20VC: YC's Daniel Gross on How YC Can Democratise AI & Reduce Incumbency Advantages, Why ML Enabled Software Will Eat The Software That Ate The World & Whether AI Will Produce Independent Companies or Be Technology within Incumbents
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 21 August 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Daniel Gross is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world's most successful accelerator with alumni that includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Flexport and many more incredible companies. At Y Combinator Daniel heads up all things YC AI having been a Director @ Apple where he focused on machine learning, as a result of his prior company, Cue (also a YC company) being acquired by Apple in 2013. If that was not enough, Daniel also has one of the valley's most impressive angel portfolios with investments in OpenDoor, Cruise (acquired by GM), Gusto and Github, just to name a few.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way from YC founder to being acquired by Apple to being YC partner?
2.) How does Daniel respond to the statement that "AI, is in part, a scam"? Why does Daniel believe that the impact of AI has not lived up to the hype?
3.) What are the 3 economies of scale that you have with machine learning when you are a large company? What can startups do to mitigate these incumbency advantages? What does Daniel mean when he says it is his job to "democratize AI"?
4.) Does Daniel believe we will see the rise of "AI companies" or machine learning as a sustaining innovation that existing incumbents use? What is Daniel fearful of with regards to this?
5.) How does Daniel view the potential for business models to be built around AI? Daniel has said "machine learning software will eat the software that has eaten the world". What does he mean by this? How does this play out?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Daniel’s Fave Book: Enders Game, High Output Management, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Daniel’s Fave Blog: Slate Star Codex
Daniel’s Most Recent Investment: Rippling
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbing, at H. Stebbings with 2Bs on Snapchat, |
| 0:05.1 | and it's day one of YC Demo Day. And here at the 20 minute VC, we like to bring you the most |
| 0:09.4 | current and timely of interviews. And so today's show, I'm thrilled to welcome Daniel Gross, |
| 0:13.9 | partner at Y Combinator, to the hot seat today. For those to run aware, Y Combinator is the world's most successful accelerator, with alumni that include the |
| 0:21.0 | likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit and Flexport, just to name a few of the incredible companies. |
| 0:26.3 | At Y Combinator, Daniel heads up all things YCAI, having been a director at Apple, where he focused |
| 0:31.9 | on machine learning as a result of his prior company, Q, also a YC company, being acquired by Apple in 2013. If that wasn't enough, |
| 0:39.4 | Daniel's also got one of the most impressive angel portfolios in the valley, with investments |
| 0:43.3 | in the likes of Open Door, Cruise acquired by GM, Gusto and GitHub, just to name a few. I'd also |
| 0:48.9 | want to say a massive thank you to Navaravacant at Angel List for the intro to Daniel today, |
| 0:53.2 | without which this episode |
| 0:54.2 | would not have been possible. But before we head into today's episode, Pendo helps companies create |
| 0:58.8 | products that customers love. It was founded when alumni from Raleigh, Google, Cisco and Red Hat |
| 1:03.9 | combined their heads and their hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product |
| 1:08.5 | managers, a complete platform for product teams. |
| 1:11.3 | With Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make data-driven decisions. |
| 1:15.8 | Survey users in-app for NPS and feedback, deliver contextual help to improve UX and user onboarding, |
| 1:22.2 | promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering resources. |
| 1:27.2 | Pendo is the proven choice of |
| 1:28.5 | innovative product leaders at Salesforce, optimizely, Citrix and many more leading companies. Learn more today |
| 1:34.3 | at go.pendo.combo.io slash harry. That's go.pendo.com. But what if you're starting out in the |
| 1:41.2 | industry and want to learn to code? Like I was four years ago, |
... |
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