In the first all-Australian episode of Venture Stories Erik interviews returning guest Ash Fontana (@ashfontana), general partner at Zetta Ventures, and his fellow countryman, Anthony Goldbloom (@antgoldbloom), CEO of Kaggle.

Ash’s fund is the first fund devoted exclusively to AI and machine learning, and the three talk about how to evaluate companies, founders and ideas in the space. Ash says that the founders he looks for are often pre-traction but post-data, meaning that they have the data but are trying to find a way to make their machine learning work commercially viable. He points out that certain data-gathering techniques just aren’t viable for a startup when “you have to lose money to learn in the machine learning space.”

The trio discuss a number of the coolest current applications of machine learning as well as where they would like to see companies bring machine learning in the future. They talk about the present and potential future impact of machine learning techniques in data labeling, oil and gas, healthcare, and the enterprise.

Anthony and Ash also talk about some of the trends they see coming in machine learning, including moving data and machine learning to the cloud as well as the use of private or disguised data to allow sensitive data sets to be analyzed by a broader group of people. They also discuss which areas prospective founders should avoid and why machine learning is conducive to certain types of problems but not others.

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Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.