marching band, the red carpet, the DJ coding her beats, is all you get before coffee (and a business card) at one of the venture’s most highly anticipated conferences, the Upfront Summit. But Marching He, even the band, couldn’t take the focus away from the true star of the show, A.I.
Upfront Summit founder Mark Suster and partners Kerry Bennett and Kobie Fuller also sketched around AI. Take-out? AI is an exciting area to invest in, but it’s too early to blindly trust it.
This is nothing new. Hyped technology often attracts a lot of interest. But the atmosphere is different in 2021, when investors were pouring billions into his 15-minute grocery delivery company and web3. Venture dry powder is locked, deals are lagging, and some investors are still licking the wounds of previous recessions.
AI feels it. According to TechCrunch’s analysis of PitchBook data, “generative AI companies won’t even set quarterly caps on their funding in Q1 2023.” Understanding what they are thinking can help engineers better understand how to execute Moonshot Vision.
