Rob May is a general partner at PJC, a leading venture capital firm. He was previously CEO of Talla, a platform for AI and automation, as well as co-founder and CEO of Backupify. Rob is an angel investor who has invested in numerous companies, and author of InsideAI which is said to be one of the most widely-read AI newsletters on the planet.
In this episode, Rob and I discuss AI from a VC perspective. We look into the current state of AI, service as a software, and what Rob looks for in his startup investments and portfolio companies. We also investigate why so many companies are struggling to push their AI projects forward to completion, and how this can be improved. Finally, we outline some important things that founders can do to make products based on machine intelligence (machine learning) attractive to investors.
In our chat, we covered:
The PAC Framework for Deploying AI
Quotes from Today’s Episode“[Service as a software] is a logical extension of software eating the world. Software eats industry after industry, and now it’s eating industries using machine learning that are primarily human labor focused.” — Rob
“It doesn’t have to be all digital. You could also think about it in terms of restaurant automation, and some of those things where if you keep the interface the same to the customer—the service you’re providing—you strip it out, and everything behind that, if it’s digital it’s an algorithm and if it’s physical, then you use a robot.” — Rob, on service as a software.
“[When designing for] AI you really want to find some way to convey to the user that the tool is getting smarter and learning.”— Rob
“There’s a gap right now between the business use cases of AI and the places it’s getting adopted in organizations,” — Rob
“The reason that AI’s so interesting is because what you effectively have now is software models that don’t just execute a task, but they can learn from that execution process and change how they execute.” — Rob
“If you are changing things and your business is chan