Just Thoughts #37: Venture Studio Research, female founder pitching and yearly self-reflection.
In the end we talked about an AI project we've been jamming around.
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The first rule of reading these thoughts is to ask yourself:
Why should I think this way?
This edition is a collection of thoughts, some old and some new. Most importantly, it is just a collection of thoughts. I keep asking myself why I keep up the writing; quite frankly, there are days I can’t answer that question. Have you ever felt that way about something?
Headlines This Week:
Venture Studio Research
Female Founder Pitching Day
Yearly self-reflection exercise
What’s Next?
Venture Studio Research
We highlighted the work done by Max Pog in Just Thoughts #1.
We also found Max Pog’s work on Startup Studios an exciting benchmark, asking us what a startup studio for media ventures would look like. We enlisted the help of Long-time media industry veteran Pauli Kopu to help us understand the media world and its relation to the startup world.
Max and his team have released an extensive research report on Venture Studios' performance, and the hype post is gaining ridiculous traction on LinkedIn. Without reciting the content, here are a few thoughts on the summary of findings;
There is too little quality research like this in general -> massive 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 for the effort.
How many of these venture studios apply the latest AI LLM and Multimodel space development? Indy makers can create fully blown copies of existing software products in days, and initial idea validation takes minutes, not hours. How is this affecting the studio space?
There seems to be an increasing number of studios with internal tech teams. This makes them suitable for teams or founders lacking tech competence, which is probably the key differentiator in deal flow compared to traditional venture capitalists who don’t invest in teams lacking tech expertise. Someone should organize a forum for non-tech founders and startup studios with internal tech teams. This could be a niche with traction or something bolt.new could host (bolt.new lets you build apps with just a prompt; the output is wild more about this in the end of the post).
The LinkedIn post with the ”re-post to gain an invitation to the webinar” is brilliant. This should be general practice for any outstanding research or whitepaper content.
Female Founder Pitching Day
I visited the Female Founder Pitching Day 2024 to support one of my coachees and gauge who attends these events, as diversity in venture investing has been highlighted continuously as an issue. I reacted starkly to Deidei’s CEO Jasmin Assulin's recent writing on the Slush platform about the fact underscored by Unconventional Ventures: Diversity investing won’t budge.
The Short Cut, SheInvest, and TechNordic Advocates co-organized the event. My first reaction was, why aren’t the local VCs flocking to this event if they want to take these diversity issues seriously? How easy is it not to show up for this one event, and what are the reasons for not? To close to Christmas? The deal flow opportunity is not real? Were they expecting an invite, or didn’t they know? What do you think?
Second, what a scoop by the partners! They got underrepresented exposure very cheaply. The event budget should be at least ten times next year. It was so slim that they couldn’t afford a stream or recording setup, or maybe they didn’t want the pitches recorded.
Thirdly, for a diversity-focused event, it felt a bit “white”. There were people with Asian heritage present, but the only black person I saw at the event walked away when I shared a story with an old acquaintance for a bit too long. It made me reflect on the fact as a white cis-gender heterosexual male. A better way to be an ally at these events is to ask questions out of curiosity. You’re not necessarily the “role model people seek” at these events.
That said, I was planning to recap all the pitches as I filmed them, but the organizers informed me the slides were confidential, which was a bit weird. Nonetheless, they sent this deck if you’re interested in the partners and who pitched. I recorded all the pitches for whoever needs them, but I guess I will have to ask the presenters individually if I can share them.
The winner was Anna Ptukha, a Ukrainian lady with an idea and the technology to make ADHD diagnoses for children by simply analyzing eye movement with a high-definition camera. Simple to understand. That was the main feedback from the judges: you should be evident during your presentation on what you’re doing, for whom, and how. It wasn’t clear in every presentation. That’s how you win a pitching competition, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll “win” in the real world.
Yearly Self-Reflection
This is the time of year feeds fill with “yearly reflections”. I prefer doing them tied to the number of days I’ve walked or crawled this earth, as explained in Just Thoughts #2
Nonetheless, I usually do my self-reflection exercise every year around my Birthday (as opposed to yearly New Year promises). It feels more appropriate to calibrate your purpose in reflection against the years you've been on this earth instead of a lunar, solar, religious, fiscal, or whatever other cycle people use to find meaning in their lives.
Just Thoughts #2 has an exercise you can follow, but if it falls short, it’s because it doesn’t force you to focus on your achievements and how you spent your time last year.
However, that’s a question of preference. My thesis is that the more faithful you are to your purpose and the better you prioritize according to your principles, the more you spend your time exactly how you should. Albiet, easier said than done [insert appropriate meme]
What’s Next?
I feel like taking a break from writing, even if the goal was to do one long-form post a week for a year, starting from Just Thoughts #1, posted February 18th, 2024. I would have seven weeks to go.
Instead, I’d be jamming on this idea we’ve been working on with Pauli Kopu, referenced earlier in this post. With Chat-GPT, dropping o3, with absurd reasoning powers, and looking into apps like a bolt.new or lovable.dev that allows you to build web-based apps with a simple prompt, creating startups is a very different game than before.
Whatever Peter Theil wrote in Zero to One needs to be revisited and revised in this world where non-technical people can suddenly create and deploy apps with only prompts. The same can be said for movies. What Google Deepmind showed the world, pushing VEO 2, you know that content creation will be crazy in 2025.
However, the only thing you can do wrong is ask the computer to do the wrong thing, which means every great movie will always start with a great script. With a great script, you can stitch together a good film. Additionally, Open-AI founder Ilya Sutskever recently mentioned we’re running out of data to train AI, but in the future AI can learn with smaller data sets. To me, this sounds like the data quality must improve at every stage of the development path. In the movie industry, this would mean script to scenes and scenes to long-form transitions management is key to a great final product.
invested in Odyssey, which recently added Pixar’s & Walt Disney’s president, Ed Catmull, to the board. This indicates that their meeting is of interest to the big players and makes you wonder what other tools you can build to fill this new ecosystem that is democratizing Hollywood 🤔 😉Until next time! I don’t know when that will be, but you won’t miss it if you're subscribing!
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