🌌 Voice Communities, Virus Containment, VC
Chalk talk, Q&A w/ Christian Johnson, our thoughts on GPT-3, tools of the week.
Grab your rabbit’s foot, this is edition number 7. Here’s this week’s breakdown—
As people continue to sit at home, socially distance and avoid physical gatherings, online communities have grown stronger than ever. The “unbundling of Reddit” is taking place before our eyes with new communities (voice, video, text, etc.) popping up daily.
Chalk is a communication application designed to help users to talk instantly. The company's voice-based community app enables end-to-end encrypted conversations, where users can easily switch between texting and talking.
Users can be invited to exclusive communities, create their own, or chat with new people 1:1. I’m a big fan of Harry Hurst’s “Tech Talks” community (pictured), where VCs and folks with startups come together to share stories and talk about tech, financing and building companies.
Learning, Building, Funding w/ Christian Johnson
Christian is a Managing Partner at MultiPass Ventures and the Founder of Respond AI. Previously, he was the Chapter Director at Startup Grind STL and spent 10 years as a police officer with the National Guard and St. Louis Metro PD.
What did you bring with you from past experiences to your current role(s)?
Working with the Police and National Guard taught me to always think about the big picture. You are constantly making investments to set you up for success in the future.
I see myself as a person who is not happy just doing one thing; I have so many ideas and things I want to bring into the world. I found a passion in working with startups to help them achieve their dreams, so I continued with it. It encouraged me to build my own tech company as well - Now I’m thinking about spinning off to soon fund startups directly from the business.
What are some tips you have for new founders?
Before you build anything, whether it's a piece of tech, website or pitch deck, you must talk to your potential customers. You would be surprised how many founders start building “solutions” that they think their customers need, without actually doing the research or hearing from the people that would use their product.
Find out who is already solving the problem that you are trying to address. Most founders think their ideas are unique. Especially with VC-backed businesses, you don't want a unique idea because that means there probably isn't a very good addressable market around it, therefore making it a bad investment.
One of the most important things to remember when starting a company is timing. You don't want to be too early in a market, but you don’t want to be too late either, as the market rapidly evolves to the needs of those in it. The challenge is getting your entry point just right. After doing your research and checking all the boxes, be able to articulate exactly why here and now are the best time and place for your product or service.
What has founding a company taught you as an investor?
Founding a company taught me to be patient and wait for the right investment opportunity. An investment opportunity is ‘right’ when you (as the investor) know what you can bring to the table, besides just money, to help the company win at scale. Funding is a very small piece of how investors succeed in this industry. An investor must look far beyond the current funding round and be able to create a winning strategy with the founders.
What exciting project(s) are you working on now?
I am currently working on designing AI-powered swarm drones for public safety and defense. This will be a gamechanger in helping end the need to put humans in harm's way during incidents like rescue operations.
I am fascinated with companies leveraging AI to elevate humanity - an example being smart city technology. Since I am already building a company around AI, I want to start making investments in companies that align with that.
*Thanks for the advice, Christian. Good luck with Respond AI & funding epic founders!
Tech Trends & Startups we’re watching
Telemedicine startups seeing increased investment around the world
The Global IoT segment is growing at a CAGR of 31.4% (2020-2027) and sees increased spillover implementation in robotics
OpenCV AI is commercializing Computer Vision
Turing ($1.75M, Seed) ⚡ - product optimization platform leveraging CPG data and AI to expose gaps in R&D for consumer goods
Sepio Systems ($13.6M, Series A) 🔒 - provides security teams with full, real-time visibility into their hardware assets to protect infrastructure
Misfits Market ($85M, Series B) 🥝 - e-commerce company selling “ugly” fruits to reduce the economic and environmental impacts of global food waste
GPT-3 Generated This Title
If you’ve opened up Twitter in the last week, you’ve been privy to the *world-changing* projects developed by a few lucky folks with access to OpenAI’s new Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT-3). It’s scary good. Popular creations include debuild.co + Sharif Shameem’s recent tweets exploring the API, a Figma plugin called “Designer” and more. Click here to see community-created examples.
So what are the ramifications (and limits) of this new model?
Don’t be fooled, it’s not the end-all, be-all computational intelligence. Truly sentient AI might not even be possible. At least not for now.
Even though it may look like the robot revolution is upon us, OpenAI’s GPT-3 model is still well within the scope of narrow AI. This model still doesn’t understand what’s happening - it’s all pattern recognition and probabilistic reconstruction. The computer doesn’t actually learn the relationship between an assertion and a context (which is natural to a human). Conversational AI will need to improve a lot further before we have Turing test-passing bots that are unrecognizable from you or me.
Also,
In a world where 90% of the internet is NSFW content, pervasive cyberbullying, racism/sexism and unending fake news, there will naturally be problems with an algorithm that can “program itself”, learning from existing data.
A few weeks ago, we linked the video of Sam Altman demonstrating GPT-3’s ability to write code directly from English input. While this amazing feat changes the software development game, it’s not yet time to hang up your Stack Overflow hat. GPT-3 won’t take your job, so long as it lacks the contextual reasoning of a human. For now, enjoy the benefits of GPT-3, build new things and revel in the fact that no machine can perform your job as well as you 😉
Related things we’re reading and watching—
Benjamin Cox describes implications of GPT-3 for SMBs, Web Developers and content consumption
Prof. Dan Jurafsky’s paper on Pragmatics and Logic in Computational Linguistics (exploring non-literal meaning)
Multi-Agent Interaction learning masters hide-and-seek by adapting to and exposing bugs in a video game’s physics
NoCode Tools of the Week
Obviously.ai - simple ML + data science tools for unstructured data
Reflect - Automated web testing platform designed to automate manual tasks
Buy Me a Coffee - monetize any site and share premium content
Wappalyzer - figure out how the best sites are made
Our Light Bulbs 💡
-Join an online community: No Cap, intern.club, Indie Hackers, DocSend
-The World Economic Forum argues that blockchain technology will be critical in the equitable distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine
-The US indicts two Chinese spies on charges of hacking medical research, sparking the closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston and raising questions about the future of US-China relations
-Thoughtful analysis of the entrepreneurs & startups changing the status quo in Africa
-MIT developed iMASC, a reusable mask with the same efficacy as a 1-time-use N95 respirator
Thing of the week
Sustainability and sharks🦈!
OCEARCH focuses on collecting and centralizing previously unobtainable data from the world’s oceans🌊 , partnering with scientists and maritime organizations across the globe. Through scientific collaboration, OCEARCH has aided in over 50 peer-reviewed studies, helping preserve endangered species and improve the ocean’s balance amidst rapid changes to marine ecosystems.
Perhaps its coolest feature, OCEARCH runs a live tracking app that shows the positions of tagged sharks, whales, sea turtles, and more across the world - a network that will only continue to grow as more animals are documented.
Here’s 45 other sustainability resources you should know about.
If you missed last week’s newsletter, find it here!
Hi! 👋 Thanks for reading The Void. We’re Zach and Jack, Partners @ Practicum and Students @ WashU + Georgetown. Leave some feedback, check us out on LinkedIn or contact us!