Your Window Into the Innovation Economy

If you opened Google, scrolled on Instagram, streamed a YouTube video or a Netflix show last night, or ordered lunch on DoorDash, you’ve touched the Stanford ecosystem. The world knows the legend of the “PayPal Mafia.” Early PayPal employees went on to found generational companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Palantir. But there’s a deeper pattern at work. The most prolific “mafia” in tech history didn’t emerge from a single company. It emerged from a single campus: Stanford University.

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I love the optimism of early-stage investing. New ideas, fresh energy, big markets. But optimism without guardrails is how you end up explaining to your investors why a “can’t-miss” deal missed so completely. This isn’t about being cynical. It’s about being clear-eyed. Most great companies had plenty of hair on the deal. The question isn’t “are there red flags?” — there always are. The question is: When things go wrong — and they will — will this founder figure it out? Hold that thought.

Walking the halls of HLTH 2025, the paradox was unmistakable. AI has officially conquered healthcare — every booth, every headline, every whispered deal. Yet behind the glow of demos and jargon, one question echoed in every conversation: Can AI actually fix healthcare — or will the system let it? For founders, operators, and especially investors, that tension defines the decade ahead. We’re past the hype cycle. Now it’s about translating AI’s promise into health — tangible outcomes, durable business models, and investable returns.

Why Supply Chain Our 21st-century American lives — accustomed to a seemingly endless and instantaneously accessible consumerism — are powered by an often-forgotten, rarely disrupted mega-network of transportation and logistics. Only when our packages begin to show up late do we remember. Shaken from our bliss, we watched when the Ports of LA/Long Beach ground to a halt during COVID, the Suez Canal was blocked for six days in March 2021, and US shipping was brought to a standstill last October by once-in-a-generation dockworker strikes. All of these bring back the nightmare of a world where the things we need (or want) don’t show up, even when we select “Next Day” or “Priority Shipping.”

In 2022, U.S. companies posted nearly 68,600 openings for cybersecurity analysts — a common entry-level role in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Three years later, that number has dropped nearly 50% to just 36,000. That shift is not the result of a recession or hiring freeze. It’s happening during a time of elevated cyber risk and persistent workforce shortages. The underlying reason is something more structural: AI has begun to automate away the first layer of cybersecurity work.

The foundational bottlenecks of technology have shifted from software layers to physical constraints like energy, critical minerals, and manufacturing capacity — now the true rate-limiters to AI and reindustrialization. As megawatts and metals become the new protocols of progress, venture-scale opportunities lie in upgrading power infrastructure, securing domestic mineral supply chains, and accelerating extraction, refining, and recycling. The Energy & Strategic Minerals Syndicate is backing the founders building solutions for this new industrial frontier, where power availability and resource resilience define the future of innovation.

The rise of “vibe coding” — using natural language and AI to build software without traditional coding — is part of a broader transformation in how work is done across industries. AI is accelerating cognitive tasks, enhancing creativity, and automating complex workflows, reshaping sectors like legal, finance, healthcare, and software development. For investors, the opportunity lies in backing AI-native companies that boost human potential and operate with unmatched speed, efficiency, and creativity.

On a dusty stretch of desert outside Phoenix, Arizona, a skyline of steel frames and clean-room towers is rising. Not for apartments or office towers, but for a “city within a city” devoted to making the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the linchpin of global chip supply, is pouring tens of billions into three new fabrication plants here, with help from the CHIPS and Science Act. The stakes are far larger than jobs or tax revenue. In a world where the tiniest chips control everything from F-35 fighters to the servers that train large language models, bringing this capacity onto U.S. soil is as much about deterrence as it is about commerce. As TSMC founder Morris Chang bluntly put it, “Globalization is almost dead. Free trade is almost dead.”

In June 2025, a significant cyberattack on a major U.S. grocery wholesaler shut down the company’s ordering system and left empty shelves in stores across the country — plus nearly half a billion in lost sales to the wholesaler. In 2024, a ransomware attack on the UK’s National Health System resulted in fatalities. In 2021, Russia’s cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline forced the shutdown of the largest U.S. fuel pipeline, triggering gas shortages across the East Coast.

Alumni Ventures is one of the world’s most active venture capital firms, backing trailblazing companies that are reshaping industries and defining the future. Over the past decade, we’ve invested in breakthroughs across AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, and next-generation manufacturing — domains that push the boundaries of what’s possible. Today, we’re excited to introduce the AV Deep Tech 10 — a curated selection of 10 game-changing portfolio companies at the forefront of deep tech innovation.