The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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: 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: 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 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Pitch Jargon Signals a Lack of Fundamental Understanding
“I tend to switch off in pitches where the presenters sort of use like a word cloud of popular terms in their pitch, and it's also a pretty strong sign to me that they haven't come to a fundamental understanding from something new. Like, to explain something bo…”
Fontana: Zetta memos always analyze compounding machine learning data loops
“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.”