Over 10 Years of Insights on Visual Technologies & AI From Leaders at DeepMind, Sequoia Capital, Meta, Union Square Ventures, Snap and More
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As the only fund that exclusively invests in visual technologies and AI, in 2014, we at LDV Capital started our Annual LDV Vision Summit to cultivate a strong and vibrant community of entrepreneurs, deep tech researchers and investors interested in viewing the world through this lens. Visual technologies typically leverage computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. Initially perceived as "cute, niche and science fiction," the landscape has transformed, with thousands of visual tech companies providing tremendous value across all sectors (see our portfolio companies as a great example of that).
As we approach our 10th Summit anniversary, we've decided to go down memory lane and spotlight the exceptional fireside chat speakers Evan Nisselson, Founder & General Partner at LDV Capital, has had the privilege to witness and interview over the years. These leaders come from companies such as DeepMind, Union Square Ventures, Meta, Spark Capital, FirstMark, Universal Pictures, Greylock Partners, Snap, First Round Capital, OpenWater, Mural and many more.
2024
We can’t wait to hear the wisdom that Roelof Botha and Esther Dyson will share during fireside chats with Evan at our upcoming 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit on March 21, 2024. Will you be joining us to participate in real time? It’s a free virtual event with over 1,000 attendees from around the world!
Roelof Botha is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. In 2022, he was named Senior Steward in charge of its global operations and he joined Sequoia in 2003. He has invested in companies such as Unity, 23andMe, YouTube, Instagram, Square, Evernote and Tumblr among other companies. Prior to Sequoia, he was CFO of PayPal which was acquired by eBay in 2002. He has been on the Forbes' Midas List 15 times.
Esther Dyson is an investor, author, businesswoman, commentator, philanthropist and a full-time executive founder of Wellville. Her primary activity is investing in and nurturing startups, with a focus on healthcare, human capital and aerospace. She is an early investor in 23andMe, Evernote, Flickr, Mashery, Omada Health, Square, Ezra (LDV portfolio company) and others. Check out our interview with Esther on investing in insurance, mapping, mental health and telehealth.
2023
Clément Farabet, VP of Research at DeepMind, discussed lessons from commercializing AI research, starting deep tech businesses & building artificial intelligence products at Fortune 100 companies. Here’s what he said about the challenges he is excited to work on:
“LLMs (Large Language Models) are a key part of the puzzle. We call them LLMs now, they're just scaled neural networks with this great transformer-based architecture that treats input streams as tokens. These models have demonstrated that being trained on a huge amount of text data, they're able to build an internal model of the world that's satisfying and that can be used to query them. That's impressive!
We have lots of unsolved problems. We need to build something more cohesive, complete, and capable of getting close to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We're going to spend the next 3-5-10 years (I don't know how long it's going to take us) exploring the rest of the space.”
Ty Ahmad-Taylor, VP of Monetization at Snap, spoke about the ideal visual tech that he'd want to have in 20 years, but he'd like today:
“I think there are four companies that are working on it. Magic Leap is still in existence. I think Google, Apple, and Meta are working on it.
We're working on it, but ultimately our form factor looks like glasses, that gives you information about the environment that you're in that you otherwise would not be party to. “What’s the name of a coffee shop that's just down the street? Who is this person that I know reports to me, but I don't remember their name?”
The compute load for doing this doesn't fit into glasses. If I were to foretell the future, any glasses would have to be paired with a phone so that they can use the compute power and the bandwidth that a phone provides. It’s a way to provide a mixed reality environment that folks live in.
What's interesting is that a lot of what you see in science fiction movies is a good foretelling of the future, but none of them have foretold what mixed reality would look like or how it would function, in the way that Minority Report told a lot of the way that we would think about the future with regards to automated cars and manipulating things in a touchless environment. Nobody foretold what augmented reality and mixed reality look like. It's an area that's ripe for innovation, and it's nothing but visually oriented.” Read more insights from Ty Ahmad-Taylor’s 32 years working at NYTimes, @Home Network, Samsung, Meta, and Snap.
Mariano Battan, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Mural, on being a resilient entrepreneur:
“The big learning is to focus on the customers that have the pain point and be patient on getting to the next focus. You cannot focus on two things at the same time by definition. You can have many satellites focusing on multiple things, but you as a CEO entrepreneur, or again, when you delegate, can only focus on one thing at a time. And I see all these AI companies building great magical brain-busting things, but they are good for everything and everyone. Even though AI will be solving a lot of problems, people are still going to be buying. You need to convince a set of folks that have a certain set of problems that have options and then they cannot remember much, especially around the brand, around being all around them. It’s super important! That would be the biggest takeaway: focusing on and being deliberate for a while. Be super specific about putting it everywhere and telling your grandma or your sister that “we are that for that particular audience” versus calling it “we're an AI company that helps…”.
2022
Mary Lou Jepsen, the founder and CEO of OpenWater, on how to make moonshots into moon landings:
“Let's face it, the people that rise to the top of the most powerful tech companies today – the ones that get to make the big decisions – are good at optimizing click-through revenue for ad sales, for example. A single vice president can kill your program because they don't understand it, and their intuition is good at the thing that is the core part of the company and you're doing the new part of the company... It's harder to do a startup within one of those companies than to just do a real startup with 1/100 of the funding. At the levels I can get to in the big tech companies, I get a lot of funding but it's easier and I can go faster and more directly to the problem with a startup structure.”
Martín Varsavsky, Chairman at Inception (formerly Prelude Fertility) & Gameto; CEO at Overture & Goggo Network, spoke about turning technological innovations into billion-dollar companies that can have a significant impact on humanity and build significant value.
“There has to be a level of envy for me to want to invest. I invest in people I admire or secretly envy. I invest in entrepreneurs that I feel are doing phenomenal work in fields that I couldn't do or get involved in, but at the same time, they may be common in my life.”
2021
Rick Heitzmann, Founder and Partner of FirstMark, discussed futurist’s perspectives on businesses powered by computer vision.
“You want to do hard things. If you're doing easy things, there are a lot of people that could do it. You create a lot of value and create important companies when you take on hard challenges and regulatory moats.
If you're dealing in the regulatory environment, you can't be scared. We’ve had companies with speed bumps, like DraftKings and Airbnb, where they've had to maybe go too fast and reel themselves in. As you're able to have a conversation with regulators, and as you're trying to prove and prove that you're doing what's in consumers' best interest and empowering people, you think that they're going to hopefully get on the same side. As we think about whether it be democratizing your electronic medical record, whether it be democratizing your ability to gain access to physicians or pharmaceuticals, which might've been hard historically, or even democratizing the ability to look inside your body to see if you're pre-cancerous, you have fatty liver disease, you have a potential brain tumor, at Ezra, all those things are important. It will be hard for regulators to stand in the way of people taking better care of themselves.”
Hayley Barna, Partner at First Round, about the biggest trends in visual tech investing:
“When it comes to visual technologies, I'm continually surprised by the range of pitches and sectors where I see it being applied. Yesterday, there was a company that was using the camera to measure biofeedback, like putting your finger behind the camera and being able to get a pulse through that. There is an increasing application to shopping, a lot about the future of retail and local commerce too. Who knows if QR codes are going to change anything, but it is fascinating to see, at least in New York, how everyone has figured them out because that is how you read the menus at restaurants.
With consumers, it comes back to how a product or a technology makes you feel or the value that it delivers - visual technologies have a great potential to save you time. We see that with Papaya, the payments company in our portfolio, you snap a picture of your parking ticket or your doctor's bill and they will pay it for you and save time. Amazing what that thing in your pocket can do for you.”
Abhijay Prakash, President of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, discussed the cutting-edge technologies impacting Hollywood & the media.
“Working at a content company, I have a bias towards content. Like any of those formulations, it’s simplistic because the temptation is if something's king then everybody else is subject, and I don't think it works that way.
It's an ecosystem and content exists in the ecosystem because I wouldn't say that the distribution gatekeepers are without power, right? They play an important role, and it’s not just in terms of what content owners get paid but even what gets served up.
Look at the battle between Epic Games and Apple and Epic Games and Google. That's a content company and a gatekeeper and I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that the distribution gatekeepers in Apple and Google's case are without power and subject to Epic. Let's see how it plays out.
I think of our content as existing in its ecosystem. It’s indisputable that if you have great content you have a business. In that sense, it is paramount and you don't have anything else without it. I spend a lot of time thinking about business models, but at the end of the day, if you don't have compelling content, I can drop the best business model on the white piece of paper, it won't matter.”
2019
Thomas Reardon, VP of Research at Meta Reality Labs, co-founder, & CEO of CTRL-labs (Facebook, now known as Meta, acquired CTRL-labs for somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion in 2019), discussed the relationship between humans & machines enabled by the neural interface technology. Here’s a piece of advice he gave for those of you who are starting companies:
“You need high-faith investors – ones that will help you raise more money. If you are working on really hard problems you need people who aren’t just looking for tilting up the website in six weeks and getting RPU up within six months. Instead, they are going to think about scientific, technical, and other metrics that will ultimately lead to revenue and profit. They can track them for the next 3-5 years that it might take you to build that thing that can be transformative. That requires high faith investors and high IQ investors.”
Nabeel Hyatt, General Partner at Spark Capital, spoke about the next billion-dollar companies at the frontiers of computer vision:
“Visual is an amazing lens to think through the world right now. The advances in computer vision in the previous few years were one of the core reasons we believed it was finally the right time for autonomous driving when we led the Series A at Cruise. I have no doubt that technology is getting massively cheaper and will make its way into many consumer hardware products in the next few years. At the same time, we are always looking for new sensors, and new visual data to evaluate the world around us, such as the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data that Capella Space is going to be providing very soon. That will be the first time a U.S.-based commercial company will offer that view of the world and can be massively enabling to the next generation of companies.”
Gillian Munson, CFO at Vimeo, formerly Partner at Union Square Ventures, discussed the rollercoaster experiences as an investor across multiple stages, entrepreneurs at companies, and the impact of visual technologies on businesses.
Here’s what she shared about deal flow and valuations:
“We recently had a hot deal come in. Lots of people were in it. It’s an awesome company. But we couldn’t get comfortable with the valuation and so an hour after the company came in, I said, “Thank you, no thank you”. For us, it is a conversation about "Does this fit not only our strategy but our return profile?" and because we have a small fund, we question "Are things going to be 5x of what they are today, can we imagine what has to happen to make that happen?". The conversation is largely about, "Do we see enough room in the combination between the opportunity and the valuation in order to get the results we need to get for our customers?".
Di-Ann Eisnor, CEO at Crews by Core, formerly CWeO at The We Company (WeWork), shared views on how visual technologies empower businesses from maps to cities and more.
“While I believe that technology has to be something in service of the community and on its own, it’s not enough if it’s not solving a problem. I do have a big love of deep tech and I have recent investments across the ecosystem and AI. It’s something I’ve been incredibly passionate about. I’m excited about processing at the edge, federated learning, and construction tech. In the past, I have invested a lot in mobility: autonomous cars.”
2018
Eric Fossum, Professor at Dartmouth & CMOS Image Sensor Inventor, discussed the evolution, present & future of image sensors.
“At some point, you come to the realization “Wow! This company is going to succeed”. You need all hands on deck. I would regret terribly if I didn’t put my all into it and this company failed. That’s why we decided to take the leap. It’s a big leap to leave a full-time job and a regular paycheck. It was a new family and I jumped off to start a company. I was a little nervous. By the way, we didn’t know anything about starting a business. The most I knew was from the paper route I had back when I was a kid.”
Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, shared insights on investing at the intersection of standout consumer businesses and vertical networks. She talked about consumer healthcare as the sector that’s ripe for disruption:
“There are several challenges in consumer healthcare. One is to bridge the emotional divide around “how do I increase access to information, increase the comfort level, and increase the feeling of safety and closeness to medical providers while getting the leverage that tech can provide?” Visual tech will be able to provide a lot for us across categories. We are seeing it in a lot of different places. Some of it we are seeing on the B2B side as well.”
Amol Sarva, Managing Partner at LifeX Ventures, previously Co-Founder & CEO at Knotel, discussed the roller coaster ride of building startups. He liked Evan’s idea of using thermal/spectroscopy cameras to track sick people in shared spaces to prevent them from endangering other people’s health:
“Imagine the same camera that lets you in, has also a red light “Don’t Come In” [in case the camera indicates you are sick].”
Amol then suggested combining this technology with tracking emotions in real time: “How about when you are happy? The camera can recognize your mood.”
2017
Josh Kopelman, Managing Partner at First Round Capital, is on the lookout to find the "Investable Window" on new technologies:
“Having lived through the shift from the desktop computer to the internet-connected computer in the early '90s and then to mobile, I think autonomous vehicles and their use and their application is just as big as the internet initial shift was in the early '90s. People have barely begun to think about all of the business impacts and the second and third-order effects of that. Part of the challenge is sequencing it. My partner, Howard, likes to say, "We invest in two places. We invest early or way too early.”
Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, spoke about generating above-average investment returns and future investment trends:
“One area that we're excited about is healthcare. A lot of healthcare involves some form of visual inspection. I have a lot of moles, so I need to go to the dermatologist once or twice a year. My dermatologist is really getting up there in age, and I'm always like, "Does he really still see these things?" He's nice and really a fantastic doctor, but that is a legitimate concern.
It's one of those areas where a machine's not gonna be distracted. A machine is gonna be very thorough. And then of course there's a lot of stuff in pathology. There are radiology images. A lot of healthcare involves the analysis of images. That's a very important application area.”
2016
Howard Morgan, Chairman at B Capital Group, Co-Founder of First Round Capital, shared his views on investment opportunities:
“People are very excited about AR/VR, and we are too, and when I started investing in VR in 1995, it was way too early. We didn't have the processing power and so on. It's still on the early side for VR. I think AR is probably closer to being really useful, which we're going to see happening over time, but that's one that there's a lot of hype on. Humanoid robotics - real androids, if you will - we're seeing a lot of proposals for that. That also seems like it's kind of a bit early, although I think we can see how to pull together pieces there. We do see a lot of things in the medical field now where there aren't big enough databases of tagged images. If you want to look at all the MRIs or X-rays or whatever that are done, there are only a few million done each year, and that, from a deep learning point of view, may not be enough. Plus they're not all tagged, and you have to get them tagged. Those are areas where it may still be a little bit too early for some of these things.”
Bijan Sabet, United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic and formerly Co-Founder and General Partner at Spark Capital about the future investment trends and early-stage opportunities in businesses leveraging visual technologies:
“I don't think you're going to live inside the Oculus 24/7, or HDC or whatever competing thing. I think it's going to be when you want that experience you're going to have that experience, and then when you don't want that experience you're going to live your life, and that's okay. I don't think this is an “or”, it's an “and.” I think that's where it's exciting. I mean there's no reason why, in the future, I couldn't do this with you, but I could be in Boston, and it will be as lifelike and realistic as me being here.”
Josh Elman, Director of Product Management at Apple, formerly General Partner at Greylock Partners, said that building a company is hypothesis testing.
“When we make an investment we're not like, "This better work. If this doesn't work we're going to fire you as a CEO and we're going to remove funding from your company." It just wouldn't work that way. It's like we're ready to join the journey and we're excited for the next hypothesis and we're giving you this much capital right now in order to go try to prove it. If we get towards the end of that amount of capital and we haven't proven enough of our assumptions we should rethink what we do with what you've built, with your own career, with where you're going.
If, by the way, we've proved them faster, we should raise more money and get a lot more aggressive to keep going to prove them. It has been a couple of years now, and I've already gotten to see both sides of that journey. It's incredible! We just keep it as this testing. It's never a failure. It's “Are we testing enough?” and at some point, you may decide that with this cap table and this amount of money, and this set of people that you've hired on this journey, maybe that's enough to try something new and keep going, or maybe it's time to rethink things”.
2015
Lane Becker, President of Wikimedia LLC at Wikimedia Foundation, Formerly Director of Product and Startups at Code for America, about managing boards:
“It comes down to just really knowing what it is that you believe in or what you care about and making sure that is represented and then weighing all the advice that you get relative to that. These are people who are spending part of their time looking at what you’re doing. You’re spending all of your time looking at what you’re doing. You’re the one with deep knowledge and deep experience in that area. It’s valuable, but you always have to gauge it against “What is the core of what it is that I’m doing?” and “How do I apply it against that and decide?” I realize that’s abstract. It’s also almost impossible to do, especially relative to your investors who definitely have a sort of power or authority position over you.”
Joanne Wilson, Angel Investor, Blogger and Co-Founder of Women’s Entrepreneur Festival at Gotham Gal Ventures.
“It’s more about where I think we’re going down the pike. I think that is one of the reasons why I don’t invest in better mouse traps. At least, I don’t think really good investors invest in better mouse traps because, for instance, a perfect example... You go somewhere and you’re talking with a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the Internet. They are not in this whole technology space, which is like seeing the future. People say, “Wow that is so amazing, this product.” And it’s like, “Yes, and that’s why we invested in it five years ago.”
Andy Weissman, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, spoke about visual technology investment opportunities.
“If you think about where we are with imaging right now and imaging technology, and you think about where we are with networks to share images, we’ve completely flipped and inverted the model of the production, distribution, and consumption. We flipped it to where people are actually in control of their distributions, and the selfie is the actual ultimate expression, not only of self but about that change in power and change in control. I think it’s something fundamental.”
2014
Om Malik, Partner at True Ventures, known for founding the technology blog Gigaom, gave a piece of advice to entrepreneurs:
“Things take 10 years. Anything worth doing takes a long time. You have to have conviction in what you are doing. Sometimes it’s very challenging to stay focused because external factors always try to dissuade you from what you think the world should look like.
At some point, you also have to acknowledge that what you are doing is not working. These are two major things.
You have to be an idiot to not know when it’s not working. With every mistake I made, I learned a lesson. I don’t think of them as a failure, I think of them “Maybe it was a wrong experiment, maybe I’ll try something else,” and I think that is where you need to be very self-aware as a founder. You can lie to everybody, except yourself. A lot of people, I find, don’t tell themselves the truth that things are not working. You can’t lie to yourself – that is what makes you succeed and that is what makes you fail.”
