🔬Eugene Hauptmann

Vishal Sachdev highlights the strategic integration of open source and proprietary tech in architecting tech stacks, developer ecosystems and resulting business models. The world class companies effectively balance value commoditization in open source and value capture in proprietary tech. This is the strategic challenge for companies operating in #blockchain and #AI. I believe those who operate at the intersection of blockchain *and* AI stand to win this strategic battle...

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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When a seed stage company hits $2M in ARR, they control their destiny: (a) default alive (b) default a Series A target Either choice is great and it’s all in your control. $2M in ARR should be the default goal at seed.

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Founderville believes one of the most significant opportunities is emerging in legacy system applications. We look for manual tasks to leverage AI for efficient automation. Rather than chasing massive TAM, which will be addressed by larger VCs, we focus on smaller market domains that won't be chased as hard. Think of "boring" processes that require human intervention or manualized tasks. Those are opportunities. Keep your eyes open if you have deep domain expertise in a non-automated and fragmented industry. #entrepreneurs #venturecapital #startups #saas

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#search disruption is one of the top topics on the list of #startups to build next of Andreessen Horowitz . Christian J. Ward of Yext talked about his market opportunity at our leadership event last week. The search and find market is fragmenting- consumers are searching for businesses not only on #google, but also on #bing, on #apple devices, on #copilot, on #amazon , on #socialmedia , on #AIbots, on #perplexity, on #maps and many more. Small businesses are left with the challenge of ensuring a strong online presence and transactional capabilities on all these platforms. Easy solved with#digitalONE by localsearch (Swisscom Directories AG) : one solution covers it all. Is your small business worried about #search disruption ? With digitalone it should not be . #disruption #future #online #search #advertising #onlinewerbung Francesco Verrienti Paloma Bosco Robert Ferenc Semir T. Nikolaus Konstantin Pandlowsky Irène Dumas Alain Deville Valentina Parente

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AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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I have been developing several vertical specific LLM based apps over the last few months. From my experience, developers building vertical specific LLM apps need to augment LLM knowledge. Right now there are two options - (1) either build own knowledge corpus and build a RAG on top of it. (2) use WebSearch in real-time. Both of these options are hard and require a bunch of engineering. Read about it here: https://lnkd.in/g2eZgDnt

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Kettleborough VC has been active for ~6 years, invested in ~30 companies, gone through ~80 funding rounds, witnessed ~12 exits including ~4 instances of partial principal erosion, seen ~4 seed to $100M journeys, tracking ~29% XIRR across the portfolio. A couple of IPOs from the portfolio surely seem very much in line ahead.

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🎯 How AI Learns to Think: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Model Training 🤖✨ - A new edition of our newsletter is out! What is it about? We live in a world where AI recommends what to watch, diagnoses diseases, and even helps cars drive themselves. But have you ever paused to wonder: How does AI get so smart? 🧠💡 It’s all about training—a meticulous, step-by-step process that transforms raw algorithms into powerful tools. In my latest article, I take you on a journey to uncover what makes AI tick: 🗂️ Data Preparation: From cleaning messy datasets to preprocessing text, images, and numbers. Quality data is everything! 🛠️ Model Selection: How to choose the right algorithm for the job, whether it's a simple regression model or a complex neural network. 🔄 Training and Tuning: The iterative process of refining predictions through techniques like transfer learning, hyperparameter optimization, and data augmentation. 📊 Validation and Challenges: Tackling issues like high costs, ethical dilemmas, and scalability to ensure AI works efficiently and fairly. Real-world success stories from 2024: 🚗 Tesla's advancements in Full Self-Driving. 📚 Duolingo AI-driven personalized lessons. 🎥 Netflix groundbreaking use of generative AI for personalized trailers. AI isn’t magic—it’s the result of hard work, smart strategies, and innovative solutions. Whether you are a tech professional, business leader, or AI enthusiast, understanding this process is key to unlocking its potential. 📖 Curious? Dive into the full article shared in the first comment bellow... Let's shape the future of AI together! 🌟💻 #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #Innovation #TechInsights #AITraining #Leadership

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🚀 Excited to partner with Noah Labs adesso ventures invests in the €3M round, led by Nina Capital and joined by DHZB Foundation as well as great angels. Current remote patient monitoring solutions often fall short, resulting in poor experiences for both patients and doctors due to inconsistent devices and software. Noah Labs aims to revolutionize this space with a patient-centric approach. Why we invested: 🫀 Team: The Noah Labs team is exceptionally strong, with deep connections to the medical field. Oliver brings invaluable founder experience from a previous MedTech venture. Marcus, the technical mind behind the AI-based voice analysis, has a research background at Harvard Medical School. Leonhard, with his medical expertise, has worked as a cardiovascular doctor and was previously head of medical at an RPM startup. 🎯 GTM: The team has developed an impressive GTM strategy and is executing it with precision. Monitoring of heart failure can be reimbursed through insurances in Germany, making it the optimal entry point for Noah Labs. Nevertheless, other diseases are already in demand and can easily be covered. 🏁 Vision: Besides using the existing RPM-tools such as ECGs and blood pressure monitors, Noah Labs follows a big vision of introducing voice-based detections of diseases using AI. Currently, several studies for their voice-based detection of heart failure are ongoing - among them a large study with reputable Mayo Clinic. This will set them apart from its competitors and create a unique value proposition. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dkR6iCWU

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Exciting to see startups aiming to use AI to discover chemicals, materials, drugs, etc. Semi companies have taken notice: AMD is investing in and Cadence is acquiring them. Semi/EDA companies have broken out by becoming critical path, whether it’s through critical software, packaging, IP, design kits from foundries, or user communities. Aside from just making it easy to make new materials, these “AI for making X” companies also need to articulate a vision as to how they can establish monopolistic positions in their industries.

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This is just incredible. Neal Ghosh's demonstration of how #VentureIQ takes deeply technical and complicated content across a range of industrial use cases and ages/stages through an AI-generated conversational podcast (a la #notebookLM) is really mind-blowing. Check out his post, below, and if you haven't seen VentureIQ, yet, let's get you set up to learn more. You can visit VentureIQ.ai or DM any of us over here to book a demo!

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Ilya Sutskever has raised $1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital for his 3-month-old startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The valuation lands at $5 billion according to sources. SSI, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. According to SSI, they've raised the money to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities. $1B raise at a $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple of months old and doesn't seem to have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild. In this case, everyone knows it takes hundreds of millions to train models. So investors are essentially rolling the dice on an extremely well-regarded team. And if it takes about a billion just to get off the ground, the valuation would need to be at least in the couple billion range to make it worth it for employees to work there. US dream 🦅 #artificialintelligence #startups #venturecapital

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Apple’s Private Cloud Compute and the business of privacy With Private Cloud Compute, Apple has gone to extraordinary lengths to safeguard user privacy with AI-related tasks. In doing so, Apple has surely also incurred an extraordinary expense. How can Apple justify the cost of providing PCC if it doesn’t directly monetize its Apple Intelligence features? Either through the improved brand perception captured in a broader privacy narrative or by monetizing PCC with other non-AI use cases. While the narrative explanation is clear, the more interesting theory about Apple’s motivation in building PCC is that it can be expanded to other use cases that can be directly monetized. The first alternative use case that springs to mind is advertising attribution. PCC sounds conceptually similar to a data clean room, albeit far more sophisticated than most implementations, which merely use IP addresses and other identifiers to match publisher-observed ad interactions with advertiser-observed conversions. While the PCC nodes seem hardware-optimized for processing AI-related tasks, other nodes could be built that aren’t.

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To anyone who thinks geekworld is boring, or that AI is the one we should be worried about: 🚨 Breaking: The Dark Side of AI Research Success - A $1.1M Lawsuit and a Prestigious Award Imagine discovering that the most celebrated paper in your field was potentially built on sabotaged research of others. This isn't a plot from Silicon Valley - it's happening right now in the AI community. The AI world is buzzing about an unprecedented situation: The NeurIPS 2024 Best Paper Award winner is at the center of a shocking $1.1M lawsuit. Here's the wild story 🧵 The paper "Visual Autoregressive Modeling" earned the highest honor at AI's most prestigious conference. But behind this technical breakthrough lies an alarming tale: 😱 The alleged facts are stunning: • The first author is accused of secretly attacking other researchers' code • Multiple research projects were allegedly sabotaged over 5 months • Teams watched months of work mysteriously fail • ByteDance (TikTok's parent company) discovered unauthorized system access The plot thickens: ByteDance didn't just fire the researcher - they're seeking $1.1M in damages. What would you do if you were on the NeurIPS award committee? Would you prioritize technical merit or ethical conduct? Share your thoughts below 👇 https://lnkd.in/dRVKS_En #AIEthics #TechControversy #Leadership #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #Research #TechNews #NeurIPS2024

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New post: The big stack game of LLM poker https://lnkd.in/d5mfqgwk I’m sure you read David Cahn’s excellent and provocative piece "AI's $600B Question", in which he argues that, given NVDIA’s projected Q4 2024 revenue run rate of $150B, the amount of AI revenue required to payback the enormous investment being made into NVDIA each year plus the electricity to power GPUs to train and run large language models is now $600B, and we are at least $500B in the hole on that payback. The numbers are certainly staggering… and are just going to get bigger. Unless the scaling hypothesis falters, this is a contest now of “not blinking first”. If you’re a big stack player like META, MSFT, GOOG, or any of the foundation model pure plays, you have no choice but to go all in — the prize and power of “winning” is too great. If you blink, you are left empty handed, watching someone else count your chips. It’s likely hundreds of billions will be destroyed, and trillions earned. For all of us in the startup ecosystem, among many things, it’s going to create a rolling thunder of AI opportunities. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/d5mfqgwk

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Jensen Huang On Nvidia’s seed round: "You Need these three things to raise successfully funding from VC" Jensen shared his fundraising experience for NVIDIA - "I didn't take any business or marketing classes and never used a presentation software called Persuasion on my Mac before. I bought the Mac just for that purpose and tried creating a company presentation for venture capitalists. We started working on my 30th birthday after getting the company funded. Initially, we met daily with the three of us, not sure what to do. We spent about six months chatting about daily life and deciding where to go for lunch, which was a big deal for us. Later, it was even a big deal if someone put doughnuts in the fridge for the morning. After meeting a lawyer at Cooley Godward, I gave him $200 to help incorporate the company. I got 15% (or maybe 20%) of Nvidia for that $200. I never finished my business plan or Gordon Bell's book on starting a high-tech company. Despite not having a complete plan, I incorporated the company. They introduced us to two venture capitalists, and I shared my ideas with them. VCs care more about great people than business plans, your reputation and history matter. Having a big vision for a large market is crucial. The idea should be clever and unique. The size of the market is important too; it needs to be large enough for the investment to make sense." Any thoughts? opinion? Enjoyed the post? Follow Sahil S. for more . #startups #nvidia #genai #fundraising #seed #founders #investors #funding #check #angelinvestors #funding

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It's already hard to get into the top-tier YC world. It's 10x times harder if you're in Europe. Even if you're in Silicon valley, it's still hard to get into the YC ecosystem. Why? Because YC is tightly closed and protected environment. An exclusive world where demo day access is invite-only for the insiders. In the world there are only 400 handpicked guests attended the last in-person event. It was purely an insider event. You have to be an insider to get access to the best deals. And I'm on of the 400 investors who's on that list. This is why I love YC so much: Statistically 6% of these startups will become unicorns. Making them the best asset class you could ever invest your money into. But, it's almost impossible to gain access to them…. You can get access through me, and that's as close to those YC start-ups as you could ever get.

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Excellent tool

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