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(This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/06\/06\/benchmarks-view-on-the-ai-race-talking-with-miles-grimshaw\/<\/a><\/br> At the end of 2020, Miles Grimshaw became \u2014 and remains \u2014 the most recent addition<\/a> to the storied venture firm Benchmark<\/a>, which has stubbornly refused to change how it fundamentally operates, despite the many changes the rest of the venture world has embraced \u2014 particularly regarding team size and assets under management.<\/p>\n With just five general partners, few principals in its now 28-year history in Silicon Valley and fund after fund sized less than $500 million, the firm was reportedly frustrated<\/a> at turns by having to compete against rivals with ever-larger checkbooks. Today, of course, a lot of those 2021-era deals and funds look like bad bets for those who backed them, while Benchmark \u2014 whose past bets include Uber, Snap, WeWork and Sorare \u2014 looks smart for having stuck to traditional early-stage investing.<\/p>\n It made us curious to know what Grimshaw \u2014 a Yale grad who was previously a general partner with Joshua Kushner\u2019s Thrive Capital<\/a> \u2014 makes of the way that Benchmark operates. We were also curious to understand Benchmark\u2019s thinking about another potential bubble: generative AI.<\/p>\n Certainly, Grimshaw\u2019s past and current firms seem to be taking very different approaches. Thrive dove right in to a recent $300 million round<\/a> in OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation. Meanwhile, in early spring, Grimshaw led a $10 million<\/a> seed round in LangChain<\/a>, which helps developers build more complex applications on top<\/em> of large language models like that built by OpenAI.<\/p>\n We talked with Grimshaw last week about those things and much more in a conversation that has been excerpted below and lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n TechCrunch: This is our first time meeting. What did you study at Yale, and was there a step in between college and joining Thrive Capital in New York?<\/strong><\/p>\n Miles Grimshaw: Yeah, the journey to go to work with the team at Thrive was very serendipitous in 2010. I was probably in many ways a very classical liberal arts student, though technically I majored in economics.<\/p>\n At the time, the question was: could you have a Silicon Alley? And those who were on the East Coast sort of found each other and bonded together and said, \u2018Yeah, we can, let\u2019s do it, let\u2019s build.\u2019 And so when I was at Yale, I met Will Gaybrick, who was actually at the Yale Law School at the time \u2014 he went on to be one of the partners of Thrive, then CFO [and now a unit president] of Stripe \u2014 and he and I became friends organically around interests in products and applications software, and he happened to know Josh from his undergrad days, and I started hanging out with them in New York on the weekends and then said, \u2018Let\u2019s team up,\u2019 so I joined the group officially in 2013, which was when I graduated.<\/p>\n I was the fourth or fifth person; we were a total of eight people, I think at the time, including a finance lead and EAs, so we were in the corner of what is now a very big office and you felt a bit like the outsiders proving it was possible and that was a really fun time.<\/p>\n Can I ask quickly: Are you Australian? Are you from New Zealand?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m British. [Laughs.] It\u2019s a very muddled accent because I grew up in the U.K. until I was 12, then moved to Boston. I\u2019m the eldest of seven kids. You can go to the next eldest \u2014 no accent \u2014 so I was right on the cusp of preserving a few words.<\/p>\n I\u2019d read just yesterday about someone described as having an \u201cunplaceable<\/a> accent.\u201d How do Thrive and Benchmark differ from an operational standpoint?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n At Benchmark, we\u2019ve kept it simple and consistent. It\u2019s just the five of us. It\u2019s always an equal partnership, with somewhere in the range of [traditionally] five to six partners, each focused on making one or two commitments each year. A huge part of it is not, in many ways, the capital but that commitment of service to helping amplify the odds and scale of success of founders.<\/p>\n Has Thrive grown much? They\u2019ve grown their assets under management.<\/strong><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know the exact sort of figures lately. But Josh and Kareem [Zaki] and Vince [Hankes] and the team over there, I have enormous respect and admiration for their ambition to serve folks in many different ways. I know after I left, there was the $2 billion fund<\/a> and I think since another $3 billion fund<\/a>. I\u2019m not sure exactly how big the team is lately, but I think they\u2019ve continued to build out various functions and support for founders and so the last I heard, it is a few times bigger than when I had left.<\/p>\n On the AI front, you led the seed round in LangChain. What is the business model there? Is this a SaaS business?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, exactly. In the space between an application experience that will get built and the model at the bottom of that stack, there is a wide range of needs that\u2019s served with great software. [Thanks to the large language models we\u2019re seeing like GPT-4], the bar got raised and what we\u2019re going to expect of software got raised, and no company wants to be a dinosaur after the meteor, awestruck and roaming around, thinking everything is blissful. What LangChain is supporting is application developers coming to the market saying, \u2018Okay, great, there\u2019s this language model that spits out tokens \u2014 how do I craft that into workflows and a great product experience for my customers?\u2019<\/p>\n Where are those developers finding LangChain?<\/strong><\/p>\n It has remarkable word of mouth in many ways. We certainly do no marketing. We got started earlier this year and now have a handful of engineers but but no one outside of an engineer on the team, which is obviously very active in the open source community. I think its Discord now has something like 20,000 members. The team is [also] at a lot of events where there\u2019s a flood of application engineers and developers coming and trying to learn and imagine and create. And so they\u2019re in the slipstream of all of that energy.<\/p>\n
\nBenchmark\u2019s view on the AI race: Talking with Miles Grimshaw<\/br>
\n2023-06-07 22:20:37<\/br><\/p>\n