At Evolution we have a principle thesis that we use when we invest and that
principle thesis is that technology decomposes monolithic industries.
This is very important for us as investors because it separates us from
other investors in our class who are maybe looking for brand new industries.
We are looking to decompose monolithic industries and AI is
a perfect decomposition tool.
Welcome back to the Super Entrepreneurs Podcast.
I'm your host, Shahid Durrani, the show where we dive into the minds
of high performing entrepreneurs, innovators, and world class leaders.
If you're someone who's always looking to grow, push your limits, think and
do bigger, you're in the right place.
Today we have Alex Chompff.
Alex is the co-founder and executive director of Evolution Ventures and
Lead General partner of Minerva Fund.
He's an active early stage venture capital firm, investing in women and
traditionally under presented founders.
Welcome to our show, Alex.
Thank you.
Shade.
It's an honor to be here and I really appreciate, thank you opportunity.
And I want to thank your audience for giving us a moment to share.
Can you elaborate on what it means as a under underrepresented
founder, just to clarify.
Sure.
Speaking now pretty closely about the Minerva Fund, because the Minerva
Fund focuses in this area, the Minerva Fund is very interested in finding an
equitable distribution of venture capital based on the very simple premise that
Providence distributes brilliance equally.
Among its people.
And so there tends to be people who are less represented in
terms of professional investment.
And Minerva Fund is looking for opportunities to find those
individuals and surface them.
And not only help to reinforce this idea of.
Brilliance distributed equally, but also hopefully uncover some fantastic
investment opportunities along the way that might have been overlooked.
Yeah, true.
So it's a niche that you'd be able to serve better.
Yeah.
We think it's very important to be of service at evolution.
Yeah, of course.
Or a fund.
We find this to be a very important driving idea in all of our work.
Yeah, I'm glad you're on this show then.
It's great.
I noticed that you were in military service and Silicon Valley, and during
the internet boom and now leading ventures like the evolution accelerator.
So how do you believe that the way you manage your business or grow
your business has been affected with that type of mix of experience.
Oh we are all products of the earth in which we're raised, and I had the
very good fortune to be raised in a family that not only had a strong
patriotic military, military tradition.
But also was filled with entrepreneurs and inventors.
And so I got an opportunity from a very young age to be exposed
to some pretty formative ideas.
And then luckily enough, because my father, who was a Marine before me and
was working for the phone company when I was a child, we moved to the California
Bay area, the San Francisco Bay Area.
And so the San Francisco Bay areas is famous, of course, for technological
innovation and has been for many years.
It's also a place where people are very open to new ideas and new ways
of thinking and new ways of being.
So I was exposed from a very young age to a wide array of, things that were not
only very traditionally American and very much of the heartland like patriotism and
military service and, finding a way to be of use to your country, but also of the
left coast, the west coast, as they say.
And, very much open to new ways of doing things and new ways of seeing
things, and a willingness to disrupt the status quo in order to bring
about a new way of doing things.
So it's very, for.
They had been raised in that terra firma.
Then from there I had a set of really good experiences, only some
of which I can take responsibility for kind of if your listeners are
used to the movie Forrest Gump, if they've seen the movie, Forrest Gump.
Forrest is in lots of famous movies, but they're not his movie if you understand.
Like he's, he goes to lots of places and is on lots of things, but he
is always like the guy in the guy in the background or the guy in.
The sideline.
That's pretty much where I've been for much of my life.
Is fortunate to be at some exciting places and some exciting times.
That's awesome.
And maybe even to have done a little bit to help push the sled.
Yeah.
But it's not my movie.
I'm just there and that was, yeah.
Unity.
You just part of it.
Yes.
So tell me, do you practice your voice in the mirror?
I'll tell you.
Did you practice for, because it's so amazing, right?
So I just have to ask.
Sure.
As I mentioned before, the call started and the nice.
You got a face made for radio?
No.
No,
I didn't mean that though, but, okay.
And
my wife says
that I talk very slowly and I'm very hard to listen to.
All I know is that inside of my own head, I'm running around shouting all the time.
There's a ton of things going on, and this is just how I present.
Okay.
All right.
That is good.
Welcome.
The best I've got for you.
I'm in my fifties and I've pretty much sounded like this my whole life, I think.
Awesome, awesome.
Awesome.
No, it's great.
So you have a podcast.
I have experimented with podcasting, but I don't have the consistency
to get to be any good at it.
And besides which I'm a much better guest than a host, honestly.
That's fine.
Ai, it is a topic that everyone's speaking about, especially in your profession.
What do you feel, or what do you believe.
AI is going to transition into in the future for new startups,
yeah.
Yeah.
AI is super interesting.
Super interesting.
I should say that I've been banging around on a keyboard for money.
Since 1990 and along the way I've picked up a few business and technical skills
and I'm absolutely fascinated by ai.
Matter of fact, I got my open dev, my open AI developer key.
I. In May.
Oh, okay.
Of 2023.
And so whenever open, it was like November or something of 2022 when they
announced I st I stayed up all night playing with that thing, man, all night.
I stayed up playing with that thing.
It was a miracle.
And I signed up for the professional thing as soon as I could get it.
And I got my developer key in May of 2023, and I launched a product by June.
Of 2023.
It's called the master verse.
Master verse.ai.
Okay.
And it's a community dedicated to exploring how AI works by
understanding how, different engines, think about different
things and, it's very interesting.
It's very super interesting.
So I'm very, I'm super interested in it.
I played around with it with my own product stack for about six months before
I started investing in it actively.
And that really helped a lot.
Because it helped me to identify where the real problems were, like
problems like research did like a recall, augmented generation, rag.
This was a problem that I was trying to solve for my users
back in June or July of 2023.
So I knew it was a real problem.
That's a company that we've invested in.
Another I started feeding ais.
Information and feeding them talking to each other and pretty quickly realized
you get to nonsense pretty fast.
So I could understand that synthetic data was gonna be a problem.
You can't create synthetic learning materials, or at
least not wholly synthetic.
No.
So I've invested in, in, in another company that is all about
building training materials.
It's called, oh geez.
It's escaping me in the moment.
I'll think of it in a minute.
Anyway so I think there are lots of opportunities.
Lemme say this, there are lots of opportunities to invest today.
If you wanna be an investor, if you want to get into ai, if
you want to be involved, try to concentrate on problems that matter.
Try to concentrate on things that matter.
Try to understand where the real problems are with the technology and go there.
To see what you can do, because that's where your opportunities are gonna be.
Where you solve problems is where you find, returns.
And that's what entrepreneurs do.
Yeah.
But do you have some kind of suggestions in your experience for entrepreneurs to
be looking into any specific industries or just a very blanket view of.
Anything that is technical right now and how can you make it better?
Yeah.
At Evolution we have a principle thesis that we use when we invest, and that
principle thesis is that technology decomposes monolithic industries.
I. Okay.
Technology decomposes monolithic industries.
This is very important for us as investors because it separates us from
other investors in our class who are maybe looking for brand new industries.
We are looking to decompose monolithic industries, and AI
is a perfect decomposition tool.
AI is.
So can you,
Before, before explaining that, can you just elaborate that, that statement
can you explain what that means
exactly?
Sure.
Yeah.
So you gotta get in the way back machine a little bit, but it'll make sense, right?
Yeah.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to be in the logistics business, you needed to
have trucks, radios, software manifests.
Drivers.
N nowadays, Amazon, Uber, and everything in between have decomposed logistics
to the point where if you wanna be part of the logistics industry, all you
need are some wheels and a few minutes of time and an app on your you get
to be part of the logistics industry.
That's a de that's decomposition of a monolithic industry.
Another decomposition of a monolithic industry would be again.
20, 30 years ago, if you wanted to be in the public eye, if you wanted to
influence, if you wanted to be heard by large groups of people, you needed
to have some access to media, right?
You needed to have cameras, you needed to have directors, you
needed to have distribution methods.
You needed to have all kinds of things if you wanted to get your
message out into the world, because media was a monolithic industry.
And so as Amazon has done to logistics and as YouTube has done to
entertainment or media or influencing, you can think of companies like
PayPal or Stripe or Quicken that are decomposing the banking industry and
have been decomposing it for some time.
Almost any FinTech you look at is decomposed banking industry, which
is another monolithic industry.
Okay.
So there are a number of other monolithic industries that are under
decompositional assault from ai.
The most easy.
Do you have some examples?
Oh, sure.
The most straightforward is the legal industry.
Pretty much anybody who's played with ai, I. And, in a business capacity
has used it to try to draft some kind of legal document or some kind of
agreement or some kind of memorandum of understanding or some kind of LOI or
things that you would've traditionally turned to an attorney for, right?
And there's an old saying which is never hand an attorney a
blank piece of paper, right?
So now you don't ever have to hand your attorney a blank piece of paper, and
it's not very it's not going to be long.
Before, you don't really need to consult an attorney for most things, right?
Once upon a time, for example, when I was growing up, every shopping center
that you went to had travel agents in it.
Travel agents some shopping centers had two travel agents.
There was enough.
And if you wanted to travel in those days, it was a lot like consulting
an attorney is, today you would go, you would sit at a desk travel agent.
And you would tell the nice lady, 'cause it was almost always a lady behind the
desk where it was you wanted to go, I want to go to Mexico for a couple weeks and
she would bang away on a Sabre computer.
We didn't know it was Sabre.
Okay.
But that was what it was Saber terminal, because she'd gone to college to learn
how to use a saber terminal, and she would present you with three options and
you would pick the option that worked best for you, and then she would arrange
it all and give you a packet of papers.
And that's how you traveled?
Yeah.
Now, when was the last time you went to a travel agent?
Five, six years ago maybe?
Yeah, maybe.
How many times have you traveled since then?
Two, three at least, right?
Yeah.
Not even counting based, but everything
is online now, right?
It is just someone who's, who would wanna go to a travel agent
so I think attorneys are situated about the same space as travel
agents were 25, 30 years ago.
Interesting.
Travel agent.
Very common.
Very good line of work.
Very high quality of life.
I think attorneys are situated right, where travel agents were situated in 1995.
Wow.
Feeling pretty good about things.
So it could be that the governments in each region could implement rules
using artificial intelligence for intelligence, for legal documents.
Go, governments can do it but entrepreneurs can do it.
You wanna know what's a fun game in the VC community right now?
A little everybody's playing at the back of their head.
We're all waiting for the single person, billion dollar company.
Yes, we haven't seen it yet, but it will be here.
It will be here.
I'll bet it's here.
Before 2030, there will be a company that's run principally by agentic AI
with somebody in the middle of it who's thought their way through it and has found
a market need and is solving that need.
Wait for it's coming.
Wow.
It's coming.
That'd
be, that's exciting, man.
Exciting.
Yeah.
When I started
in the, when I started in vc, I started as a technical provider.
I was the director of technology to the world's largest venture capital
firm at the height of the.com.
And interestingly enough, they had the world's first incubation
space and I don't think they were quite sure what to do with it.
So they gave it to me and I. I got this amazing experience all the way through
the.com boom, but the principle source of, or the principle use of funds in
those days, at least in the beginning for early stage companies, was to
purchase computing infrastructure so that you would have file, print, email,
and so forth, because those things were very difficult to come by in 1999.
Now the company that I was in service to was actually the company that
invested in Google, and I was in the building when they got their check,
and a few years later, nobody needed to buy a quarter million dollars worth
of server hardware to start a company.
You just went to Gmail and signed up.
And then we got into a whole new kind of use for VC funds.
A whole new need.
It was no longer for computing infrastructure.
Now it was for people, and that's what's been happening
for the last 20 years or so.
What happens when you don't need that money for people, when
that's not your principal expense?
When you don't have to go out and hire half a million dollars worth of
development resources for six months?
To try to, but it'll be in technology,
right?
That investment instead.
What'll what will happen is that entrepreneurs in particular will be
able to bring their ideas to fruition.
I. Much more efficiently, capital efficiently, and time efficiently,
just as we are much more efficient today than we were in the early two
thousands, and we're much more efficient then than we were in the 1990s.
This is increasing all the time.
That's what technology is doing.
AI is.
Very much an efficiency increaser, an efficiency enhancer.
And like I said, I think the legal industry is a very good example,
but where I think AI really excels in here, we're talking principally
about language learning models, but almost any kind of learning algorithm.
Will excel at the intersection of complexity and, for a pretty fair chunk
of our professional class in, the Western world, you spend a fair amount of your
life, your education, your business, trying to make sense of complexity.
That's how you earn your money, right?
Whether you're assigned, trying to make sense of data, whether you're an attorney
trying to make sense of contracts, right?
Whe whether you are a nonprofit trying to understand how to do tax filing, right?
There's most of the money that gets spent at the higher level of
at the higher order, at the higher abstraction level is around complexity.
And AI is extremely good at not getting confused by complexity.
So if you're making your mark, that makes sense.
If you're looking at a business where people's principle value offering is
that they've studied for years to be able to interpret a complex topic.
Then you're probably, yeah.
Vulnerable to these learning outcomes.
Yeah.
So are you, do you have a department that is looking at developing any tools
other than the one you did back in 23?
We're always playing.
Okay.
And I can, so is there any kind of secret you can share?
Can stop myself what you're working on right now.
But Mo,
most of the time it's much more prudent for me to invest in people
who are solving problems than I'm aware of because, because I could
solve one problem or two problems where I can invest 20 companies Yeah.
That are solving 5, 6, 7 problems.
Yeah.
No, that's great.
Yeah.
No, definitely man.
It was great Alex, talking to you today about all of this fantastic stuff
that you're doing and the work that you're doing, if there's any last.
Suggestion that you can give or tip that you can share with the audience.
If they have some kind of an idea boiling within them that they want to utilize
or bring forth in the market, but just don't have any resources, they just
watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts and it's burning them up
and they wanna do something with it.
What are the first few steps they should take to start creating
some momentum towards it?
The first thing that I would do is make a few notes and talk about it with people.
Share your idea.
One of the things that market research.
Okay.
But let's just start with sharing.
Just sharing the idea.
Just that's what I'm socializing the idea.
Because a lot of entrepreneurs have a fear that their idea might be stolen from them.
Yeah.
And that's something I really want to give you freedom from.
Yeah.
Because if you're the kind of person who thinks of solutions
to problems, this is not the only solution you're gonna think of.
Yeah.
No, I will give one piece of advice, if I may, to the entrepreneurs in the
crowd who might be looking for fun.
And it's something that I've said before and if your audience has
heard it before, I apologize.
But I think it's worth saying, and that is that when you're looking for funding
for your project, it's really easy to feel like you're panning for gold.
I. And panning for gold is a cold, miserable, unrewarding experience.
Anybody who's ever seen pictures of miners standing up to their waists
and freezing cold water looking for that tiny little nugget can imagine
how much that must have sucked.
And that's what it feels like to be an entrepreneur.
Looking for funding, and I wanna give you something that's really important.
I want you to understand as an entrepreneur that you're actually the gold
that all the rest of us are looking for.
The whole funding ecosystem, everything around startups
is actually looking for you.
You are the gold that we are all high.
So know that and get started because there's people who are
hunting for you who wanna raise you up and help you be successful,
and Alex is one of them.
We certainly try.
Yeah.
No, it's great my friend.
Great.
Getting to know you and calmly listening to you speak.
It was very impressive, very soothing.
So I'm grateful to have this opportunity and the knowledge
that you're sharing is very deep.
And definitely I'm very excited to see what's coming about.
I'm sure you're working on something big and you just don't want to share
right now, maybe, but if you do, you can always, come back on a show when
you do launch it and we'll love to have you here and speak about it more openly.
Yes.
It's an honor to be here and for your audience.
If they're interested in understanding AI and being part of an AI
community, try master verse ai.
If you're interested in learning about fundraising, try evolution accelerator.co.
Okay.
Perfect.
Community, we're here to serve.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for that offer, and thank you so much for
your time, and keep in touch.
Thank you, Shahid.
It's an honor to be here.
Appreciate
it.