Ash Fontana, General Partner at Zetta Venture Partners, discusses the firm's founding history and focus during a Data Driven NYC event hosted by Matt Turck.
“We lay claim, which sounds like a funny claim to lay today as being the first fund completely focused on intelligent systems.”
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More from Ash Fontana
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 FontanaNov 20, 2017▶ 13:39The 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 FontanaNov 20, 2017▶ 15:03The 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 FontanaNov 20, 2017▶ 6:45The 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 FontanaNov 20, 2017▶ 9:16The 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 FontanaNov 20, 2017▶ 5:55The 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 FontanaNov 20, 2017▶ 7:14The Evolution and Impact of AI // Ash Fontana, Zetta Venture Partners
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