YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Fitzpatrick

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-12-31
most recent: 2025-12-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“People we bring in did not go to college and we assess them on cognitive aptitude and skill. And so I think the really positive note I would leave on is I think the way that people learn, the topics they learn, the way we look at resumes and how to screen and assess people will move in a really positive direction. And I think a very different one that we've had the last hundred years.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly is better now than it has ever been in any point in history. You can take any topic on Earth and with just an internet connection learn you can go through and you can pick your topic. And I think one of the reasons that's particularly important is educational system we've had for the last 10, 15 years, actually 50 years, doesn't really work. I mean, we have massive K through 12 challenges with STEM topics in the US, for example. We have huge learning gaps largely driven by socio-demographic context. And most of our educational system is based around like teach people biology, English, and history, and not teach them about basic things like FICO scores or how to do coding. And to add to all that, the college system has created a student debt crisis where people way too many people are going to colleges that are not worth going to for and taking on enormous amounts of debt to do it. So I actually think, again, I think the way our educational system will shift, will function, will shift material. We're a talent assessment company, an enormous amount of time.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at U.S. healthcare, we spend 14,000 per capita per year on patients in the U.S. So that's like a rough spend. That's $2,500 to $3X, like Germany and Canada spend as an example. If you then break down the context of that, 9% of that roughly is administrative, something like 25% of it's waste, and then actual cost of care is really challenging. I mean, Johns Hopkins just released a stat that 250,000 deaths a year happen because of avoidable errors. You see things in AI like 20% better identification of breast cancer risk, for example. So I think actually healthcare is another one where the cost framework for healthcare has been not good over the last 20 years, and the cost of care improvements will be really material if AI works well. So I think that's another one. I think the one I'm probably most excited about is education. If you're a kid growing up in any socioeconomy disadvantaged city in the world, your ability to learn about any topic on earth incredibly...”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I think despite some of my callism on enterprise adoption, I actually am an AI optimist and I actually think that the current narrative on some of the risks are far outweighed by some of the benefits. And just to give a couple examples, right? And I'll go through four, including healthcare. If you take energy as an example, right? There's a lot of question around like data center implications for energy, but you do the math right now. Data centers are about 1% of total global electricity usage. AI data centers are 0.25 to 0.5% of that. actually really small I don't even know cooling electricity air conditioners is 14 to 20 of global electricity usage AI has so many different ways with grid optimization cooling where I mean the World Economic Forum just came out and said it's going to be massively net positive from a environmental impact standpoint so I think energy is one where if you think about all the energy needs we're going to have and the investment now going to clean energy because of all this I think we'll actually be in a much better place 10 years from now I think healthcare is another”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, challenged at 78% alpha margins actually ever existed. What I mean by that is there's the gross margin. But if you look at like profitability in public software multiples, it's fascinating, right? In the last two years, you've seen public software multiples go from 20x to 10x, partly because of growth changes and partly because as they move profitable, their growth slows materially. And what you realize is like, I actually would take the flip side of this, which is the integrated units will be very, very profitable because the way they grow, they'll be able to acquire customers faster, build them things that are good faster, and so they won't have the box stickiness, but they'll also, I would argue a lot of those software companies below the line were not that profitable.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serving a customer need, not selling that customer software, if that makes sense. And so I think from an adoption standpoint, one way to do this is to bet on AI agents, which are more of like a SaaS paradigm who will sell stuff to customers. And the other way to think about it is what are business models that will change because of this. And I think there's a whole host of like, you know, Gen AI native services businesses are very, like, you know, tax accountancies, et cetera, are really interesting examples of that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disruptive. So you mentioned Revolute and Banking, for example, or you could go into like loan servicing. There's many different areas where people are standing up new businesses. One of the most interesting stats I've heard recently is if you look at why Combinator's recent class, I think it's like the largest, it's 2x the revenue of any prior class. And many of those are businesses.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Look, you know, I think it's an interesting question because I think a lot of the reason people are investing in the agents out of the box is that they're trying to apply a SaaS paradigm of what's worked historically to AI, which is challenging. The model building layer is clearly producing amazing returns. I think the AI agent layer is more complicated. Now, where I think that's also complicated is the application layer is tricky too. And I think you hear a lot of commentary on this like many of the applications may or may not work. They're not really getting full workflow embedding. They're more of like kind of nice to have in workflow context. So actually my counterintuitive take would be one interesting question of the paradigm now is whether new companies built around AI get distribution faster than big companies figure out how to adopt AI. I think that's like the interesting paradigm for our society. And so I think some of the most interesting new businesses are actual businesses using AI in the physical world that are AI native and that will be high.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That out of the box agents will solve everything with a push of button. That is, I think, the biggest misconception now is that I think many people were hoping the adoption curve will be, I buy something, I just push into my business and it takes a whole process and fixes it. And I think they're realizing it requires training, fine-tuning, and a whole host of process redesign and business ownership.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but a CEO that I respect a lot when I took the role, I asked him his advice to what's the best way to think about a team? And he said, look, your job as a CEO is to do three things really well. Recruit rate people, create a culture where they love working together and build great things and try and make them all extremely rich. And I think it's a funny framework, but I think an interesting way to think about like that is my responsibility to employees. I want to find great people, help them enjoy each other, and then build something that becomes big and helps solve them achieve their dreams.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Databricks, which is you're going to be like, well, they're very rated. But look, I think their tech is great. And I think that it's interesting in a lot of ways the most useful foundation for AI is really good Databricks infrastructure. I think when I hear a customer has them, I'm always very happy.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do in some ways. I think that I feel very lucky to be building something at this particular time and with a group of people I love working with. This happens to be what I spent my last decade doing and it happens to suddenly now what a lot of people wanted, which is great. And so I feel very lucky because of that. And so every day I wake up and see what else can I do to kind of push that forward. And so I do kind of live on the road. But look, I think some of the things I've tried is like, you know, you figure out things like FaceTime. Make sure you keep the cadence interaction high because being on the road is stuff. But I also don't think it's forever. I also think I'm in that fun stage of trying to take something to like we kind of went zero to one and now we're trying to go one to end but we're not yet you know fully mature public company or anything like that and so i think she's been very understanding throughout that process”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the first thing is to find a great girl who understands that you are really passionate about what you're doing and is supportive of that. I think my girlfriend Claudia has been great on that front. I am very appreciative of that. But look, I mean, it's tough. I'm on the road probably 60% of the time. If you look at my last five weeks, Riyadh, Geneva, Paris, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Boston, Singapore, now London again. So, I mean, that's a huge.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of frameworks that you can integrate the new tech into. And that has to be a core function of the business is five-year strategic planning is not a useful exercise right now in a lot of ways. I think you want to think about five years in terms of the cultural context you build, the organizational, like the institutional memory, to use the seven powers framework, but the actual iteration cycles are much, much faster. And I think if you don't react quickly, that does not sustain. And now I think the interesting flip side of that is enterprise sales cycles, for example, are much longer. So it's not like you can't survive unless you're making decisions. But I do think the big thing is a lot of the tech being developed changes every two to three months. And so you need to be constantly incorporating that into what you build.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like actually, if you look at the function of an army, at some point it moves into people in the field make the decisions. And so you have to have the training, the strategy of recruiting to do that, and then you have to empower your teams to work. And I think I think about a lot of that very similarly. The second thing I think a lot about is in the AI world at least, strategy is a somewhat overrated concept. And what I mean by that is I think actually all strategy, I was talking to a CEO in the biotech space, and he was saying that strategy is very important for them because every time they make a capital decision, it's a seven-year capital cycle, right? And so in that case, strategy makes a lot of sense. But in the AI world, one thing that's been interesting to me is every three months, the entire world changes. And I just had to get very comfortable with that dynamic. You have to think about your investment life cycle as core beliefs you have and then 30 to 40 percent of things that you iterate constantly based on new tech. So there is tech that you're going to build, like a new voice agent comes out that will become obsolete. And you have to just be very comfortable that you're building an interoperable.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think two things I would highlight. One is that I think control is a bit of a fallacy depending on the volume of things you have going on. Meaning I actually think the question earlier on hiring great people, if you're serving several, you know, let's say a couple years from now you're serving a couple hundred customers on different topics, you actually need to have values, consistent tooling, consistent approaches, but you need to empower all those teams at the edge to operate and do what they will. And so actually one of the focuses I've made over the course of the year is to reduce a lot of our hierarchy, make the organization way more flat so that companies, that people at the edge serving customers are empowered to make decisions. They have decision-making frameworks, they have consistent tooling, but they are empowered, I think, trying to control that centrally maybe works in like a manufacturing business, but you lose a lot of latency of decision making. I think if you look at, like, there's a lot of, interestingly, military history that would say the same thing.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the benefit of integration is if stuff comes up on a Saturday or you're pushing on a new product bill, like you will work on that Saturday. But if you do that from your home, that's totally fine. I think office culture to me is like if you took a hypothetical thought experiment and you said over a year, I think there is a diminishing.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exponentially, yes. I think if you take engineering as an example, I think you can execute engineering tasks remotely, but the process of working through really thorny problems. So I've tripled the size of the engineering team. And what I can tell you, the interesting thing is vast majority of those people wanted to be in person. Now, I'm not saying that's true of all engineers, but it was interesting how many people, particularly the younger tenures, were like, I want to be co-located, I want to work through things. And so I don't even mandate office attendance. I just have it in those offices and we have huge appetite. I was with our, we have 40 people in our London office. I was with many of them last night. They were all commenting on how many of them come in voluntarily, even on like a Friday where they might not need to because they like being around their peers. I think that I would actually bifurcate two separate things, and I don't think they're related. One is the hours you work seven days a week, very flexibly depending on client needs exist, from physical co-location. I actually don't think they're related, meaning”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we were a fully remote company for nine years until I took over. We've now gone largely in person. We do have some folks work remote, but we now have offices in New York. We took the old Pinterest space in San Francisco, London, Paris, Poland, DC, and just opening Austin, Texas now. And I think the interesting thing I've experienced since that is I do think remote, you really struggle to build culture in the same way. So I think that the things I've experienced since We Remote is just a way stronger positive culture of co-location, which I think people enjoy their work and get to know their coworkers a lot better as a result of it. I think it gives us a lot more depth with customers to be co-located in cities where we spend time with them. Like if I take London and Paris, we need to be co-located with the customers there. It can't just be, you know, someone in a Zoom screen in New York.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting if you look at the players in our space, there have been very different levels of capital raised, and people had success more and less. I actually think a lot of our investment is in different areas than many of our peer setting AI training are focused on. A lot of it's in things like the enterprise, it's in core software platforms that are maybe a little bit different than what they're focused on. So I think you can raise a lot of money, and the question is where you spend it. Again, I actually think most of the capital we need in the next five years is more enterprise focused. I think we've actually built something on the IT side that feel very, very good about.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the simplest answer I'd have to that is that growth in this industry relates to the amount of capital you raise and your earlier question on investment. I do think there's a world in which if you pursue hyperscale growth, it is possible, but you have to invest a lot more to do that like every new company, every new customer you're onboard does cost money to do the four deployment engineering work. You invest more in your tech. And so there is an interesting like, do you run a business for consistent steady growth for 20 years or do you try and build something that gets to 50 to 100 billion dollars and becomes game changing? And we have very much tried to operate in a way where I think we have a path to profitability and everything else, but we are going to invest in the near term because I think it is a very interesting time to do that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are definitely parts of our, like, I think if you take our delivery and operations teams, they're in war mode quite a bit of the time. So I think, again, I'm more describing general, I think, countercultural beliefs I have on how to hire certain sets of gray people. I don't think it applies to every single function of the company. I would agree with that. I think there are definitely, you have to be able to push really hard to deliver certain outputs. And I think we do a great job of that. But I also think, you know, there have been ideas of like every great engineer should be able to spend 30% of their time on new projects as well as sprinting on the existing ones. I think it's paradigms like that that are important.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's actually right. And let me caveat what I said I think it's also the nature of the business I'm in being AI. Meaning I actually think that's a very true statement if what you're trying to do is scale a relatively consistent business model to do one or two things, then that is a function of execution and hiring people to go in very specific roles and do very specific things well. And I actually, sorry, let me caveat my prior comments on that. I think the difference is a lot of what we do is research and exploration fundamentally, right? And so in the AI world, it is a different dynamic in that you're trying to figure out very specific problems with customers to solve and build really unique tech. And so I think in that world, you do have a different cultural dynamic. It is a research culture as much as it is an implementation culture.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really enjoy going to work every day where they're intellectually challenged and where they feel like they can unleash creativity. And so I think I spend a ton of time thinking about that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think not just higher. Higher, retain, and evolve, great people. Because I actually think you have to give them a platform that they enjoy day to day. I think the two things that I believe that somewhat counterintuitive is when you recruit a great person, I don't think about role most of the time. Meaning I think people are very role focused of like, I will hire this person and they will only do oil and gas as an example, right? But the reality is really good people will run five to six different roles across the seven to eight different products, particularly on the business side. You may have somebody that does everything from delivery to sales to account. And you can be comfortable with that if you hire great all-around athletes in a lot of ways. And I think the second thing is it has to be fun. My view on one of the narratives that has gotten a bit lost in the last couple years is if you have a culture that is brutal to work at, people will leave. They might stay around as long as your stock's high, but they're not going to stay. And I think you have to create an environment where people...”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's probably the topic I spent an enormous amount of time focused on that. It's probably a topic I think about the most because I actually do think if you get amazing people, everything else will follow from that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Setting a vision and trying to figure stuff out and actually iterating a lot of stuff. And I do think we ended up building a lot of things that really worked, but it took time and it took iteration as much as anything else. It took iteration and trust. So I would say the counterintuitive thing is I didn't fake it and then I never told people would definitely work. I would actually, my entire approach would be to say, I think this would work. This is my reasoning why I think it would work.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great example. And so I think what I was doing that in the early days partly because there was very little media coverage or interest in it. I was kind of figuring stuff out from first principles. And so I think the degree to which I faked out I make it was I had to figure out other people I worked with and customers that trusted me enough to allow me to co-iterate and develop stuff with them. I had to figure out a way to recruit really good people. That was actually like I actually think if you take any business very simplistically it's a question of can you build trust with customers and co-iterate to develop and make things work and then can you recruit unbelievable people to deliver that? And it actually really comes down to recruiting in a lot of ways. I think that that's actually the number one thing we focus on. I think of us as a talent company as much as anything else. You could argue that like not to use a sports analogy, but like Nick Saban did not build Alabama football with the process. He built it with recruiting the best football players in the country. And I think about that the same way. You have to recruit great people. So in some degrees, in the early days of that, you know, 10, 12 years ago, I was.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you've never gone through InfoSec and approvals of the bank, and look, for very good reason, banks are much more complicated to do a bill like that in, right? And so I think what was...”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To try and figure out what information, not now, but this was 12 years ago, they had very little information on the script to say customer information, what they might sell. So I had a lot of conviction that that would work. I did not know what would be most interesting. In fact, there were areas I thought would be really interesting, like banking were actually much harder to do this inconsistently. It was somewhat you mentioned earlier, like the average bank spends 93% of its cost, of its tech cost on maintain initiatives, 7% go into building new things.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I first started working, and it wasn't even called AI back then, it was kind of data analytics was what it was actually called. This is probably 12 years ago or 13 years ago now, probably 12 years ago. And I think the firm gave me a pretty interesting purview to try and explore where I could build out AI offerings across different sectors and customer bases. And I don't think I knew what I was going to build candidly. I think that the interesting dynamic is I had a lot of conviction that, and partly because some of the things I'd done before, that AI could be really useful on a whole host of things from inventory forecasting to pricing to credit underwriting. If you just thought intuitively of the sources of data, the fact that, so 70% of the software in America is over 20 years old. Most of that data is massively fragmented, not clean. And so a lot of the decisioning that happens in the enterprise is done in a really fragmented way. And this is what I did know. I did know that if you took your average sales rep making a call, most of the time they're like Googling some.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that I did see that. And look, I think robotics is another one that will take longer, but we'll be really interesting when it works. But by the way, I think even in that case, you'll need more task-specific robotics, not just broad-based.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SaaS box, I know it will work. If I deliver an agent in the current world, there was actually a report AWS came out with today that's interesting. Like 70% of agents are actually not even AI agents as you think of it. Most of the agentic processes today are actually traditional script writing and just traditional automation, right? And I think that's why I don't self-identify as an agent company actually at all. I think we do AI agents. We do AI workflows are a core part of what we do, but we do data. We do training fine-tuning. And agents are one tool in the toolkit because I think too much emphasis on them a lot of the time won't work.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's such an interesting question. I think it depends on what faking it means, right? And one of the things I think is really complicated about Gen AI is it's non-deterministic, right? So like if you've never built a machine learning model to do pricing in industrial manufacturing, you can still understand what data is available, understand how the price is being set today, and get pretty comfortable that what you build, if you say you will build it, will work. And I think that is okay. I think the challenge of non-deterministic systems is there is more risk to faking until you make it. Meaning if you can kind of go out and say your agent will do anything, then you actually have to deliver an agent that works, right? I think that's part of the interesting, you're asking about an accounting dynamics, is I think it's part of the interesting dynamic of like a lot of the contracts that the people will sign right now are like, I'll sign for 50 agents to be delivered. But then the question is, do you deliver the agents? Do they work? And so I think that is a different thing than SAS to go to go back to your earlier question. If I deliver”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I guess it's all a question of degrees, and I think in my mind, I want to say things where the narratives are the same to the public and to what our team thinks and what our customers experience. And so I think that's part of why I have focused on saying some of the nuances of what's not working and not claiming everything works out of the box. And I think that is a different approach. But it's been a core to how we've thought about building the brand is we are building this around trust where like I want a company we work with to know that if I say this will work it will work and I think you only get one chance to do that right”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So hypothetically, if I was going around saying we have an out of the box agent that does everything, and then that wasn't actually true, that's what either creates opportunity for others or risk for us. That's how I think about it. And so I think what's been very important for me and how...”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I do think branding matters a lot. My view now is that it's been very helpful for us to spend time where I spend a lot, I spend about 70% of my time on the road. And I go to a lot of conferences, things like that. And I think building a brand is really important for trust, for awareness, for engagement. And so, and I think also how you tell that story is really important. So I'm very much a believer. One of my favorite quotes, like Mark Andreessen has this idea that when private and public narratives diverge, that is the risk or the opportunity. So meaning if you say things you don't believe to be true, or if everyone's saying things that don't believe true, then what is the actual private narrative? So I think it's been very important to me to make sure.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so to some degree. I think Invisible is a culture of we believe in doing great work for customers and we were kind of not really focused on telling the whole world about that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was interesting when I took over, we had had, if you looked at the entire public internet, I think there was one article available. And so we've definitely spent a lot more time this year thinking about it.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the simplest answer is actual physical world interactions. So what I mean by that is I think a lot of the most interesting data that we don't even really have access to yet is things that exist in the physical world that are more complicated to acquire and organize. So I'll give you an example. We're serving one of the largest agricultural conglomerates in the US on herd safety, so actually like monitoring risk factors, when should you send a vet for their herd of cows, basically. That whole process relies on us actually sending for deployed engineers to farms, dropping starlink terminals into those farms and building out custom computer vision models in those contexts. And I think there are so many different physical world contexts that become really, really interesting, but it does take costs and capital to build those out. I think oil and gas, oil rigs are an interesting one as an example. And so I think physical world interactions.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I mean, to me, it was a simple one, which is if you think about the dynamics of return on capital, you can either harvest capital or invest capital, and your decision to invest depends on the growth you see as a result of that investment. And I think we're in the greatest environment for growth that has ever existed. I think Invisible is really uniquely positioned to capitalize on that growth, too. And so I think of our five core platforms, I think of the growth vectors across both AI training and enterprise. And there were just way too many different things I thought were interesting to invest in. It was the clear best use of capital. And look, I'm trying to build this for the next 10 to 20 years. And I think if you want to build enterprise value for 10 to 20 years, now is the time to invest and build. And I hope we never get to the harvest stage, but it's definitely not now.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This year we have started to invest a lot more. So, I think one of the big differences historically Invisible had only raised $7 million of primary capital in its entire nine-year journey. We initially announced 100 effectually right now, raised $130 million. And so I'm investing very heavily in technology. So we will not be profitable this year, no.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McKinsey days. McKinsey go on block days. That was the thing I realized was different about traditional ML models versus Gen AIs. In machine learning, you can backtest, you can get to a really clearly statistically validated outcome without any human intervention. I think on the Gen AI side, you are going to need humans in the loop for decades to come. And I think that is something that most people are starting to realize. I think it's always confusing to people when they hear like, oh, that's how models are trained on the back end. I didn't realize that's how the statistical validation works. And so I think that's been an interesting evolution curve as people started to realize that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think the biggest one is just the view that when I first started this job, the main pushback I always got was that synthetic data will take over and you just will not need human feedback two, three years from now. And it's interesting. From first principles, that actually doesn't make very much sense if you think through it, right? If you think about the diversity of tasks that exist in the world and then how long it would take you to get comfortable with the accuracy, it doesn't make any sense, right? Like I'll take legal services because it's a really interesting one, right? A lot of legal data in the world exists with big law firms. It doesn't even exist in the public. So if you take like the corpus of publicly available information, that's been commoditized for years at this point, right? And so most of the logic is incredibly contextual to language, culture, multimodal context, and the information stored in individual companies, as an example. And so the only way to actually do the fine-tuning process consistently and to get it accurate for any specific context is RLHF. And I actually think in my decade in my”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, good question. Well, I think Airbnb has one consistent fee. That's the difference. There's actually a fair amount of variation based on the skill side of the expert. Like you don't have a consistent rate relative to the booking amount. That's the biggest difference. So there's huge variety depending on the project, the expertise type, the expert type of what you book on that.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is revenue. I think that the rate you get on every project is different. The margin you make on every project is different. So I do think it is revenue. And I think that the...”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they are both competitors in different ways to different parts. All of those players are competitors in different ways, different parts of our business. I think I call out Palander because I think they realized 10 years before the rest of the kind of tech market that for deployed engineering customization would be important. And I think that was a very countercultural leap at the time. I spend a lot of time running for deployed engineering teams and most of what I saw with players like Accenture. What was called tech services back then was not a place that anyone wanted to play in. And so Powder spent a decade before anyone realized it was important building good tech, right? And so I have a ton of respect for that and the culture they built out of that. I think on the AI training side, I won't comment on anyone specific. I think all the players in the space are good and they all do different things well.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In both AI training and an enterprise, I don't think the answer is one player. I think actually, interestingly, in the enterprise historically, there's probably it's been Palatine or not many others, so that's kind of, I think, why you've seen more people want alternative options to that. I think that's part of the reason you've seen so much excitement on enterprise AI recently. I think most of these markets end up with three, four, or five players. I don't actually think it's even two. And I think the choice in consumers is markets tend to create that, and that's a good thing, right? Like, I think you'll have some specialization on certain topics, you know, maybe some better at coding, some better at specialist tasks, some better at PhDs, but I think it'll stay with a fair amount of choice.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't actually. So I think one of the challenges is that the adoption curve of this stuff is going to take a lot longer than people expect. So I do think, I said this to you earlier, like I think on enterprise, this is a five to ten-year adoption journey, not one to two. And so I think you have a dynamic where people will have a lot of time to react and to think about what's useful in addition to that. And so I actually find a lot of the people coming out of college right now are some of the highest adopters of this and the most useful for these kind of tools. And so we're hiring more and more people that profile, not less. But I think the usage curve of that group of people, certain tasks will not be done, but there will be many more. So I'll give an example. Accounting.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has a context, I don't know if you've heard the bank do this thing called model risk management, where they actually do a whole host of validation and testing on things like redlining before they roll a model out. That's what the enterprise is going to have to do. And so it's not that the model improvement doesn't matter. I actually think the benchmarks are a good way to get some sense of model improvement, but they're almost orthogonal to enterprise uptake. I think enterprise uptake depends on trust and precision on specific tasks at 99% accuracy, not generalizability.”
2025-12-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Enterprises Will Not Adopt AI without Forward-Deployed Engineers | Who Wins the Data Labelling Race: How Does it Shake Out? | How Synthetic Data Threatens the Future of Human-Generated Data with Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source