The Exchanges

Q And w what do you think of AI as a category? I mean, you guys are big and open AI.

A Yeah. I mean, it's not a category. I mean, I, I, I, I, I've said this stat a couple of times, but you know, when I first started doing venture capital, everything was social, local, mobile. It was like over 60% of the companies that I looked at, yeah, looked at in the first year were, were of that category, and it was like, ah, everybody was doing it, right? Now, every single, for a while, I think the pendulum was already being on the shift, but for a while, it was close to 100% Of companies would say AI or LLM by, you know, minute two of the pitch or page one of the deck. And I think that that's changed. It's now just, uh, you know, a tool like it's like saying the internet and people have realized that. So I think people are less and less trying to overload that term, which is really good. Um, but, so I think it was just, that was a challenging few months there where every single company was just saying, oh, we're an AI company. It's like, no. And so.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, it's not a category.”

Q which was the tail end of the party. But it is a great question, Dave, and point, Brian, because if it turns out that sports, and especially football, is going to drive the economics of all of this, I mean, it's relatively constrained in terms of types of content. So, If Sam were here, he'd talk about the football league. He tried to back Brian, were you in that too?

A Yeah, we, we, you know, we have mutual friends who started, started these leagues and that didn't, I mean, it's very, very, very, very, very, very difficult to compete with the NFL, right? The, the product is, I mean, you don't get better than the product, and plus you have the community element with the fantasy football stuff, right? It was just the perfect marriage, like fantasy football. Fantasy does not really work well for other sports, and it works so well perfectly for football that it just gets people entertained and jazzed about the NFL who even otherwise wouldn't care about watching it, right? And I do think that, you know, the betting ecosystem, but especially fantasy ecosystem, has been just Put the NFL just so far ahead of everything else.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we, we, you know, we have mutual friends who started, started these leagues”

Q Okay. So Brian, you've been thinking about immersive worlds for some time. What do you think about the, I, I can't just, Vision Pro, it's too, it doesn't roll off the tongue, this thing. What do you think of this thing?

A The Vision Pro, the Vision Quest, or whatever you want to call it, seems like it's pretty promising, because for the, what, for the reasons that Dave was saying, if it's truly an interface that you can pick up naturally, there's the VR element, which is, you know, kind of the entertainment stuff, You can do on a plane. And I think we've had that for a little while. Obviously you can do the VR stuff on a quest. We've seen that for a while. In fact, one of the reasons why I first invested in Oculus was similar to the experience that Britt had, which is that I was walking around in a fantasy world and a knight came up with a sword and I was actually scared. And so we thought we had to invest and that's similar to the dinosaur experience. And that's the kind of the entertainment VR aspect. The, the, the way this is going to actually You know, improve beyond that is if it truly does get the spatial right. Two ways I think you can improve on it. If it does actually get the spatial right, which I have not tried this yet. We do have one in the office, but I haven't tried it yet. In the same way that, you know, my two-year-old daughter can look at photos on an iPad because it's just such a natural interface for her, or they can, you know, scroll through stuff real easily. If it's that kind of an interface, you can interact with your environment and get more information from your environ…

AI assessment note: “seems like it's pretty promising, because for the, what, for the reasons that Dave”

Q Awesome. Well, what else about, before we move on to some of the other exciting topics of the week, streaming sports, anything else that we want to say? Brian, any thoughts? Or are you just chomping at the bit to invest in startups developing for the Vision Pro?

A No, not, I'm not, I'm not chomping in a bit to do that, but I am, I am excited to try it and see how it progresses. I, you know, as somebody who's been around this space for 25 years now, and my license plate actually represents that, I do think this is, I mean, the Quest has been really good for lots of people, but I do think that something like this, if it truly works, and again, as Dave was saying, he thinks it actually works interface-wise, I do think it unlocks A new, you know, kind of paradigm. Do I think it's gonna be as, like, massive mainstream as the phone? No. I mean, it's still maybe in a decade.

AI assessment note: “No, not, I'm not, I'm not chomping in a bit to do that”

Q gear from the side. There's no data on the screen. You have things like World Series of Poker that became extremely popular because they let the fans in on what was going on with each hand, you know, and once they did that, they went to the top. And I, esports was growing really fast for a long time. Has that changed at all? Or where, where is it now?

A I, I think that it is My guess is that it's not growing as fast as it should be, and I think a lot of this has to do with, I thought that a lot of the, it takes, you know, major production, and it takes, you know, kind of drumming up community, like the community aspects of these things is huge, and even though the viewership of things like League of Legends Worlds is still huge worldwide, in America, this hasn't fully taken off, and I'm not exactly sure why, like nobody has really established the For lack of a better term in the old days, we had the concept, the water cooler conversation, right? And that hasn't happened, even whether it's with the demographic of e-sports or something else, right? Like the talent of the people like running the shows is probably just not there and not at the same level. And we don't have that water cooler stuff with e-sports. I, I would, I would have expected it to have taken off a lot more by now. Um, especially as kids are just growing up playing these games more than they're growing up Playing, you know, basketball, football, right? Like I, I would have thought that, you know, we would have seen like, you know, Fortnite championships or Counter-Strike championships or League of Legends championships take off more in America and it just hasn't done that yet.

AI assessment note: “My guess is that it's not growing as fast as it should be”

Q an emotional relationship with them while they're playing on and off the court. NFL is like, One click above that, it's very, it's harder to see the players' faces, and so, you know, and then when you come to esports, it's like the players are fully obscured by the, by the digital representation, right? So is it, is there something about the humanity that gets in the way of storytelling?

A I don't think so. Um, I, I, I really think it's a penetrating, like, you know, pop culture. You know, kind of thing. Like a real, it's like, you have to watch it because it's what everybody else is watching. And maybe for the seven year olds, it is, but that then doesn't, for some reason that hasn't like translated yet into when they become adults or people who have money that can support ad based systems, right? And that's why a lot of these esports things are pretty challenging other than for the game developers themselves, because they can sell a lot of copies of their games because parents buy kids games, right? But any other model in terms of the esports portion of it is really tricky.

AI assessment note: “I don't think so. Um, I, I, I really think it's a penetrating”