Bloomberg's early-stage VC fund will only invest in Series A or earlier companies. Then when looking at AI companies they ask two questions: "1) Do you have access to your own user? 2) Do you have access to a data set that's yours? If they have both those things, then they can create a virtuous cycle where the user contributes the data, the data gets better, and it makes for a better user experience."
Asking about access and usage rights to data and means of applying learnings from the data is a very obvious qualifier, so there is little valuable insight here.
It seems like it'd be hard to build a durable competitive advantage without either owning the user relationships or owning the data, correct? Such a company would be just an algorithm and some tools around it, which are relatively easy for a competitor to copy.
We are trying to cluster user personalities and match it with our text corpus cluster in order to find the best documents matching the user's personality. For us Wikipedia raw data suffices since it's counterproductive to use proprietary searchable text corpus.
While the VCs viewpoint is totally understandable from their perspective, always chasing money & valuation gets aggravating for us startups.
Business today: can you cut off their air supply, or can they cut off your air supply?
I can't imagine why this would be a good thing to draw attention to.
OUYA's execution was bad enough that it went out of business.
Actually, I believe we really are on the cusp of a very different world of software, due to AI. But, it's been a long time coming, and a lot of great minds have kinda gotten lost in the academic pursuit of AI.
That's a peculiar way to think about new technology, to say the least. "Too late to fully understand it", really?
