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Venture Daily x Antler

Exciting news! Our team at Venture Daily has been accepted into a residency program at one of the world’s most active early-stage venture capital firms.

Antler, a leading global firm with 27 offices worldwide, wants to help us build something much bigger than just this daily show.

From over 5,000 applicants to the program here in the US, only 70 founders were chosen for the Austin, Texas residency, and we are thrilled to announce we are two of those founders.

Over the next eight weeks, our team (pictured above), will be working out of the Antler Austin offices to begin building our big idea. That idea involves bringing you, our audience, a lot more venture capital and tech media content. Videos, podcasts, and written stories. This newsletter that we just started. And content that doesn’t just inform, but is engaging and entertaining.

Let’s face it, venture capital media and news is pretty boring, and always has been. It’s rarely anything but the facts.

But venture capital and tech sure aren’t boring! This world features the globe’s most influential companies, unbelievable technological innovations, and eccentric billionaires. These stories deserve to be told and it’s our vision to bring them to you.

Our goal is to prioritize better storytelling in venture capital and tech.

So if you enjoy what we do here at Venture Daily, we hope you’ll like this newsletter. And please forward this to a friend if you know someone who wants to stay informed about VC and tech.

We can’t wait to bring you a lot more venture-related content, very soon.

Should the US Gov Be More Invested in AI?

The Story: AI experts Fei-Fei Li and Alan Davidson say that regulation in the United States is necessary, but that it should not be erected without thoughtful consideration.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal interviewed the two AI authorities at the Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach. Fei-Fei Li, the co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Alan Davidson, the assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information at the US Commerce Department, discussed the government's role in policing artificial intelligence.

When asked about the most serious risks AI poses, Li said they include biases, privacy issues, and weaponization. She followed that by saying, quote, “For me, one of the leading risks right now is the severe imbalance between the private and public-sector investment of AI in this country.”

Davidson, who works in the public sector for the US Commerce Department, added that, quote, “we’ve been working on, first and foremost, a set of commitments from AI companies around safety, security and trust. We’ve gotten those, and now we’re working on expanding those and doing more. We need to have these guardrails in place to open up innovation.”

Li believes thoughtful AI regulation is needed, and that the existing regulatory framework needs to be updated quickly to keep up with the fast-moving expansion of AI tools.

The Expert: Our team spoke with Jeff Wong, global chief innovation officer at Ernst & Young, for insight into the regulation conversation.

Wong believes there’s two main reasons why the public sector has been slow to invest in AI. “[It’s] very clearly two things. One thing is expertise… and the second thing is just the way the structures of the public sector tend to be set up. They tend to move thoughtfully, but not necessarily at the speed of the rate of change. And AI is really driving a fast fast rate of change.”

During the interview with WSJ, Davidson made the point that regulation can actually “open up” innovation, and not just impede it. Wong agrees that guardrails provided by federal AI regulation can open up innovation: “It depends on the details of the innovation. Absolutely, I’ve seen situations where regulation accelerates innovation. And why it accelerates innovation is it makes a lot of companies, and investors, and people more willing to jump in.”

Not everyone shares the opinion that regulation is necessary, however. In his recently published “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z founder Marc Andreessen emphasizes that AI, with its potential to save lives, should not be subject to any pause in its development as that could hinder the prevention of avoidable deaths. He characterizes such restrictions as akin to “a form of murder.” His manifesto features a strong condemnation of attempts to regulate technology. But Wong doesn’t believe being a “techno-optimist” means you are automatically opposed to regulation.

Federal regulation of artificial intelligence has been a hotly debated issue within the private sector for much of the past year, but the US is still without any laws from Congress on the AI front. State regulation, however, has already occurred in more than half of US states.

January Venture’s 2023 Early Stage Founder Sentiment Report

The Story: On Thursday, January Ventures released its 5th annual Early Stage Founder Sentiment Report. The report surveyed over 400 founders across multiple industries, locations, and backgrounds to gauge the temperature of founders in 2023.

Here are some highlights from the report.

• The percentage of founders who feel more optimistic about their ability to raise capital is at a five-year high with a 32% increase from last year.

• However, while overall founder sentiment has increased, female founder confidence is at a five-year low with only 30% of female founders reporting they are optimistic about their chance to raise capital.

• Only 4% of respondents said a layoff contributed to them founding a company.

• 85% of founders reported that their startups have less than 12 months of cash runway left.

To combat short runways, founders are hiring less, cutting spend on software, and reducing staff count. And they are finding raising difficult. In fact, 39% of them have either paused their raise or responded that they are having troubles with raising capital.

The Expert: Jen Neundorfer, co-founder and managing partner at January Ventures, says the most disappointing finding in the report is the response female founders gave to the question about optimism for receiving funding.

The report also highlights how few workers who were laid off have started their own companies. It reads: “More than 93,000 tech workers were laid off in 2022, and there were hopes a startup boom would follow. Yet, only 4% of respondents said that a layoff from a full-time job contributed to them founding a company.”

The billow of new talented entrepreneurs expected after mass tech layoffs has not arrived yet, which is surprising to Neundorfer. “The prevailing sentiment was that all of the people that were laid off were gonna go and start a company and I think the reality is that some of those people felt pretty risk averse after being laid off,” said Neundorfer. “That said, I think it’s really too early to tell.”

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