Roundtable Recap: July 17 – AI Investment Thesis with Alex Benik, Encoded Ventures

During this week’s roundtable, we had Alex Benik, Partner / Founder at Encoded Ventures, discussing the fund’s investment thesis. Great discussion on how we each view the disruptions AI is causing on multiple fronts.

VCs investing today have to think about the next 5-7 year window and what changes are likely to come.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Featured Videos

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: “Operating system” isn’t the right term. Here’s my two cents—during the cloud era, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) became a well-understood concept.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My thesis is that the best approach to build truly serious, complex systems leveraging all the capabilities of AI—whether it’s generative AI, agent-based AI, or others—is to go to market as an IP-plus-services company. Pick domains to focus on and develop deep domain expertise. That, I believe, is one of the most effective ways to build very, very valuable companies. Is that what you’re trying to do?

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Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you positioned the company in 2022-2023 in the direction of Generative AI?

Marty Sprizen: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What applications did you go after?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped an AI Security Startup to $10M+

Osprey Security Founder Rohit Anabheri had effectively used the Bootstrapping Using Services technique to bootstrap an AI-Powered Enterprise Security venture to mid eight figure revenues when we spoke in 2023. In that process, he had turned down offers for venture capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and then we’ll come to the Osprey Security journey in a moment. You are a serial entrepreneur, yes?

Rohit Anabheri: That is correct.

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Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. But standard VC route at the time was different from the standard VC route of today because the number of, the amount of money that VCs used to invest was much smaller. The VC fund sizes were much smaller. It was actually the way venture capital should have been.

The Accelerator Conundrum: Playbook for B-to-C Entrepreneurs

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus on customers, revenues and profits. 1Mby1M’s mission is to help a Million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sramana’s Digital Mind AI Mentor virtually mentors entrepreneurs around the world in 57 languages. Try it out!

B-to-C startups are notoriously high-risk. The failure rate is brutal. The temptation to chase scale with venture funding is strong—and often fatal. Most accelerators feed this temptation. They want viral growth, app downloads, and DAUs—regardless of whether there’s a business model behind it.