SC Moatti

I think of staying sharp in AI (or anything) as being part of a conversation: 1. You can join the conversation, for instance by attending events, listening to podcasts, reading blogs -essentially you're doing more than your job, but you're just consuming content and absorbing knowledge 2. You can shape the conversation, for instance you speak on a panel, you comment on articles, you participate in a roundtable -you're doing more than consuming by adding your perspective on a topic that's given to you 3. You can drive the conversation, for instance you give a talk, write an article, get interviewed on a podcast -you're deciding what is important and why, how a topic should be discussed, ie you are subject matter expert

AI disrupts business in 3 ways. Let's use Pixar as an example: 1. Reduce cost: Pixar employs a lot of graphic designers to create and animate movie characters. AI tools can make their job easier and their projects move faster, which reduces cost. 2. Improve productivity: Pixar also employs a lot of producers, who pull the different pieces of a movie together. AI agents can make their job faster and more effective, which improves productivity. 3. Increase revenue: Pixar can increase revenue by using AI to create personalized movies for each viewer. This would attract more people to watch movies, as each experience would be unique, opening up a new revenue stream that wasn't feasible with traditional movie production methods.

Many fear AI at work: 1. Fear of new things --> Lower the barrier; show ChatGPT's ease with prompts like "how would Oprah write this." This makes AI accessible and fun. 2. Job loss fear --> Highlight AI's role in spotting typos in letters or code, improving efficiency without replacing jobs. 3. Responsibility shift fear --> Show AI's ability to send truly personalized emails effortlessly, enhancing productivity. It frees time for more strategic tasks, demonstrating AI as a tool for empowerment rather than replacement. By focusing on these benefits, you can ease fears and foster a positive outlook towards AI integration in the workplace.

A common misconception when it comes to upskilling is that taking a tactical course (like a coding class) is going to demonstrate proficiency. That rarely works in super innovative fields like AI because it's so new that the cheap online courses themselves are created by people who don't have a ton of expertise in the subject -in fact, most of them are creating the course in order to learn themselves. Isn't the best way to learn something new to teach it?! So my advice is that you be the teacher. Rather than take a course, create a course and measure your success by the number of people who take your course and what their feedback is on it. You can apply this recipe to any innovative field.

One of the hardest things about venture capital fundraising is getting to know your LPs, here's why: - all of them are different: they all have different reasons for why they invest. Of course, everyone wants to make money, but each break down their pockets of capital in a different set of buckets (by geography, industry, stage, thesis) - very few communicate their allocation strategy: you can glean pieces of it by looking at which other funds they've invested, or other public data they may share (and some are required to do it), but most of the time it's pretty scarce - they need to know you over several years in order to trust you and feel comfortable writing you a check because they need to see how your investments perform

At first, it seems easy to manage cash flow at a venture firm: you get your management fee every quarter, so revenue is predictable, and you mostly call capital for your various funds, so the money flow is quite simple. But when you start to get distribution, things get more tricky: you need a scalable way to send checks to your investors, you need to decide whether to reinvest some of the capital (instead of distributing it), so there's a lot of good business judgment required. Then when you reach the point when you are turning a profit on your funds, cash flow modeling is really necessary: you need to create waterfall models to understand who gets when, you need to account for taxes before you distribute carry. That's when you need a CFO.