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Ash Fontana

Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners · 1 appearance on the record.

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

investorauthorexecutivefounder@ashfontana ↗LinkedIn ↗ashfontana.com ↗

Ash Fontana launched AngelList's online investing and syndicate platform and served as Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, focused on artificial intelligence startups. He backed companies including Canva, Kaggle, and Groq, and authored the book The AI-First Company.

14statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.71/5average certainty → 2.57/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 1 opinion · 7 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 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 Ash argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

236 words/min while actually speaking · 1.6 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ash Fontana: 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 24 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 5,654 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Ash Fontana 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 55%

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

Opinion
Fontana: Programmatic sourcing of early-stage startups is a fool's errand
“The programmatic analysis of early stage companies, I think, is a fool's errand, and I have seen some of the best data in the world of AngelList. I've talked to all sorts of people experimenting with that data when I was there and since then, and it doesn't re…”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 7:03 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Ash Fontana: Proprietary Data Is Required for Superior AI Performance
“You need proprietary data to build a model that generates results that are far better than what someone else can generate by throwing commodity data into, you know, an openly available model.”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 11:10 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Fontana: AI-First Startups Build Compounding Advantages Unlike Traditional SaaS
“In SaaS, you're competing on features and integrations, and they're easy to copy, and it's just a rat race. And in AI-first companies, you can get this runaway advantage very quickly because the system compounds in value itself, like without it, without any ef…”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 16:59 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fontana: AI startups achieve 95% to 98% long-term gross margins
“You tend to start at 40 or 50% gross margin, but then you get to 95, 98%, we're seeing in some companies we work for gross margin, and then you just stay there. As opposed to SaaS companies, we're constantly having to build another feature or deliver a service…”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 25:08 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Assertion Partly supported
Fontana: European AI startups receive 10% of the funding given to US peers
“There's more research papers, AI research papers that is coming out of Europe than anywhere else, but European AI entrepreneurs get one-tenth funding of US entrepreneurs.”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 36:18 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Fontana: Legacy Software Incumbents Cannot Easily Build Consequential AI Models
“If you're a company that's not an AI first company that started sort of before this AI era, you can't really build any predictive models of consequence because you don't have any of that customer data and you have to sort of go back to your customers, renegoti…”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 9:29 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Disclosure
Zetta evaluates data moats across accessibility, fungibility, dimensionality, breadth, and perishability
“Data moats are indeed real, and we evaluate those data moats very carefully at the diligence stage, and we look at things like accessibility, fungibility, dimensionality, breadth, and perishability.”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 11:37 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Disclosure
Fontana: Zetta requires discounted market cap to exceed fund size
“And you know, if that number, which is the potential market cap of the company discounted to today is bigger than the size of our fund, then that's the starting point for thinking about making investment.”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 22:11 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Fontana: Workout-based networking is discriminatory; long walks are better
“I'm really hesitant to build work relationships this way because it can discriminate against people in all these little ways. So I think the only thing to try to answer Andy's question, the only thing I've found is, you know, just go on long walks with people …”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 32:51 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fontana: AngelList discovered Uber and Opendoor before other investors
“And at AngelList, we found companies like Ubers, Imogen, and Opendoor before anyone else, or before many others.”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 6:02 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Fontana: AI-first companies focus on predictive models, not product features
“AI first companies, on the other hand, they focus on building predictive models, not product features, getting quantitative feedback, not qualitative feedback, and from machine agents, from how the model's just running itself rather than human customers, and t…”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 8:46 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Fontana: Systems of Intelligence Capture Real-Time Unstructured Data Exhaust
“A system of record gets data in a structured form as it's manually entered by a human sort of after the fact in like instruction fields, so like a CRM or an ERP or something like that. A system of intelligence gets data usually in unstructured form, and it's a…”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 14:12 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Insight
Fontana: AI-First Startups Shift Toward Revenue-Sharing Business Models
“AI first companies tend to have a little bit more of a shared benefit model or a percentage of the increase in revenue model.”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 16:09 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Fontana: Audits household weekly for eco-friendly products and boycotts almonds
“Over the last couple of years, I've just been going systematically reducing my impact on the environment. And so this includes everything from cutting out meat, And not eating almonds and boycotting that industry. And actually every week I go through my house …”
Ash Fontana Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 31:12 20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today

The other half of the tape: Ash Fontana's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 3

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0021312019episodesmentions
0112019episodes it came up in
001.50.5312019episodesmentions per episode
2019 3 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Lear Nov 18, 2019 25m
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