Fontana: Systems of Intelligence Capture Real-Time Unstructured Data Exhaust
Ash Fontana · 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 · Nov 18, 2019 · at 14:12
Ash Fontana, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, defines the core technical distinction between traditional systems of record and AI-first systems of intelligence.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 automatically collected by machines as data exhaust as the product is used.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ash Fontana
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: 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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”