1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Mark Phillips, Founder and Managing Partner at 11 Tribes Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What size checks do you write?

Mark Phillips: Out of fund two, we’re writing a $1-$1.5 million check into  to portfolio companies over the course of the next two to three years.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Mark Phillips, Founder and Managing Partner at 11 Tribes Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Most VCs and certainly Andreessen Horowitz are operating with a unicorn chasing mindset. This particular fundraise by Andreesen Horowitz is absurd because to give returns to limited partners on a $20 billion fund makes no sense.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Mark Phillips, Founder and Managing Partner at 11 Tribes Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me just comment on what you said. The problem with the venture capital model that we have arrived at this point over the last, let’s say 30 years, is that it is all consuming. The investors expect the entrepreneur to put everything aside except for making the venture a success; and that success must be success that makes the investors money. Otherwise, it’s not considered a success. If the investors don’t make money, the founder’s not going to make any money at all.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Mark Phillips, Founder and Managing Partner at 11 Tribes Ventures (Part 1)

Mark Phillips, Founder and Managing Partner at 11 Tribes Ventures, discusses a non-Unicorn chasing investment thesis.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner at Priven Advisors (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think the distribution is going to be an interesting point, which is one of the reasons why I find the Agentforce announcement exciting. The same way that a lot of SaaS companies were able to distribute through app exchange, a lot of agent companies will be able to distribute through Agentexchange, and that is going to be invaluable.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner at Priven Advisors (Part 5)

The people who understand those enterprise systems the best are in the best position to build those agents. Is there going to be a big opportunity to build agents that are from entrepreneurs?

How do you think about it?

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner at Priven Advisors (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Yes. In all our discussions last year on AI, human centric AI was front and center. AI is in enterprises, AI is in small businesses, but it’s either a human using AI as whether it’s a co-pilot or an assistant, whatever; but it’s the human making the decisions. It’s the human using the AI to do his or her job faster, more efficiently, et cetera.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner at Priven Advisors (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. My thesis also is that the defensible businesses are domain knowledge heavy in AI. The layers of abstraction to some extent are already in place, and there’s going to be more. Just to give you a feel for my framework, I look a lot at the parallel with the cloud computing infrastructure that came about over time.