20VC: Why AI Is More Artificial Than Intelligent, Why Engineering-centric Founders Are Able To Pivot Best & Why Startups Are Like Games with Alina Cohen, General Partner @ Initialized Capital
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2017
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alina Cohen is a General Partner @ Initialized Capital, one of Silicon Valleys leading early stage seed funds. Their portfolio includes the likes of recent unicorn, Coinbase, Flexport, Cruise Automation, OpenDoor and many more incredible companies. As for Alina, prior to Initialized, she ran tech investments for Tamares Group, the first outside investor in Palantir, and previously founded Recrec, a computer vision startup which was acquired by Facebook, where she worked on Platform and Groups.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alina made her way from selling her computer vision startup to Facebook to GP with one of SF's best new seed funds, Initialized?
2.) Why does Alina think gaming is so similar to start-ups? What core components are the same? What about gaming led Alina to realise there were secrets to the world of starting companies and growing startups in Silicon Valley?
3.) Why is Alina so focused on engineering-centric founders? Why does Alina feel they are the most attractive investment opportunities? Why are they the founder profile that deals best when pivots have to be made?
4.) Why does Alina think that AI is more artificial than intelligent today? If ML is a "leveraged play on data", where are the opportunities for startups with such data incumbency? Does AI just help the big get bigger?
5.) Why is Alina so bullish on the future of personal voice computing? What does Alina think will be the catalyst to consumer adoption? What are the compelling consumer applications with voice? Why does this remind her of the early FB platform days?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alina’s Fave Book: The Three-Body Problem
Alina’s Most Recent Investment: Fly.io
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alina on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 20 minute VC with me, your host, Harry Stebbings, and you can find me on Snapchat |
| 0:04.0 | at H. Debings with 2Bs, where you can suggest questions for future guests, and even suggest guests |
| 0:09.0 | for future episodes. It'd be great to see you there. However, to the show today, and you might |
| 0:13.1 | remember we've had the fantastic Alexis O'Hanian and Gary Tan at Initialized Castle on the show |
| 0:18.1 | previously. Well, I'm thrilled today to be joined by their partner, |
| 0:25.3 | Alina Cohen. Alina is a general partner at initialized, one of Silicon Valley's leading early stage seed funds. Their portfolio includes the likes of recent Unicorn Coinbase, Flexport, Cruise |
| 0:30.7 | Automation, Open Door, and many more incredible companies. As for Alina, prior to initialize, |
| 0:35.8 | she ran tech investments for Tamara's group, |
| 0:37.9 | the first outside investor in Palantir, and previously founded Recreck, a computer vision startup, |
| 0:43.1 | which was acquired by Facebook, where she worked on platform and groups. I also have to give |
| 0:47.2 | a huge thanks to the main man, Gary Tan, for the intro to Alina today, without which this |
| 0:51.2 | episode simply would not have been possible. But before we head into today's episode, Pendo helps companies create products that customers |
| 0:57.6 | love. It was founded when alumni from Raleigh, Google, Cisco and Red Hat combined their heads |
| 1:02.7 | and their hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers, a complete |
| 1:07.4 | platform for product teams. With Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make data-driven decisions. |
| 1:13.5 | Survey users in-app for NPS and feedback. |
| 1:16.6 | Deliver contextual help to improve UX and user onboarding. |
| 1:19.9 | Promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering resources. |
| 1:24.9 | Pendo is the proven choice of innovative product leaders at Salesforce, |
| 1:28.5 | optimizely, Citrix, and many more leading companies. Learn more today at go.pendo.combo.com. |
| 1:33.3 | I. That's go.pendo.com slash harry. But what if you're starting out in the industry and want to |
| 1:39.6 | learn to code? Like I was four years ago. I went to Treehouse, the online school where you can |
... |
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