Ash Fontana
Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
3shows
3appearances
56statements
5resolved
2supported
1contradicted
40%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Ash Fontana said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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: All Software Will Become Intelligent Software
“And we met, and we just had this mind meld around, like, this next era of computing, and that is, all systems, all software will become intelligent software.”
Fontana: Future AI ensembles will discover knowledge beyond human comprehension
“And what's really gonna happen in that era, which we're sort of starting now, is You get an ensemble of AI techniques, so you might have like a Bayesian system and a neural network and a bunch of other stuff that work in concert together to understand a system…”
Fontana: Early-Stage AI Investing Is Effectively Value Investing
“You could actually think of what we do as value investing in a way, because what we do is we price the risk that a company can actually generate this really valuable prediction. And when we meet a company, they're probably at 30 to 50% accuracy on a model, whi…”
Fontana: Smaller fund sizes don't require hitting extreme power-law tail winners
“And so, our investors don't have to hold a belief that we're extraordinary pickers that can predictably find companies in their very, very long tail of the power law distribution. We hope we do that, but they don't have to believe that up front if your fund si…”
Ash Fontana: Search-as-a-service incumbents are AltaVista while Constructor.io is Google
“A lot of the, all the companies in the market today for search as a service are AltaVista, and constructor is Google.”
AI startups must reject on-premise deployments to build defensible data moats
“And some of those customers will ask you to do an on-prem private deployment, will ask you to not use their data to train anything that you do, and you need to reject those customers. Because you are not going to build a company that has any sort of moat aroun…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
Fontana: Why Zetta Ventures Avoids Healthcare AI Investments
“We've stayed away from a lot of applications of current AI technologies to healthcare, because when it goes wrong, it's really catastrophic, and it will go wrong. But we've moved towards a lot of applications to it in industry, like, again, in manufacturing an…”
Fontana: Europe produces more AI research than the US or China
“There's more AI research coming out of Europe than anywhere in the world. More than the US, more than China.”
Fontana: Why Physical Presence in AI Hubs Still Provides an Edge
“I used to think that geographic advantage in sourcing is like one of the most unsustainable things, because anyone can just get on a plane and be somewhere, but it just constantly surprises me that just being in these centers and being able to have conversatio…”
Fontana: Why AI Startups Should Target Industries With Convex Payoff Curves
“You want to work in industries where the payoff is really high. So I think of like convex and concave payoffs, where if you get it right, it's really valuable to you. But if you get it wrong, it doesn't really matter. So again, going back to medical use cases,…”
Fontana: Most AI systems are simple statistical extrapolation models
“The reality is, as much as we're excited about this era of AI creating new knowledge and ensembles of models, understanding complex systems, for the most part, we're pretty far away from that, and the reality is a lot of AIs are, like, fairly simple statistica…”
Fontana: Why Investment Memos Should Avoid Templates
“I think the interesting thing, and this has been something that I'm a bit of a stickler for, is our memos start as a blank page, and we try not to use templates, because I think templates form your thinking, and so you start with a blank page, and you just sta…”
Fontana: If You Are Competing For a Venture Deal, You Are Losing
“I sort of say something internally, which is not often the most helpful thing to say, which is as soon as you're competing, you're losing.”
Fontana: Society Is Entering an Era Where No One Cooks
“It pains me to think that we're going into an era where no one cooks their own food, but we are, and delivery and various other technologies are getting so good that you click a button and you get food in 10 minutes, and people love that, of course.”
Fontana: Why 'Data is the New Oil' is a Useless Analogy
“I think also people think about data volume rather than the dimensionality of data or whatnot, and often you solve really important problems with really small amounts of data. And so, I think people think about volume, and data is the new oil, and all this sor…”
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 across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 3
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ash's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners | 1 | 29 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners | 1 | 14 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 MADLEDGER | Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners | 1 | 13 | 33% 1/3 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |