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Ash Fontana

Special Advisor, Zetta Venture Partners · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

13statements → 4claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 4.15/5average certainty → 2.15/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 1 names 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.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Fontana: Zetta was the first fund focused on intelligent systems
“We lay claim, which sounds like a funny claim to lay today as being the first fund completely focused on intelligent systems.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 0:15 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Fontana: Zetta was the largest investor in Kaggle when it sold
“We were the, Biggest investors in Kaggle when they sold on the board there.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 8:26 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners

How they sound: speaking style how? →

255 words/min while actually speaking · 28.6 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ash Fontana: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,007 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ash Fontana said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
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.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 13:39 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Insight
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…”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 15:03 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Disclosure
Fontana: Zetta maintains a firm thesis against horizontal AI investments
“From the very beginning of our fund, we just said we're not going to invest in anything that's horizontal.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 6:45 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Disclosure
Ash Fontana: Zetta does not look for revenue traction in seed AI startups
“What we don't look for is traction, right? Like by the time a company has revenue and whatever else, it's sort of, One, if you think of what my job is, it's to find things that other people can't find that are valuable, and it's pretty obvious at the point whe…”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 9:16 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Assertion Supported
Fontana: Zetta was the first fund focused on intelligent systems
“We lay claim, which sounds like a funny claim to lay today as being the first fund completely focused on intelligent systems.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 0:15 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Disclosure
Zetta avoids consumer AI and superficial AI overlays due to data disadvantages
“What we're not spending time on are things where AI, well, we don't spend any time in the consumer stuff because a lot of that data is owned by bigger companies, and it's very hard to get a data advantage there, and we don't really spend time on things that ha…”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 5:55 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Insight
Fontana: Vertical AI wins through specialized data collection and model tuning
“To make us only invest in vertically focused applications, because that's where you can really get ahead of everyone else by focusing on tuning a model for a very specific purpose, getting data to train a model for a very specific purpose.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 7:14 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Opinion
Fontana: 2017 data science tools are like software tools in the 1980s
“The tools that data scientists have available today are like what software developers had in the eighties.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 8:43 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Assertion Partly supported
Ash Fontana: Data isolation prevents Algolia and Elastic from improving search algorithms
“Now, Algolia, Elastic, like, all these companies do that. They make it very easy to deploy a very fast search box on your website, but the thing is, because they guarantee you that they're not going to share any data in any way with anyone they can't really im…”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 12:39 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Disclosure
AI startups boost productivity by hiring from biology, physics, and econometrics
“Looking really far, you know, relative to Silicon Valley mindset, really far afield into some of those disciplines to hire people has been immensely productive for companies that we work for.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 17:58 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early AI startups with under $5M in funding hire 50 data labelers
“So, we'll have early stage companies, like companies with, like, you know, less than ten million dollars in funding, some of them less than five million dollars in funding, and they're hiring teams of 40 to 50 data labelers.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 19:33 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Disclosure
Fontana: Zetta invests when startups prove dataset predictive value
“We're really interested when a company has a unique data set, and they've started to show that it has some predictive value. So it can, you know, they've run an experiment to show that it's predictive of something at a very high level of accuracy or they've pu…”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 1:13 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
Assertion Contradicted
Fontana: Zetta was the largest investor in Kaggle when it sold
“We were the, Biggest investors in Kaggle when they sold on the board there.”
Ash Fontana Nov 20, 2017 ▶ 8:26 The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners Nov 20, 2017 23m
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