This is the second episode in our data-driven VC’s series. Mike is co-founder and Applied AI at Moonfire - one of the pioneering VC firms in the field of data-driven investing. Mike is a hacker at his heart and we go into some interesting technical details in our conversation.

You can listen to Starwatcher podcast over here or pick you favourite platform:

* Google Podcasts

* Apple podcasts

* Spotify

Show notes and topics we are discussing:

- Mike's background as a hacker, engineer and becoming a VC

- Establishing Moonfire with data as a core fabric of the firm

- Sourcing, screening and evaluation as a machine learning driven recommendation problem

- Adopting transformer architecture from very beginning.

- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

- Universal approximation theorem

- About the stage of Data-driven investing industry

- Data-driven VC landscape report

- Analysing founders vs. analysing companies. Units of calculation at different stages of company life cycle.

- How LLM's have affected people analytics

- Importance of data across sourcing, screening and evaluation cycle

- Thesis-driven approach

- Having prepared mind in conversations with entrepreneurs

- Importance of identifying which companies don't fit thesis.

- Trusting data vs. making an own opinion

- Assisted expert decision making process

- Building tools to assist human expert

- Agent based approach

- Impact of public Large language models

- Story about improving venture scale classifier model by 20%

- Performance of GPT4 vs. in-house models

- Kardashev scale

- API (outsource) models vs in-house models

- Giving LangChain access to internal tools

- Diminishing AI advantage in VC industry

- AutoGPT and "Thought, Action, Observation" loop

- Alignment problem

- Why it is actually valuable to be kind with LLM's

- Dramatic change of intellectual labor market

- Importance of humans to humans experience

- AI from startup perspective

- Rapid change of information exchange and expressing human emotions

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starwatcher.substack.com