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Jeremy Conrad

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27
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2017-09-20
most recent
2017-09-20
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1
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  1. “So, the last one we announced was Marvel that last mile delivery robotics company, and the reason we said yes is because Matt and Jason as founders were just exactly the kind of people that were looking for. They're smart, they're ambitious, they had kind of relevant technical expertise, but really saw this larger opportunity to take kind of this emerging technology that it had finally made it to the point where you could actually really scale it.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, I'm going to go with the Opportunity Mars rover because it was supposed to be there for a 90 day mission and well over a decade later it's still driving around Mars.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I'm going to go with prorata that Dan Primac over at Axios writes just because I think it's like the best take on kind of what's going on in the larger ecosystem.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think when I first started, the hardest part was as a former operator, it was like, these aren't my companies. And so you're there to give counsel, you're there to give advice, but sometimes founders will go in a different direction, and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. But I think kind of giving up that control since I spent six years in the Air Force kind of running groups was a bit of a change for me.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I'm not at all worried about killer AI. I think that people love to talk about when you're on the early part of the exponential, you can't tell. And I would argue that when you're on the exponential part of the S curve, it's hard to tell as well.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So there's a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature Why Violence Has Declined. So it's by Stephen Pinker, and it's The History of Violence from Global Genocide to Murder over the last 10,000 years. And when you finish this book, you will feel invincible just understanding how safe we are today compared to our ancestors.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We really like being an early stage fund for a variety of reasons. I think that we really focus on helping our companies find product market fit. And then I think when you look at a classic Series A or Series B fund, the reality is that they invest in lots of different sectors, but a big part of their skills is helping companies scale from 20 people to 2,000 people. And so for us, we think that being the best at early stage in hardware is really where our focus is. We don't really have ambitions to go raise $500 million or a billion or $5 billion like NEA does, just because that doesn't fit our model very well.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, I think for space, there's a narrow aesthetic of conditions that show it can be viable. So in the last decade, there's these things called CubeSats, which are very small about the size of a loaf of bread satellites. And so if you can build something and launch it on a CubeSat and prove that your technology works, that then I think you have a shot. For that, you can raise half million and million, two million dollars, get one in orbit, prove it work, and then go take the data from that and go to the investors and say, well, I proved it works. Now I need to launch three of them, and these can have customers. And for that, I need $10, $20 million. And so there's more and more launch opportunities, but for one communication satellite company that I was looking at for their first satellite in orbit working, you needed $50 million. And I just don't know how in the venture ecosystem, like there's occasionally people who will drop in and just make that big bet. But I think that in general as a founder, if you can't think of a couple different firms who could do your A and B, you're really kind of like trying to shoot the moon in an already difficult environment.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Chain manager for a Fortune 500 company, you need to know where every boat in the world is. And if that boat goes off course, that might mean everything to your business. And so you need to know every minute of every day where it is. And then if you look at all the other things you can do in non-imaging based stuff, they all tend to be high frequency needs. So that's remote sensing. And so I'm pretty bearish on the kind of imaging side of it. But if you move on to the other things you can do in space, and the next one's obviously communication satellites, the reality is that it comes down to spectrum and the ITU regulates that and has issued all the spectrum. And at the end of the day, now it's like you've got to go buy spectrum in countries. And there are groups trying to do this with these LEO constellations, but the first thing they do is spend hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on spectrum. And that's not a good fit for the startup ecosystem.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Myself So, there's two main reasons that I embarrass on most space companies. So, you know, to be clear, we're investors in Spire, which does non-imaging-based remote sensing. I'm incredibly bullish on Spire. I think Peter has built an incredible company with an incredible value proposition. And I think that they're in a really good position. But there's a couple of different things. And I've got a whole map of this on my notes, but take remote sensing. And so that's imaging or non-imaging. I think that imagery at the end of the day, the question is, is it a high frequency need? Does someone wake up every day and say, I need to have this right now? And so if you're the US military, imaging is incredibly important because they can do a lot of intel on that. But in general, there's this mythical hedge funds that want to buy pictures of, you know, aluminum piles in, you know, China. And really, the reality is that the hedge fund industry is not doing that well, and the amount of money they spend on data just really isn't there. And you're also comping that picture with 10 other ways they could possibly get that information. The reason that I like non-imaging and what Spires doing is because if you were a supply”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Absolutely, and also that they did something that I think is particularly hard as a startup just because there's a lot of other risks you're trying to buy down as well as they built a really great brand. And I think that if you look at those things like you've got to find founders who understand that and can really help build that.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I definitely think consumer electronics as a product category is still viable, and you're going to see some really interesting stuff going on. And certainly you've had things like VR and have had acquisitions that are starting to, you know, that's going a little bit slower than I think everyone would like. But also, let's be super clear. DGI is just a consumer electronics company. It's a $10 billion company. And they're showing no signs of stopping. So I think that for Fitbit and GoPro in particular, people kind of like fell out of love with them. But at the end of the day, they're still public companies that you can buy into or sell out of and there's 200 private unicorns today that wish they had the problem of being a public company that fell out of love.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, I think consumer electronics is one of the hardest things to do in the venture ecosystem right now, partially because at some point you need a huge slug of money to go big. And so right now it's like an old sane in consumer electronics that you can sell 20,000 units of basically anything. If you are Sony and you make something and you put it on every shelf and every Best Buy and Walmart, you'll sell tens of thousands of units just because that's kind of how it works. And then it might just die from there. So for us, when we look at consumer electronics, one, we think that single cell hardware is probably not viable right now. So there has to be some sort of recurring revenue model. And so typically it's either drop cam style hardware plus software services on top of that, or it's got to be some sort of consumable base thing. And that's, you know, we have a portfolio company called NEMA where they do allergen sensor. And so you actually use it as a consumable every time you do it. And so if you have one of those two things and can demonstrate that there is large demand, then you can go raise that round you need. But I think we're going to see a lot less of things like Juicer.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it's about making sure that you really narrow your scope for your first product because if 90% of your product works in its hardware, you have nothing. And so unfortunately, a lot of times you'll have founders that by definition are very ambitious and they'll include too much in that first rev. And then when there's inevitably some problems or integration issues, they can't just then cancel that second wheel or that whatever it is that's giving them a problem because that's all part of the design. And so there is this little bit of complex systems engineering. And so you have to have a good vision from day one. And so I think that you will have these if you look at any piece of hardware, the first one is generally kind of crappy and then over time it gets better. But that one that first one that's kind of crappy has to do something that gets high value for their users.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “We're really focused right now on when we work with our companies to make sure they understand how to get to revenue as fast as they can. You know, I think that two years ago, the ecosystem was in a place where you could go raise a big A or small B on hype and good team and that the idea that there was going to be a market there. But right now, we're seeing very much a tightening in the market of when you get to Series B, you better have revenue or be about to sign those contracts or this money will undisputedly unlock that. And so that's a little bit of a change. But I think that that's true in just adventure comes in waves and cycles across the entire ecosystem. And you think that you're seeing some stuff right now where some companies are struggling to get to that next metric and there's been a couple companies that have shut down recently. And so for us, we're very focused on making sure our companies can get to those revenue targets that we think they need to hit.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So, what we found is that there's a couple different things. One, there are just some businesses that are not a good fit for venture capital. And this is true on software, this is true on hardware. And I think that for a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't always fully understand kind of what the milestones you have to get to are. So whenever we make an investment, one thing we really focus on is what is the right amount of money for you to raise to get to your next round? And since we've, you know, we've got 42 investments, we've got to see a lot of rounds go down, we have a really good understanding for kind of where the ecosystem is and where those series A and Series B investors are. And we'll go talk them. We'll say, what would you need to see to make this investment? Now, the reality is that they just want to invest in great businesses. And if you can convince them that this is a scalable venture-backled business, they'll look at anything.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Absolutely. I think that there's a little bit of an analogy to LA. It's like I grew up in LA, which is one of the centers of aerospace in the world. But whenever you tell people you're from LA, the first question is, do you know any celebrities? And it's because, you know, for Hollywood to be the global phenomena that it is, everyone has to know it exists. When you get on a plane or use a satellite with communications, you don't need to know where that satellite came from. And I think that hardware in the valley is very similar. For Google and Facebook to be the companies they are literally every person on the planet has to know that they're there. Whereas the reality is Apple's largest company in the world does more revenue than either of them. And like for some reason, there's just never that association of like, oh, Silicon Valley, that's where Apple is. For some reason, the default is Google and Facebook. And there's dozens of incredible hardware companies here, but they just don't have kind of the mindshare that I think some of the social media companies do.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's incredibly competitive, and it's never enough. And I think that it's easy to kind of get suck into the dark side of the valley, which there are people who suffer from depression and divorce and all this other stuff that people really don't talk about. And it's just like, it's incredible because people just kind of lose perspective. It's like, you can go start a company, be wildly successful by inner measure. But if you know the 10 people in the world more successful than you, you still feel like the 11th man on the list.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You know, I think that there's a lot of different reasons for that, but honestly, I think the dirty secret of the valley is that you always know someone more successful than you. So the Kaufman Institute has done a bunch of research and there's this term called the Midwest Curse. And it's like, why do you like companies in the Midwest typically exit early, one to two, three hundred million dollars? And it's because I think that I spent five years living in Albuquerque. If you sold a company for $200 million in Albuquerque, it's insane. You would be the most successful entrepreneur that Albuquerque has ever produced. Whereas if you sell company for $200 million in the valley, you're one of a dozen people at a party that might have done that as well. And I think that there is this kind of framing where like it's certainly got its downsides as well, but I think that the ability to see that people have gone on to start $100 billion companies every six to eight years in this ecosystem. I think kind of gives people a different perspective.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I think it's about understanding what application you're going for. Now is not the time to go build what I call the final robot. And you'll see this occasionally that companies are pursuing and it's like a biped and C3PO kind of stuff that can, you can just drop in and train to do anything. I think the best robotics companies started today will have like a singular use case where the ROI is obvious and apparent. So we're investors in a company called Marble, which does last mile delivery. And so especially as e-commerce has grown, as on demand has grown, we think there's going to be this growing and growing demand for on-demand delivery stuff and the ability to have a robot to actually go and do those deliveries is a key critical component of that.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Two things that I don't think are really that you can't bet on that will get better are locomotion and manipulation. So if your robot needs to drive around, you can't assume that, oh, like three years from now, my motors will cost a lot less. From a manipulation perspective, if you need a robotic hand, there's some technologies out there that are kind of emerging that could be interesting, but I think it's risky to bet that the hand will get better. Whereas if you have LIDARs in your robot today, you can assume that they're going to drop 5x in price in the next”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And I think that in general, great investments are hard but not impossible. If you want to go make a new jet engine, I don't think that's very good as a startup because at the end, it requires too many different expertise people with different types of expertise on top of just too much capital on day one. Whereas now, you know, the cloud has gotten so cheap and so easy to use. Like overall software has gotten much better and also easier to use. And hardware, the stack for a hardware company is shorter than it's ever been. And so that's why I think it's a great time to start a robotics company because it's hard enough that it's defensible but easy enough for a startup to do.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I really don't think it does, and I would also argue that what people consider core AI ML today is a bunch of nifty tricks. And so you see lots of nifty demos, but in terms of actual production AI or ML actually out there, a lot of it's a little bit mechanical turk. If you actually go back and look and say, well, you know, let's take a self-driving car company, for instance. They all have teams of people that are still tagging data manually. And if you go and look at application on application, a lot of it is large group of humans tagging data manually and then sure, you use a little bit of ML to make that easier or more scalable but every single use case you have to pick off individually.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, so there's five major kind of megatrends that are the reason robotics is happening. And I've got a good friend who says he likes to invest in companies at Surf Moore's Lob. And what that really means is that this is kind of a thesis from the late 90s and early 2000s of today maybe it's really expensive to do what you're doing. 18 months from now, Moore's Law says, okay, now it's pretty easy. And then 18 months later, it's cheap and easy because you get to ride the tens of billions of dollars of investments in kind of semiconductor. And so today what we're seeing in robotics is things like connectivity, cheap sensors, advances in computer vision, storage costs, and just overall computation. All of those things conspire to make the cost of starting a robotics company fraction of what it used to be.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, and so we really didn't actually pivot as much, it was more a reflection of kind of like what we are today. So today we talk about how we're a hands-on VC and what that means is we only do five to ten deals a year and then we're gonna dig in with them. So my partner Eric and our director portfolio Tim and my other partner Helen, all of us really sit down and try to get in with the companies and do things like product requirements documents, market requirements documents, really understanding kind of what that company needs. And so, you know, when we very first started, it was more of a classic kind of incubator model where you did two classes a year kind of stuff, but we quickly moved away with that. So we like to just say that we're a hands-on VC and that's how we operate.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, there's a couple different things. First and foremost, there are incredible design tools. So, you know, my first job in aerospace was in 2002 at Northrop Grummet. And at that time, cab machines are still $15,000 to $20,000 per computer, and the software is $15,000 or $20,000 on top of that. And it still sucked. Kind of fast forward to 2010, 2011, and today, any $500 computer can run incredibly sophisticated cat. And on top of that, the software is free. And then you kind of add in rapid prototyping like 3D printing, and you're kind of time for your first unit plus things like Arduino make it so it's orders of magnitude cheaper to get up and running.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I moved out here in 2010 with my good friend Helen Benisky. And our original intent was to do a startup as many people come into the valley to do. And we worked on one for a little bit and then kind of shut it down because the business case wasn't there. But really we started talking about starting a hardware company. And this is summer of 2011 and we started to talk to some other people and really found out that no one was interested in funding hardware startups. And so we asked around and we said, well, why? And they said, well, it takes too long and it's too expensive. And based on just like our friends and stuff I'd done in the Air Force, we just knew that that wasn't true anymore. So we made the fateful decision to start a venture capital fund.”

    2017-09-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Core AI Is Largely A Bunch of Nifty Tricks, Why Consumer Electronics Is The Hardest Thing To Do In Venture & Why Silicon Valley Will Dominate The Future of Robotics with Jeremy Conrad, Partner @ Lemnos Labs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source