20VC: YC's Daniel Gross on How YC Can Democratise AI & Reduce Incumbency Advantages& Why ML Enabled Software Will Eat The Software That Ate The World

Daniel Gross is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with alumni that includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Flexport and many more incredible companies. At Y Combinator Daniel heads up all things YC AI having been a Director @ Apple where he focused on machine learning, as a result of his prior company, Cue (also a YC company) being acquired by Apple in 2013. If that was not enough, Daniel also has one of the valley’s most impressive angel portfolios with investments in OpenDoor, Cruise (acquired by GM), Gusto and Github, just to name a few.

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Daniel made his way from YC founder to being acquired by Apple to being YC partner?

2.) How does Daniel respond to the statement that “AI, is in part, a scam”? Why does Daniel believe that the impact of AI has not lived up to the hype?

3.) What are the 3 economies of scale that you have with machine learning when you are a large company? What can startups do to mitigate these incumbency advantages? What does Daniel mean when he says it is his job to “democratize AI”?

4.) Does Daniel believe we will see the rise of “AI companies” or machine learning as a sustaining innovation that existing incumbents use? What is Daniel fearful of with regards to this?

5.) How does Daniel view the potential for business models to be built around AI? Daniel has said “machine learning software will eat the software that has eaten the world”. What does he mean by this? How does this play out?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Daniel’s Fave Book: Enders Game, High Output Management, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Daniel’s Fave Blog: Slate Star Codex

Daniel’s Most Recent Investment: Rippling

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Daniel on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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