What Vinod Khosla and Others Have to Say About Recent Developments in AI
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Startup Grind's Global Conference 2023. The 2-day event brought together more than 1,000 people, including early-stage founders, venture capitalists, tech providers, students, and others, in Redwood City to network and attend panel discussions with some of the greatest minds in the tech ecosystem. As in most big events, the main value is meeting new people but the insights I gathered from the panels on this one were also extremely valuable, so I decided to share some of my notes here. Hopefully, this can be helpful to other founders, VCs or any tech enthusiast.
Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures
Panel name: The Future of AI with OpenAI's First Investor
About the speaker: Vinod is a legendary entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the Founder of Khosla Ventures, a “venture assistance” firm that helps entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. He previously co-founded Sun Microsystems.
Main insights:
AI is transformative in almost everything we do.
However, when everybody is interested in the same thing, there is almost certainly a bubble. The same goes for AI.
Just like in the dot-com boom, there will be some companies that actually generate immense value, similar to Google and Microsoft back then, but there will also be “some bubbles”.
For an AI company to succeed, they still need to provide something valuable for consumers or businesses. Some companies are just putting wrappers around ChatGPT and saying it is an AI startup. Those will probably not be around in the long term.
AI companies need to look ahead and think about what will differentiate them when GPT-5 or GPT-6 are out.
80% of what humans do today can be automated with AI but for each job, we as a society will decide if we want to use this technology or not. Some industries will slow developments down, some will adapt.
You have to ask yourself what is your role in that world. According to him, by 2050, people will be able to choose if they want to work or not.
He’s not worried about AI going sentient. Khosla is more worried about the AI race against China. He believes US AI companies should go as fast as they can so they don’t lose this race.
AI will benefit small and medium businesses since this technology democratizes the expertise and knowledge that only big companies had access to before.
Nobody will remember your failure. People only remember your success.
All major technological revolutions are made by entrepreneurs and not incumbents.
Friends don’t tell you why your startups will fail. You as a founder need to challenge yourself on how your startup might fail. This is more important than how you’ll succeed.
His thoughts on crypto: there is one group that is building tools and products for crypto people where there is a lot of speculation and he and his firm stayed out. However, he believes in crypto projects that have solutions for the real world. He mentioned Helium as being a good example since if it is successful, it will become a serious AT&T competitor.
Barr Moses, CEO & Co-Founder at Monte Carlo, and Steve Loughlin, Partner at Accel
Panel name: The Power of Co-Creation: Building a Category with Your Customers
About the speakers: Barr is the CEO and Co-Founder at Monte Carlo, a digital data reliability platform that has raised over $230M in funding so far. Steve is a Partner at Accel, a multi-stage VC firm, and was previously CEO at SalesforceIQ.
Main insights:
When she was starting out, Barr tried out 3 different ideas at the same time before she moved forward with the one that had the best initial product-market fit.
The first step of the journey is to find a real pain that exists for customers today in a market that is or could be big and grow in the future. The second step is to get the conviction that you have the right team to solve this problem.
Customers don’t care if you’re a “category creator”. They only care if you’re solving a real problem for them.
The clock is ticking the minute you start working with a customer. Speed and focus are very important.
Pay attention to the “hell yeah” moment - it is when your product does something that makes the customer jump out of their chair when they see it in action.
If you’re a category creator, you need to be everywhere all the time. Make everyone inside the company spread the word about your product. Make your customers celebrate your achievements and talk about your product publicly.
If she would start over, she would replicate being so customer focused and having them as their north star. She would also focus on speed - time is a startup’s biggest asset. She wouldn’t listen to advice from others, she would give more weight to her own gut.
Zach Perret, CEO & Founder of Plaid, and Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures
Panel name: The Future of Fintech
About the speakers: Zach is the CEO & Founder of Plaid, a financial data aggregation platform that has raised over $700M in funding so far. Mark is a Partner at Index Ventures, a multi-stage VC firm, and was previously a Team Leader at Dropbox.
Main insights:
Zach believes in the acceleration of every process. If you’re spending time on a repeatable process, it can be automated.
AI can enable these automations. Fintechs can, for instance, use AI to automate support workflows or accounting.
AI will also have big implications for fraud tagging, data management, underwriting, and wealth management as a whole.
Many people are already asking ChatGPT for financial advice. Plaid could, for instance, map assets and liabilities from users to get even more specific advice from it.
About the recent SVB crisis, Zach expects business owners to adopt a more similar financial habit to their own personal finances. A good example of this is that most businesses will probably have many different bank accounts, much like they have their own personal money in different accounts.
His advice to founders: 1) don’t die, do everything you can to keep the company alive, and 2) don’t kill yourself, make sure to build a work environment you can work for at least 10 years.
Ivan Zhao, CEO at Notion, and Mike Vernal, Partner at Sequoia Capital
Panel name: How Notion Augments Human Intellect with AI
About the speakers: Ivan is the CEO at Notion, which he described as being a “computing platform” that people currently use as an all-in-one shared workspace. Mike is a Partner at Sequoia where he led several notable investments, including Notion’s Seed, StarkWare’s Series A, and Rippling’s Series C.
Main insights:
Ivan started by saying that AI made intelligence abundant. It is a paradigm shift as big as the printing press but maybe not as much as language.
We are at the beginning of understanding what to do with AI. It is like going toward the future faster and faster but by looking only at the rearview mirror.
It is very similar to other big inventions, such as electricity. Nobody was sure about what we could do with it, then we started using it to generate light, move things, etc. There are horizontal applications, such as powering a motor, and vertical applications, such as powering a vacuum cleaner.
He says advices are very contextual. As a founder, you need to think for yourself before you take them.
What is your role in a world where intelligence is abundant? The market has an answer out there. You just need to find it.
Thought of the month
Why write? In the age of AI, it is always good to remember the benefits of doing things ourselves:
“Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out”.
Chart of the month
It might be counter intuitive, but AI is a bigger threat to higher paying jobs according to a research done by research by the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI. Among the positions they mention are accountants, auditors, budget analysts, and mathematicians.