Alina Cohen

Angel Investor · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderengineerexecutive@alibovacohen ↗

Alina Cohen co-founded the computer vision startup RecRec and led technology investments at Tamares Group. She previously served as a General Partner at Initialized Capital and is an angel investor.

17statements → 6claims → 2claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.18/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 5 assertions · 5 opinions · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Alina argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Cohen: Sand Hill Road VCs completely missed investing early in Palantir

“Pretty much all of Sandhill had completely missed the boat on Palantir, and this guy had been there, and he saw it early.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 6:21 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

How they sound: speaking style how? →

245 words/min while actually speaking · 0.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Alina Cohen: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 3 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 2,944 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Alina Cohen is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host 2/10

setup questions received 75%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play “Can I be contrarian here? I'm going to, I'm too, I'm too opinionated here. I always think it's micro segmentation around data and highly specialized data sets that actually makes k…” ▶ 20:03“Do you regret it?”

What they said17 Episodes1

Everything Alina Cohen said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Cohen: Machine learning benefits tech giants, not early-stage AI startups

“Machine learning is a leveraged play on data, so So it's the Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles of the world that are getting the most benefit from it. It's not the early stage startups.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 13:48 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Opinion

Cohen calls chatbots a fad due to limited natural language processing

“I'd have to say fad. Bad. I don't think that natural language processing NLP is there yet.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 20:17 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Opinion

Cohen: Current AI relies on data without enabling true reasoning

“That doesn't bring us any closer to the ability to reason, to create, or to do anything else that we associate with actual intelligence.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 13:30 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Insight

Cohen: Reaching computer vision's final 10% accuracy requires massive scale

“With computer vision, it's easy to get 90% of the way there, but the last 10% is nearly impossible unless you're at huge scale.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 5:38 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Assertion Supported

Cohen: Sand Hill Road VCs completely missed investing early in Palantir

“Pretty much all of Sandhill had completely missed the boat on Palantir, and this guy had been there, and he saw it early.”

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Cohen: Potential acquirer planned to gut LogDNA's product during acquisition talks

“In the case of LogDNA, they were going to gut a lot of the product and make it into something that was not what the founders wanted it to be.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 11:02 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Insight

Cohen: Engineering-centric founders pivot best because they can enter cockroach mode

“I think that when you're able to build the product yourself, when you're able to do the heavy lifting, I think you're also more flexible. Just, it's a way of thinking about things, and I found that those people have tended to be the most successful In terms of…”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 11:44 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Insight

Cohen: Highly valuable startups often grow without tech press coverage

“There's this thinking in the valley that there's one right way to do a startup. That you launch it on TechCrunch, you have a press cycle, you network at all these parties, but really there's so many different ways of doing it. There's this whole world of incre…”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 4:35 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Opinion

Alina Cohen: Always prioritize engineering-centric founders with deep expertise

“I don't know if I could pick one thing, there's one thing I would always pick, and that's engineering-centric founders with deep knowledge, deep expertise, and real secrets.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 8:01 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Assertion Supported

Alina Cohen: OpenAI relies on LogDNA for software logging

“They're used by OpenAI and a bunch of others”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 10:14 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Insight

Cohen: Accepting an acquisition makes founders players in someone else's game

“Transition from being your own game master to being a player in somebody else's game.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 10:49 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Insight

Alina Cohen: Voice interfaces enable true multitasking unlike traditional screen-based devices

“It's one of the few interfaces that doesn't force an interrupt that you can multitask with. With just about anything you're doing, you can keep doing it and still be using your voice, and with everything else involving computers, you more or less have to stop …”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 17:36 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Disclosure

Cohen: Initialized Capital is not yet actively investing in voice startups

“I'm not going to come out here and say that we invest in voice companies. We're really not sure yet, but it is a really interesting new platform.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 17:59 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Opinion

Alina Cohen: Amazon Alexa provides greenfield app opportunities like early Facebook

“And it reminds me of the Facebook platform back in the day in that there's just so much greenfield opportunity. There's so much opportunity to leverage the growth of Alexa to grow your own app.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 18:06 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Alina Cohen: LogDNA gained 800 customer signups on launch day

“And in the first day alone, they had 800 customers signing up”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 10:02 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Alina Cohen: Amazon Alexa is the most straightforward platform to develop on

“I've developed for a lot of platforms before, and this was by far the most straightforward Forward Development Experience”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 17:25 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Cohen predicts a growing market for translated Chinese science fiction

“There might be this whole market for Chinese sci-fi books translated into English coming up.”

Alina Cohen Aug 30, 2017 ▶ 19:33 20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Abl	Aug 30, 2017	13m

Alina Cohen

The record, in short

Their most notable supported claim

How they sound: speaking style how? →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Appearances (1)

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