20VC: The Future For Autonomous Vehicles & How Software Is Eating Cars with Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Investor @ Shasta Ventures

Nikhil Basu Trivedi is an early stage investor with Shasta Ventures, where he focuses on consumer, mobile and SaaS. Prior to joining Shasta, Nikhil was a member of the Insight Venture Partners team in NYC. Before making the move into venture, Nikhil co-founded Artsy in his sophomore year at Princeton University, Artsy now employs over 100 people and has raised over $50m in venture financing. One of Nikhil’s main passions is self driving cars and so today’s show will be centred around the proliferation of autonomous vehicles and what that means for us as a society?

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How did Nikhil come to be a VC in SF having spent his early years in the UK?

2.) Why is Nikhil so excited about self-driving cars? What is the enabler that is allowing this mass rise of the autonomous vehicle?

3.) What happens in a world of little mechanical engineering at all, where repairs can be achieved with software updates? How does this change the complexity of production? How does this change what the supply chain might look like? How does this change the capital structure required?

4.)How does the rise of the autonomous vehicles effect the sharing economy? Is Nikhil bullish on Lyft, Uber, Didi? With on demand, when will we reach a point of equilibrium when the supply of drivers that gets drawn in and the price that attracts consumers will be equivalent?

5.) Who is the leader, is this a winner take all, will the acquisition of GM and Cruise mean a dominance? Who has Nikhil been impressed by?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode: 

Nikhil’s Fave Book: Leading by Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz 

Nikhil’s Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily, CB Insights

Nikhil’s Most Recent Investment: Tally 

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

If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

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