Ash Fontana, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, explains Zetta's bottom-up market sizing tool and investment criteria.
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“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.”
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Opinion
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Insight
Ash Fontana: Proprietary Data Is Required for Superior AI Performance
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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…”
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AssertionNot 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…”
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AssertionPartly 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 FontanaNov 18, 2019▶ 36:1820VC: 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…”
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