May 21, 2025 • 23 mins
FREE TRAINING: https://start.shahiddurrani.com/
Welcome to another inspiring episode of the Super Entrepreneurs Podcast! Today, we sit down with Alex Chompff, the co-founder and executive director of Evolution Ventures and lead general partner of the Minerva Fund. Alex brings a unique perspective, combining military discipline, Silicon Valley innovation, and a passion for technology to revolutionize how industries operate. In this episode, Alex shares his insights on decomposing monolithic industries, investing in underrepresented founders, and the transformative power of AI.
=============================
Chapter Stamps:
01:41 Understanding Underrepresented Founders
02:57 Alex's Background and Experience
06:23 The Rise of AI in Venture Capital
09:26 AI's Impact on Monolithic Industries
11:54 The Future of AI and Legal Industry
18:58 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
=============================
Pullout Quotes:
- "Technology decomposes monolithic industries."
- "If you want to solve big problems, go where the real pain points are."
- "AI is an efficiency increaser, an enhancer of what we can do."
- "You are the gold that investors are hunting for."
- "Don’t fear sharing your ideas – it’s the first step to momentum."
Social:
Website: https://www.evolutionacceleration.com/ and https://minerva-verse.com/minervafund/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchompff/
Disclaimer:
Please be aware that the opinions and perspectives conveyed in this podcast are solely those of our guests and do not necessarily represent the views, ideologies, or principles of Super Entrepreneurs Podcast, its associated entities, or any organizations they represent or are affiliated with. We provide a platform for discussion and exploration, and the content of each episode is understood to be independent expressions from our guests, rather than a reflection of the beliefs held by the podcast or its hosts.
Notice to the Super Entrepreneurs Community:
Before we part, remember to join our Private Facebook group, 'Mindset for Bu
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
At Evolution we have a principle thesisthat we use when we invest and that
principle thesis is that technologydecomposes monolithic industries.
This is very important for us asinvestors because it separates us from
other investors in our class who aremaybe looking for brand new industries.
We are looking to decomposemonolithic industries and AI is
(00:23):
a perfect decomposition tool.
(00:45):
Welcome back to the SuperEntrepreneurs Podcast.
I'm your host, Shahid Durrani, theshow where we dive into the minds
of high performing entrepreneurs,innovators, and world class leaders.
If you're someone who's always lookingto grow, push your limits, think and
do bigger, you're in the right place.
(01:06):
Today we have Alex Chompff.
Alex is the co-founder and executivedirector of Evolution Ventures and
Lead General partner of Minerva Fund.
He's an active early stage venturecapital firm, investing in women and
traditionally under presented founders.
(01:30):
Welcome to our show, Alex.
Thank you.
Shade.
It's an honor to be here and I reallyappreciate, thank you opportunity.
And I want to thank your audiencefor giving us a moment to share.
Can you elaborate on what itmeans as a under underrepresented
founder, just to clarify.
Sure.
(01:50):
Speaking now pretty closely aboutthe Minerva Fund, because the Minerva
Fund focuses in this area, the MinervaFund is very interested in finding an
equitable distribution of venture capitalbased on the very simple premise that
Providence distributes brilliance equally.
(02:11):
Among its people.
And so there tends to be peoplewho are less represented in
terms of professional investment.
And Minerva Fund is lookingfor opportunities to find those
individuals and surface them.
And not only help toreinforce this idea of.
Brilliance distributed equally, butalso hopefully uncover some fantastic
(02:34):
investment opportunities along theway that might have been overlooked.
Yeah, true.
So it's a niche that you'dbe able to serve better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We think it's very importantto be of service at evolution.
Yeah, of course.
Or a fund.
We find this to be a very importantdriving idea in all of our work.
(02:54):
Yeah, I'm glad you're on this show then.
It's great.
I noticed that you were in militaryservice and Silicon Valley, and during
the internet boom and now leadingventures like the evolution accelerator.
So how do you believe that the wayyou manage your business or grow
(03:14):
your business has been affectedwith that type of mix of experience.
Oh we are all products of the earthin which we're raised, and I had the
very good fortune to be raised ina family that not only had a strong
patriotic military, military tradition.
But also was filled withentrepreneurs and inventors.
(03:37):
And so I got an opportunity froma very young age to be exposed
to some pretty formative ideas.
And then luckily enough, because myfather, who was a Marine before me and
was working for the phone company when Iwas a child, we moved to the California
Bay area, the San Francisco Bay Area.
(03:58):
And so the San Francisco Bay areas isfamous, of course, for technological
innovation and has been for many years.
It's also a place where people arevery open to new ideas and new ways
of thinking and new ways of being.
So I was exposed from a very young ageto a wide array of, things that were not
only very traditionally American and verymuch of the heartland like patriotism and
(04:21):
military service and, finding a way to beof use to your country, but also of the
left coast, the west coast, as they say.
And, very much open to new ways ofdoing things and new ways of seeing
things, and a willingness to disruptthe status quo in order to bring
about a new way of doing things.
So it's very, for.
They had been raised in that terra firma.
(04:42):
Then from there I had a set ofreally good experiences, only some
of which I can take responsibilityfor kind of if your listeners are
used to the movie Forrest Gump, ifthey've seen the movie, Forrest Gump.
Forrest is in lots of famous movies, butthey're not his movie if you understand.
Like he's, he goes to lots of placesand is on lots of things, but he
is always like the guy in the guyin the background or the guy in.
(05:05):
The sideline.
That's pretty much where I'vebeen for much of my life.
Is fortunate to be at some excitingplaces and some exciting times.
That's awesome.
And maybe even to have done alittle bit to help push the sled.
Yeah.
But it's not my movie.
I'm just there and that was, yeah.
Unity.
You just part of it.
Yes.
So tell me, do you practiceyour voice in the mirror?
(05:29):
I'll tell you.
Did you practice for, becauseit's so amazing, right?
So I just have to ask.
Sure.
As I mentioned before, thecall started and the nice.
You got a face made for radio?
No.
No,
I didn't mean that though, but, okay.
And
my wife says
that I talk very slowly andI'm very hard to listen to.
All I know is that inside of my own head,I'm running around shouting all the time.
(05:54):
There's a ton of things going on,and this is just how I present.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
That is good.
Welcome.
The best I've got for you.
I'm in my fifties and I've pretty muchsounded like this my whole life, I think.
Awesome, awesome.
Awesome.
No, it's great.
So you have a podcast.
I have experimented with podcasting,but I don't have the consistency
(06:17):
to get to be any good at it.
And besides which I'm a muchbetter guest than a host, honestly.
That's fine.
Ai, it is a topic that everyone's speakingabout, especially in your profession.
What do you feel, or what do you believe.
AI is going to transition intoin the future for new startups,
(06:39):
yeah.
Yeah.
AI is super interesting.
Super interesting.
I should say that I've been bangingaround on a keyboard for money.
Since 1990 and along the way I've pickedup a few business and technical skills
and I'm absolutely fascinated by ai.
Matter of fact, I got my opendev, my open AI developer key.
(07:02):
I. In May.
Oh, okay.
Of 2023.
And so whenever open, it was likeNovember or something of 2022 when they
announced I st I stayed up all nightplaying with that thing, man, all night.
I stayed up playing with that thing.
It was a miracle.
And I signed up for the professionalthing as soon as I could get it.
And I got my developer key in May of2023, and I launched a product by June.
(07:26):
Of 2023.
It's called the master verse.
Master verse.ai.
Okay.
And it's a community dedicatedto exploring how AI works by
understanding how, differentengines, think about different
things and, it's very interesting.
It's very super interesting.
So I'm very, I'm super interested in it.
I played around with it with my ownproduct stack for about six months before
(07:51):
I started investing in it actively.
And that really helped a lot.
Because it helped me to identifywhere the real problems were, like
problems like research did like arecall, augmented generation, rag.
This was a problem that I wastrying to solve for my users
back in June or July of 2023.
So I knew it was a real problem.
That's a company that we've invested in.
(08:12):
Another I started feeding ais.
Information and feeding them talking toeach other and pretty quickly realized
you get to nonsense pretty fast.
So I could understand that syntheticdata was gonna be a problem.
You can't create syntheticlearning materials, or at
least not wholly synthetic.
No.
So I've invested in, in, inanother company that is all about
(08:34):
building training materials.
It's called, oh geez.
It's escaping me in the moment.
I'll think of it in a minute.
Anyway so I think thereare lots of opportunities.
Lemme say this, there are lotsof opportunities to invest today.
If you wanna be an investor,if you want to get into ai, if
you want to be involved, try toconcentrate on problems that matter.
Try to concentrate on things that matter.
(08:54):
Try to understand where the real problemsare with the technology and go there.
To see what you can do, because that'swhere your opportunities are gonna be.
Where you solve problemsis where you find, returns.
And that's what entrepreneurs do.
Yeah.
But do you have some kind of suggestionsin your experience for entrepreneurs to
(09:15):
be looking into any specific industriesor just a very blanket view of.
Anything that is technical rightnow and how can you make it better?
Yeah.
At Evolution we have a principle thesisthat we use when we invest, and that
principle thesis is that technologydecomposes monolithic industries.
(09:35):
I. Okay.
Technology decomposesmonolithic industries.
This is very important for us asinvestors because it separates us from
other investors in our class who aremaybe looking for brand new industries.
We are looking to decomposemonolithic industries, and AI
(09:55):
is a perfect decomposition tool.
AI is.
So can you,
Before, before explaining that, canyou just elaborate that, that statement
can you explain what that means
exactly?
Sure.
Yeah.
So you gotta get in the way back machinea little bit, but it'll make sense, right?
Yeah.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to bein the logistics business, you needed to
(10:18):
have trucks, radios, software manifests.
Drivers.
N nowadays, Amazon, Uber, and everythingin between have decomposed logistics
to the point where if you wanna bepart of the logistics industry, all you
need are some wheels and a few minutesof time and an app on your you get
(10:40):
to be part of the logistics industry.
That's a de that's decompositionof a monolithic industry.
Another decomposition of amonolithic industry would be again.
20, 30 years ago, if you wanted to bein the public eye, if you wanted to
influence, if you wanted to be heardby large groups of people, you needed
(11:01):
to have some access to media, right?
You needed to have cameras, youneeded to have directors, you
needed to have distribution methods.
You needed to have all kinds ofthings if you wanted to get your
message out into the world, becausemedia was a monolithic industry.
And so as Amazon has done tologistics and as YouTube has done to
(11:25):
entertainment or media or influencing,you can think of companies like
PayPal or Stripe or Quicken that aredecomposing the banking industry and
have been decomposing it for some time.
Almost any FinTech you look at isdecomposed banking industry, which
is another monolithic industry.
Okay.
So there are a number of othermonolithic industries that are under
(11:48):
decompositional assault from ai.
The most easy.
Do you have some examples?
Oh, sure.
The most straightforwardis the legal industry.
Pretty much anybody who's played withai, I. And, in a business capacity
has used it to try to draft some kindof legal document or some kind of
agreement or some kind of memorandumof understanding or some kind of LOI or
(12:11):
things that you would've traditionallyturned to an attorney for, right?
And there's an old saying whichis never hand an attorney a
blank piece of paper, right?
So now you don't ever have to hand yourattorney a blank piece of paper, and
it's not very it's not going to be long.
Before, you don't really need to consultan attorney for most things, right?
(12:31):
Once upon a time, for example, when Iwas growing up, every shopping center
that you went to had travel agents in it.
Travel agents some shoppingcenters had two travel agents.
There was enough.
And if you wanted to travel in thosedays, it was a lot like consulting
an attorney is, today you would go,you would sit at a desk travel agent.
(12:54):
And you would tell the nice lady, 'causeit was almost always a lady behind the
desk where it was you wanted to go, I wantto go to Mexico for a couple weeks and
she would bang away on a Sabre computer.
We didn't know it was Sabre.
Okay.
But that was what it was Saber terminal,because she'd gone to college to learn
how to use a saber terminal, and shewould present you with three options and
you would pick the option that workedbest for you, and then she would arrange
(13:17):
it all and give you a packet of papers.
And that's how you traveled?
Yeah.
Now, when was the last timeyou went to a travel agent?
Five, six years ago maybe?
Yeah, maybe.
How many times have youtraveled since then?
Two, three at least, right?
Yeah.
Not even counting based, but everything
(13:37):
is online now, right?
It is just someone who's, whowould wanna go to a travel agent
so I think attorneys are situatedabout the same space as travel
agents were 25, 30 years ago.
Interesting.
Travel agent.
Very common.
Very good line of work.
Very high quality of life.
I think attorneys are situated right,where travel agents were situated in 1995.
(13:59):
Wow.
Feeling pretty good about things.
So it could be that the governmentsin each region could implement rules
using artificial intelligence forintelligence, for legal documents.
Go, governments can do itbut entrepreneurs can do it.
You wanna know what's a fun gamein the VC community right now?
A little everybody's playingat the back of their head.
(14:20):
We're all waiting for the singleperson, billion dollar company.
Yes, we haven't seen ityet, but it will be here.
It will be here.
I'll bet it's here.
Before 2030, there will be a companythat's run principally by agentic AI
with somebody in the middle of it who'sthought their way through it and has found
(14:41):
a market need and is solving that need.
Wait for it's coming.
Wow.
It's coming.
That'd
be, that's exciting, man.
Exciting.
Yeah.
When I started
in the, when I started in vc, Istarted as a technical provider.
I was the director of technology tothe world's largest venture capital
firm at the height of the.com.
And interestingly enough, theyhad the world's first incubation
(15:04):
space and I don't think they werequite sure what to do with it.
So they gave it to me and I. I got thisamazing experience all the way through
the.com boom, but the principle sourceof, or the principle use of funds in
those days, at least in the beginningfor early stage companies, was to
purchase computing infrastructure sothat you would have file, print, email,
(15:26):
and so forth, because those thingswere very difficult to come by in 1999.
Now the company that I was in serviceto was actually the company that
invested in Google, and I was in thebuilding when they got their check,
and a few years later, nobody neededto buy a quarter million dollars worth
of server hardware to start a company.
(15:47):
You just went to Gmail and signed up.
And then we got into a wholenew kind of use for VC funds.
A whole new need.
It was no longer forcomputing infrastructure.
Now it was for people, andthat's what's been happening
for the last 20 years or so.
What happens when you don'tneed that money for people, when
(16:08):
that's not your principal expense?
When you don't have to go out andhire half a million dollars worth of
development resources for six months?
To try to, but it'll be in technology,
right?
That investment instead.
What'll what will happen is thatentrepreneurs in particular will be
able to bring their ideas to fruition.
(16:31):
I. Much more efficiently, capitalefficiently, and time efficiently,
just as we are much more efficienttoday than we were in the early two
thousands, and we're much more efficientthen than we were in the 1990s.
This is increasing all the time.
That's what technology is doing.
AI is.
Very much an efficiencyincreaser, an efficiency enhancer.
(16:52):
And like I said, I think the legalindustry is a very good example,
but where I think AI really excelsin here, we're talking principally
about language learning models, butalmost any kind of learning algorithm.
Will excel at the intersection ofcomplexity and, for a pretty fair chunk
(17:12):
of our professional class in, the Westernworld, you spend a fair amount of your
life, your education, your business,trying to make sense of complexity.
That's how you earn your money, right?
Whether you're assigned, trying to makesense of data, whether you're an attorney
trying to make sense of contracts, right?
(17:33):
Whe whether you are a nonprofit trying tounderstand how to do tax filing, right?
There's most of the money thatgets spent at the higher level of
at the higher order, at the higherabstraction level is around complexity.
And AI is extremely good at notgetting confused by complexity.
(17:59):
So if you're making yourmark, that makes sense.
If you're looking at a business wherepeople's principle value offering is
that they've studied for years to beable to interpret a complex topic.
Then you're probably, yeah.
Vulnerable to these learning outcomes.
Yeah.
(18:20):
Yeah.
So are you, do you have a departmentthat is looking at developing any tools
other than the one you did back in 23?
We're always playing.
We're always playing.
Okay.
And I can, so is there anykind of secret you can share?
Can stop myself what you'reworking on right now.
But Mo,
most of the time it's much moreprudent for me to invest in people
(18:43):
who are solving problems than I'maware of because, because I could
solve one problem or two problemswhere I can invest 20 companies Yeah.
That are solving 5, 6, 7 problems.
Yeah.
No, that's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, definitely man.
It was great Alex, talking to youtoday about all of this fantastic stuff
(19:04):
that you're doing and the work thatyou're doing, if there's any last.
Suggestion that you can give or tipthat you can share with the audience.
If they have some kind of an idea boilingwithin them that they want to utilize
or bring forth in the market, but justdon't have any resources, they just
(19:26):
watching YouTube videos or listeningto podcasts and it's burning them up
and they wanna do something with it.
What are the first few steps theyshould take to start creating
some momentum towards it?
The first thing that I would do is make afew notes and talk about it with people.
Share your idea.
One of the things that market research.
(19:48):
Okay.
But let's just start with sharing.
Just sharing the idea.
Just that's what I'm socializing the idea.
Because a lot of entrepreneurs have a fearthat their idea might be stolen from them.
Yeah.
And that's something I reallywant to give you freedom from.
Yeah.
(20:08):
Because if you're the kind ofperson who thinks of solutions
to problems, this is not the onlysolution you're gonna think of.
Yeah.
No, I will give one piece of advice,if I may, to the entrepreneurs in the
crowd who might be looking for fun.
And it's something that I've saidbefore and if your audience has
heard it before, I apologize.
(20:28):
But I think it's worth saying, and thatis that when you're looking for funding
for your project, it's really easyto feel like you're panning for gold.
I. And panning for gold is a cold,miserable, unrewarding experience.
Anybody who's ever seen pictures ofminers standing up to their waists
(20:48):
and freezing cold water looking forthat tiny little nugget can imagine
how much that must have sucked.
And that's what it feelslike to be an entrepreneur.
Looking for funding, and I wanna giveyou something that's really important.
I want you to understand as anentrepreneur that you're actually the gold
that all the rest of us are looking for.
(21:10):
The whole funding ecosystem,everything around startups
is actually looking for you.
You are the gold that we are all high.
So know that and get startedbecause there's people who are
hunting for you who wanna raiseyou up and help you be successful,
and Alex is one of them.
(21:32):
We certainly try.
Yeah.
No, it's great my friend.
Great.
Getting to know you andcalmly listening to you speak.
It was very impressive, very soothing.
So I'm grateful to have thisopportunity and the knowledge
that you're sharing is very deep.
And definitely I'm very excitedto see what's coming about.
(21:53):
I'm sure you're working on somethingbig and you just don't want to share
right now, maybe, but if you do, youcan always, come back on a show when
you do launch it and we'll love to haveyou here and speak about it more openly.
Yes.
It's an honor to be hereand for your audience.
If they're interested in understandingAI and being part of an AI
(22:16):
community, try master verse ai.
If you're interested in learning aboutfundraising, try evolution accelerator.co.
Okay.
Okay.
Perfect.
Community, we're here to serve.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for thatoffer, and thank you so much for
your time, and keep in touch.
(22:36):
Thank you, Shahid.
It's an honor to be here.
Appreciate
it.
At Evolution we have a principle thesisthat we use when we invest and that
principle thesis is that technologydecomposes monolithic industries.
This is very important for us asinvestors because it separates us from
other investors in our class who aremaybe looking for brand new industries.
We are looking to decomposemonolithic industries and AI is
(00:23):
a perfect decomposition tool.
(00:45):
Welcome back to the SuperEntrepreneurs Podcast.
I'm your host, Shahid Durrani, theshow where we dive into the minds
of high performing entrepreneurs,innovators, and world class leaders.
If you're someone who's always lookingto grow, push your limits, think and
do bigger, you're in the right place.
(01:06):
Today we have Alex Chompff.
Alex is the co-founder and executivedirector of Evolution Ventures and
Lead General partner of Minerva Fund.
He's an active early stage venturecapital firm, investing in women and
traditionally under presented founders.
(01:30):
Welcome to our show, Alex.
Thank you.
Shade.
It's an honor to be here and I reallyappreciate, thank you opportunity.
And I want to thank your audiencefor giving us a moment to share.
Can you elaborate on what itmeans as a under underrepresented
founder, just to clarify.
Sure.
(01:50):
Speaking now pretty closely aboutthe Minerva Fund, because the Minerva
Fund focuses in this area, the MinervaFund is very interested in finding an
equitable distribution of venture capitalbased on the very simple premise that
Providence distributes brilliance equally.
(02:11):
Among its people.
And so there tends to be peoplewho are less represented in
terms of professional investment.
And Minerva Fund is lookingfor opportunities to find those
individuals and surface them.
And not only help toreinforce this idea of.
Brilliance distributed equally, butalso hopefully uncover some fantastic
(02:34):
investment opportunities along theway that might have been overlooked.
Yeah, true.
So it's a niche that you'dbe able to serve better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We think it's very importantto be of service at evolution.
Yeah, of course.
Or a fund.
We find this to be a very importantdriving idea in all of our work.
(02:54):
Yeah, I'm glad you're on this show then.
It's great.
I noticed that you were in militaryservice and Silicon Valley, and during
the internet boom and now leadingventures like the evolution accelerator.
So how do you believe that the wayyou manage your business or grow
(03:14):
your business has been affectedwith that type of mix of experience.
Oh we are all products of the earthin which we're raised, and I had the
very good fortune to be raised ina family that not only had a strong
patriotic military, military tradition.
But also was filled withentrepreneurs and inventors.
(03:37):
And so I got an opportunity froma very young age to be exposed
to some pretty formative ideas.
And then luckily enough, because myfather, who was a Marine before me and
was working for the phone company when Iwas a child, we moved to the California
Bay area, the San Francisco Bay Area.
(03:58):
And so the San Francisco Bay areas isfamous, of course, for technological
innovation and has been for many years.
It's also a place where people arevery open to new ideas and new ways
of thinking and new ways of being.
So I was exposed from a very young ageto a wide array of, things that were not
only very traditionally American and verymuch of the heartland like patriotism and
(04:21):
military service and, finding a way to beof use to your country, but also of the
left coast, the west coast, as they say.
And, very much open to new ways ofdoing things and new ways of seeing
things, and a willingness to disruptthe status quo in order to bring
about a new way of doing things.
So it's very, for.
They had been raised in that terra firma.
(04:42):
Then from there I had a set ofreally good experiences, only some
of which I can take responsibilityfor kind of if your listeners are
used to the movie Forrest Gump, ifthey've seen the movie, Forrest Gump.
Forrest is in lots of famous movies, butthey're not his movie if you understand.
Like he's, he goes to lots of placesand is on lots of things, but he
is always like the guy in the guyin the background or the guy in.
(05:05):
The sideline.
That's pretty much where I'vebeen for much of my life.
Is fortunate to be at some excitingplaces and some exciting times.
That's awesome.
And maybe even to have done alittle bit to help push the sled.
Yeah.
But it's not my movie.
I'm just there and that was, yeah.
Unity.
You just part of it.
Yes.
So tell me, do you practiceyour voice in the mirror?
(05:29):
I'll tell you.
Did you practice for, becauseit's so amazing, right?
So I just have to ask.
Sure.
As I mentioned before, thecall started and the nice.
You got a face made for radio?
No.
No,
I didn't mean that though, but, okay.
And
my wife says
that I talk very slowly andI'm very hard to listen to.
All I know is that inside of my own head,I'm running around shouting all the time.
(05:54):
There's a ton of things going on,and this is just how I present.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
That is good.
Welcome.
The best I've got for you.
I'm in my fifties and I've pretty muchsounded like this my whole life, I think.
Awesome, awesome.
Awesome.
No, it's great.
So you have a podcast.
I have experimented with podcasting,but I don't have the consistency
(06:17):
to get to be any good at it.
And besides which I'm a muchbetter guest than a host, honestly.
That's fine.
Ai, it is a topic that everyone's speakingabout, especially in your profession.
What do you feel, or what do you believe.
AI is going to transition intoin the future for new startups,
(06:39):
yeah.
Yeah.
AI is super interesting.
Super interesting.
I should say that I've been bangingaround on a keyboard for money.
Since 1990 and along the way I've pickedup a few business and technical skills
and I'm absolutely fascinated by ai.
Matter of fact, I got my opendev, my open AI developer key.
(07:02):
I. In May.
Oh, okay.
Of 2023.
And so whenever open, it was likeNovember or something of 2022 when they
announced I st I stayed up all nightplaying with that thing, man, all night.
I stayed up playing with that thing.
It was a miracle.
And I signed up for the professionalthing as soon as I could get it.
And I got my developer key in May of2023, and I launched a product by June.
(07:26):
Of 2023.
It's called the master verse.
Master verse.ai.
Okay.
And it's a community dedicatedto exploring how AI works by
understanding how, differentengines, think about different
things and, it's very interesting.
It's very super interesting.
So I'm very, I'm super interested in it.
I played around with it with my ownproduct stack for about six months before
(07:51):
I started investing in it actively.
And that really helped a lot.
Because it helped me to identifywhere the real problems were, like
problems like research did like arecall, augmented generation, rag.
This was a problem that I wastrying to solve for my users
back in June or July of 2023.
So I knew it was a real problem.
That's a company that we've invested in.
(08:12):
Another I started feeding ais.
Information and feeding them talking toeach other and pretty quickly realized
you get to nonsense pretty fast.
So I could understand that syntheticdata was gonna be a problem.
You can't create syntheticlearning materials, or at
least not wholly synthetic.
No.
So I've invested in, in, inanother company that is all about
(08:34):
building training materials.
It's called, oh geez.
It's escaping me in the moment.
I'll think of it in a minute.
Anyway so I think thereare lots of opportunities.
Lemme say this, there are lotsof opportunities to invest today.
If you wanna be an investor,if you want to get into ai, if
you want to be involved, try toconcentrate on problems that matter.
Try to concentrate on things that matter.
(08:54):
Try to understand where the real problemsare with the technology and go there.
To see what you can do, because that'swhere your opportunities are gonna be.
Where you solve problemsis where you find, returns.
And that's what entrepreneurs do.
Yeah.
But do you have some kind of suggestionsin your experience for entrepreneurs to
(09:15):
be looking into any specific industriesor just a very blanket view of.
Anything that is technical rightnow and how can you make it better?
Yeah.
At Evolution we have a principle thesisthat we use when we invest, and that
principle thesis is that technologydecomposes monolithic industries.
(09:35):
I. Okay.
Technology decomposesmonolithic industries.
This is very important for us asinvestors because it separates us from
other investors in our class who aremaybe looking for brand new industries.
We are looking to decomposemonolithic industries, and AI
(09:55):
is a perfect decomposition tool.
AI is.
So can you,
Before, before explaining that, canyou just elaborate that, that statement
can you explain what that means
exactly?
Sure.
Yeah.
So you gotta get in the way back machinea little bit, but it'll make sense, right?
Yeah.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to bein the logistics business, you needed to
(10:18):
have trucks, radios, software manifests.
Drivers.
N nowadays, Amazon, Uber, and everythingin between have decomposed logistics
to the point where if you wanna bepart of the logistics industry, all you
need are some wheels and a few minutesof time and an app on your you get
(10:40):
to be part of the logistics industry.
That's a de that's decompositionof a monolithic industry.
Another decomposition of amonolithic industry would be again.
20, 30 years ago, if you wanted to bein the public eye, if you wanted to
influence, if you wanted to be heardby large groups of people, you needed
(11:01):
to have some access to media, right?
You needed to have cameras, youneeded to have directors, you
needed to have distribution methods.
You needed to have all kinds ofthings if you wanted to get your
message out into the world, becausemedia was a monolithic industry.
And so as Amazon has done tologistics and as YouTube has done to
(11:25):
entertainment or media or influencing,you can think of companies like
PayPal or Stripe or Quicken that aredecomposing the banking industry and
have been decomposing it for some time.
Almost any FinTech you look at isdecomposed banking industry, which
is another monolithic industry.
Okay.
So there are a number of othermonolithic industries that are under
(11:48):
decompositional assault from ai.
The most easy.
Do you have some examples?
Oh, sure.
The most straightforwardis the legal industry.
Pretty much anybody who's played withai, I. And, in a business capacity
has used it to try to draft some kindof legal document or some kind of
agreement or some kind of memorandumof understanding or some kind of LOI or
(12:11):
things that you would've traditionallyturned to an attorney for, right?
And there's an old saying whichis never hand an attorney a
blank piece of paper, right?
So now you don't ever have to hand yourattorney a blank piece of paper, and
it's not very it's not going to be long.
Before, you don't really need to consultan attorney for most things, right?
(12:31):
Once upon a time, for example, when Iwas growing up, every shopping center
that you went to had travel agents in it.
Travel agents some shoppingcenters had two travel agents.
There was enough.
And if you wanted to travel in thosedays, it was a lot like consulting
an attorney is, today you would go,you would sit at a desk travel agent.
(12:54):
And you would tell the nice lady, 'causeit was almost always a lady behind the
desk where it was you wanted to go, I wantto go to Mexico for a couple weeks and
she would bang away on a Sabre computer.
We didn't know it was Sabre.
Okay.
But that was what it was Saber terminal,because she'd gone to college to learn
how to use a saber terminal, and shewould present you with three options and
you would pick the option that workedbest for you, and then she would arrange
(13:17):
it all and give you a packet of papers.
And that's how you traveled?
Yeah.
Now, when was the last timeyou went to a travel agent?
Five, six years ago maybe?
Yeah, maybe.
How many times have youtraveled since then?
Two, three at least, right?
Yeah.
Not even counting based, but everything
(13:37):
is online now, right?
It is just someone who's, whowould wanna go to a travel agent
so I think attorneys are situatedabout the same space as travel
agents were 25, 30 years ago.
Interesting.
Travel agent.
Very common.
Very good line of work.
Very high quality of life.
I think attorneys are situated right,where travel agents were situated in 1995.
(13:59):
Wow.
Feeling pretty good about things.
So it could be that the governmentsin each region could implement rules
using artificial intelligence forintelligence, for legal documents.
Go, governments can do itbut entrepreneurs can do it.
You wanna know what's a fun gamein the VC community right now?
A little everybody's playingat the back of their head.
(14:20):
We're all waiting for the singleperson, billion dollar company.
Yes, we haven't seen ityet, but it will be here.
It will be here.
I'll bet it's here.
Before 2030, there will be a companythat's run principally by agentic AI
with somebody in the middle of it who'sthought their way through it and has found
(14:41):
a market need and is solving that need.
Wait for it's coming.
Wow.
It's coming.
That'd
be, that's exciting, man.
Exciting.
Yeah.
When I started
in the, when I started in vc, Istarted as a technical provider.
I was the director of technology tothe world's largest venture capital
firm at the height of the.com.
And interestingly enough, theyhad the world's first incubation
(15:04):
space and I don't think they werequite sure what to do with it.
So they gave it to me and I. I got thisamazing experience all the way through
the.com boom, but the principle sourceof, or the principle use of funds in
those days, at least in the beginningfor early stage companies, was to
purchase computing infrastructure sothat you would have file, print, email,
(15:26):
and so forth, because those thingswere very difficult to come by in 1999.
Now the company that I was in serviceto was actually the company that
invested in Google, and I was in thebuilding when they got their check,
and a few years later, nobody neededto buy a quarter million dollars worth
of server hardware to start a company.
(15:47):
You just went to Gmail and signed up.
And then we got into a wholenew kind of use for VC funds.
A whole new need.
It was no longer forcomputing infrastructure.
Now it was for people, andthat's what's been happening
for the last 20 years or so.
What happens when you don'tneed that money for people, when
(16:08):
that's not your principal expense?
When you don't have to go out andhire half a million dollars worth of
development resources for six months?
To try to, but it'll be in technology,
right?
That investment instead.
What'll what will happen is thatentrepreneurs in particular will be
able to bring their ideas to fruition.
(16:31):
I. Much more efficiently, capitalefficiently, and time efficiently,
just as we are much more efficienttoday than we were in the early two
thousands, and we're much more efficientthen than we were in the 1990s.
This is increasing all the time.
That's what technology is doing.
AI is.
Very much an efficiencyincreaser, an efficiency enhancer.
(16:52):
And like I said, I think the legalindustry is a very good example,
but where I think AI really excelsin here, we're talking principally
about language learning models, butalmost any kind of learning algorithm.
Will excel at the intersection ofcomplexity and, for a pretty fair chunk
(17:12):
of our professional class in, the Westernworld, you spend a fair amount of your
life, your education, your business,trying to make sense of complexity.
That's how you earn your money, right?
Whether you're assigned, trying to makesense of data, whether you're an attorney
trying to make sense of contracts, right?
(17:33):
Whe whether you are a nonprofit trying tounderstand how to do tax filing, right?
There's most of the money thatgets spent at the higher level of
at the higher order, at the higherabstraction level is around complexity.
And AI is extremely good at notgetting confused by complexity.
(17:59):
So if you're making yourmark, that makes sense.
If you're looking at a business wherepeople's principle value offering is
that they've studied for years to beable to interpret a complex topic.
Then you're probably, yeah.
Vulnerable to these learning outcomes.
Yeah.
(18:20):
Yeah.
So are you, do you have a departmentthat is looking at developing any tools
other than the one you did back in 23?
We're always playing.
We're always playing.
Okay.
And I can, so is there anykind of secret you can share?
Can stop myself what you'reworking on right now.
But Mo,
most of the time it's much moreprudent for me to invest in people
(18:43):
who are solving problems than I'maware of because, because I could
solve one problem or two problemswhere I can invest 20 companies Yeah.
That are solving 5, 6, 7 problems.
Yeah.
No, that's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, definitely man.
It was great Alex, talking to youtoday about all of this fantastic stuff
(19:04):
that you're doing and the work thatyou're doing, if there's any last.
Suggestion that you can give or tipthat you can share with the audience.
If they have some kind of an idea boilingwithin them that they want to utilize
or bring forth in the market, but justdon't have any resources, they just
(19:26):
watching YouTube videos or listeningto podcasts and it's burning them up
and they wanna do something with it.
What are the first few steps theyshould take to start creating
some momentum towards it?
The first thing that I would do is make afew notes and talk about it with people.
Share your idea.
One of the things that market research.
(19:48):
Okay.
But let's just start with sharing.
Just sharing the idea.
Just that's what I'm socializing the idea.
Because a lot of entrepreneurs have a fearthat their idea might be stolen from them.
Yeah.
And that's something I reallywant to give you freedom from.
Yeah.
(20:08):
Because if you're the kind ofperson who thinks of solutions
to problems, this is not the onlysolution you're gonna think of.
Yeah.
No, I will give one piece of advice,if I may, to the entrepreneurs in the
crowd who might be looking for fun.
And it's something that I've saidbefore and if your audience has
heard it before, I apologize.
(20:28):
But I think it's worth saying, and thatis that when you're looking for funding
for your project, it's really easyto feel like you're panning for gold.
I. And panning for gold is a cold,miserable, unrewarding experience.
Anybody who's ever seen pictures ofminers standing up to their waists
(20:48):
and freezing cold water looking forthat tiny little nugget can imagine
how much that must have sucked.
And that's what it feelslike to be an entrepreneur.
Looking for funding, and I wanna giveyou something that's really important.
I want you to understand as anentrepreneur that you're actually the gold
that all the rest of us are looking for.
(21:10):
The whole funding ecosystem,everything around startups
is actually looking for you.
You are the gold that we are all high.
So know that and get startedbecause there's people who are
hunting for you who wanna raiseyou up and help you be successful,
and Alex is one of them.
(21:32):
We certainly try.
Yeah.
No, it's great my friend.
Great.
Getting to know you andcalmly listening to you speak.
It was very impressive, very soothing.
So I'm grateful to have thisopportunity and the knowledge
that you're sharing is very deep.
And definitely I'm very excitedto see what's coming about.
(21:53):
I'm sure you're working on somethingbig and you just don't want to share
right now, maybe, but if you do, youcan always, come back on a show when
you do launch it and we'll love to haveyou here and speak about it more openly.
Yes.
It's an honor to be hereand for your audience.
If they're interested in understandingAI and being part of an AI
(22:16):
community, try master verse ai.
If you're interested in learning aboutfundraising, try evolution accelerator.co.
Okay.
Okay.
Perfect.
Community, we're here to serve.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for thatoffer, and thank you so much for
your time, and keep in touch.
(22:36):
Thank you, Shahid.
It's an honor to be here.
Appreciate
it.
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