YouSaid · the spoken record

Roy Bahat

lines on the record
32
first
2016-04-13
most recent
2016-04-13
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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

  1. “There we go. I'll take that as if I can do that once this week, I'm happy. So thank you for that. I'll talk to you later.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So our most recent investment is not to disclose. You know, the reason I said yes, so this is actually very easy because we went through, we saw some Twitter conversation about, oh, a checklist of the things you invest in. And then we realized checklists are actually not the right way to think about it because it's not like, oh, if you have all these 10 things, we'll invest. And so we went through the effort. You can see it on our website of actually writing down our decision criteria for investing. And what we look for is there are a bunch of things that are tick boxes. Do we trust the founders or the deal terms fair? Is it in scope for us? But then really what you're looking for is one reason to believe the startup could potentially be an outlier. And sometimes it's the founder's experience. Sometimes it's early engagement data. In the case of this last investment, it was just an insight on a media market that was so different from anything I'd ever heard that I just thought we got to see how that turns out. I almost just wanted to invest just to see the next turn the next page in the book.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Media redefined is the thing I read every day. Jason Hershorn's newsletter about the media industry, which I read both because of its content and because Jason has a personality is just amazing. I should also disclose we're an investor, but I was reading it for years before we invested. And so I'm a big fan of that. And then there is a newsletter by Azim Azhar that's called, I think it's called the Exponential. And it is all about technologies that are the exponential view. All the technologies that are having exponential effects and obviously focuses on machine intelligence. And it's just he finds these things that I don't know where he finds. They're just terrific and he's got a warm tenor to him. This whole idea of human beings helping us to distill and simplify the world is, you know, despite all my earlier comments about machine intelligence is a really powerful and wonderful thing.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Divorced, or it's very, very difficult to get divorced. And so the bigger issues tend to come up when around trust, and this has only happened one or two times, but where a founder turned out had misrepresented something to us that was very material, you know, manipulated us. And we're very easy to manipulate because we're so transparent. I mean, when I give people a term sheet, I say, go shop it. It's not going to explode. I only want you to work with us because we're the best choice for you, not because I've put you under some time pressure. And I think that you can end up in these situations where people think that they have to play a certain game and then you end up having a trust break. And so the trust breaks are very difficult for us. And candidly, we're still trying to figure out what you do in those situations. Fortunately, they've been so few and far between that the vast majority of experiences we've had with founders are just making something as brutally difficult. We're behind you. Let's help make you better and go. And we'll roll dice and see if it works. And if it works, we'll all be through.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so and we have many cases where we're the only investor in a company. So here's the thing I'd say the founders are my customers. So it depends when you say messing up every founder struggles performance wise with some aspect of building an early stage company. And so our orientation then is to help them and work very hard. And if we thought that there was a better alternative than the founder for the business, we'd tell the person that. And then if they said, no, no, no, thanks. That's nice. That's your opinion. But I'm going to keep going. Generally, we would back them to keep going. In fact, every case, we back them to keep going. And so we're very straightforward about our views, but ultimately the founder is our customer, and we work for the founder. There is one other kind of way, though, which is when you hire an investor, it's a shotgun wedding, often because you've known the person maybe for a month or two, ideally for longer, but sometimes a month or two in a funding process is a lot. And then you're married and you can't get divided.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, one thing I'd say is there are many VCs who are very private and not doing the blogging, marketing, tweeting game, who have extraordinary curiosity and are wonderful human beings and are just somewhat less retweeted. And to me, that quality of being true to yourself and being curious is the thing that produces trust. Because when you fake expertise, you don't have or assume you know something you don't know. That's what puts distance between you and a founder because the founders are the ones who actually have to figure this out. That's the hard work.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “First of all, I'll just add I think there are many wonderful VCs. I just think it's that the typical VC is disastrous. What has yet to change is that we still believe at the very earliest stages that we know more than we can possibly know. We see these as little businesses when I call it quantum startup physics versus Newtonian startup physics, a business that is pre-product market fit. What is it doing? What market is it in? What is it working on? We don't have language for these very, very young businesses to understand their complexity and their ambiguity and their unknown ability. So I think a little more awe for the unknown for all of the people who invested in one business that only succeeded because it turned into something completely different. I think respect for the unknown is the biggest thing that I think we're missing as an industry and curiosity is the way.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Watership down. It's the story of these rabbits who go on a long journey to save themselves. And the reason I love it is A, it's a tale about unexpected leadership, you know, the leader in the novel is not the strongest, not the smartest, but a person who cares about the right answer and has extraordinary judgment. And because it reminds me of how all these settings that we human beings live in are so different from one another. But sometimes you transpose it into this silly tale about bunnies and you realize it's all kind of the same. We're fundamentally much more similar to each other than we are different. And that to me is a really inspiring message.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Is intrinsically more valuable to us because it was written by a person than the short story written by a machine, and we live in our human corner.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Know yet. I think it's very hard for us to imagine what that future will look like. So many assumptions will change. And so I think grappling with the questions now and elevating those questions is probably the best we can do. And my view on why work matters to people is it matters to people when it is necessary. The nobility of being a farmer when people have to farm in order to eat is extraordinary. You know, the nobility of doing something that becomes unnecessary can be compromised. And we need to figure out how we make sure that people are doing things that feel noble to them. I do think one logical conclusion of this might be what I call the human corner theory, which is that what jobs will human beings do? Well, they'll do the jobs when other people want to buy something specifically because it was made by a person. And we have a word for this, which is handmade. And we might imagine a world where, you know, the short story written by a person.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “At some point in the next 10 to 20 years. And I've been studying policies like the universal basic income in order to figure that out and see what we ought to do about it as a technology industry. Because if we're going to cause all this, we have to have a view on where society should go and try to build a constructive society”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Look, the good news version of it is if you'd been standing here at the dawn of the industrial age and said, 97% of people work in farms, all those jobs will go away. You know, you'd be right. But it happened slowly enough and enough new jobs were created that people satisfied their needs, which are think to be doing meaningful work that's necessary to subsist, you know, to make enough income in order to be able to live and to progress and grow. Like I think those are the core human work related needs. The only question with machine intelligence is because it is happening more quickly, will it happen so fast that it will be disruptive to the point of creating a crisis? You know, the number one job for men in the United States is truck driver, you know, let alone the self-driving car, the self-driving truck could put millions of people out of work. And my view is, A, that we probably will need to reconsider the relationship between work and subsistence.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Human oriented design, in the experience of it as opposed to the technology. And I think that's exciting because we'll have a wider range of businesses. I mean, one of the fascinating things to me about the startup world is how the nature of companies that get started is so similar to the communities that are starting companies. When you have a bunch of young people starting companies, of course, you know, food delivery and urban transportation, those tend to be things that young people care a lot about. I'm excited for when more people who are founders have been in the working world for 30 plus years and identify new needs, let alone, by the way, we don't invest in the space of things that serve people's personal lives. But if I did, I think services for the elderly are the number one untapped opportunity. And just wait till we have more 65-year-old tech founders because they'll see the opportunity.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Isn't that the million dollar literally question? I have no idea and I don't want to have an idea about it, by which I mean to say I could blovate and tell you, oh, I think it'll be task management or document retrieval or analytics or sales. But sort of like the early days of the software industry, it is too soon to see exactly how this will shake out. I mean, I think we tend to be obsessed with first in the technology industry and first loses to best every time. The first iOS app companies were not the best iOS app companies, platform after platform. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing here. What I'm excited by is the world is now a grand natural experiment where founders are just building all kinds of stuff. And as the founder of Howdy pointed out to me, Ben Brown, who's extraordinary, he said, you know, it's a different kind of developer that's building these tools. It's a developer that's more interested in.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Produce the biggest winners. It's funny, Peter Thiel has this whole thing, of course, about picking markets in which there's no competition. But Facebook, his most successful single investment ever, started in a year when I think there were 26 other college social networks started that year. And so the competition isn't bad. It's just a signal of opportunity there. But it can be a little bit maddening. And what you try to do is just ignore it, is have your beliefs and ignore the way that the fads in startup company creation oscillate around your beliefs.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I mean, look, as with anything where you are standing in front of a steamroller as it comes by, there's a dangerous aspect to it and a powerful aspect to it. The powerful aspect is lots more people are thinking about these techniques, and that means lots more founders. And, you know, the world of startups is constrained by one variable, which is the quality, the quantity of extraordinary founders. And so more people doing this is great. On the other hand, it's not so fun when you work on something and really I credit my partner Siobhan, as I mentioned, and also James Cham, who is another of our partners, with opening my eyes to it. And then all of a sudden, the rest of the world thinks it's almost a cliche. AI, we funded the first Slackbot company that was funded, which is Howdy. And then the next Y combinator class comes and you have many, many, many chatbot companies, those moments of intense competition tend to.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, it's sort of like asking can you build a big standalone software company in the sense that the software has to be applied to something useful in order to be valuable? So is Amazon a commerce company that uses software or is it a software company? If what you're talking about is I guess I'd call them method-only companies, you know, some technology that you think can be applied to a wide variety of situations and you're not really building around any one of them, then yes, then I do think that is aquaire terrain. And I also think that machine learning as a technique, now to get specific on a technique, I mean, it just seems like every startup and every big company has all of a sudden crossed out data scientists in all of its most wanted job requisitions and then replaced it with machine learning. It's just this talent area where everybody knows it's important and is gasping for expertise. And there aren't even that many people who know how to apply the techniques all that well, let alone invent new ones.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And so, not just in software and not just in machine intelligence, I think this, the open source idea is a very powerful model for interacting, as powerful as the line managed corporation. There are a lot of misunderstandings about it, but it can really work. And specifically in machine intelligence, yes, I think that whenever developers have attention on an issue, the quality of software in that issue tends to go up relatively quickly. And there's no question that's going to be the case for machine intelligence.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think that when you think about how the future of work is done generally, not just in software, open source is probably the single most important new method that we as a working culture have invented, period. And let me describe why. One of the things I said earlier is we didn't like that VCs are secretive, and so we try to be the most transparent VC possible. An early way we did that is we said we started writing up our kind of manual for how we would run the fund, what investments would we make, how would we ask diligence questions, all this stuff. And then we decided to publish it. And then we thought, but if we're going to publish it, it's going to change a lot. And we're going to want to invite comments from the community. It turns out if you want to have a business document that changes a lot in public and collaborates with outsiders and insiders to evolve it, open source actually tends to be a great way to do that. And so we published our manual to GitHub and released it under an open source license.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, sure, there are. I mean, there's the competitions like ImageNet and then Kaggle, which is another of our portfolio companies, publishes some of its data sets in public. And so sure. The issue is if you're looking at the same data everybody else is looking at, then you really do have to be smarter than everybody else for it to work, which if you're doing a Kaggle competition is kind of the point. You're competing to see who can come up with the best algorithm to describe some effect on a particular data set. But if you're trying to build a startup, then it's good to think that you might have some data that might one day be your own.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Words, you'll get more better applicants, or you'll get a more balanced gender mix of applicants. And that idea of being able to predict the effects of something while you're working on it is a really powerful one. Imagine a journalist to see how well a podcast episode will do based on the text of your introduction, that kind of thing. It could be really exciting.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Apply it to a bunch of different situations, then I think the going is very hard. You probably have to start with some consulting services. It's just difficult to find examples where that's worked. That said, if your startup is, let me take some pretty well understood AI techniques and apply them to a new use case where I can get access to the data and then create a virtuous cycles where you get more data, which gives you a better experience, which gets you more users, which gets you more data, then it can work. So I'll give you an example of a company like that is one of our portfolio companies is Textio, which analyzes business text. They start with job descriptions, and we've all used a spell check and remember the magical feeling the first time you saw the little red line under a misspelled word. This is like that only instead of checking spelling and grammar, it predicts the results of a business document while you're writing it. So it'll look at a job description and say, if you change the”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, so I think that's true. My partner, Siobhan Zillis, who two and a half years ago was the first one on our team who said, hey guys, machine intelligence is a big deal. Let's start paying attention. And she began by doing this survey that she's now updated annually of more than 2,000 machine intelligence startups. And one of her early conclusions was that at least today, access to the data is the limiting factor, which means, by the way, not only do companies like Facebook and Google have an advantage, but pretty much every old industrial incumbent, if it has a way of getting at its data and making use of it, also has an advantage. In a way, it swings the pendulum back toward the bigger organizations. And so does that mean that startups have no chance? No, there are plenty of opportunities for startups. And I'll give you the warning and the opportunity. The warning is if your startup is, hey, I've got a black box that does machine intelligence, let me try to.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It can pass the Turing test and be confused for a human being is just a lot less important than whether it does lots of useful things for us, everything from beating a human cardiologist in the performance of diagnosing heart issues with an MRI to routing us through traffic, to turning off dangerous processes at a factory to dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, name your use case.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's a great question. Yes, I think machine intelligence will eat software while software is eating the world. And here's the reason why the biggest advance in software in the last few years on the side of how the software actually works as opposed to how it's consumed where the biggest events is mobile. But the biggest advance in how the software works is the continuing explosion of the volume of data that is available and slightly more slowly that is in use. And so the quote-unquote big data thing turns out to have produced a number of very valuable technologies, not that many valuable businesses. And part of it is because the data on its own, as everybody knows, is just information. Machine intelligence is the layer that takes all of that data and applies it to things that are useful for us. And so in that sense, I do think it eats absolutely everything. I think whether or not”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So let me instead take the cluster of terms because I'm technology curious. I'm not the right person to give you the precise technical definition. But the way we think about it is techniques like deep learning and machine learning are different classes of methods used to generate insight from data. And we can get more specific about whether they're classifiers or doing something else. But those are techniques. And AI has unfortunately come to mean a hodgepodge of things. So we actually try to avoid talking about AI. And the reason is AI has come to mean both the cluster of all those techniques and”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “In that case, I wouldn't know anything about it, but you can keep going. Okay, well, I mean, here, I wouldn't either, because apparently I'm not according to you. You're not there yet.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Quite the opposite. In fact, just last week, I said no to a company that both me and my partner James were looking at. And six hours later, after he and I talked, he wrote to them and said, I'm overruling Roy and I'm saying yes. So that might have been a little disorienting for the founder. But ultimately, I think it was the right decision for us because our view is, look, we invest in startups that try to make the future of work better. Everybody knows the best ideas are highly polarizing. And so we've set up a model to try to harness their polarizing effect to make the best decision, which is to say, we want to say yes when there is one person on our team who is very excited about it.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Taking it and are in a position to decide whether to give you money. So I remember early in the life of Bloomberg Beta, one of my partners came to me and he said, I'm going to recommend we do this deal. And I was like, what do you mean recommend? I don't have any opinion on whether we should do that deal or not. If you want to do it, you should just do it. And that's why we have this any one person says yes on our team. We do a deal. So anyway, that's how it came to be.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “With founders where they can really understand your intent, not that making money is the most important thing, but just that it's legible. And then I thought about all the things I didn't like about VC. And then the question was, could you just flip the bit 100% the other way on all those things? So for example, I really didn't like the secrecy of it. I didn't like that I would spend weeks angling to get a meeting with somebody through a very trusted relationship, only to end up in the room and realize, oh, crap, you don't actually fund this kind of business. So that sort of thing. And then the other thing is I didn't like the partnership dynamics of most of the venture firms that I encountered. I mean, specifically, you know, you develop a wonderful relationship with a partner or partners. And then comes the grand moment of decision. And all of a sudden you find yourself staring down a bunch of people who have much less experience in the thing you're doing, haven't really thought about it that much, are clearly not taking your thing with the same seriousness that you're”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “In fact, most of my own experiences with VCs were fairly negative. But then the Bloomberg guys called and said, hey, we want to do a corporate VC, and we've worked with you before because ages ago I had worked with them when I was in city government. And it looks like you know something about startups. Would you like it to do it together? And my initial response was a long rambling rant about the ills of VC and corporate VC in particular. And then the Bloomberg guys did something very smart, which is they said, okay, okay, that's great that the model is broken and VCs lose money. And they're not actually that helpful and all this stuff. But if you had to design it in a way that would work, how would you design it? So that was an interesting thought exercise. And we invented what became Bloomberg Beta, which is to say fix the issues with corporate VC by investing just to make money because it's the only way I know to have a fully transparent relationship.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “No, I mean, I actually was a big skeptic about technology generally. I got offered my first job in technology writing HTML in 1994. And I looked at these blue links and I was right out of high school. I looked at these blue links and I thought nobody will ever use this thing. So it just goes to show how smart I am. And then it took more than a decade before I realized my folly and that after being in government, I worked in New York City government after 9-11, after working in professional services, after working at a big Fortune 500 media company. I finally, finally realized, as is common for many, mostly by accident, that, hey, it turns out startups are the fastest and most reliable way to change the world. And then, you know, I started one and helped a bunch of others, invested and that kind of thing. And I had zero intention of becoming a VC.”

    2016-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Machine Intelligence Will Eat The World Of Software with Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source