Ash Fontana
Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
29statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.34/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 1 assertion · 3 opinions · 17 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion 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: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Ash Fontana on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Ash Fontana said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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…”
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…”
Fontana: AI talent is not overly concentrated in big tech
“I also see every day people breaking off from these companies and just applying their knowledge to all sorts of other industries day-to-day and starting their own companies, and so Talent is like not that concentrated, actually, and there are all sorts of grea…”
Fontana: Founder Empathy Outlasts Tactical Knowledge in Venture Investing
“The one thing that you take away from that, or I took away from that, that I apply to venture is not like, this is how you hire your first salesperson, or this is how you like integrate with this platform, because all that knowledge changes, best practice is a…”
Fontana: The 2013 Convergence That Sparked the Neural Network Revolution
“That was a really interesting time, 2013, 14, because that's when this neural network revolution started, and that is, we were finally at the point where we'd had some research breakthroughs into how neural networks work. We had enough data to feed these, like…”
Fontana: Off-the-shelf AI models fail on specific industry problems without tuning
“Once you get to like a specific industry problem, like
Is the bottle cap too big for the bottle on this production line?
Like, did the plastic extrusion process not work properly?
You can't sort of use off-the-shelf models to do that, and so, what you need …”
Fontana: AI Startups Must Hit Minimum Algorithmic Performance to Deliver Value
“And so working out what that minimum, we call it the minimum algorithmic performance, but essentially like what accuracy a customer needs for that to be valuable to them is one thing. And then how far away is the company from achieving that?”
Fontana: Zetta Requires Partner Pass-or-Advance Decisions After One Meeting
“And so at Zeta, if you meet a company, you have to decide whether to have them meet someone else on the team or pass on the opportunity after the first meeting.”
Fontana: A Lack of Memo-Writing Energy Predicts Bad Board Members
“Firstly, do I even have the activation energy to write this memo? Because if I don't have the activation energy to write the memo, am I going to want to turn up to board meetings on like a six hour flight away every month? Am I going to want to get on the phon…”
Fontana: Average Returns Rise With More Exposure in Power Law Distributions
“And the unintuitive thing about power law distributions is that your average return goes up as your points of exposure go up.”
Fontana: Simulation Tools Offer Greater Value Than Decaying Hedge Fund Data
“What I'm excited by there is not necessarily like the next best data source, because they tend to be very perishable. I'm excited about different tools for those hedge funds that are trying to make predictions in complex systems.”
Fontana: 2019 Data Science Tooling Resembles 1980s Software Engineering
“The state of tooling for a data scientist in, so what, 2019 is what it was for a software engineer in like the late eighties, early nineties, There's still so much that's so hard about building these things that could be made a lot easier with the right tools”
Fontana: Google will never build AI solutions for niche vertical markets
“They're not really structured, and their businesses are so big such that it's not really worth it for them to go in and solve problems in a lot of vertical markets, so markets where the total opportunity is a couple hundred million dollars. This just doesn't w…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Ash Fontana – Investing in Artificial Intelligence at Zetta Ventures (First Meeting, EP.11 | Oct 28, 2019 | 54m |