of the capital that came into the asset class over the past kind of five to ten years has been to create a little bit of a misalignment, a misalignment between LPs, that's who's invest inventor firms, and the venture managers, and then a misalignment with founders ultimately. And that's what got us this sort of passionate idea to bring venture back to its roots. Chemistry is sort of a simple idea. It's a boutique venture firm. It's small. It's designed to scale very slowly. We are not a hyper-growth startup, even though we try to find those to invest in. We want to bring some sort of personal service back to venture capital. We don't have big teams of people. We are the portfolio services team that works kind of hand on with our startups. And that ethos we felt like was missing from.”
2024-12-06 · Odd Lots · Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source