Fontana: Zetta memos always analyze compounding machine learning data loops
Ash Fontana · Ash Fontana – Investing in Artificial Intelligence at Zetta Ventures (First Meeting, EP.11) · Oct 28, 2019 · at 44:53
Ash Fontana, partner at Zetta Venture Partners, describes a mandatory section in Zetta's investment memos for AI startups.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 12.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Invariably, we always have a section on the competitive advantage the company could build and compound by looping customer feedback data through the machine learning system to generate a prediction that gets better and better over time.”
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: 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…”