Rob May is the CEO and Founder of Nova Cloud. That makes him a four-time entrepreneur. He’s also made angel and VC investments in over 100 startups. He’s worked in the past as an electrical engineer designing various hardware devices. As an industry analyst, Rob writes the newsletter “Investing In AI” and hosts the “AI Innovator's Podcast”.  

Rob May is the co-founder of the AI Operators Fund along with Rana el Kaliouby. Rob tries to be the first check in. He likes to take "syndicate risk" -- there is a risk waiting for the deal to close and a VC invests and takes out good deals. Valuations have come down and they are getting into really good deals.

His reading of this moment: ChatGPT will unlock new businesses and vertically targeted startups. LLMs get better as they get bigger. Scaling is different and it has emergent properties. SaaS early stage investments take $4-5m; AI deals need $6-8m. There are other differences. But this space will have heavy over-investment.

AI companies: There's a lot of defendability. Data is the moat. Beyond product market fit, today there's "model market fit". We discussed "The ChatGPT Stampede" and many other interesting topics.

Recommended reading: Investing in AI (Rob's blog)

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If you liked this podcast, prior Lessons from a Startup Life blog posts are available here: https://douglevin.substack.com/