Tech Deciphered

Can AI be a co-founder? Do you need a technical co-founder, any more? How about a business co-founder? What can AI do for you as co-founder? Will this become the “brave new world” of start-ups, small and medium businesses? For this and much more discussion, a no BS perspective on AI as a potential co-founder. Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Intro     Welcome to episode 70 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we’ll talk about AI as a co-founder. Can AI be your co-founder? Do you need a technical co-founder anymore? Or do you need a business co-founder anymore? What can AI do for you as a co-founder? Will this become the brave new world of startup and small businesses? Nuno, what’s your take on this topic? Have you started seeing that for early stage startups, the AI co-founder?   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. We start seeing this notion of people now—”Oh, I could be a single founder.” I mean, single founders have existed for a long time. We’ll come back to a little bit the taxonomies of founding teams. But definitely, is now a little bit of a trend where people are like, “Well, I don’t need a co-founder. I’m just going to go do my own thing.” Normally, the case is made more for, “Oh, I don’t need a technical co-founder. I can vibe code and put some stuff together and go through things.”     As we go through the episode today, I think we’ll go into the details on why technical co-founders might still matter and why there are certain areas of technical founding that might not matter as much where AI can really be your co-pilot, so to speak.     The Classic Case for Co-Founders     But maybe let’s start with what is the case for co-founders? Why do you need to have a co-founder? Why can’t you just do it yourself? Historically, there’s been really sort of an angle where there’s sort of these two entities in the founding team. Right? The business founder and the technical founder.     The business founder is the person that runs business related activities. If you’re doing, for example, enterprise software, SaaS, et cetera, your business co-founder is responsible for go-to-market like hiring sales—in particular, at the beginning actually being the person who does sales, establishing partnerships, creating and managing elements that are more related to admin with the help maybe of third parties around finance, et cetera. The business founder is more the person who’s focused on the business aspects of the company, which would be go-to-market, which includes sales, channel partnerships, marketing, et cetera. Might include, as I said, the admin side, et cetera.     Then the technical co-founder is more focused on elements that are connected to the technology stack, development of the code base. If it’s just software, development of software, could be more on the product side as well, someone who’s more of a product manager, et cetera. That’s why you need those two entities. Because you need these two entities, so to speak, these two people. Because you need someone who has more knowledge of how to develop a code base, how to get it off the ground, how to develop the MVP, the minimum viable product early on.     On the other side, you need someone who figures out: how do we get this thing to market, how do we actually deploy it, how do we monetise it, how do we create partnerships if they apply. That’s why we’ve had this classic case for founding teams. Now just to be very clear, it is also true that we’ve also had single founding teams for a long time. We have companies that have been founding only for one person. But at the end of the day, the ethos has been, let’s have two co-founders, one on the technical side at least and one or more on the technical side and one or more on the business side at the very least.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s true. That’s what you have typically seen. Maybe, going back historically, maybe the most famous example of this technical co-founder plus business co-founder has been the founding team of Apple—Steve Jobs with Mr Wozniak. Steve, on the business side; Woz, as he was called, on the technical side. That has been that maybe that’s reference point for all of Silicon Valley for decades. At the same time, it has not been true for every successful company. If I take HP, for instance—if I remember well, they were both technical co-founders: Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard. If you take Microsoft, Bill Gates had, in some ways, a lesser co-founder, but both were technical. Paul Allen was technical like Bill Gates.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro I would say Gates was more incredibly technical, but he became a business guy. I think that was part of the secrets of Microsoft early on. He was very business-savvy in some ways. He was very technical. Until this day, I think he’s extremely technical and extremely intelligent, but he was definitely very business-savvy.   Bertrand Schmitt He was able to wear two hats in some ways. If you think about HP, it’s probably a similar story. When we talk about the one-person founder alone by himself, the question would be, is it a technical co-founder or business co-founder or a mix of both? Someone who can do both even early on or who learned to do both pretty quickly. Probably, Bill Gates would be a good example if we assume Paul Allen was less critical.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. I think that’s a good point, and you went back to one of the OGs like Wozniak and Jobs. I’d say Jobs was business clearly, great marketeer, et cetera. But he was also very deeply involved in product. Interestingly enough, think maybe not as involved on product early on as he became later on with NeXT and then his second coming, so to speak, to Apple. Where you get much more involved in product management and how products were deployed. But to your point, he wasn’t a technical co-founder. Clearly, that was not the role.     I think if we look at some of the great success like Google, Sergei and Larry were both very technical. I guess they brought in Eric Schmidt very early on to be the CEO. But at the end of the day, the definition of founders in Silicon Valley, maybe we’ll come back to that later, is at least you need to have technical founders early on. Then maybe the business people will come along or maybe one of the technical people will go more onto the business side. But you need to have this duality of role that you, Bertrand, we were just talking about. Someone who either becomes more business-savvy, more business side, but definitely someone who’s more on the technical side. I think that’s how the Silicon Valley has emerged over the last many decades. Right?   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. It’s interesting you brought in the story of Google with Eric Schmidt because you could argue they brought him in as a CEO, but he used to be CTO at—was it Novell? I forgot.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Novell. Yeah. I think he was CEO of Novell at some point. Yeah.   Bertrand Schmitt He was CEO at some point because I was going to say, clearly, he has also a technical background. Able to do the business side. No question. But he was also coming from the technical side.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro He was definitely technical at the beginning of his career, and he was also at PARC, Bell Labs, and a variety of other organisations. He was in software engineering at Sun Microsystems, to your point. Then he became the CEO and chairman of Novell. But he is a technical guy by background, for sure. No doubt. He has a PhD. But he was brought in to be the CEO. He was brought in to be more the business guy. I think, very honestly, Silicon Valley loves the story of actually the technical CEO. The person who has at least very product or deep product knowledge and understanding of technology, so it doesn’t get bullshitted necessarily by the rest of the engineering team, so to speak.     Now there’s notable exceptions to that. There are companies that were built very heavily on people that were incredibly business-savvy and very much on the go-to-market side. But, again, justifying why you have co-founders, why you have the technical person and the business person at the very least early on in the structure of the company.   Bertrand Schmitt If we look at more recently, of course, we have the exception of Elon Musk starting and running so many companies in parallel. Some he didn’t technically funded. He was early on investor, took over very quickly. But he’s also an interesting example of a very deeply technical person with very strong business acumen, obviously. That’s another example. Do you have examples of many successful companies just started by a very business co-person in the tech industry? Obviously, outside tech, it’s a different story. Yeah?   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Not a lot, but I feel like in the enterprise software side, there are people that have managed to be great at doing it because they are amazing at building sales teams, and amazing at then building engineering teams around them. I’m not sure I can start giving as many examples as we’ve given on the other side of people that did have a very strong technical background so to speak. I don’t know if he’s a technical guy. I do think he had the bachelor’s in electrical engineering. One guy is David Duffield. He was the guy who founded PeopleSoft and then later on founded Workday.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. I was looking for him, actually.   Nuno Gonçalves Pedro David Duffield, to my knowledge, I think he has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering an

What do we travel with? How do we prefer to travel? What are our travel hacks?  If you are seasoned travel or just getting into that hamster wheel, this is the episode for you. Our thoughts, best practices and hacks on traveling. Share with us yours on LinkedIn or X. Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro INTRODUCTION Welcome to Episode 69 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today we’ll go on a slightly softer note and discuss our travel hacks and preferences. Bertrand and I often are asked, “What do you guys travel with? What do you prefer to travel with? What are your travel hacks?” And a few other questions in this world of hamster wheel travelling. Today we’ll share a bunch of our preferences. We’ll share a lot of the things we travel with, from luggage to electronics to other services and devices. We will share to the best of our knowledge, how to really do it in style, if that’s at all possible, once you’re in that hamster wheel. We’ll share some of our hacks, not only for business travelling, but also for leisure travelling. Interesting stuff. We all have our hacks. We all have our stuff going on. PREFERENCES TRAVEL Airlines, alliances, loyalty programs Maybe we start with airlines and all the things around that. Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, sure. Don’t get me started on Air France, who cancelled on me a huge quantity of miles without alerting me, without notice, just a few weeks before I was supposed to take a flight. I will try my best to never use them again. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It was that bad. Air France is out, so that’s the beginning. Let’s maybe talk about the guys who are in. I’ll give you my top airlines around the world. Obviously this depends. Depends if you have to travel through that region or if you’re travelling to that region. My favourites, I think maybe not sure if it’s in full order, but I would say Emirates, obviously, Qatar Airways. If you’re hubbing through Middle East or if you’re going to the Middle East, two amazing airlines, probably two of the best in the world. I would say maybe Emirates is my favourite now. I have to be thoughtful in how I put that forward. Qatar is also exceptional, obviously if you’re hubbing through Doha. Incredible airline as well. The Asian ones in general, we’ll leave the Chinese for a second because that’s a different ballgame all together. Let’s not say all Asian ones and obviously different ones are great. I’d say Singapore Airlines continues being systematically an exceptional airline. They’ve become very expensive, but an exceptional airline. A little bit SOP driven, only airline in the world, true story, that I complained not once or twice, but three times on the same incident, and I actually never got a response from them on an incident which is interesting. In general, service is exceptional. Their facilities at Changi Airport are exceptional. The planes are really well-kept, the food is great, very attentious, and really like them. Cathay, I haven’t flown with them in a while. They went through a bit of a slump at some point. They were my favourite for a long time. Then they went through a bit of a slump in terms of product in particular, in terms of the quality of the product, in terms of the quality of the seats, service on board, et cetera. I’ve heard positive things recently, so maybe worthwhile putting them back on my Top 5 list around the world. Then the Korean Airlines in general are pretty strong on service. Depends a little bit on the plane. I’ve had always better experiences with Korean Air than with Asiana. Maybe Korean Air gets that last Top 5 thing. Talking about the negative ones for me that I try to avoid. I try to avoid as much as possible some of the European ones. TAP Air Portugal, the Portuguese one, is actually pretty decent by European standards. British Airways depends on the format of the plane. I find their business class service and product not to be as compelling as other airlines right now. I always found the service on British Airways, you only get great service on reshares if you’re in first class. On long haul, even in business, it’s a little bit matron. It’s like, “Sit down and just stay put, and we’ll serve you, but we won’t really be particularly paying attention to you.” In some ways, TAP Air Portugal, I think they’re a little bit more thoughtful and nicer. Lufthansa is similar to British Airways. I’ve had very mixed experiences, but in general not great. The service, they got a lot of bad rap on their first class stuff. In Europe, I’m not sure there’s anyone that I’m excited about. I haven’t flown with Air France a long time. Apparently I shouldn’t. Iberia I’ve flown with and it’s okay-ish. I don’t remember any airline in Europe that I’m particularly fond of. Maybe I’m missing someone. SAS is okay, I guess in the Nordics, but not a great deal of amazing airlines in there. Then negative Chinese. Most of the Chinese airlines, I haven’t flown with them in a long time, so I obviously have to be careful in not pushing it forward. Not a huge fan of JAL and ANA in Japan. When in doubt, I would go ANA. Then in Taiwan, also not particularly excited about any of the Taiwanese airlines, but they’re not bad either, so it’s okay kind of thing. Then on the American Airlines, which I’m sure people are excited to know about, I’m really not a fan of United. Sadly, they’re on Star Alliance Bertrand Schmitt Do you remember this video on United? There was this guy being dragged out of the plane, bloodied and everything. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It sounds about right, I think. Bertrand Schmitt I think it’s just before COVID or at the beginning of COVID. I forgot. It was bad. It was so bad. Nuno Goncalves Pedro My favourite was only domestic flights with Virgin America. By the way, Virgin Atlantic, I’m going to fly again with them in a couple of months and I remember them fondly. Their upper class product was really cool back in the day. Their lounge was really cool at Heathrow. This was many years ago. Looking forward to experimenting with it again. Virgin America was really strong and then obviously they merged with Alaska. Alaska is okay. It’s good. I feel it still has a little bit of the Continental and Virgin America ethos, which is pretty good. I’d say of the big ones in the US, the only one that I think has improved quite a bit in terms of service has been Delta Air Lines, although their hub is Atlanta, which as I call it, is where you get lost in space in general. It’s a black hole, I guess. We’ll come back to airports later. American is okay-ish, but I’ve had some really bad experiences as well in American. United is the bottom for me. Southwest, I haven’t flown in a while. They’re quite expensive now, Southwest, actually. Bertrand Schmitt I think they have changed dramatically, Southwest, from what I read in terms of what you get, what is included, not included, how they work. It’s not the same. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Top 5 guys that I would make an effort to fly with: Qatar Airways, Emirates. Emirates obviously doesn’t really belong to any of the alliances, which makes it a little bit more cumbersome for points gathering and all that stuff, but I think they’re really top end. I think Singapore Airlines belongs in that group. Then just below for me, Korean Air Lines and Cathay and then the rest. There’s preferences. I have preferences as I said. If I have a chance, I’ll go Delta rather than American or United. If it’s to Europe, then I prefer a European airline to American and to United. To Asia, the same thing. I prefer an Asian airline to American and United. Delta, it depends a little bit on the plane and all that stuff. That’s my rough preferences. I’ve had my worst experiences with United. My worst experience I think probably were all with United, delayed flights issues and all that stuff, bad service. Bertrand Schmitt If I have to fly to Europe, I used to try to use Air France, but two issues again, they take away your miles. That was during COVID. Two, you run the risk to have a strike in France. That’s obviously the risk. Now I’m probably more trying to fly Delta if I go to Europe. Asia, I will try to stay away from Air China, that’s for sure. I got some memorable experience when they were so scared away I would bring down a plane by using my tablet. It was just as crazy. I would say the Taiwanese airlines, I have overall positive experience. Not great, not bad, I would say. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Which is your favourite of the two? Bertrand Schmitt Let me be careful. It’s China Airways, China Air. There is a new one, actually, a third one that started recently. I cannot say I have a big preference, a clear-cut preference between the Taiwanese airlines. Taipei Airport is quite convenient to branch from in Asia. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s EVA Air or EVA Air and China Airlines? Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, EVA Air is one of them, China Airlines, and there is a third one now that just launched. Nuno Goncalves Pedro STARLUX, is that the one? STARLUX Airlines? Bertrand Schmitt Maybe. Yes. In the US, living in Seattle, this is a hub for Alaska. We use Alaska quite a bit. I will use Delta as well, and United if no other choice. Nuno Goncalves Pedro And American? Do you have a perspective on American? Bertrand Schmitt I have never used them, actually. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Really? It’s American Airlines. Bertrand Schmitt Same for the other one we talk about, Southwest. I’ve rarely, rarely use it. I’m sure I use it

America’s AI action plan … “Winning the AI race” has just been announced. What is it all about? What are the implications? How will the rest of the world react? A deep dive into the announcement, approaches by EU and China, and overall implications of these action plans. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Context of the White House AI Summit Pillar I – Accelerating AI Innovation Pillar II – Building American AI Infrastructure Pillar III – Leading in International AI Diplomacy & Security Comparing Approaches – U.S. Action Plan vs. EU AI Act vs. China’s Strategy Implications and Synthesis Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro Welcome to episode 68 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will focus on America’s AI action plan, winning the AI race, which has just been announced a couple of weeks in by President Trump in the White House. Today, we’ll be discussing the pillars of this plan, from pillar I, the acceleration of AI innovation, to pillar II, building of American AI infrastructure, to pillar III, leading in international AI diplomacy and security. We’ll also further contextualise it, as well as compare the approaches between the US Action plan, and what we see from the EU and China strategy at this point in time. We’ll finalise with implications and synthesis. Bertrand, is this a watershed moment for the industry? Is this the moment we were all waiting for in terms of clarity for AI in the US? Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, that’s a great question. I must say I’m quite excited. I’m not sure I can remember anything like it since basically John F. Kennedy announcing the race to go to the moon in the early ’60s. It feels, as you say, a watershed moment because suddenly you can see that there is a grand vision, a grand plan, that AI is not just important, but critical to the future success of America. It looks like the White House is putting all the ducks in order in order to make it happen. There is, like in the ’60s with JFK, a realisation that there is an adversary, there is a competitor, and you want to beat them to that race. Except this time it’s not Russia, it’s China. A lot of similarities, I would say. Nuno G. Pedro Yeah. It seems relatively comprehensive. Obviously, we’ll deep dive into it today across a variety of elements like regulation, investments, view in relation to exports and imports and the rest of the world. So, relatively comprehensive from what we can see. Obviously, we don’t know all the details. We know from the announcement that the plan has identified 90 federal policy actions across the three pillars. Obviously, we’ll see how these come into practice over the next few months, few years. To your point, it is a defining moment. It feels a little bit like the space race of ’60s, et cetera. It’s probably warranted. We know that, obviously, AI platforms, AI services and products are changing the world as we speak. It’s pretty important to figure out what is the US response to it. Also interesting to know that we normally don’t talk about the US too much in terms of industrial policy. The US seems to have a private sector that, in and of itself, actually stands up to the game, and in particular in tech and high-tech, normally fulfils or fills the gaps that are introduced by big generational shifts in terms of technology. But in this case, there seems to be an industrial policy. This seems to set the stage for that industrial policy and how it moves forward, which, as you said, we haven’t seen in quite a long time. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. At the same time, on one side, yes, there is some level of industrial policy, but I feel quite a big part is getting the government out of the way so that private companies can truly innovate. Because America, like many other countries, have accumulated over decades regulations, you could call it over-regulations of many sectors and industries. I would say part of it is showing the way, but part of it is really a lot about just removing obstacles along the way that were posed by decades of government regulations and acknowledging that if these regulations are not removed, it could truly impede America’s chances to win the AI race. Nuno G. Pedro How did we get here? Obviously, there was an executive order in January this year, 2025, on removing barriers to American leadership in AI, the directive being the US to become the world capital of AI, so to speak. We had this announcement at the White House in late July 2025, the White House AI summit, which set the stage for this, winning the AI race, America’s AI action plan piece. That’s how we got here in the first place. Shall we jump into the pillars and get into the meat of this? Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Maybe to finish on setting the context, what was interesting with this announcement, it was not done the usual way. It was more done in the context and format of a podcast co-hosted by Olin Podcast. Some of our listeners may know that David Sachs, who used to be part of the Olin podcast, is now the AI and crypto Czar of the White House. Nuno G. Pedro Yes. It was done with much pomp and circumstance in the good old days of empire-making in some ways. Let’s jump into the first pillar, accelerating AI innovation. It feels like this pillar, there are a couple of interesting elements to it, but one of the key elements to it, I’d say the overarching element that we can see is removing onerous regulations that would hinder the development of AI. So, having a very light-touch regulatory approach and proactive support for AI development all across the board in terms of R&D, also across the elements of data that are put at the table. The plan apparently does call for the identification of rules to eliminate and even pre-empt state AI laws. Where the federal government would, in some ways, try to make sure that the state AI laws don’t come in and destroy a lot of these elements. We’ve discussed some of the stuff in the past; if our listeners remember, we talked about this, several onerous laws that were put forward in particular in California. It feels that the federal government is, in this case, sort of saying, actually we have to go in and be top down about this, and we want to remove onerous regulations across the board and make sure that they’re not put in place then by states. Bertrand Schmitt I’m very excited by all of this. Removing red tape and onerous regulations, I think, is critical to move forward, especially at such an early stage where we don’t really know where it’s going to go. As you said, California was preparing some very onerous regulations. Luckily, they were not signed into law by the governor, Gavin Newsom. But I think that was a very clear signal that states might decide to go crazy. We need to do something about it. Personally, I think it’s good to have the states being able to define some of their own regulation. But I would make an exception in the digital domain where things are pretty different across much more easily the borders. There is no border to the Internet in some ways. I think when it goes digital, it’s a much bigger issue, especially at such an early stage. If you look at startup companies, they cannot deal with a plethora of state regulations depending on which state the user is in. This would be a nightmare, to be frank. Not just regulations, but the multitude of regulations state by state. Personally, I’m pretty excited about that. The other piece of the puzzle is, of course, repealing the previous administration’s AI regulations that are just way too far-fetched, unnecessary, just going to hinder innovation. I’m very excited that this was removed, and I also believe they were a threat to free speech. Nuno G. Pedro There are elements here just to be a little bit even-handed, that we need to see how they play in action. One of them is this notion that this should not be acting as a Ministry of AI Truth, and that basically, there shouldn’t be ideological bias, so to speak. There’s been some mentions in general about preventing so-called woke AI, et cetera, et cetera, in federal use. It could go the other way as well. We know that a lot of the data out there has biases because of the way it was built. I think that part on the data side and the ideological bias side, interesting thoughts, put at the table in the plan. We’ll need to see how it pans out. I still have at least a couple of concerns on that. The second element that I feel we have to be moderately optimistic about, we’ll need to see how it pans out as well, is almost this notion of, if we eliminate almost all the key onerous regulations out there, that in some ways, self-regulation and market forces will compensate for us. We also know that that’s not been historically true in many cases. We’ll also need to see how that pans out. Obviously, just overregulating upfront, we’ve discussed it also in past episodes, like for example, the EU has done in the past, regulating upfront technologies without even understanding what the use cases are, is also not fruitful. It’s also not good. The US has had a long history of being lighter on regulatory environment, which has served it well in terms of technology advancements. In this case, we’ll need to see how the regulatory environment actually evolves. I’m also moderately optimistic on that topic, but we’ll see how it actually evolves. It could be a big issue if we start seeing some elements of exaggeration in terms of how data is collected,

Nintendo Switch, the Nokia 7110… what are the tech devices and gadgets that changed your life? How about you biggest disappointments?In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we will share ours. We look forward to hearing yours. Share on LinkedIn or via email or X Navigation: Intro (01:34) Tech That Changed Our Lives Our Worst Tech Purchases Reflection & Takeaways Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand SchmittWelcome to Tech Deciphered, episode 67. This will be a lighter episode as summer is upon us. We will discuss and talk about tech that changed our lives, as well as tech that disappointed. Some of you might know, some of you might not know, but both me and Nuno are tech nerds. We have played with tech most of our lives, always looking for the next available new piece of technology to use or collect. We are going to talk about that and maybe start on the positive side. The tech that changed our lives. Nuno Goncalves PedroI’m sure everyone has their stories. Even if you’re not a nerd, there’s going to be that piece of equipment, that mobile phone, that gaming console, that whatever, that dramatically changed you, made you more productive, or allowed you to do something that you’d never done before, et cetera. It’s always an interesting conversation to have, and it creates a lot of wonderful memories. It brings you back to places, it brings you back to that moment where you bought the device, that first time that you used it, the experiences you had, some of them maybe actually, not necessarily positive. We’ll come back to the worst tech purchases of all time. Shall I launch Austilities, Bertrand? Shall I tell my first one? Bertrand SchmittSure, Nuno, feel free. Nuno Goncalves PedroGood stuff. I’ll start with maybe the one that I’ve had the longest memory on, which is the Philips Videopac. Now, many of you will have no clue what I’m talking about. Bertrand SchmittNo idea. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Videopac. Even Bertrand, which is impressive. The Videopac was a video game console that worked with cartridges, launched obviously via Philips. I’m not sure if the one I had was actually from Philips, question mark. It was the same format and I remember it very fondly. It was really a gaming console with a little joystick. Very basic thing. The Videopac was actually launched first thing in ’83. I’m not sure when I first started using it, but I suspect I was 7 or 8 years old, so that would have been a couple of years thereafter. I remember it fondly. We got it from Andorra. If you guys know, I was born in Portugal. Andorra is this small-owned country between Spain and France, and they had no sales taxes back then, so you’d go there and buy stuff really cheaply. I think that’s what we bought when I went there with my parents. I remember it very fondly. I remember playing games on it. Strangely enough, I don’t remember any of the games I played on it, but I remember it very fondly as one of my first computer experiences and stuff. That was pretty cool. Bertrand SchmittNice. I think in France. I’m not sure this one was available. At least it doesn’t ring a bell. I think we had some Atari consoles in France. Me, actually, I didn’t start with a console. I started with a regular computer. Not the PC kind. It was an Atari computer. Actually Atari 520ST, very popular in Europe. There was also Amiga that had similar computers. It was Motorola CPU 68000 if I remember. It was my first computer. Also, could be used for gaming, of course, 3.5-inch disk, if I remember well, some colors, I would say 320 times 200 pixels. It was great. It was a start for me of understanding computers, starting to program them. I might have started before actually to program computers, but it was not a computer I own. That was the first computer I owned. That was quite amazing at the time. I remember doing quite a bit with it. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first computer was actually the Schneider Euro PC. I’d played before with the ZX Spectrum and with an Amstrad computer. Those did not belong to me. They were not my purchases. They were not for me. They belonged to my uncle. Bertrand SchmittNot the same. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first one that I owned was the Schneider Euro PC. It’s the first computer ever that I coded in. People probably don’t remember Schneider at all. It was a computer division. Bertrand SchmittThey do washing machines. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt was a little keyboard with the floppy drive, and then you had to connect a monitor. I had to get a monitor. Mine was color. It was really cool. It’s the first, as I said, first computer I ever coded on. I think that’s the first code I ever wrote was in basic. I played games on it. There was this volleyball game, like beach volleyball game that I remember playing on it. It was really, really, really cool. Very fond memories of it. I still have that computer somewhere back in Portugal in storage. Probably the first defining computer experience for me. Bertrand SchmittDoes it still work? Nuno Goncalves PedroThat I do not know. I’m intrigued by it. I do not know. I suspect not, but because of wear and tear, but I’m not sure. It was last time I played with it. I don’t know. Maybe it still does. Bertrand SchmittMaybe it does value as an antique, actually. You never know this kind of stuff. Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. Bertrand SchmittMy second big one was actually a handheld calculator, HP48X and then a later model, GX. The HP48 was really my entry, my start in the mobile computing world. It was amazing. For me, it Was my first computing device always in my pocket. It was in the mid-90s, I guess. It was great to do basic science, maths, physics, that sort of stuff. I also use it extensively to program in assembly language, which was not supported by HP. There was a small community of crazy people like me having fun programming in assemblies or their small handheld calculator doing stuff that was supposedly impossible to do on the calculator. The funny part is that some in our group ended up working for HP, developing the next follow on calculators for HP. Nuno Goncalves PedroThat’s very, very cool. I have done HP48GX and I remember it fondly. I used it in college quite heavily. I did do some coding on it at some point in time. Very cumbersome device to do any coding on, but it was like the top of all the freaking calculators, graphical stuff, et cetera, et cetera. It’s like an unfair advantage back then when computers weren’t around. Bertrand SchmittMaybe one more point was a great RPL, the Reverse Polish Lisp language, which was very special to this model of HP. You have to enter your calculation in a very different way compared to the calculators. I love this approach of RPL. Nuno Goncalves PedroDefinitely an amazing device. Following up maybe with a couple of PCs from my end. Two that come to mind, the Compact Deskpro 386S. It was a 386 from Intel. Super overengineered device. Expensive as hell. When Compaq was in their heyday, it was like a pretty chunky desktop. Did a lot of stuff on it. It’s where my coding evolved. A lot of desktop publishing, writing stuff, et cetera. It was a significant device for me. The other one, probably immediately thereafter was my first custom-made Tower PC. I bought a Tower, and then I had my own motherboard that I bought and my own hard drive and whatever. Making just work together was in and of itself complex. I remember that fondly as well. It’s probably the first PC where I did heavy-duty gaming, the Deskpro being more the first that I did a lot of desktop publishing in. I remember the Tower one more because of gaming actually, shockingly enough. It went with me, I think through college, if I’m not mistaken, the tower one. Those two were my next PCs that I remember very, very, very fondly. Compaq went to hell at some point in time. They merged I think with someone. Was it Gateway or something more did they merge with? Bertrand SchmittI think so. Long ago. Nuno Goncalves PedroThey did go to hell at some point. Bertrand SchmittYes. I think they got killed by the new approach pushed by Dell to make computers on demand. Actually, I was also a customer of Compaq. My first PC was a Compaq. It was a Compaq laptop, Compaq 286 SLT. It was a huge brick. I was just checking £14. That was my first IBM compatible PC. That was great. Technically it was my dad’s computer, but I was using it. Then like you, at some point I made my own tower PC. Did some PC gaming from that point as well, and other stuff, of course. When you make your first Tower, that’s a special moment because you start to realize it’s all adding components that work well together. That’s a special stage in the journey. Nuno Goncalves PedroCompaq was bought for $25 billion in 2002 by HP. They were Texas-based as well, so was Dell. I think Compaq was global PC maker for a while, and then Dell overtook it, and the rest, as you said, is history. Maybe my next one was, I bought it, I think I was on vacation in England. I had saved some money and this was in the ’90s still. I’m going back in time for my Tower PC, which was the SEGA Game Gear. I never had a Game Boy, actually. I played with other people’s Game Boys, but I wanted like a graphics thing. I know this is going to be pissing off a bunch of people. I always preferred Sonic to Super Mario, so who would have said that I would become a race car driver? I always actually preferred it. I remember it for Sonic, it was really a cool handheld cons

The reckoning is here. Once a safe harbor, Big Tech has finally also gone full out on layoffs. Is this a structural shift to employment in Tech? Will the subsequent talent spillover be great for start-ups and entrepreneurship? Will it positively affect other industries? In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we will answer these and other questions in a deep discussion on the Global Tech Labor reset. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Layoffs & Restructuring Shifts in Compensation & Perks Rise of Fractional, Freelance, and Solopreneur Work Talent Spillover to Other Sectors Geography & Culture Shifts Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 66 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we’ll talk about the global labour tech reset. Tech and big tech, which seemed immune to any lay-offs, seems now to be under fire. Massive lay-offs over the last 2.5 years, a lot of discussion around the importance of having a computer science, computer engineering background, and so what seemed to be a safe haven for any graduate is now under stress.     Today, we will discuss the structural perspective on what’s happening in the market, if this is a long-term trend or not, what has led us to this, and what is next. We’ll talk about the rise of fractional freelance and solopreneur work, as well as talk about talent spillovers, and some of the usual geographical dynamics around the space. Bertrand, a huge shift in tech.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, definitely. It’s pretty big. I think it started probably around 2022, once we got some changing interest rates that have a pretty massive impact in stock prices for a lot of companies. At that time, a lot of companies decided, and usually under some pressure, that it was time to be more efficient, to generate more cash. Yes, you want to grow, but not grow at all cost. You have to go efficiently.     That’s when we started to see some share price going down and step by step, quarter after quarter. Some change in attitude with a lot of big tech and that has created some impact in term of lay-off from different parts of the business, from the sales team to the DNA, to even engineering R&D.     What is also been happening since 2022, 2023 is a change of focus. A lot of focus is being put in AI. A lot of investment in CapEx is going to AI. At some point, if you want to keep doing all this investing, investments, you might have to get some other part of the business in order to create additional savings to do all the spend you can in AI. There has been more recently a switch. It’s not about just efficiency to push all the… But generating the ability to invest in AI.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s part of a broader movement. Before we step back a little bit and go back in history, even recently, we’ve heard that there’s talks between Meta and a bunch of private equity firms like KKR, Brookfield, Apollo, and others, to actually help in financing data centers. Meta is a gigantic company, so one would assume they have cash to do all these things. Maybe they don’t.     To your point, that level of efficiency that is now needed in the market where you need to throw actual money, CapEx, into the building of infrastructure, the building of the core underpins of what you’re doing is pretty vital. But let’s go back a little bit of a second, and we’ve talked about it maybe in our early episodes.     Companies like Meta, Facebook back in the day, Google, Alphabet now, and others had a tendency, in particular in the Bay Area, to hoard engineers. They would over-hire. There was a lot of discussion that some of these players had as much as 20%-50% the engineering resources they needed, and part of that is that they didn’t want their competitors to have them, and so in some ways, we went from hoarding too much capacity to the days of COVID that in some ways illustrated that there were a lot of people that maybe were not working very hard also on the engineering side, not just on the sales, et cetera side.     That right-sizing, I think, has been a long time coming. We discussed in a past episode that there was a little bit of an adaptation, or an adaptation, rather to the market by a lot of these public companies saying, “Now that I have a mandate where there’s lay-offs happening in other industries, I can do it myself.” But this time is different, and I think the message of probably today’s episode is going to be around that. This time is different.     There are some fundamentals that have changed. Bertrand has already alluded to AI as one fundamental shift in terms of the efficiency of engineers, in particular more junior engineers. There is more behind this. There is the notion that you need less to deliver more. In tech, I would start with a platitude. I think if anything, everyone talks about AI and how AI is going to disrupt financial services, and it’s disrupting functions like marketing, and displacing people around, for example, customer service, and all of this. But a lot of people forget to talk about the most obvious industry that’s being disrupted by AI, and that industry is tech.     Tech is disrupting itself with AI because you have all these tools available, you have all these platforms that you’re deploying, and they have value for your own purposes. They become the underpinning of a more efficient workforce, in particular if you’re a tech company. A lot of people don’t talk much about that, but I think a lot of what we will talk today around lay-offs and efficiencies and all of that actually do relate to the fundamental shifts we’re seeing where the emergence with a lot of these AI tools and platforms that we’re seeing, so tech is disrupting itself at the end of the day.   Bertrand Schmitt I think AI has two effects. One is it’s so big, it’s so important, you cannot miss it as a business that you are going to reallocate resources. From your traditional product lines, your traditional development, expansion, creation of new features, and you will reallocate instead more money to AI. It can be one side, can be just CapEx, and the other side will be, of course, software that you want to develop connected to AI.     I think that was the first effects that started early on. What it means is that many companies ultimately decide to fire people who are not so AI knowledgeable and instead hire people who have more expertise in AI. I think what you are talking is a second effect of AI. Now we start to reap the rewards of the investment in AI. What we are seeing as a result is that we can do more with less.     Basically, if you’re a software company, or a tech company, you have a lot in software engineering. If you have a lot in software engineering, guess what? One of the best way to leverage AI is actually to use it to develop more efficiently, faster. The tools have gotten better and better, what we got 2 years ago was barely usable, 1 year ago start to be good. Now, I must say, it’s shockingly impressive what you get if you have tool like Visual Studio or if you use some other tools on the market that are even more focused on AI.     It’s quite shocking the quality of the code auto completions that you can get. It’s quite shocking what you can get from other tools directly like ChatGPT. It’s definitely like having a buddy that can support you, check your code, provide you some IDS, run code, help you go faster through documentation, testing. You are going to save time. The first effect might be, you know what? We can do so much more with the same workforce. Maybe we can reduce slightly the workforce, and we’ll still do more thanks to AI.     Of course, there might be a question of you might want to keep the same size of software engineering so that they deliver even way more than before and your pace of development is truly accelerating. Companies are facing multiple options here. It looks like many are choosing to be more efficient.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, there’s just… Let’s talk numbers, right? In terms of lay-offs, 2024 alone, it seems like the number was around 250K-260K, globally, people were laid off.   Bertrand Schmitt In tech.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro In tech, yeah. This is global tech lay-offs, right? In tech, 250K, 260K tech lay-offs in 2024. In the US, it varies. We have numbers that go from 95,000-150,000 tech jobs in the US alone that were laid off in 2024. We’ve had numbers that over a period of 2.5 years, 400,000 people in tech were laid off globally. These are massive numbers. This is an industry that by itself was already, in some ways, part of some efficiencies. It’s not the most inefficient industry in the world in some ways, so very significant numbers that we’re talking about.   Bertrand Schmitt It’s not just lay-off, it’s also who you are not hiring anymore. I think we found an interesting stats and the quantity of entry-level tech jobs have dropped by 50% since 2019. Before the pandemic, new graduates made up 15%, of big tech hires. Today, it’s just 7%. We’re moving from 15% to 7%. It’s pretty shocking.     Where is it coming from? We talk about general cost-cutting measures post-COVID, but for sure, there is a lot around AI and automation, and especially since that AI is replacing a lot of more entry-level jobs. It can be QA, it can be IT support, it can be some software development. It’s definitely a big change. One thing not to forget is that computer science used to be a much smaller field 10, 20, 30 years ago. It has expanded a lot.    

Robotics is a field that seemingly hasn’t really delivered on its promises. Sure, plenty of robot arms and other robotic solutions in logistics and industrial spaces, but what about the rest… including, Consumer?!  Navigation: Intro (01:34) B2B Robotics Consumer Robotics Looking Ahead Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 64 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss robotics. Our new overlords are coming. Robotics is a field that seemingly hasn’t really delivered on its promise. Sure, plenty of robot arms and other robotic solutions are out there. But somehow it feels like we should be actually already controlled and dominated by our robotic overlords. Today, we will discuss B2B Robotics, their growth, adoption, industry use cases, the drivers of innovation in that space, players in that space, challenges. We will also talk about consumer robotics, talking about also robots that have gone mainstream, personal and social robots, emerging trends that are happening in the home, market dynamics. Then we’ll look ahead to the future of B2B, the future of consumer, and the societal and workforce impact, which obviously is going to be the last but not the least topic that we will address today. Let’s start with B2B. B2B Robotics. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, thank you, Nuno. It’s certainly a growing space. As you say, it might not feel like it, but at the end of the day, we already have quite a few millions robots in B2B. It’s estimated that the stock of your operational robots, industrial robots, is around 4.28 million units in 2023, which was a 10% increase year-on-year. If we look at China, and I think we talk about the fact that we are installing around 400,000 robots a year. China alone by itself has been installing 276,000 units in 2023. China is definitely a leader in that space and that might come as a surprise to some. That number, to put it into perspective, is five times higher than the second place, Japan. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think China has recognized a long time ago that because of its population composition, that they’re going to have a lack of people to produce, to be in factories, et cetera, so they actually have been adopting robots now for many, many years. I think now, you were joking with me just before we recorded this, but now that we’re having trade tariffs and all that stuff, it might make sense to have a broad discussion around why robotics in an industrial environment are key. Bertrand Schmitt Definitely. I think that actually I was surprised to hear that, when we’re making this recording on April 15, I was surprised to hear in the Trump administration, quite a lot of very positive support regarding AI and robotics. It looks like part of the plan is already acknowledging this is not like the old-school jobs that we are going to bring back. It would be a different type of jobs. There will be way more robotics than before. Obviously, more robotics is possible thanks to the latest advanced in AI. There is some consensus that, yeah, it’s not just bring back the old jobs as they were, but it would be a new type of jobs. It would be a new type of industrial revolution and acknowledgment that robotics are here to make all of this not just more efficient, but even possible. Because it’s clear that if you take the US, for instance, there is actually not so much unemployment in the US. For an industrial revolution to happen, we need to bring our new friends, the robots. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If we go through the use cases where we see robots coming in, obviously manufacturing, automotive and electronics will probably come to people’s mind. A lot of robot arms are being used there. More than serve your classic solutions, et cetera. But it’s a lot of robot arms using on specific pieces on the line, a lot of pieces of robotics that we don’t recognize necessarily as robotics, but are actually roboticized systems used, in particular on automotive, again, in consumer electronics. Basically, it has to do with the fact that there’s a tremendous lack of… One, there’s going to be, at some point, the limitation on how fast you can produce, so that’s very obvious. Two, there’s actually even lack of people that can do some of these roles. Some of it is actually high precision work. In most of these environments, there are environments where humans need to coexist with the robots that are on the line, and that has led to the creation of this movement of cobots. Robots that are able to basically interact with the environment that they’re in, obviously be very careful around safety procedures that they don’t kill a human being that is around them. There’s been a lot of innovation around that using computer vision, using sensors, and using a variety of other elements around that. That cobot segment in particular is growing quite rapidly, estimated to be 14.7 billion market by 2031. But obviously, we all recognize manufacturing, there’s robots being used, so no shocks there. One of the largest markets by far. Bertrand Schmitt Definitely. Collaborative robots are a recent phenomenon made possible thanks to better activation of motors, electric motors possible thanks to new AI, vision AI. There is a lot of the latest technologies that makes this possible versus your big, bulky, robotic arms that used to be encaged. It’s not to kill anyone. Yeah, it’s a change from bigger to smaller. I mean, we can even say step by step, and we’ll talk more about it, but more humanlike in terms of how it looks. Here we have around 113,000 professional services’ robot for transportation and logistics sold in 2023 alone. That was a big increase of 35% year-on-year. I think we have all seen how Amazon is doing with some robots in their warehouse, logistics systems. What some might not have seen is as impressive in China. If you look at the efficiency of some of these warehouse in China, it can be very impressive. I don’t think they’re holding anything back actually in China. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, definitely not. There’s a lot of amazing things happening on the logistics side. Obviously, Amazon bought one of the early granddaddies, which was Kiva Systems, which was bought by Amazon, and now it’s Amazon Robotics. There’s a lot of stuff happening on the lines, autonomous mobile robots for the transport of materials, robot extruders, mobile picking robots, automated forklifts, and a bunch of other things. It’s also an environment where I know Amazon is obviously using a lot of co-robots, and there’s a lot of people around as well still. Very interesting environment. I’d say probably Amazon has been the company on the logistics side that innovated the most, the earliest, certainly in the US. I still remember the Ocado ads where they use robots. In the UK, there’s always been a lot of this debate whether that was actually very useful, very impactful in Ocado’s operations or not. Also, retailer there. But definitely, I think we would recognize probably Amazon has been one of the players that has innovated the most in this space for a couple of decades now. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, it’s definitely I mean, that has been key for them to grow, to expand their network. As you know, I mean, Amazon has a lot of people working in their warehouse, but they were still able to manage to grow so fast while not growing proportionally the number of people working there. It’s thanks to advance in robotics. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. One other area, obviously, of use has been in the healthcare and medical space, and particularly in high precision need environments. Surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical, their Da Vinci system, does provide the precision that you need for procedures that require minimally invasive play with high precision. Basically, things that you can’t really… The human hand actually might not be precise enough for it, even if you’re an amazing surgeon. Beyond that, medical robots have grown quite significantly. It’s grown to the thousands units, which might not seem a lot compared to the hundreds of thousands that Bertrand, you were just mentioning. But obviously this is a much more specialized space, less mainstream in some ways of robotics. A lot of these devices are incredibly expensive, and then we’ve seen a lot of innovation around that. There’s obviously the old-school players that are on the market, Johnson & Johnson’s of the world, Medtronic, that have also entered that arena, the surgical robot arena. Then there’s a bunch of other applications for robots that I would highlight. Hospitality or hospital delivery robots, so robots in hospitals that do deliveries. Rehabilitation exoskeletons, which is really, really cool. If you guys remember Aliens, the second exoskeleton that she has and stuff like that. Obviously this is for recovery for people that are rehabilitating. It supports them in their rehabilitation without having necessarily to have a human there all the time doing that. Then obviously diagnostic robots. A lot of players in this space, CMR surgical as well, Ethon, Exobionics, Cyberdine. There’s a bunch of things happening right now that are quite cool. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. If you look at rehabilitation robots, the growth was pretty amazing at more than 128%. You can call it a surge. Some of these metrics are pretty amazing. As you said in rehabilitation, for sure, if you need a human by the side all the time, it will be way

The current landscape of fundraising for start-ups, companies and VC funds, as well as best practices and hacks… and how to get those investors to giving you the money. Navigation: Intro (01:34) What is the current evolution and landscape for fundraising for start-ups? What is the current evolution and landscape for fundraising for VC firms? What are the best practices – strategies, processes, tactics and hacks – for fundraising overall … for start-ups? What are the best practices – strategies, processes, tactics and hacks – for fundraising overall … for VC firms? How to get investors (VCs and LPs) to commit to giving you money? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Hello and welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 63. In this episode, we are going to talk about the evolution and the current landscape of startups and VCs fundraising. We will talk about this evolution and landscape for fundraising, both from a startup and VC sides. We are going to talk about the best practices, strategies, process, tactics, and hacks for fundraising on both sides when you are a startup or when you are a VC firm. And ultimately, we will finish on how to get investors to commit to give you money. Hi, Nuno. How are you?   Nuno Hey, Bertrand. We’ll start with the evolution and current landscape of startup fundraising. It’s been a couple of exciting years. We got to the height of it all, the bull of all bull markets, actually in 2021, post-COVID. Then we had 2022 and 2023. Very sharp correction, dramatic reduction in venture investments. ’24 was a good year. It’s a year that scaled back again, seems stabilizing. I think we’ll see what ’25 has on hold. My prediction is that it’s going to be a great year.   Bertrand Yeah, 2021 was pretty shockingly good post the start of COVID. After a sharp wait and see by end of 2020, things were going back not just to normal, but to overdrive. It’s really by the end of 2021 that the music stopped. We had to worry about inflation with interest rates going up. 2022 was definitely bad for startups and VCs alike. But as you said, 2024, we are back to a better place. I would have the same bet for 2025, as you have, Nuno.   Nuno One interesting piece is there’s something that I think changed everything in 2024, which is AI. If we didn’t have AI in 2024, I don’t think we would have had this landscape. Important to note, and we’ll talk about it later on when we talk about the landscape for actual VC fundraising, that the way that VCs work in their cycles and how they raise money, there’s always a little bit of a lag around the table. It means there’s still a lot of what we call dry powder with VC firms.     This means that VC firms have raised quite a lot of money from limited partners for 10-year funds with, for example, four-year investment periods. Therefore, they still need to deploy capital in whatever market they’re in. The fact that there were a lot of AI opportunities means that they’ve been deploying a lot towards, for example, AI place. That’s going to change as well. We’ll talk later about, again, the VC fundraising landscape, but there’s going to be a little bit of an adaptation on those two time lags around the table.     But for me, the big effect of 2024 was without a doubt, AI.   Bertrand Yeah, and it’s very interesting because when you think about it, the new AI revolution started with LLMs, with OpenAI launching ChatGPT. And this is an event that actually started end of 2022. So that AI revolution, financing, fundraising, actually started in 2023. But at that time, it was still so bad from an overall macro perspective that it was not enough to change the big trends. But at the same time, for sure in 2024, I think it had time to turn around. We’ll talk more precisely about the numbers, but it’s pretty clear that, as you say, AI has taken over.   Nuno The height of it from the numbers we have in mind shows that on a global basis, 2021 was the all-time high in terms of startup investing at 750 billion. We’ve now had a significant reduction, basically around 349 billion, if the number is around correct, but certainly as deep as that in 2023, returning basically to levels that we saw back in 2018-2020. 2024, we went back up to around 370 billion. I think this year is going to be higher as we discussed before.     One clarification I would say, a lot of people would say, Is that true across the board? Is everything being equally dispersed? Not really. We’ve seen that early stage has suffered more. Mid to late stage, in particular in 2024, had another peak. Not peak year, but had a significant amount of capital was really deployed in mid to late stage investing. Last year, backing projects that either were already on their way or projects that are around what we would consider structurally AI, and therefore that are much more capital-intensive even if they’re earlier stage.   Bertrand It’s also more going to the bigger firms, if I’m not wrong here. It’s more to the bigger firms. In terms of investment, I guess it was also more to the bigger startups, if you pick an operator AI, for instance. I guess it has been actually pretty tough. If you are not one of the top 20 VC firm, if you are not one of the top 20-50 AI startups, what we’re going to talk about might not feel the same. You can argue that the bar got much higher for VC firms as well as for startups. It’s definitely a different world versus 2021, where things were good for mostly anyone.   Nuno Basically, if we look a little bit at funding sources to startups, obviously, traditional VCs have reduced dramatically, which is not surprising as we were talking about before. Angel investors and seed funds also had a reduction. Obviously, as you could imagine, if people, very high net worth individuals are normally angel investors and microfunds normally are smaller, they obviously had the tension of reducing their pace of investment, maybe in their own new fundraising cycles themselves for new funds.     Large corporations had reached very aggressive activity back in the day in 2021, but now there’s a little bit more moderation happening to it. Then obviously, we’ve seen family offices coming more into the market in the last few years and being more aggressive around directs. How does that landscape look to you, Bertrand?   Bertrand I think it’s definitely right. Maybe another piece of the puzzle is that if you look at some US investors going to Europe, for instance, expanding internationally or to China, it went back. Many firms, if you take in China, separated from their Chinese office. If you think about investment in Europe, so many reduced, actually, their investment in Europe. So quite typical that when things are good, you try to go pretty global, you try to expand, and when things are tough, you go back to your core. I guess China is a bit different story. It’s more for geostrategic reason. But you could argue the landscape also has changed dramatically locally there.   Nuno It’s also true, obviously, of what we’ve seen in terms of the sectors. We’ve just talked about AI and deep tech in general, where it’s been booming, and it’s basically stood up. Some of the numbers would be that AI deals are 35.7% of all global VC deal value. By value, it’s incredible, which is record. But it’s not true of everything else. If we look at other sectors, for example, crypto, there was a bust and there’s no recalibration, and it’s not true across the board in terms of sectors.   Bertrand Crypto, for sure, went through a huge burst. This one, you could argue, was mostly caused, at least in the US, by the action of the regulators from the SEC and others casting a cloud on the industry. I wonder how much it will go back to a boom, actually. Right now, now that we have someone who might be the first pro-crypto president in the US. What do you think?   Nuno Well, I won’t comment on the present being pro-crypto or not. I think we might see a re-acceleration of crypto this year, in particular because there’s a lot of uncertainty geopolitically around the world, et cetera. Normally, I’d say that’s a clear tailwind for it. The regulatory environment, at least in the US, seems like it’s going to get further clarified. If it does, I think we’ll see a great year for crypto in the US.   Bertrand We have climate tech and clean energies. I guess this one, we have seen the number since the funding fell, actually, pretty significantly in 2023, 30-40% before the year before. My guess is that this is going to change very significantly for very different reasons in US and Europe. If you take the US, all this ESG stuff is going to decrease significantly for investment related to it, because definitely this is not something that’s supported by the new administration.     We can remember the drill, baby drill mantra. It’s not totally pro-climate tech or clean energy. I would expect much less investment there and actually a reallocation to more traditional energy source. But in Europe, it might be changing for very different reasons, simply because there is no money and there is a lot more actually investment that might go to defence spending. There have been a lot of talks in that direction the past few weeks. The last I was hearing actually is a willingness to dramatically change the meaning of ESG or potentially drop it all together in Europe.     Most people might know this movement started and has been extremely strong in Europe. I started hea

Our analysis of the Space & Aeronautics, Defense and Homeland Security industries from key trends to investment landscape… to perhaps, more importantly, evil vs no evil? Where are we now? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Why now? Geopolitics Aerospace and Aeronautics Defense and Homeland Security Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro Welcome to Tech DECIPHERED. In today’s episode, Episode 62, we’re going to discuss space and aeronautics, defense and online security. We are going to talk about key trends, why now is such a wonderful time to be looking at this space not only from a startup perspective but also from an investment landscape perspective. We’ll also go into the whole evil versus no evil topic. Specifically, we will discuss why now, and the geopolitics of the industries, aerospace and aeronautics, defense and homeland security, and then we will conclude. Bertrand, why now?   Bertrand Schmitt Why now? I think this industry, this sector, space, defense, homeland security has seen not just a lot of growth and quite a few very successful companies coming out, but it’s an interesting complete turnaround, if you look at that from an entrepreneur or from a VC investor perspective. Why now? I think there has been, I would say, historically, there was a lot of scepticism, a lot of concerns by entrepreneurs, investors alike, centred around the military industrial complex.   Bertrand Schmitt We probably all remember the famous Eisenhower’s farewell address where he was sharing his distrust of that military industrial complex. And venture capital shunned these sectors also due to long sales cycle, in some cases only one client, the Department of defense for many startups, as well as ethical debates.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, it’s an evolving landscape. Startup came with disrupting legacy models. It’s not just a cost-plus approach. It’s a product approach. It’s agile. It’s innovation. The debate around, is it evil to is it something we must do in order to address global threats, basically coming to the forefront for investors and entrepreneurs alike.   Nuno G. Pedro It’s a supply and demand issue. It’s not just that startups are not necessarily interested in it because it always creates this issue around, is it evil? Is it good? Are we doing something good or not? I think there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of supply issue because of that angle. But it’s also a demand issue. Contracts historically with military take a long time to be hashed out. They depend on doing trials and proofs of concept.   Nuno G. Pedro I think on the other hand, it’s an industry that historically was very resilient and dominated by services. Particularly the US military want to own everything, and so, therefore, there was this notion that whoever was the provider provided it to provide it as a service for them. There are services that still need to be done today, but the industry has been largely productized, and there are a lot of products. I buy planes, I buy weaponry, I buy a bunch of different software systems that will allow me to operate, but they’re productized. I think that’s one of the big shifts that we’ve seen and why now is a good time to look at it.   Nuno G. Pedro If I’m a startup, I don’t need to go through 3, 4, 5-year cycles until I sell anything of scale. Then on the plus side, once I sell, it is at scale. There’s a lot of money in the military. We’ll talk a lot about the numbers later on, but there’s definitely a lot of money in the military complex that warrants the focus of startups.   Nuno G. Pedro The other part is venture capital firms. Venture capital firms, historically, maybe because of the whole evil versus no evil and perceived ethical issues have stayed away from it. But we have more and more active large firms in the space from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz. We ourselves have invested in companies that are around both the Homeland Security and the military complex space. So as a venture capital investor, because then the cycles to sales are better, because then startups scale faster, the economic piece of it has been solved.   Nuno G. Pedro Then, on the other side, the whole ethical issue has been really put into perspective. There’s clearly a lot of geopolitical tension right now. Defense as an industry. It’s an industry that needs to scale properly where there are geopolitical interests at scale, but you need to put money where your mouth is.   Bertrand Schmitt We will talk more about it, but I believe also we had one big example of an extremely successful company that really broke the dam in how you see these investments from an entrepreneur or investor perspective and how you can really win against these traditional companies, very entrenched companies. This is SpaceX. SpaceX really shown to everyone that, yes, you can build actually rockets. You can build better rockets. You can build cheaper rockets than everybody’s.   Bertrand Schmitt That was the poster child of, yes, there is a brand-new market opportunity that until now we thought was impossible to crack for young, talented tech entrepreneurs. Suddenly, everyone could see in some ways that the emperor was naked and that these big defense contractors were actually extremely weak.   Bertrand Schmitt From my perspective, they became weak. It was a two-way street. Also, the government makes them weak. You have only one supplier. You have only one buyer. At some point, it’s about wining and dining clients. It’s not about solving problem. At some point, it’s garnering political support, not delivering great products.   Bertrand Schmitt I think there has been a slow path to extreme mediocrity, and mediocrity might be generous term, actually. I think there is, as a reaction to that, again, SpaceX example, shows that you cannot just make things 10% better, but you might make 10x or 100x cheaper and change the whole industry.   Nuno G. Pedro I do think the example you put forward is a great example on aeronautics and aerospace. On military and online security, Palantir was at that first breakthrough. You could argue it’s still a relatively services-heavy company rather than a product, but it is a startup, it IPO-ed, etc. It’s obviously a company that has done really, really well in the industry. We now have obviously the example of Anduril in the drone space and how that’s scaling.   Nuno G. Pedro I think we have now a bunch of good examples to your point, Bertrand, as there has been an unbundling of pieces that were typically government-owned or only government pushed like NASA. With aerospace, you have this opportunity like SpaceX that just dramatically changes how things are done, where it eliminates all these inconsistencies and these inefficiencies. I think that’s been true also of the defense and military complex side and how that has scaled.   Nuno G. Pedro Maybe moving to geopolitics, it’s very clear that the US is the big player, spending a significant amount of its yearly budget on military by any admissions. Probably around 900 billion a year spent on defense in the US, which is incredible. The US GDP is 27.7 trillion as of 2023. This is a significant part of it, so obviously, the budget’s much lower. The use of military in the US and defense is a huge percentage of its not only GDP, but also its yearly budget. US is clearly leading the way, obviously. We’ll discuss other countries and where they’re at.   Nuno G. Pedro Europe doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. I think the recent discussions happening around Ukraine and what’s happening there show a little bit that not only it’s lost the plot, but it’s lost the power as well because it lost the plot.   Bertrand Schmitt I’m French. You’re Portuguese from origin. For me, it’s totally shocking why is Europe… It’s been 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it feels like the Europeans rushed to stop investing in their defense. There are some metrics in terms of German investments in defense spending, for instance, where we move from huge quantity of tanks to barely any tanks as Germany can bring into any battle. This is one example of how it moved from being a military superpower, same for France or the UK, to basically the shadows of their former self. It’s quite unbelievable.   Bertrand Schmitt For me, what’s unbelievable is that even after 3 years of Ukraine war, some Eastern European countries have changed their defense spending. But the Western European countries have not changed much their spending. All these promises about increasing military productions, being able to provide military supplies to Ukraine.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, we sold them or gave them “some weapons”, some typically older weapons, but at the end of the day, we are not even able to provide enough artillery shells, which is the bread and butter right now on the battlefield. Same with drones. Most of the parts are coming from China, on both sides of the conflict, by the way. It’s a very, very scary situation.   Bertrand Schmitt I guess we are recording that one week after JD Vance spending some time in Europe and talking at a Munich conference about European security. It’s very clear that the US is fed up from this perspective. As a result, I would expect actually a change in spending and priorities by Europeans. I guess they will buy some weapons from Europe, but also from the US. There have been some European initiatives like the JEDI initiative to stimulate faster

Our review of 2024 and what 2025 holds for the world and the Tech industry. From geopolitical dynamics to M&A and IPOs, regulation, crypto winters and summers, to inflation and DOGE and many other things. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Review of 2024 What’s next, 2025? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Welcome to Tech DECIPHERED Episode 61. It’s at this time of the year where we look back what happened in the past year in 2024 in tech, as well as trying to put some thoughts into what 2025 might look like, what might be the next big things happening in global tech industry. Let’s start with our review of 2024.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s been an interesting year. A year of elections around the world, so maybe we start at that level. The landscape geopolitically has become very interesting. I’d seen some chart that shows the most gain on the right ever globally across elections. I think there’s some message going on that people are really not happy about, status quo. Obviously, in the US, Donald Trump got elected, so he will again be the President of the United States next year or starting next year.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro In Europe, we’ve had a lot of countries that went to the right. Austria, I believe the right wing party won. A lot of interesting and somehow shocking results in some cases with very populist views, for example, countries like my own Portugal, and all around that. Very significant geopolitical transition where it seems like populism is here to stay.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro There are significant concerns around the world around immigration. There are significant concerns around the world around security. There are significant concerns around the world around economic growth. I think the elections that we saw this year, for the most, are reflecting upon the discontent of citizens across the world, of which the US is just but an example.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Actually, I’m not sure anymore about that when we call populism, one side or the other, what it really means at some point, it doesn’t sit right to me anymore. I think 10 years ago, maybe I had some concept about what it means. But today, I’m not really clear, to be frank, because when you see Trump and his alliance with people like Elon Musk or JFK, it’s not clear they are populist at all. The same in Europe. I’m not really clear, what is true is for sure more right wing, moving away from left or centre.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, this will have a significant impact on a lot of topics, and we’ll go through that. France also went more right wing, at least in term of parliament. Germany, we will see next year, actually. They’re preparing for election, the government in Germany. I think it was the day or the next day after the result of the US election, the government imploded. There are new elections scheduled for early next year. It looks like it will also go more right wing. It will make certainly for an interesting change of policies and politics.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed, all of all, I think a lot of renewed discussion around what is the role of countries, governments, different counties, provinces, states in the case of the US, local government, is the system fully broken or not? A lot of debate around precisely the incentives that people have to vote for a party versus another and what are the key issues that are on their mind. But as I mentioned, I feel it’s clear that it’s the economy, stupid back through the day, and security have been effectively the key considerations for this year.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro In terms of the overall year, it was a year that was supposed to somehow be really awful. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a year that was awful. Stock markets have gone up, in particular in the US, driven mostly by technology, The Fed rates started to go down, so it seems like inflation now is more and more under control. We see a lot of movement around, in particular, the technology stack of the fence that has taken us to the next level. There’s a lot of bright spots. I think we had anticipated maybe a very bleak 2024. It certainly was not in terms of equities, both on the public markets, but also on the private market side of the fence, including venture capital.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll come back to that later. I think there is somehow certainly on the private markets a huge impact of AI. AI is distorting the numbers. The markets are still a bit shaky, but AI and AI investment has changed how the markets look certainly for venture capital. We’ll come back to that later. But basically, a year that was bad, and well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t bad.   Bertrand Schmitt I would mostly agree with you, Nuno. Maybe I would qualify that it’s certainly true in the US. China also in terms of stock market, it did well thanks to a big stimulus. It’s not clear how long it stays that way, but it looks like they plan to keep doing more stimulus. The European markets were pretty bad, or at least it was like zero or slightly negative. US, for sure, doing very well. Maybe also the European startups, at least with the ones in AI, are also doing well like in the US.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed. In terms of other pieces of the market, the M&A market have been very strained. There has obviously been some acquihires on the low end of the spectrum in terms of lower cap acquisitions in place. There’s now a few large acquihires, as we mentioned in one of our last episodes, happening on the AI space. But a bunch of M&A activity that was basically blocked for big tech companies, and some of them silly blocks, I think in my mind.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s been a tale of two outcomes. One, acquihires somehow seem to be working and getting around the system. Then on the larger M&A side, in particular, the beginning of the year, the first half of the year or so, a lot of blocks and a lot of things that didn’t go through, even when… Some of them actually I don’t understand why they didn’t go through. A little bit surprising and shocking.   Bertrand Schmitt As you say, some of the big tech companies tried to go around M&A getting blocked by doing some very surprising, very large acquihires, never done before, at least at this scale. One interesting one is actually OpenAI, because if you look at what Elon Musk is arguing that it has de facto become acquired by Microsoft, except it is not. That would be another one where will OpenAI have been acquired in a parallel universe by Microsoft, if there was not all these regulations already in place blocking a lot of acquisitions for big tech?   Nuno Goncalves Pedro There might be acquisitions that maybe already happened that we just don’t know yet. But we’ll soon find out about them. Because the entrenched Trojan horse of participation in the company rights that the companies have while putting money to the company, et cetera, give them effectively right at some point to have ownership of IP and ownership of a bunch of things. Anyway, we won’t know until we know is going to be the scenario for some of these plays.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe moving to AI. AI is the gift that keeps on giving if you’re trying to fundraise. It’s like it reminds me of crypto and blockchain in Web3 in the heyday where you just had to put something in there, and you would raise money.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I would say we are starting to see already this year in 2024, even before we go to 2025. I would call it actually the end of the beginning. It’s the end of the beginning of this big AI leap forward that we’ve had. We’re watching the last chapters of this, if this first chapter where there’s been a ton of money, thrown on foundational models, large language model building platforms, as we discussed before in that episode that we dedicated to not starting a company around AI platforms at this stage. I think that cycle is coming to an end. Things are going to scale and continue scaling. There’s going to be, I think, a lot of investment on the AI app side, on the applications that are AI-first.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro But definitely 2024 has been a year where we’re starting to see the end of that beginning, the end of that leap forward that we’ve watched over the last year and a half or so of the big AI momentum coming to bear.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Really interesting. Really exciting. We’re seeing all these acquihires in the space. I think we’ll see more hardcore M&A, in particular in the US with President Trump being in office, I would say that’s probably going to open even more the floodgates around M&A, like hardcore M&A, not just these funky deals on Trojan horse investment or acquihires that we were just mentioning before.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s tough to say at this stage. I don’t think they have been super, super clear on what they plan to do regarding M&A, especially if you look at JD Vance’s positions, who are actually quite supportive of Lina Khan actions. Let’s see until we see who they have named as head of FTC to get a sense of where it’s going.   Bertrand Schmitt In term of AI, I agree with you. I mean, it’s the end of the beginning. The big AI platforms have consolidated their power, and they have consolidated also because there was such an arm race in term of getting the financing to build bigger, larger, better models that basically no one could keep going on if you don’t have billions on the side to keep running. I mean, in a way, Elon Musk with xAI might have been the last entrant

In a few decades, will Europe be good for anything beyond food and tourist experiences? With Europe lagging on innovation, productivity and with extremely costly decisions on the Energy side, and needing to defend itself, what is next? Navigation: Intro (01:34) New report out from Mario Draghi Profound mistakes in Energy initiatives increasing costs and competitiveness Dalio and Lee Kuan Yew comments Lack of growth in Europe, lack of creation of new European champions Too much protection for employees? Too Complex regulations around companies and innovation initiatives are too bureaucratic Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 60 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss European competitiveness. The competitiveness of all of Europe, not just the European Union, but the whole of Europe. It’s been in the news recently. There’s been a new report out from Mario Draghi a couple of months ago that really mentions what is happening in Europe, what are the things that need to be done for Europe to increase its competitiveness going forward.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro There have been a lot of discussions around the world on Asia, in particular, and American dominance of the world economy. Europe is lagging behind. What do we make out of all of this? Maybe let’s start with the report out from Mario Draghi and the conclusions of that report.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I think it was for once, a pretty interesting and pretty lucid report from a commission by the European Commission and written by Mario Draghi with a lot of support from many CEOs and also entrepreneurs to provide feedback to try to explain what’s happening, what’s going on. I would agree with everything in terms of analysis or conclusion, but I must say it’s a good read.   Bertrand Schmitt Maybe a few points that he’s making is first acknowledging that there is an issue in European competitiveness and growth since the past 20, 25 years. This lack of competitiveness and growth has increased with a great financial crisis from 2008-2012. In 2012, there was a crisis around the euro. I think it is indeed time to try to look back at what happened and try to get some sense about what could be done differently going forward.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro A couple of really astute observations. Obviously, the GDP growth of Europe has lag behind that of the US and China. The period of time from 2002-2023, the US has grown 2% and both on constant prices and constant PPP prices. China, 8.3% and the EU, 27 at 1.4%. Obviously this report is on the EU. Clearly lagging, and the lag is significant.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro If we look at GDP at constant prices, there was a 17% delta in 2002 between US and Europe, and now there’s a 30% delta between US and Europe. It’s lagging you further behind. Even more seriously, China has outpaced it on constant prices. If we look at constant PPP prices, the EU was actually 4% above the US back in 2002, and it is now below 12% of the US.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro China has outpaced both of them at constant PPP prices. This is worrisome. I think Mario Draghi makes, or the report makes a bunch of very significant and strong statements, which basically are saying, “We cannot, as the European Union, continue like this and have the social welfare that we put in place in all these countries.” something’s got to give.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro He goes on to make a couple of proposals and what he thinks needs to be done in Europe. But very significantly, what he’s saying is this is a crisis. We need to address it. This is not just a nice report, please read it. It’s like we cannot afford the lifestyle that we’re having.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro If Europe or European Union was a household, it would be going bankrupt, I think is what he’s saying. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. Something’s got to break at some point. Either the social welfare construct that we have will not work any more, or we, as Europe, will need to really reassess how we behave, et cetera. Very interesting report. A lot of fear at the beginning of the report immediately. Then three areas that he recommends action on for Europe in order to reignite growth.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. First, I would like to say that, yes, some are doing analysis based on PPP, but there is a risk when you do that. Because PPP is cute when you try to estimate cost of food, if you go locally your food, for instance, or pay locally your services. But for anything you buy from outside your region, PPP doesn’t work as well. That’s a big issue for Europe, given that it’s manufacturing less and less of what it’s bringing. PPP can be providing some comfort in terms of things are bad, but maybe not as bad. I would be careful in terms of analysis where they push PPP so much.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro But it’s on both, Bertrand. They are showing it at constant prices.   Bertrand Schmitt It’s on both. It is just that the impact is way bigger when you did not choose PPP.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to tell those that don’t know what PPP is, is power purchasing parity. It’s something to your point that aligns the power purchasing parity across different markets. It’s an adjustment made to the numbers, basically.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, because what we see, for instance, is on a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown twice as much in the US since 2000. It’s an absolutely huge difference.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I always switch it, so I apologize. It’s purchasing power parity. Purchasing power parity.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Apologies again.   Bertrand Schmitt I think one point that I believe is really important is the lack of innovation in Europe. That is, of course, very scary. They made a good point, it’s the lack of tech companies in Europe. One number shared in the report, only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European. Only four. How can you be one of the top three regions in the world and the future is not well represented in Europe?   Bertrand Schmitt For sure, it’s a big issue. It has big issue in terms of R&D. The three biggest spenders of R&D in Europe are actually automotive companies. Guess what? None of them is Tesla. I’m not sure where is this R&D going, but I will guess it didn’t go in the right direction on top of it. But it’s not just a question of how much you spend, but how well you use it. That part is something to be fixed.   Bertrand Schmitt Another data point maybe around tech companies, but there is no EU company with a market cap over 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the past 50 years. While all six US companies with a valuation above one trillion have been created in the past 50 years. That for me is just incredible because it’s proof of a total lack of dynamism that is step by step self-fulfilling. I’m not saying individuals in Europe lack dynamism. I guess it’s not the overall European system that is creating so much ball and chains behind your back. You cannot run. At best, you walk. At worst, you crawl.  If you have your operations in Europe. That’s really probably the main issue.   Bertrand Schmitt One could argue, has it been designed or proposed this way to help the incumbent? I don’t know. But for sure, the result is that all of these regulations, all of this lack of competitiveness, or all of these constraints and cost are creating issues. The end result, whatever you agree or not, the end result is that you don’t create with such a system highly successful companies. That’s it. They were created a number of years ago.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s even more significant than that. Obviously, if you look at startups, more recent startups, 2008-2021, close to 30% of the unicorns that were founded in Europe, so startups that went on to be valued over a billion dollars, relocated abroad, mostly to the US. It’s even worse. When there is innovation in Europe, these guys want to raise money from the US They want to raise money from US venture capital. They want to expand into the US markets in many cases.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro In a significant amount, we just saw 30% of unicorns, from 2008-2021, relocated their headquarters to the US, or most of them to the US It’s incredible. It’s like even the innovation doesn’t stay in Europe. It’s not just that the industrial complex is totally stale. To your point earlier, in the last 50 years, it’s more than that. The new companies that are emerging are also not staying in Europe, or at least a significant part of them are not.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, that’s a very good point. That one is really scary because even if you say, “Oh, you know what? We have some good programs to help create startups.” At some point, the rational ones might discover that actually they better leave Europe because it would be more efficient for them to gain scale from the US. They will probably realize that most of their markets in the US in the first place, they will see that most of the exit opportunities, be it in terms of M&A or in terms of IPO, will probably be in the US if they are highly successful.   Bertrand Schmitt There has not been a lot of successful acquisition of big tech companies in Europe or IPO of tech companies in Europe. There has been a few, of course, but certainly not to the level we’ve seen in the US. The US is still seen as the best path for exit for a lot of startups, especially the ones that have global appeal in terms of products and cu

Do we need yet another new AI platform? Would new foundation models stand a chance in today’s market? Will OpenAI, Anthropic, etc be the new Tech winners … or will they just get acquired, at some point? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Landscape Recent gigantic acqui-hires The Big Players How will the hardware change? Will there be a next wave beyond GPT? Is it too late to come in and disrupt the big players? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 59. Again, this will be an episode on AI. This time we make the case for not starting yet a new AI platform and not investing in one either. What’s happening in AI? I guess all of you have heard about all the massive investment made by some of the leading players, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, XAI, Oracle, as well as even some smaller startups from Anthropic to Mistral.   Bertrand Of course, Amazon has built its own frontier model as well as is providing infrastructure to a lot of players. But isn’t there already too much capital going into AI platforms and isn’t it going too fast?   Nuno Well, we think probably yes. That’s going to be the thesis of our discussion today. Some of the startups you mentioned, by the way, they’ve raised a ton of money. I mean, Anthropic is well above 8 billion. Mistral is at a couple of billions as well, right, at this stage?   Bertrand I think we are closer to a billion.   Nuno It’s around a billion. Yeah, around a billion, several billion for Anthropic. Then there’s a couple of companies we will talk about later that raised a few billion that are no longer independent. It feels like too much. It feels like there’s a gold rush of sorts. It is probably a good analogy. A lot of investors putting capital into it.   Nuno But at the same time, it’s being matched by the big players, Microsoft, Google, Meta by pushing LLM, XAI, OpenAI, we could argue, is it a big player already or not? But they just raised a ton of money as well. At 150 billion valuation, right? I mean, it’s like…   Bertrand Yes, 150 billion valuation.   Nuno It’s like, okay. They’ve already said, well, we are going to continue raising money. We’re going to continue spending a lot of money as well. It feels like a gold rush. It feels like there’s too much capital deployed into it. Something’s got to give, someone’s going to fail. Maybe that’s a good segue to the fact that we already start seeing some moments that are quite interesting.   Bertrand Maybe to OpenAI, to jump back, to be fair, they’ve reached more than 3 billion of annualized revenues, and that was based on numbers from June. This is very high valuation for sure. But it’s also coming with one of the fastest growing business ever in terms of revenues.   Nuno Yes. We will see if it’s sustainable, the business that they’re building, because there’s no competition. People are using other services out there in tandem. I see a lot of people, for example, using perplexity rather than ChatGPT. We’ll see if Gemini catches up at some point or not. I would argue they have grown very fast, but they have not faced as much competition as they’re probably starting to face right now. At least that would be my thesis.   Nuno In any case, we start seeing signals of companies that go to the market and get bought out, and they get bought out for amazing amounts. If we look at Google and there, I would argue, acquihire of Character.ai. It seems to 2.5 billion to get the team and I guess the tech as well. But it feels a bit like acquihire. They’re trying to get the CEO back into the fold at Google. So interesting, I feel.   Nuno The Inflection one was at least in the highest hundreds of millions. We heard 650 million for the IP licensing deal from Microsoft to get the founder and CEO to join Microsoft to head AI. Let’s say it’s around a billion and let’s call it even, but that’s like another gigantic acquihire.   Nuno What gives? And it’s a little bit like it feels a little bit like free money. I’ve had a bit of a chance to think about this. It’s not just that it feels a little bit like free money. It’s some of these acquirers, like the Microsoft of the world, et cetera, might still be overvalued themselves, question mark, and therefore they’re basically putting capital because they have the capital to deploy at this stage.   Nuno But it feels a little bit abusive. It raises all these concerns. If I’m an investor, and I’m backing a company in the AI space that is doing yet another foundational model, or that it’s playing at the limit between infrastructure and platform, and I know it’s going to be capital-intensive, but I’m one of the early investors and I hope that they’ll raise a bunch of money, well, there’s no guarantee that at some point they won’t just get bought out.   Nuno Maybe the early investors will make a pretty decent return or a pretty good return, certainly a very fast return. But maybe those who are coming later won’t make a ton of money out of it because the company end up being just acquihired.   Nuno It may also uncover a hidden secret, which is for you to scale, this is so capital-intensive in terms of consumption of compute, storage, other parts of infrastructure, etc, that at the end of the day, only a big, big guy can win. Therefore, either you raise tens of billions of dollars or you have no chance even to compete. What do you think, [inaudible 00:04:49] ?   Bertrand Yeah, I think it’s a mix of things that are happening right now. One is, as we know, the FCC has been blocking acquisitions from the big players. What we are seeing is companies that might have been properly acquired in the past, but suddenly the bigger companies cannot really acquire any more. So they have to find ways around current regulations or at least how the regulators is seeing the regulations and is using its power to block acquisitions and therefore are going around by doing this type of very weird acquihires with separate licensing deals.   Bertrand We’re in a pretty strange position. And it’s not just AI. In general, there has been much less acquisitions from the, can call them the Fabulous 7, if you want, because their ability to acquire has been very restricted. I don’t think, of course, it’s a good thing for startups. So it’s raising a lot of questions of how as a startup, can you keep ultimately providing liquidity to your business, especially when, as we know, there’s also very little IPO these days.   Bertrand So it’s a very weird combination of you cannot really do an exit through the bigger guys, and only the bigger guys can afford to spend billions and billions in an acquisition, by the way.   Bertrand If you don’t provide the IPO opportunity, then what do you do? Maybe that’s what we are seeing as well is what you end up doing is doing these weird acquihires, at least for the businesses that are not worthy of keep going at the rate they started.   Nuno Yeah. Obviously, there’s two sides to this There’s the investment side of the play where if I’m an investor, I want to return, and therefore, I want the company to get acquired at some point, or for the company to IPO, that’s the ideal scenario. But obviously, I wanted it to be acquired at a valuation that is beneficial to me.   Nuno If I came into a round where the company was valued last, I don’t know, 2 billion and the company gets bought for 2 billion, that’s not much of a gain, right? There’s that element of the piece of the puzzle. Then there’s the element you’re mentioning, which is really the M&A perspective of the big guys. Can I really acquire? Will I be allowed to acquire this asset and this team and this company?   Nuno But in some ways, they’re doing really under the disguise of acquihire. I’m getting the talent, the core talent in. For example, the deal with inflection was that, they got the talent, and then they did a licensing agreement with the company, though. I don’t think formally they acquire the company. There’s obviously other natural activity going on. AMD bought a startup, Silo AI for 665 million.   Nuno There’s activity going on not just on the platform foundational model side, but also around the chip capability side, infrastructure side. It’s a little bit truly like a gold rush. If you remember in the gold rush, there was the whole pics and shovels. Our friends from Levi Strauss, the jeans makers were attached to that because people needed more comfortable trousers to do work on or in, rather. That’s how Levi Strauss became a big name.   Nuno In some ways, there’s a lot of things happening around the ecosystem, not just in the core platform foundational models side, but also around infrastructure that needs to change. Some would say it’s justified. There needs to be a ton of investment. My thesis is there’s too much money being poured into it, and there’s going to be a lot of people crying at some point, particularly on the investor side, because something does have to give.   Nuno It’s impossible that we will have at scale, assuming very high capital intensity, 10, 15 players fighting for the same broad foundational models. I don’t see that happening.   Bertrand I think there are different perspectives here. One is as consumers, all this investment in AI or businesses that are going to benefit from AI is going to be great because I see the performance of all these models keep improving. I see their capacities keep improving. I see their abilities. I mean, the way now it’s multimodal mode

Another election year and it’s already a dramatic one. Biden vs Trump turned into Harris vs Trump. An attempt on Trump’s life. What’s next? This episode will focus on the implication of the elections for Tech and its ecosystem in the US and globally. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Harris vs. Trump Silicon Valley / Tech business at large views Implications for Rest of the World Our take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 58 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss the US election and what it means for tech. How will the upcoming US election affect tech and the entire ecosystem in the US and globally? To be clear, and just to put a disclaimer, this episode will not focus on policies by the candidates that do not relate to what we perceive to be implications to tech. For example, we will not be discussing topics like pro-choice versus pro-life, and other things that are obviously very central to the decisions that many of you will make in how you will vote for the next presidential elections in the US. Nuno Goncalves Pedro At the same time, we will also share with you what we know to the best of our knowledge. Obviously, policies change with time, and proposed policies definitely change a lot with time, as you know, with politicians. There might be things that we will share with you today that might be different when you listen to our episode. We are not responsible for that. People and candidates change their minds all the time, even after they’ve been elected. That’s not our fault. Just with those disclaimers, that’s what we’re going to share today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The third and final disclaimer, obviously, there will be tonality on how we discuss and evaluate some of the policies, and if they’re good or bad or whatever. But from this, you cannot also take a conclusion on, “Oh, I should vote for Trump,” or, “I should vote for Harris,” because no, this is just a view around tech and tech ecosystem. We will share how we perceive the policies and the proposed policies, and that’s literally it. We’re not giving you advice on who to vote for. Bertrand Schmitt First, this is a recording made August 28. We’ll try to be as precise and as relevant as of this date. This is before the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. As a reminder, a French politician once said that promises by candidates only engage those who listen to them. With that as a reminder, let’s start the topic. Maybe first, we can talk about the official platform. As of today, there is an official platform if we go to the page of the candidate, Donald J. Trump, there is a 20-point page, and there is a more detailed PDF as well on the Trump Republican platform. Some of our points will try to leverage what is on this official platform page, and we will also, of course, try to leverage what was done when Donald Trump was president, because sometimes actions speak louder than words. We also pick what we have heard from the candidates on the trail, if it diverts or if it adds to that platform. Bertrand Schmitt On the other side, VP Harris’ platform is not there. As of August 28, there is no official platform on her website, which, to be frank, it’s scary because if you cannot hold a candidate to their promise after they are elected, that’s a tough place to be. Obviously, she’s part of the Biden-Harris administration, so we will leverage for discussion what was done by her administration, what was also planned by her administration, and we will highlight whatever has been shared by her, since she’s running as a candidate. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Well, okay. That’s a great start. But based on speeches—obviously, Vice President Harris is in office right now, so she’s been part of a platform—based on what analysts’ say, we’ve looked at a bunch of comparisons across the board for where they stand on a variety of issues. Maybe we start with economic policy overall, and talk a little bit about how we see the Biden-Harris administration, and obviously what things have happened around there. We will later discuss other topics like taxes, labour, perspectives, for example, on gig working, immigration, antitrust, and a variety of other topics. The economic policy overall piece that we will share at the beginning is very high-level, as you will see, then we will go in details into a couple of other areas. Maybe starting on that, Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Actually, we have two, and when I say candidates, of course, we should think about the ticket, per se. If we take on Trump’s side, what’s interesting with both Trump and JD Vance is that they have both extensive experience in the private sector. Trump, obviously, as a businessman, who built a business empire. JD Vance, as an ex-VC, venture capitalist. Both have been in the trench of what it means to run a business, to be on the board of businesses, to be on the private side of things. Bertrand Schmitt On the other end, we have a stark contrast, because both Harris and Walz have actually never been on the private side of things. Harris has been on the legal side as a prosecutor, as attorney general. We have Walz, who had a long experience in the military, followed by running for different position at state level before becoming governor. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I would say one parenthesis on JD Vance. He was in venture capital for a short period of time, three years and a half or four years, which is not very long, for venture capital funds are normally 10 years, et cetera. But he does obviously have private sector business experience before that as well. He did write the book, and the book was made into a movie. There’s definitely a lot of private sector stuff in there. Bertrand Schmitt That’s true. Actually, I forgot to say that JD Vance also has a military experience. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, he was also in the military. Bertrand Schmitt The economic policy, if we look at what has happened under the Biden-Harris administration, I mean, obviously it has been hugely inflationary. The numbers have been terrible. I mean, if you have a basket of stuff to buy at the groceries, you have seen big price increase. Go to McDonald’s or any other restaurant, you will have seen a huge difference in the past four years. Whatever the Inflation Reduction Act was supposed to do, I guess it did the opposite of the name of the act. It was a more inflationary act instead of a reduction one. Bertrand Schmitt The latest has been Kamala Harris has shared, or some of her spokesperson have shared that she wants to put in place some level of price controls, which is pretty scary, to be frank. In some ways, it’s typical to first create inflation, and then to claim it’s the fault of the capitalists. If prices are increasing, therefore we need to put in place price controls. I think the last time that there were some level of price controls in the US was a long time ago, in the ’70s. It was not a good outcome, just to be very clear. It has rarely, if ever, be a good outcome if you go to price controls. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, I mean, price controls, I don’t think would be a great idea anywhere in the world. On economic policy, I would bring another element to the table, which is maybe stepping one step above. As you guys probably know, both Bertrand and myself are not American originally. I have since become an American citizen, so this will actually be the first presidential elections that I will have the pleasure and honor of voting in. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Bertrand is not an American citizen, but he does live in the US and has lived in the US for a very long time. Coming from different countries, Bertrand’s from France, I come from Portugal, with national health systems. We both lived in China, which is a bit funky in terms of health system. Again, different education systems, et cetera. I’d say the only point I would make is, at least from my perspective, coming out of Europe and having lived in Asia, there’s very little structural support on things that I do think are critical. For me, the three things that are critical, I always mentioned these three things, are health, education, justice. The health, education, justice system in the US is, let’s just say, very private sector-owned. It’s very private sector-led, and it’s uncommon for that in many countries in the world. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It has its pluses and minuses. But if I were to look at the minuses, the fact is, if I’m an American citizen, the level of protection I have in terms of, for example, having a health scare or whatever is not really comparable to, for example, I’m a Portuguese citizen, I live in Portugal. I do think there are a lot of factors that are put into economic policy to make some of these elements work in the economy, which, to be honest, the Democrats have had probably a better track record than the Republicans have had. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The whole notion of you take care of yourself, and if you have health issues, take care of yourself, and if you have diabetes, you take care of yourself, is very much a Republican speech motto thing. On the Democrats side, there’s more of this level of protection for at least certain elements. Now, we can have, as Bertrand was saying, also an argument that there’s been too much spend. The government is overspending dramatically. We have money that we don’t have the right to spend. We’re borrowing. Nuno Goncalves Pedro What happ

Did we go from a broad bubble to a gen AI bubble? What is the current state of AI and generative AI? What has been commoditized and what is still distinctive? What does the future hold? Navigation: Intro (01:34) The State of AI / gen AI On the negative side On the positive side Our take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Welcome to Tech Deciphered, episode 57. This episode will be about generative AI, and we will be asking the question, “Are we in a generative AI bubble?” Bertrand Schmitt In our last episode, we talked about AI, what was the latest happening in terms of endpoints, PCs, Macs, iPhones, and is it a risk? Is it a benefit? Today, we’ll talk about what’s happening with GenAI. Is it overhyped? Is it too much investment? On the plus side, we’ll be wondering, okay, maybe it’s not a bubble after all, or even if it’s one, is it such an issue because basically is it laying the foundation for a new stage, a new scale of AI for an act two of generative AI. Good to talk to you today, Nuno. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Nice to talk to you as well, Bertrand. I’ll start with my answer. It is a bubble and it isn’t. I’ll come back to that. I’ll leave you guys on that cliffhanger. Let’s start maybe a little bit with where we are in the state of AI and GenAI. Are we at commodity level or not? Adoption levels that we’re seeing in the market. Interesting report from McKinsey. Some around the state of AI, they did over 1,300 interviews. It was really a survey format around AI and GenAI adoption. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Some, like the conclusions, increased adoption of AI in at least one business function. Over the last year, this dramatic increase. I’m not really sure. Everyone that said, yes, we’re using it is actually using it. I take that with a grain of salt. This is self-reported, again, and so everyone has to be using GenAI, but everyone’s aware of it. I’m sure there’s an increase in adoption for sure. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The second piece that I feel is a little bit more exciting is what are the functional areas of companies that are using AI and generative AI more actively? Maybe not super mega surprising marketing and sales, which is core to some companies, but relatively support function. A little bit surprising to me that people are seeing product in our service development as number two. Surprising to me that software engineering is so low. Again, maybe no software engineer has actually filled in anything around that. That’s why it’s so low or middle of the board, or they don’t know what their engineers are doing, really, which is also interesting. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Then very low on strategy and corporate finance were business analysis, triangulation of data, or using ChatGPT, et cetera, I would have taken a little bit for granted that people would be using it. A bit surprising on that. Just feel it’s an interesting… Again, self-reported, it’s a survey. Some interesting conclusions on both sides in terms of the functions, et cetera. Some the conclusions as well on the rapid ascendancy of generative AI. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, for me, what I’m quite impressed, I must say, is how fast generative AI has picked up. I don’t think I remember any new technologies that move so fast in terms of adoption, because here we are already talking about adoption metrics. I mean, it moved from nowhere in 2022, 33% in 2023, 65% in 2024. Basically, as high as the adoption of AI, the general AI adoption took seven years to get there. Bertrand Schmitt Here it’s two years. I’m not sure I remember any technologies that move so fast in terms of adoption. It took years and years for smartphone to get there. It took 5, 10 years for cloud computing to get there. It’s really fast, I must say for me, is my first reaction. Bertrand Schmitt In terms of function, marketing, I’m not surprised. That’s where you can use generative AI to generate content relatively easily. It’s not mission-critical content, it’s content you can review. At the same time, it can give you some clear benefits in terms of moving pretty fast and needing less resources. I guess for some other function like software engineering, I think right now, I guess the biggest issue is that you cannot trust it. It’s not something that you are ready to deploy in production so quickly, very different from content for marketing. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe perhaps a little bit more interesting is the article from Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint. I hope he’s still at Redpoint, and I didn’t say anything wrong. Bertrand Schmitt I’m not sure, actually. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Around the evolution. He was at Redpoint. Bertrand Schmitt He was. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Around the evolution of AI and this notion that it might be following the sigmoid logic, so log scale sometimes. Then sometimes exponential in terms of curves, so the exponential improvement and then log curve, which is flattening out for those who are not familiar with log curves. I would even say maybe it then looks a little bit linear, because if it’s exponential and then log, then it’s basically it looks a little bit linear. A little bit of argumentation around, are we going for the next S-curve? Are we going for the next log curve? Where are we on development? I think our intuition is probably telling us that there’s more stuff to come still on this technology stack. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Although this technology stack, as we know, the whole use of transformers to get us to where we got to buy OpenAI and all the other players is definitely, according to everyone that I talk to, not what’s going to take us to AGI. It’s definitely not what is going to take us to the big innovations, the big next themes and the next levels. Bertrand Schmitt I really like the way OpenAI has categorized the different level of AI similar to self-driving cars. As a reminder, level one was a chatbot layer, robots that can chat with you. You could argue, interestingly enough, this level one is what used to be actually considered something very hard and the proof we have made AGI, I guess everyone now realize that Turing test is absolutely not enough. Bertrand Schmitt Level two: reasoners, robots that use logic to solve problems. Level three: agents, robots that act independently of humans. Level four: innovators, robots that create new ideas independently. Level five: organizations, robots that replicate the work of AI. Bertrand Schmitt At this stage, where are we? OpenAI say it’s close to move from level one to level two. We will see. As you say, I tend to agree that at this stage, I feel that we are getting some plateau. Just to be clear, things keep improving. Don’t get me wrong, there are very clear metrics that we improve stuff, but it feels more an improvement through brute force. Let’s move from that many terabytes of data to 10X that terabytes of data. As a source, let’s move from 1,000 GPUs to 10,000 GPUs. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, of course, you are improving stuff and the magic things with the current foundational models is that they scale very well with more data as long as quality stays good, and they scale very well with more GPUs. I guess the only issue at this stage is that it doesn’t feel that there will be quantum leaps with this technology in terms of moving to level two, level three, without any separate breakthrough. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. We know OpenAI is using other methods and other technology pieces into their technology stack beyond transformers, et cetera. It’s already very apparent that they are. But still, the analogy of this with the self-driving car levels, which if you remember, is also level one through level five. Magically enough, it’s very similar. Nuno Goncalves Pedro For those who are unaware, probably today, the best case scenarios that we see out there is like a level three. Some cars don’t even have beyond level two. It’s like they’re telling you, there’s a car on your lane or whatever, that’s nothing. A little bit like the Tesla experience today is on the level three thing. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’re very far from level five. I’m sure, Bertrand, you’ve had similar stories. We’ve been promised self-driving cars for a long. I remember from my perspective, the penny dropped when I looked very heavily into the space, spent over a year looking at companies that were deeply embedded in the architecture of self-driving. Then at some point in time, I ended up spending time in this specific space with just simulation. The area where you simulate behaviour of cars to get those driving miles, but there are actually no cars on roads. It’s actually a simulation. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The first thing is, 80% of the players I said was just BS. It looked like gaming simulations using Unreal, and there was no factoids to it. There was no physics to it. There was nothing that they were really testing. Then you got to the other 20%, and you realized these guys are a little bit more legit. Then you realize, well, there’s things that they’re not simulating, for example, like rain and snow, and what happens if there’s ice on the road? At some point you’re like, “But that’s pretty critical, right?’ Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s when you realize I spent probably a lot of time around this, 2016, 2017, when you were like, “Oh, my God, this is going to happen.” You’re like, “No, not anytime soon.” Again, this promise that we’re going to achieve AGI with a stack right now, I feel is tot

AI is literally everywhere… in our mobile phones, laptops, their chipsets, etc. As integrations increase, what are the implications for everyone? Why are all the announcements from Microsoft, Google, Apple, Open AI and others, important? One of those episodes that you really need to listen to, as this IMPACTS YOU and all of us Navigation: Intro (01:34) Getting us all on the same page This matters TO YOU!!! Open AI launching 4o The responses So… What? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Hi, welcome to episode 55 of Tech Deciphered. In this episode, we will talk about open versus closed and proprietary. What does it mean in technology to be an open or closed application? You have all heard about open-source, I guess. There is a saying in Silicon Valley, if you are first, you close it. If you come late, you open it. Bertrand Schmitt Basically, it means that you might have an advantage being the first player on the field. You might afford to be able to close-source your product, your software, your application. But if you are late to the game, late to the party, and it’s difficult to fight the leading player in the marketplace, maybe an alternative strategy in order to gain distribution is to open-source your product. There have been many examples of this through Silicon Valley history. Today, we are going to talk more about all of this. Good to see you, Nuno, today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Nice to see you as well. Shall we start with history—the history of open-source? It’s apparently the first known system that was supposedly open-source or in public domain was in the ’50s, the A2 system in 1953. Basically, it was a compiler. A compiler is what turns source code into binary code that gets run by a machine. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s what allows you to run apps on, for example, your phone and things like that, a compiler. I know some of you that are like, I’m a computer engineer. Is that a compiler really or is it an interpreter? Let’s forget that for a second. Let’s call it a compiler just to make life easier for everyone involved. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That was the first public domain open-source thing that we know. Then there isn’t much, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, there isn’t much. Obviously, there was the summer of love at some point in the late ’60s, and maybe through the ’70s, people started thinking through, shouldn’t we be doing things that are more open? One of such people was a gentleman called Richard Stallman, who’s still alive, so you’d shout out to him. He was part of this “let’s call it hacker community” from those days and was doing some interesting things around it. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There was this belief that source code shouldn’t be closed, that if you were monetising something quite a lot, and you were putting even certain things in your code, that if, for example, you were using unlicensed applications, so unlicensed binary, that you would run into trouble and have other issues. So he manifested himself against it and came up with something that we’re still using till this day, the GNU or the GNU Project and GNU Manifesto. Now, GNU, this is the funny part—some of you will find it funny, others might not—stands for GNU’s Not Unix, which is a recursive acronym. You have to appreciate computer scientists and computer engineers coming up with things like that. Nuno Goncalves Pedro But its GNU is GNU’s not Unix, because at that time, Unix was a proprietary or had been made over time a proprietary platform by a couple of big companies in the market. There was this view that they wanted to, in some ways, get out of that space. The GNU project was born, and we, till this day, have what we call GNU general public licences, GPLs. You probably have heard about this. Now, it’s in the ’90s, early ’90s, that we have the biggest movement, I think, in the history of open-source with a gentleman called Linus Torvald. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I probably butchered his name. Linus Torvald, something like that, pushed a version of a kernel that he had. Actually, the first version he had was not open to the public, but then he released it to the public under a GNU licence. And that operating system was called Linux. And the rest is history. Linux has led to many other things after that. It’s a wildly used operating system globally, in particular on the server side, with many variations, and we’re off to the races. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s the shortened version of how we got here in some ways. Then there’s a lot of cool things that happen afterwards, but that’s like seminal moments are GNU and Linux. That’s the two things you need to remember. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, and if I may say, Linux is really the kernel, and then you have by extension, Linux, the operating system are actually combining a kernel plus many tools from GNU or not GNU. Just to remind everyone, the Internet is running on Linux. Nuno Goncalves Pedro On Linux? Bertrand Schmitt We’ll talk later about a lot of our other open-source software. It’s not just Linux, but so many components of the Internet that are running on open-source software. Also, just to be clear, the first definition of open-source was coming from our friends at GNU, but ultimately, there has been competing initiatives to define or redefine what is open-source. Bertrand Schmitt One organisation in particular, the open-source Initiative, OSI, has tried to codify their own way and probably in a different way, what is considered open-source or not. They have this official definition they published in 2006, and they keep updating them for GNU, they keep generating new definitions and creating new or updating licences. Bertrand Schmitt We have multiple licences possible when we talk about open-source, which can create some misunderstanding about what is exactly open-source or not. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll come back to the more bad use of open later in this episode where obviously there are people that use open, and it’s not open at all. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Nuno Goncalves Pedro But these are seven moments in real open-source. It created a movement, it created a way of doing things. It created a mindset on how people can share each other’s source code. At the very nature, open-source starts from there. It starts from the notion that source code, not the binary, not what’s created by the compilers that then is run as an application, but the source code itself can be shared for free. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s incredible. That’s like the religion of the time was a religion of we have all these big monolithic companies like IBM, Microsoft emerging, etc. It’s someone that’s saying, “No, we don’t accept the closed ecosystem play. We want to have code that is shared globally.” In some ways, that movement is now probably the dominating movement in the world in terms of source code sharing. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Obviously, as we know, there’s a lot of people profiting out of code today. There’s ways of keeping your code intact and keeping things in-house. But the open-source movement has changed how things are done. It is a quasi-religious movement. It’s this notion of you have… There’s copyright. I enforce my copyright, the entitlement I have to this thing that I developed. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s copyleft, which is a term that came from open-source, which you are obliged to share under certain licences all the stuff that you developed around it. To your point, there are coexistent pieces. We’ll come back to that later when we talk about Android and Google and the Android open-source project versus Android itself. What is closed? What is open, and how do some companies do well in maintaining these two aspects working really well, like the openness and the closeness piece? Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think Google does a decent job on Android. We’ll argue later if that’s the case or not. And yeah, it all started, similarly, with this gentleman Richard Stallman, and then with Linus just giving us Linux, and everything changed. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s really amazing when you think about what was happening at the time. If you think about the ’90s, it was the rise of Microsoft, from DOS to Windows, and Microsoft becoming at some point one of the most valued company and at the time certainly fighting tooth and nail against. Bertrand Schmitt Open-source was considered evil by some corporations when actually no, it was just a movement and a different approach to business and willingness to develop things in a different way and a way that was more open, transparent, collaborative, and especially important you could argue in the age of deploying applications everywhere, depending on these applications’ stability over time. It is a significant evolution of the history of computers and programming. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Microsoft will keep popping up in this episode. Just to be very clear, this is not their first rodeo. They’ve been having these fights or antitrust cases, etc. In some ways, a lot of the reactions we saw, even with Linux, Linux becoming such an important operating system, certainly server-side globally, has to do with a fight to Microsoft. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Because obviously, as you said, Microsoft went DOS to Windows, and then they were really managing a closed ecosystem. There was this view like an operating system is critical. An operating system for those who are listening to us who are not computer scientists or computer en

When a company says they are launching a new product that is open, is it really? What does open even mean? The history behind open source, its successes and failures, and all the lies we are told all the time by some Tech players. The truth, unvarnished Navigation: Intro (01:34) What is Open Source Software – history, definition and core innovations? Open Source ftw (for the win) Lies… when Open is not Open, but a Moat or the Bridge for Closed Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Hi, welcome to episode 55 of Tech Deciphered. In this episode, we will talk about open versus closed and proprietary. What does it mean in technology to be an open or closed application? You have all heard about open-source, I guess. There is a saying in Silicon Valley, if you are first, you close it. If you come late, you open it. Bertrand Schmitt Basically, it means that you might have an advantage being the first player on the field. You might afford to be able to close-source your product, your software, your application. But if you are late to the game, late to the party, and it’s difficult to fight the leading player in the marketplace, maybe an alternative strategy in order to gain distribution is to open-source your product. There have been many examples of this through Silicon Valley history. Today, we are going to talk more about all of this. Good to see you, Nuno, today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Nice to see you as well. Shall we start with history—the history of open-source? It’s apparently the first known system that was supposedly open-source or in public domain was in the ’50s, the A2 system in 1953. Basically, it was a compiler. A compiler is what turns source code into binary code that gets run by a machine. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s what allows you to run apps on, for example, your phone and things like that, a compiler. I know some of you that are like, I’m a computer engineer. Is that a compiler really or is it an interpreter? Let’s forget that for a second. Let’s call it a compiler just to make life easier for everyone involved. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That was the first public domain open-source thing that we know. Then there isn’t much, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, there isn’t much. Obviously, there was the summer of love at some point in the late ’60s, and maybe through the ’70s, people started thinking through, shouldn’t we be doing things that are more open? One of such people was a gentleman called Richard Stallman, who’s still alive, so you’d shout out to him. He was part of this “let’s call it hacker community” from those days and was doing some interesting things around it. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There was this belief that source code shouldn’t be closed, that if you were monetising something quite a lot, and you were putting even certain things in your code, that if, for example, you were using unlicensed applications, so unlicensed binary, that you would run into trouble and have other issues. So he manifested himself against it and came up with something that we’re still using till this day, the GNU or the GNU Project and GNU Manifesto. Now, GNU, this is the funny part—some of you will find it funny, others might not—stands for GNU’s Not Unix, which is a recursive acronym. You have to appreciate computer scientists and computer engineers coming up with things like that. Nuno Goncalves Pedro But its GNU is GNU’s not Unix, because at that time, Unix was a proprietary or had been made over time a proprietary platform by a couple of big companies in the market. There was this view that they wanted to, in some ways, get out of that space. The GNU project was born, and we, till this day, have what we call GNU general public licences, GPLs. You probably have heard about this. Now, it’s in the ’90s, early ’90s, that we have the biggest movement, I think, in the history of open-source with a gentleman called Linus Torvald. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I probably butchered his name. Linus Torvald, something like that, pushed a version of a kernel that he had. Actually, the first version he had was not open to the public, but then he released it to the public under a GNU licence. And that operating system was called Linux. And the rest is history. Linux has led to many other things after that. It’s a wildly used operating system globally, in particular on the server side, with many variations, and we’re off to the races. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s the shortened version of how we got here in some ways. Then there’s a lot of cool things that happen afterwards, but that’s like seminal moments are GNU and Linux. That’s the two things you need to remember. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, and if I may say, Linux is really the kernel, and then you have by extension, Linux, the operating system are actually combining a kernel plus many tools from GNU or not GNU. Just to remind everyone, the Internet is running on Linux. Nuno Goncalves Pedro On Linux? Bertrand Schmitt We’ll talk later about a lot of our other open-source software. It’s not just Linux, but so many components of the Internet that are running on open-source software. Also, just to be clear, the first definition of open-source was coming from our friends at GNU, but ultimately, there has been competing initiatives to define or redefine what is open-source. Bertrand Schmitt One organisation in particular, the open-source Initiative, OSI, has tried to codify their own way and probably in a different way, what is considered open-source or not. They have this official definition they published in 2006, and they keep updating them for GNU, they keep generating new definitions and creating new or updating licences. Bertrand Schmitt We have multiple licences possible when we talk about open-source, which can create some misunderstanding about what is exactly open-source or not. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll come back to the more bad use of open later in this episode where obviously there are people that use open, and it’s not open at all. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Nuno Goncalves Pedro But these are seven moments in real open-source. It created a movement, it created a way of doing things. It created a mindset on how people can share each other’s source code. At the very nature, open-source starts from there. It starts from the notion that source code, not the binary, not what’s created by the compilers that then is run as an application, but the source code itself can be shared for free. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That’s incredible. That’s like the religion of the time was a religion of we have all these big monolithic companies like IBM, Microsoft emerging, etc. It’s someone that’s saying, “No, we don’t accept the closed ecosystem play. We want to have code that is shared globally.” In some ways, that movement is now probably the dominating movement in the world in terms of source code sharing. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Obviously, as we know, there’s a lot of people profiting out of code today. There’s ways of keeping your code intact and keeping things in-house. But the open-source movement has changed how things are done. It is a quasi-religious movement. It’s this notion of you have… There’s copyright. I enforce my copyright, the entitlement I have to this thing that I developed. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s copyleft, which is a term that came from open-source, which you are obliged to share under certain licences all the stuff that you developed around it. To your point, there are coexistent pieces. We’ll come back to that later when we talk about Android and Google and the Android open-source project versus Android itself. What is closed? What is open, and how do some companies do well in maintaining these two aspects working really well, like the openness and the closeness piece? Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think Google does a decent job on Android. We’ll argue later if that’s the case or not. And yeah, it all started, similarly, with this gentleman Richard Stallman, and then with Linus just giving us Linux, and everything changed. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s really amazing when you think about what was happening at the time. If you think about the ’90s, it was the rise of Microsoft, from DOS to Windows, and Microsoft becoming at some point one of the most valued company and at the time certainly fighting tooth and nail against. Bertrand Schmitt Open-source was considered evil by some corporations when actually no, it was just a movement and a different approach to business and willingness to develop things in a different way and a way that was more open, transparent, collaborative, and especially important you could argue in the age of deploying applications everywhere, depending on these applications’ stability over time. It is a significant evolution of the history of computers and programming. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Microsoft will keep popping up in this episode. Just to be very clear, this is not their first rodeo. They’ve been having these fights or antitrust cases, etc. In some ways, a lot of the reactions we saw, even with Linux, Linux becoming such an important operating system, certainly server-side globally, has to do with a fight to Microsoft. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Because obviously, as you said, Microsoft went DOS to Windows, and then they were really managing a closed ecosystem. There was this view like an operating system is critical. An operating system for those who are listening to us who are not computer scientists or computer engineers

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Can you handle the truth? What is the future of news? Are we at a Spotify moment? Do we even care about the truth? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Mainstream vs Niche News (02:09) Are we Close to the Spotify/Netflix moment? (29:30) State or Government Ownership and Influence of Media (46:06) Polarization & The Truth (58:36) Year of Election (1:05:10) Conclusion (1:09:21)  Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno In today’s episode of Tech Deciphered, we will be discussing the truth. Can you handle the truth and the whole truth? More specifically, we’re going to talk about the future of news, where we are today. Obviously, a lot of discussion around fake news, polarization of news. Nuno We will go into a conversation on whether we are close to the Spotify moment of the news space, and whether how we’re caring for the truth is still actually true. Do we still care for truth or do we just care about our own opinions and to reinforce them over time? Bertrand That’s a big question. I think to start about this topic, we probably want to start from this big debate that has gone pretty big over the past 10 years, but maybe even more the past five years. It’s maybe the mainstream versus niche news and all the dramatic changes that have happened in a way, thanks to internet. Nuno There’s the mainstream versus niche, there’s the mainstream versus speciality. Maybe let’s start with mainstream. What is mainstream news? Is it just news or do we get news through mechanisms that sometimes are not news anymore? Bertrand Is it still mainstream? Nuno Clearly, there has been a decrease in viewership of the newscasts, the news programs that we used to watch in our own countries, in the US. Now people can watch whatever they want whenever they want it. In some ways, there’s still maybe some flagship national news shows that people listen to. Obviously, there’s dedicated news channels like CNN, Fox News, of course, as well. Nuno Is it really where we consume our mainstream news? My view is obviously with the decreasing of viewership across the top channels, one would say maybe less so, but clearly still there is mainstream news. Fox News represents a specific side of the spectrum, but it is mainstream. CNN is as well. What’s your view, Bertrand? Bertrand I was asking this question only jokingly because I don’t know many people who still watch some of these mainstream news channels. My impression is that actually, first, the metrics are pretty clear. It’s a significant decline in viewership. You talk about TV, but the price is the same. A few managed to, I would say, stay somewhat relevant. Take a New York Times, take a Wall Street Journal, but even that definition of relevant is a very small viewership. Bertrand The numbers are extremely small in terms of who is paying for a subscription to these services. We are talking about millions at best, so that’s very small. One thing I noticed, I think that is pretty clear across the board is that, most of what we call mainstream media is more and more watched by the older generations, meaning people who have very long habits of watching their news that way from a TV channel. And two, who have not gone to the internet for their news because they were stuck in their old ways in some ways. Bertrand Obviously not everyone is like this, but my understanding is that they are all facing growing, older and older generations. Of course, there’s a question, what does it mean in term of advertising? Because if you’re not able to target 30, 40-year-old mom, that’s a problem. That’s really, for me, a big question. It’s not only becoming less and less relevant and mainstream because of the smaller and smaller viewership, but it’s also a different kind of viewership. Bertrand There’s, of course, a question of, is this viewership going to stick or actually just going to die? Sorry to be very abrupt, but if your target audience is mostly 70 plus and everyone younger doesn’t want or care or consume their news that way, that’s a huge trouble for these companies. Obviously, they know that. Nuno On the TV side, I think a couple of things. One, local news, in particular, if you look at the US, still has a bit of a role. If you want to know what’s happening, if there’s a storm coming, I think weather is a great example of why you check the news. In principle, it should have some directionality. Obviously, national news is a different ball game. Nuno I feel there’s many ways of consuming news today. In some ways, actually, news channels, the classic mainstream news programs, are competing with things, for example, like social media. A lot of people consume news, shockingly enough. We’ll talk about Twitter later, but a lot of people even consume news on TikTok. The latest thing that came out on TikTok, and people will share things, for example, on Instagram, on stories, et cetera. Nuno It’s just these tidbits that have very little context. I think TV is It’s a bit under attacked with low attention span. To your point, maybe, certain older generations, they have more the appetite to trust certain newscasters in what they say, the George Stephanopoulos at ABC, whoever else at Fox, et cetera. There’s this notion of maybe there’s a couple of generations that trust the newscaster for presenting news in a way that they think represents either some neutrality or whatever. Nuno If we step back on journalism, journalism was always supposed to be a counterpower. It was the fourth power, the counterpower. It was about keeping the powers in check, the judicial power, the legislative power, et cetera, in check. I think that’s changed. It’s changed because of the internet. It’s changed because of rapid access to information. Radio, for example, in some ways has been totally under attack. Podcasts have taken over on that side. Nuno Press has been under attack as well. Who are the publications that are still thriving? The publications that relatively thrive are the big guys, New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economists, where there’s either a quality expectation in reading them, or there is a notion of the number of journalists that they can throw at specific articles. Nuno A little bit the opinion pieces and the investigative journalism piece of the puzzle is what I think still makes press work, because you have the time to put stuff together, the time to really go under the hood and generate newsworthy things out of it. In some ways, the clickbait thing has changed the world. It’s like, can you get my attention or not? If you can’t, I’m going to just tune out and go somewhere else, and I’ll consume my news in some other way. Bertrand Two good points. One, local versus national. The other one about the clickbait. Local versus national, that’s true. I register to my local newspaper to get the local news because I want to know what’s happening. Unfortunately, I find it biased, so I’m not always super happy reading that. The other piece that is clear is, I don’t care whatever they publish on national news. Bertrand For national news, I have my Wall Street Journal subscription, I have my Bloomberg subscription, and that’s what I will use for national or world news, actually. In the past, if we go back a long time ago, when you have to print newspaper and journals and stuff, there was some logic to combine national and local news because it’s not efficient to have different newspapers for everything. Bertrand I think now it’s quite clear that you won’t get the best quality, get national-wise, global-wise from your local newspaper. In a way, why bother? That has definitely been my approach. Clickbait, that’s a great point. Bertrand I also remember reading stories, not just stories, but data analysis about how the news in term of, not just what’s in the title, but once in the body of the news, how it has gone downhill in the past 50 years. The language has become worse and worse in terms of making it scary at every level, from car crash to the Earth is dying, the world is burning. Bertrand There was this famous comparison I think it was on German TV where they were showing a weather forecast basically on TV, it looked like everything was burning in Germany. If you take the same news report, weather forecast report five years back with similar temperature, there was certainly not this impression that was shared by making the graphics looks very dangerous. Bertrand There is definitely a change. My take is that, consumers are noticing. People are not as dumb as some of the people in the news seem to think. People might think by themselves, notice a change, notice when it doesn’t correlate with the reality they live. We might talk more about this, about the brainwashing that some news organization have been trying to do. Bertrand I think it’s also part of why mainstream media has been dying because that propaganda part is becoming more and more visible. It probably went overdrive and as a result has become more visible. I think that’s totally part of why people are looking for more, there niche source of information, or new internet platform to get access to consumer journalism. Nuno It’s a tale that is important. We define our own canons. We define what are the things that we trust and the journalists that we trust and the things that we don’t trust. I’m similar to you. I consume my per local news. Actually, I think it’s pro

Is Technology intrinsically good, bad or neutral? In this episode, we will go into the depths of Technology Philosophy & Ethics, what it actually is, its historical developments, the current movements of the present and what the future likely holds. What is e/acc, what is EA? What is Degrowth? We will also discuss spiritual and religious elements, in as much as they relate to Science and Technology. Navigation: Intro (01:34) What is Technology Philosophy & Ethics? (02:33) Historical Developments (04:17) The Present (23:44) Our Views (49:06) Conclusion (54:45) Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast 1. Intro Bertrand Schmitt Welcome to episode 53 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will be about technology philosophy and ethics. This is a bit far from our usual topics around investment and building companies, but we felt it was an interesting moment in time, especially with the development of AI, to talk about some of this, I would say what’s behind some of the reflection in tech around where we should move forward, how much we should accelerate, should we even consider a pause in some developments? Bertrand Schmitt Is technology intrinsically good, bad or neutral? We’ll try to go into the depths of some of these questions. We’ll also talk about e/acc, about EA, about degrowth, and we will also discuss some spiritual and religious elements in so far as to how they relate to science and technology. 2. What is Technology Philosophy & Ethics? Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Wonderful. Let’s start with what is technology, philosophy, and ethics? Basically, define the philosophy of technology as a subfield of philosophy. We have a good start there. It’s part of philosophy. Let’s start there. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, It actually studies the nature of technology and its social effects. It has several branches. Ethics is probably the one that’s been most published about recently. What are the ethics of AI, et cetera? Relations between science and technology, human-technology relations, there’s been some interesting debates as well around that, in particular in countries like Japan who always seem to be at the forefront of some of the stuff that happens around virtual and digital things and actual humans. Bertrand Schmitt Are you thinking about virtual girlfriends? Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Virtual girlfriends, virtual wives. You could get married to virtual wives. Obviously, the political dimensions of technology has also been hotly debated recently. Who owns semiconductors? Who owns AI? Is AI centralised or not? Is this an arms race? Is this going to be a source of geopolitical danger? Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Obviously, there’s different views around technology. There’s obviously the view that technology is autonomous, but it does determine society. It’s a human construct. It’s co-evolutionary, so it evolves at the same time as we should, and there should be boundary conditions around it and how we evolve. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Basically, this leads to anything between technophobes, people that hate technology, people that are technophilia, I’m not sure that would be the right word, but that have technophilia, that love technology like you and I, Bertrand, we love technology in some ways. Then there’s people at the edges of this that go on different angles like technology anarchy and a bunch of other things. 3. Historical Developments Nuno Goncalves Pedro, That’s basically a very broad definition of technology philosophy. But maybe moving to a little bit of more of an understanding how we got here, let’s go through history, Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt I must say, first of all, people who really hate technology, I guess they should go back to living in huts with no fire. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Maybe even before huts, maybe before there were huts, there was fire, there wasn’t huts. There were caves. Bertrand Schmitt Go back to caves or go on trees, I guess, because at the end of the day, the story of humanity is connected with technology. Obviously, we will not be here talking on Zoom about technology and philosophy if we are not believer in some ways of technology. At least, we have to be the children of technology. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, If we go back, the history of technology philosophy actually goes back to the Greeks. Even the Greeks have been talking about this technology thing, about how there are these things that we create, technology, we human, that try to emulate nature. If we go back in time, just the beginnings of technology philosophy are really related to Greeks. The first notion is that technology should in some ways emulate nature, or it’s trying to emulate nature. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Then at some point, I think this is around Aristotle, he starts saying, “Wait a second. No, that’s not quite accurate. Technology should not be trying to emulate nature. There should be a fundamental distinction.” They call it an ontological distinction between what is created by nature and what is created by human beings. Therefore, technology should be what is created by human beings. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Out of that, there’s been this fundamental difference that we still have today, what was man-made versus what was not man-made. Today, it’s even more complex because there’s what’s nature-made, what’s man-made, and what’s machine-made. Just to make life even more complex, we have all these different ontological distinctions. Bertrand Schmitt What’s inspired by nature, what’s a copy of what nature could do, but done automatically by machine. In this [inaudible 00:04:44] from what could be done by nature. It’s not as easy as it used to be in some ways. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, For a long time, I think we’ve had this notion of history where technology in some ways, and I think this is related to something we’ll talk in later, which is medieval times and all these, we’ll talk about it later as well, the [inaudible 00:05:04] and these fake news from very, very far back of what happened in medieval times. But science and technology has always been alongside us. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, There’s this notion that around medieval times that religion and the church hampered the development of technology. That in some ways was promulgated by a late Renaissance. A lot of people that then came much later than that, such as Bertrand Russell and a few others, that in some ways, Catholicism, Christianity, later with Protestantism, hamper the development of science. And that in some ways, men were being held back from all their potential by developing tools that would increase, one, their productivity, but would also increase the classic utilitarian notion of the product itself that we were creating. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Obviously, one of the most famous examples is the famous heresy Declaration on Galileo, that relates to science in particular, to the fact that at some point the church came against science. And this gentleman, Galileo, was wronged. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, We have even this famous sentence that he would have said after his condemnation to heresy. Even people think that he was condemned to heresy and he was killed, and that he would have said, “Eppur si muove”, which in Latin would mean, and still it moves. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, This is all related, obviously, to the theory of whether the Earth was the centre of what we now know to be our solar system or not. Obviously, now we know that it’s a solar system, so the sun was the centre. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, It relates to Copernicus, who had been one of the first guys to figure it out. I’ve now heard that actually there was someone before Copernicus who had put forward that theory. The interesting thing about all of this story is it’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit. He never said “Eppur si muove”, he wasn’t killed. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, He was actually sent to a farmland house that he had. Think of it as a domiciled prison thing. The reality is he wasn’t the guy who came up with it. Copernicus and many others before actually came up with it. Funnily enough, he was Catholic, and he was very close to the Curia at that point, to the Vatican at that point. He was very close to the Pope, effectively. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, The reason why he got condemned for heresy was he basically took up on the theory. This is a very funny story. You guys should look it up. He took up on the theory, and he took it upon himself to say it was his theory. Then he started doing analysis on it. Then he basically came and said, “I’ve come up with this logic that the sun is the centre. It’s not actually Earth. What’s happening on Earth is based actually on the movements of the moon and the waves, and there’s a relation in that.” Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Anyway, his theory was actually fundamentally totally wrong. He kept being asked by the church of the time, “Can you provide proof?” Because we’ve heard from… Copernicus, by the way, was religious as well. The guy who came before Copernicus as well was also religious. It was nothing against the church. The church at that point was willing to potentially believe that actually we were not the centre of the universe, as we assumed it at that point. But they were asking for proof. Could you prove it? It was a series of these political things and indrominations with the church that actually led Galileo to be, in the end, condemned by heresy. Nuno Goncalves Pedro, He actually did publish a document that was considered a reticle because he tried to go back t

The Apple Vision Pro is out and we each got ourselves one… Our first impressions on the early days of the Vision Pro. Will it change the world forever, like the iPhone? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Overall… TL;DR In-depth analysis Competition with Meta Quest 3 Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture newsIntro Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro In this episode, episode 52 of Tech Deciphered, we will talk about the Apple Vision Pro. It’s now out, and both Bertrand and myself got ourselves one. So what are our first impressions on the early days of the Vision Pro? Will this revolutionise the future of input and output? Is this the new iPhone? Is this finally the product that Tim Cook has developed that shows us that he is the future of Apple? Let’s start with the overall impressions, Bertrand. What are your overall impressions? Bertrand Schmitt What are my overall impressions? It’s a mixed bag, that’s for sure. It’s a very impressive piece of tech. I think my worry is that it has been oversold by Apple, but also by a lot of YouTubers. When you keep looking at these YouTube videos of people using it for eight hours a day, I think it’s totally, utterly bullshit. There is no way in hell any normal human being will put that on their head eight hours a day unless forced to do it. Nuno G. Pedro Unless you’re working on your neck like you’re a Formula One driver or something. Bertrand Schmitt Exactly. You are working on your neck. Yes, it’s neck training. No, more seriously, overall, and we will go more in depth later on this episode, I feel it’s a great device for maybe two use cases. One is if you want to watch 3D content. To watch 3D content, 3D movies, potentially at some point 3D sports, when we get that, we don’t have that yet so far, 3D concert, then I think It’s awesome. Bertrand Schmitt Watching 90 minutes of 3D movies, it’s just an insane experience for me. It’s just amazing. It’s your best way to consume a Blade Runner 2049, a Dune. It’s actually maybe better than in a movie theatre if you combine it with a proper headset because the audio is quite good, the bass are pretty poor. For me today, as a mainstream consumer, that’s the best main use case. For businesses, there might be some reason to look at, if you are doing 3D design, to look at 3D objects in the middle of your room, I can see that as well. Bertrand Schmitt Beyond that, I think we’re talking about very stretch use cases. One of these could be to record a video of what you are doing and sharing that with other for training. I could see that probably for training purposes. But beyond that, at this stage, I’m not sure what’s the point to put 2D panels in the middle of a 3D vision with a headset that’s very heavy and very uncomfortable. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t know your experience, wearing the headset, but anyone telling you that this headset is nice to wear, do they have a metal head to wear that comfortably? I have no clue. I mean, I’m hopeful there will be better straps, but for me, it’s still a nightmare to wear it. Nuno G. Pedro Yeah, this has been tested by 007 villains, so they all can send away the thing on their head. Fully agree with your assessment. It’s impossible have it on your head, to be honest, even for more than an hour-and-a-half, two hours. An hour-and-a-half and two hours is already a lot. So even watching that movie, you might have to take a little break to watch that movie, in particular if it’s over two hours, which many of the Sci-Fi movies actually are, or at least the canonical ones. Nuno G. Pedro I agree that for the consumer side, I think the consumption of content will be great. Maybe I would say besides immersive content, immersive communication, we’ll get back to that later on the Zoom experience and the FaceTime experience, so I won’t unravel that whole discussion right now, but the immersive communication piece, I think, will get finally started at some point. Nuno G. Pedro For me, those two pieces are the pieces that are going to be core to the early use cases of the Vision Pro. Business, agree with you. Some collaboration tools, some consumption also of immersive content for business is quite powerful, but it’s $3,500, right? It’s so expensive. I mean, it’s more expensive than a really good laptop or an iMac. Bertrand Schmitt It’s a price range of your high-end MacBook Pro. Nuno G. Pedro Yeah, it’s the price range of the best-in-class laptop that you could use out there from Apple. It’s just expensive as hell. I feel, maybe giving it the other angle, I feel it’s a platform. The Vision Pro is a platform that they launched where they don’t have any killer apps yet, almost. Except maybe for the content, immersive content piece, they have no killer apps day one. Nuno G. Pedro As I said, I think they will have immersive communication day two, day 100, whenever a lot of these bugs are sorted out. But day one, that’s it. They launched a platform, which is the Vision Pro. It’s really exceptional. As you said at the beginning, it’s great technology. It’s really incredible. It does show us a glimpse of the future, but it’s not the future yet. I agree with you because of the size and how heavy the device is, I’m not sure as a platform, it would stand a test of time, even with software updates, et cetera. Nuno G. Pedro I have a bunch of things that I have issues with this on. We were just before recording this episode, trying to sort out My Persona, which is in beta trial, but it needs the optical ID thing, and the optical ID thing for some reason is not working for me, and I don’t know why, and maybe I need to clean it better. I’m not sure. Nuno G. Pedro It’s just there’s still all these little quirks at the core of the experience like optical ID piece that are just like, “Guys, why did you launch it?” Maybe you should have waited a little bit more and have that ecosystem a little bit more prepared. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, I think the usual way to launch a product where we present you a bit in advance. We share with you a developer conference the details of the API, you can learn how to compile on your Mac, make it work, but you cannot access the device, and you have to wait so long before you can access the device. Bertrand Schmitt Basically, most developers who have developed any app for the Vision Pro probably didn’t have any access to the Vision Pro itself. You are guaranteed a few months of horrible bugs trying to just make it work. Surprisingly enough, even as you say, the Apple apps are actually not working so well. You’re having issues with Apple ID. Bertrand Schmitt Me, I’m facing a contact page that’s empty, and everything is actually properly linked on my account and everything, but it’s empty by default. I have to manually add everyone so that I can FaceTime them. It’s just pretty insane, so it’s not a bug per se, it’s just horrible design. It’s very weird out-of-the-box. I still want to say that out-of-the-box, that media consumption with Apple TV if you’re watching 3D content, it’s totally insane. Bertrand Schmitt For me, it has replaced my home cinema at home. I’m putting a big high-end headset. I have a really good bass as a result, and the Vision Pro, and it’s the best movie theatre experience I ever had. It beats a movie theatre because there is no one around blocking my view. I’m in the perfect spot, and it’s better 3D that you can have in a movie theatre. It’s better colour. You have an OLED screen versus a projection. Bertrand Schmitt For me, there is one use case, I’m very surprised that they have not pushed hard on it, because a lot of their other use case are simply not there. Another piece I see a lot, I mean, Apple is showing off, you are watching your Apple Vision Pro in a plane. Come on. I mean, this stuff is the size of a backpack. When the box to put your Vision Pro in, it’s on backpack. We’re seriously going to transport that in a plane? You don’t take any other luggage, it’s just your Vision Pro with you? I mean, this is nuts. Bertrand Schmitt People will say, “Oh, yeah, it’s great. It’s an external screen for my Mac.” Come on, you can get an external screen that’s a small, slim light and put in your backpack on top of your Mac and everything else. That’s not a realistic alternative. At home or at work, of course, you have an external screen if that’s what you need. Don’t tell me you need a Vision Pro for an external screen. I think this use case just makes zero sense. Bertrand Schmitt For me, at this stage today, makes zero sense. But that media consumption has really shocked me because I’m doing it only once every day at night. The other piece that has shocked me is the quality of the special 3D. If you start watching a 3D object in your home, it can be a Formula One car, it can be a human body, it just sits there perfectly at the right height with the right lighting in a very good pass-through environment in the middle of your living room, for instance, it’s awesome. I don’t have a real use case for it, but it’s super, super awesome. I’m sure some 3D professionals will have use case for it. That is also very, very well nailed. But everything else at this stage, it’s like whatever. Nuno G. Pedro There’s this video with the Apple Immersive video stuff that has all their nature videos that are available for free. Also the Alicia Keys. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, the Apple Immersive videos are awesome, awesome. Nuno G. Pedro The Alicia Keys recording thing, whatever. I had a friend o