Crazy Wisdom
Deep Tech Renaissance: John Lee on Emerging Technologies and Capital Allocation
- Entrepreneurship & Startups
- deep tech
- venture capital
- ai and ml
- cybersecurity
- enterprise software
- startup strategy
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Watch on YouTubeAbout this episode
- John Lee is an early-stage investor focusing on deep tech, enterprise software, cybersecurity, AI/ML, and automation.
- Deep tech companies are similar to biotech companies in terms of capital structure.
- Unlike traditional tech startups, they have a longer incubation period to accrue value.
- Scarcity of capital drives better business models.
- Interesting hybrid models exist that are designed to develop revenue in the near term.
- Rare Base: Focuses on finding cures for rare diseases by characterizing cells and testing drugs on them. Sells IP assets as a novel business idea.
- Count: Aims to make accounting firms more efficient by acquiring existing firms and implementing AI techniques.
- Despite a renaissance in funding, deep tech has not yet penetrated the lives of ordinary consumers.
- The scarcity of capital is forcing companies to be more creative in their go-to-market strategies.
- San Francisco and Boston are significant clusters for deep tech companies.
- LLMs are seen as collections of human intelligence trained on internet content.
- Emergent properties arise from the crosstalk across different nodes in LLMs.
- Doubts exist about the ability of current models to scale.
- OpenAI aims to develop models with 100 trillion parameters, although the feasibility of this is debated.
- Science is transitioning from an "artisanal" practice to an engineering discipline.
- Reproductive Innovations: Research is being conducted on how to effectively assist couples in having children later in life.
- Energy: A debate exists over the effectiveness of fusion vs fission in energy production.
- Long regulatory approval times are a challenge.
- Jazz Venture Partners focuses on the convergence of deep tech and science, aiming for creative translation.
Episode transcript
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Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is John Lee. He is an early stage investor in deep tech, focusing on companies across frontier enterprise software, cybersecurity, AI, ML and automation. So welcome to the show.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess there are kind of like two ways to build companies in San Francisco or in Silicon Valley or startups in general. You know, I think one, one form is you kind of assemble existing technologies and you build a product really quickly and, and you're kind of expected to get traction on it quite immediately. And a lot of your value is based on the traction that you develop. You know, deep tech. On the other hand, you know, the capital structure is somewhat more akin to something like biotech where you have a much longer incubation period. And the theory behind that is that you can develop technologies that give you pretty substantial advantages to be able to accrue value much more significantly in the downstream. And so I kind of categorize everything that requires a long bake off time as a sort of deep tech. There are a lot of intricacies within those two things where I think there's a lot of innovation to be had. But I would say most classically that's, that's kind of the description or practical reality of what a deep tech company is.
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