Beyond Touch: An AV Big Idea

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  Speaker 1:

  Hi, I’m Mike Collins. I’m the founder and CEO of Alumni Ventures. One of the things we do here is share pretty transparently ideas we have about the future—interesting technologies. We work really hard to have a prepared mind when it comes to investing, and we like to share that with our community.

  So, going to talk a little bit about computer-human interfaces today. So voice, eye, gestures are things that we find very interesting. Again, as AI continues to develop, compute continues to develop, robotics continue to develop, the interface between humans and computers is an opportunity for investment and value creation. So it’s going to be just a brief overview today, but we want to share a little bit of the idea and how we’re thinking about it.

  Next slide.

  Alright, before we get started, I should pause and remind everyone: we’re speaking today about Alumni Ventures and our views of the associated landscape of investing in technology. This presentation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell securities, which are only made pursuant to the formal offering documents for a fund.

  With that, let’s get into it.

  So the thesis: human-computer interaction is evolving beyond the touch interface, which was really revolutionized, I think, by the iPhone—when we moved from a little tiny keyboard on a phone to kind of a glass touch interface. It was really powerful.

  And the human-computer interface—keyboard, mouse—is going to continue to change over the next decade. And I think we’re going to see some really interesting opportunities created because of that. Specifically voice. Also, we think on a secondary basis, eye and gesture tracking is going to continue to revolutionize how we live, work, and just go about life. So we think there’s opportunities—primary and secondary—with computer-human interfaces.

  One of the things—we have this science fiction picture of robots, for example. Why do we have a humanoid robot? That seems really inefficient. Beyond—I think we discover over time that actually humans have evolved to be pretty versatile machines. The whole world has really been designed around humans. So it’s a lot easier to design a robot to fit in our world than to change our world to fit a robot.

  And so yes, you’re going to see non-humanoid robots doing very specific tasks in certain contexts that haven’t been designed really for humans. There’s no need in those applications to not do what is the most efficient way to do it. But I definitely think we’re going to have humanoid robots just because it’s much easier to adapt in our world.

  So I think the same is also true for interfaces. Humans have voices. Humans have sight. Humans have touch. And so as we think about interfaces, I think we’re going to look at all those human senses being brought to play. Clearly, touch has been the story of the last decade, but I think we’re going to look at expanding that and it’ll continue to evolve over time.

  So this is an AV Big Idea Masterclass. I’m Mike Collins. I’ve talked a little bit about what we’re going to talk about today. Just a little bit about Alumni Ventures. We’ve been around a decade. We have a pretty good trophy case. We’ve raised almost $1.4 billion. We have almost 11,000 investors. We have 10 investing teams scattered in the venture hubs. We’re typically ranked as one of the most active venture capital firms in the world. We exclusively co-invest alongside top-tier VC firms. So we see a lot, do a lot. Very proud of our portfolio. You can check that out on our website.

  Yeah, this is our brag sheet, trophy case. I won’t go through it, but we see a lot of interesting technologies. We make a lot of our content available to the public, some for our community members only, and there’s also exclusive content that we make available just to our customers. But we tend to be open and share our ideas and thoughts.

  Speaker 2:

  And that’s what we’re doing here today. So—voice, eye tracking, and gestures.

  Speaker 1:

  So—voice. We’re seeing the first version of Siri was mediocre at best. Alexa was a Saturday Night Live skit. But those things are getting better, and I think we’re going to see, over the next several years, more and more voice.

  People are using, for example, ChatGPT as they commute to find out answers to questions, to do research. I think as agents come along, people are increasingly going to use voice—obviously in the right context. You’re not going to do this on a busy subway. You’re not going to do this in a business meeting.

  And I think the story of today’s presentation is not so much a switch from keyboards, mice, touchscreens, but that the entire interface is going to just get broader. And so you’re going to have the choice depending on the context of where you are, depending on the specific application, location, what kind of screen you need to be looking at. I just think it’s more of an expansion versus a replacement story.

  Humans talk interactively, very naturally. And so as computers get much better at hearing, articulating, communicating back with us—and I think for me, kind of a benchmark is Apple having a billion phones out there—it’s my benchmark. I think Siri is getting better, and I think it’s going to get a lot better in the next three years.

  And I do think that that will be a big difference maker. And I think as we get the search and the AI systems also become more part of our lives, I think their voice capabilities are going to be increasingly part of our lives.

  So this will lead to different forms of customer service, commerce, information, virtual assistance, healthcare, communications. I think more and more of this is going to be voice-driven.

  Again, if I were just to look at my life—and if you were to chart my use of voice interface—it has been slowly but steadily increasing every year. I think the rate, the steepness of that curve is likely to increase. So that creates opportunity.

  Eye tracking, I think, is also going to become more part of the mix. This is, I think, smaller than voice. I think it is a little further away. I think it is a little more niche. But I do think a really good example of this is Apple’s eye tracking system. Their augmented goggles are really fantastic, actually. If you have a chance to drop by an Apple store and try it for that purpose only—to check out eye tracking—it’s definitely doable.

  I think we’re seeing that now in some security applications. But I think we’re going to see that more in gaming, advertising, user behavior.

  It is the largest data feed pipe into the human brain, actually. I think technically, the eyes are kind of an extension forward of the brain. So eyes are really important. And if you can get more data through the eyes, I think we’re going to see more and more tracking—intention, intent.

  I think it’s a big marketing angle. I think it’s gaming. And again, I think in 10 years—augmented reality glasses, goggles—eye tracking’s going to be a big part of that.

  And then gestures. As we move, humans are tactile creatures. I think we’re going to see that—more and more gestures, touch, movements. I think you see this with your watch. I think you’re seeing this with things related to augmented reality, virtual reality, earphones. The ability to make movements, make gestures—also going to be part of the mix.

  Again, just to restate this one more time—I don’t think this is like, “Oh, everything’s going to be a hand gesture in our computing.” But I think there’s going to be more of it.

  And so again, if you want to peek into this—the Meta glasses, the Apple goggles—they’re starting to use these kinds of things where you flick like this, and it moves pages in your field of vision. Seems like science fiction, seems like it’ll never happen—that’s true of any technology—but it is coming, and there’s going to be more of it.

  Yeah, so I’m going to just do a little bit deeper dive on voice. I think voice is probably the nearest and biggest—human-like conversations. I think the ability to—we’re still in a world where it sounds mechanical, it’s not natural. But I think that that is going to quickly become invisible to people.

  I think you’re seeing this in deepfakes. But the ability to really have a very natural human interaction—where you’re likely to know it’s an assistant, computer-generated customer service, personal assistant, somebody helping you through a cumbersome process to help you get your taxes done or to make travel reservations—I think that that is going to be much more of a conversation that you’re having than it is you sitting there swiping, typing, gesturing.

  As agents come along, I think a lot of those are going to happen with human conversations, and that’s going to feel very good to human beings. It’s much more natural for us to communicate…

  Speaker 2:

  Via talking than typing and swiping.

  Speaker 1:

  I think we’re going to see this in healthcare, legal services. A lot of interactions every day, I think, are going to move from typing to talking—and that’s going to create enormous business opportunities.

  So this is—I could put a bunch of curves and graphs and charts up on the screen here—but we’re just seeing these technologies get better. ASR, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, agents—all of these curves are up and to the right at a pretty steep slope.

  So I think—just take another example—translation between languages. The ability, if you’re a podcaster, to all of a sudden get your podcast into every major language with a click of a button. It’s now transcription services. These things are all becoming frictionless at this point.

  So the technology underlying this is one area of investment, right? The infrastructure to make voice, gestures, eye movement seamless is a huge opportunity. Somebody’s going to build—the companies are building—those pipes now.

  And just an example—this again, selling our own book here. This is just four of our portfolio companies that we’ve invested in the space. We just are big believers in innovation in computer-human interfaces, for sure.

  Again, you can visit our website. You can check out these companies and others we’ve invested in. But we’re excited about this opportunity—and again, excited to share why we’re excited about it.

  So again, just a little bit here too—we get pitched every day ideas about eyes, voice, gestures. Again, we turn down the vast majority of opportunities we see. But here are three ideas that we’ve seen that we find interesting and intriguing—and there’s more. But great entrepreneurs, great startups, great venture capital lead investors are funding companies today that are going to change your life five…

  Speaker 2:

  Years from now. Questions? Yes.

  Speaker 1:

  So, when we do these things—you may have missed it—but there’s a place over to the right in GoToMeeting where you can ask questions. Those get sent to me or I read them, and I try to answer them.

  Speaker 2:

  So, how does AV support…

  Speaker 1:

  Its portfolio companies in this space? So AV is a co-investor. We’re not on the board. We don’t price rounds. We don’t lead rounds. But we try to add great value to our portfolio companies in the three areas that most ventures care about.

  One is: help me raise more money. So we’re very connected—as a very active firm. A company will come to New York—we’ll help make introductions to a dozen firms that might be interested in leading their A round.

  They also like help in customer introductions, recruiting. What we do is—we’re network-powered. We use the power of our Rolodex to help our portfolio companies. And so I think we have a reputation as a firm that is a really awesome co-investor. So entrepreneurs like us in that role within their round of financing.

  So that’s how we try to support—we activate our network to help our portfolio companies. Kind of like a favorite aunt or uncle—we leave you alone, but if you need help, we’re going to help you.

  What differentiates AV’s approach to investing in these kinds of technologies from other venture capital firms?

  So listen, every venture capital firm has a niche—some built around their reputation, some built around a geography or a stage of investing. There are firms focused on specific technologies—whether that’s a social trend, a technology infrastructure, or a business model like SaaS. They have their niche.

  Our niche is the fact that we are a co-investor exclusively, and we have an incredible network of people that are both our source of capital and the way we help our portfolio companies. So we have a relatively large team—nearly 50 full-time investment professionals. Actually quite a large team of people. Ten independent teams making independent decisions. Those are the ways we differentiate ourselves.

  And because of that, we see a lot of deals and we can work with a lot of founders who are looking to round out their round of financing.

  Speaker 2:

  Last question.

  Speaker 1:

  Can I invest retirement funds?

  Yes. Actually, a significant number of our investors do that. It’s through a self-directed retirement account. I won’t go through the details. If you’re interested, I would encourage you to just hop on the phone with one of our people who can help walk you through that. We’ll have contact information at the end. It’s pretty straightforward to do.

  That was easy. I can do one more.

  What do you think are the big opportunities in the next 12 months in venture capital?

  Yeah, I mean, the obvious answers are robotics, AI. I think there’s a lot of interesting things going on in energy. The life sciences—there’s a lot of drug discovery technologies that are making that much more of an engineering problem.

  The really interesting thing I would say compared to 20, 30 years ago is that almost every sector of the economy now has tremendous entrepreneurs, innovation, venture capital-backed companies trying to make things better. You can go from space to life sciences to the public sector, to energy, to transportation, consumer products—all of the above.

  So I would just say it’s a golden age of innovation. Technology? Technology, yes.

  And if other people have questions, feel free to get in touch. We try to answer people’s questions. We like to do this. This, I think, is fun. We’ve been at this 10 years. We’re focused on retail customers. We tend to find that our customers break down into certain categories—personas. These aren’t good or bad, but they’re just different.

  And so ask yourself—I think it’s interesting—are you more of an asset allocator? This is kind of the logical “I’m thinking about portfolio management” type. People that are new to this—that venture capital is an asset class they don’t have a lot of experience with and they want to understand it and learn—and they think, given how many companies stay private forever now or for a very long time, they believe that to be a good investor, they need to invest in it. So they want to learn about it. We call those people venture-curious.

  We have legacy builders within our community. These are people who have made it, they’ve done well, and now they’re thinking about paying it forward. They’re thinking about the next generation. They’re thinking about building wealth for the causes that they care about. And they get a lot of joy from funding teams that are where they may have been 30 years ago. So that’s a group of our investors.

  We definitely have tech enthusiasts—people that are maybe doing this professionally. These are the people that read science fiction and are subscribed to NASA’s space podcasts and Instagram accounts. They like being in the know. They like learning about the world and are curious.

  And then there are people who just—either for this part of their portfolio or just at this part of their life—are swinging hard. And they love the high-alpha opportunities. They recognize that there’s risk, but there’s huge upside if you get it right. And they view venture capital as that part of their portfolio where they don’t want to play it overly cautious. They want to use this part of their portfolio—and hopefully allocate appropriately—to make bets, make big swings for big opportunities.

  So we have a place in our community for all of those.

  So rule one: be self-aware. Which are you?

  Most of us are multitudes and combinations of these, but it’s a way to think about it—and then find the right allocation and the right fund for…

  Speaker 2:

  …who you are and where you are in your journey.

  Speaker 1:

  So—appreciate your time today. Hopefully there was a nugget or two in there for you—to have a prepared mind, to think about it. If you’re interested in any of our funds, visit our website. Or you can just put your phone up to these things—I think it’ll take you right to our AI fund or our teammates that’ll talk to you specifically about what we do and how we do it.

  But yeah—we welcome you in. If you like this kind of content, feel free to share it.