Foundation Capital

I wanna bring us someone who has been playing with it.

Jaya Gupta is a partner at Foundation Capital.

Jaya, welcome to the show.

It's great to have you back.

Like work emails and, uh, connecting to Outlook and, uh, connecting-

Okay

... to like more of the, you know, foundation capital side of the house.

Like, I think it's, uh, you know, you know, Muse has been...

Adam began his career as an engineer and operator, holding leadership roles at Apple, Lucasfilm, and Sony before becoming a venture investor.

He spent a decade as a general partner at Foundation Capital and later led Silverlake's growth equity platform, where he oversaw investment like Tesla and SolarCity.

He has also been named to the Forbes Meet Us list four times and serves on the board of Stanford School of Engineering.

Today, we'll explore why artificial intelligence is moving beyond software and into the physical world, what UP Partners calls as the kinetic age, and how founders are building intelligent systems across robotics, transportation, manufacturing, energy, and aerospace.

If this person is correct and if this market involves and if this supply chain is able to deliver at a certain cost, then something wonderful will happen.

In the case of SolarCity and Tesla, they were such fundamental ideas that they didn't seem foreign to me.

And Foundation Capital had funded Sunrun.

which was the progenitor in many ways of SolarCity.

But you mentioned how, you know, you were learning.

You got to learn from scratch and learn that part of the business in the 2000s, which is you were at Foundation Capital and then.

You had a whole career in PE at Silver Lake, which is now one of the most well-known B firms that also does technology investing.

But through all this time, you've probably seen a lot of acquisitions.

A few guests on the show have described the venture capitalist role as primarily a a network job.

It is a network based job, which you refer to making introductions.

And it's, you know, the deals flow through, you mentioned in your apprenticeship in that first year with, with Catherine, with Catherine at Foundation Capital as, you know, I think she asked you to do, get lunch with the most interesting person you knew.

and then ask them for the next most interesting person, which is a way of network building.

Rippling countersued over patents.

And in venture, Mayfield added Adit Singh, who co-led Foundation Capital's first Cerebros investment as infrastructure partner focusing on hardware, infrastructure software, cybersecurity, and physical AI.

Now, infrastructure, and this is the big one.

GitHub's August 17 outage lasted seven hours and 47 minutes, and the root cause was capacity failure.

Um, he is a rationalist entrepreneur and angel investor.

Um, he's also the founder and CEO of Relationship Hero, an online relationship coaching service backed by Foundation Capital and Y Combinator.

Um, and to me and many others, he's probably best known for, uh, being a voice of, I would call a voice of reason and logic in social, um, and just in the industry talking about everything from cryptocurrencies to AI, to SaaS, to general, um, you know, just business processes and how the world runs.

He's a smart and inquisitive and just really thoughtful human.

Yeah, I was going to add, I was going to ask about that because you mentioned that earlier, that these are essentially context graphs.

And I don't think – I had not heard that term used until the Foundation Capital article last December.

And then everybody – that's all anybody talked about.

But you've been – did you call them that before then or –

There's a woman named Jaya Gupta, um, who's been writing a bunch of pieces recently that I've been following along these ideas of like, where are the moats in an AI world, and what's the role of generalized intelligence? She doesn't call it specialized intelligence, but kind of like some of these similar ideas of what should the labs own and what should your company own, and what does that mean for what you should be doing right now?

Is it Jaya from, uh, Foundation Capital? Is this...

Yeah.

Uh, yes, uh, uh, yeah, uh, great stuff there.