Sandhya Venkatachalam
@SVenkatachalam
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Founder @axiom_vc; Prev Partner, Khosla Ventures; Looking for founders using AI/ML to build the most impactful companies on the planet!
Joined May 2009
Honored to be featured in Business Insiders 2022 Rising Stars in VC for betting way, way early on #AI @maddierenbarger @BusinessInsider
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“I never want to create a boring UI from scratch by hand again…” says @rauchg @agihouse_org #AGIHouse @vercel
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@KateClarkTweets That’s why women must also START new VC firms. I founded DeepAngels focused on #AI Seed investing. We use data in our own sourcing and diligence. Result: Unbiased 50/50 distribution of male and female founders.
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“We are not building a car, we are building a driver” @Waymo #AI #EmTechDigital #selfDrivingCar #DriverlessCars
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We have democratized #AI creation; now we need to foster responsibility @harryshum @EmTechMIT #EmTechDigital
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@rrhoover Some do it because they want to be a VC and can’t actually get a job at a VC firm. Some want all the Carry. However, Some of us are doing it because the nature of VC is changing and a lot of existing VC firms don’t get it . we want to be on the right side of the disruption!.
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Very proud to be part of #socialcapital with one of the highest number of female VC Partners ~50% #FoundersForChange
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@joshk @firstround @nshalek @Yale Thanks for this! I just left Khosla and am raising my first fund on my own. Tough timing but I am determined. Can we chat?.
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@KateClarkTweets Yes! I started Deep Ventures on exactly this thesis. We are focused on founders using AI to transform and disrupt big industries. I have a running list of great up and coming AI founders here
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🙏🏽.
@alexandr_wang @paulg in AI specifically, KV will outperform every other fund, but my bet was overall returns.
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I had to double check the number of zeros but yes it’s peta-ops!!! I am blown away by @GroqInc amazing achievement and proud to be an investor! .
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Great summary of metrics every startup should live by @a16z
http://t.co/abGHBmrofA
#startup #Metrics.
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Proud of the team and to have led the Seed round @Galileo_AI They are one of the truly new LLM-native startups out there with a big vision to completely rethink an entire industry!.
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So proud to be part of the journey @firefliesai first as an angel and now as their Series A lead!.
Super excited to announce @firefliesai's $14M Series A from @khoslaventures, @canaanpartners, and our amazing angels!.
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Proud to be an investor in @firefliesai as they scale to meet unprecedented demand. Everyone should use this! @krish_ramineni @sudotong.
Whoop whoop. @firefliesai on Gartner's 25 enterprise software startups to watch. Congrats @krish_ramineni and team!
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Amidst all the AI hype, it was my honor to host an evening with Quoc Le, a true AI pioneer. Quoc grew up in Vietnam and didn’t have electricity till he was 9. Now he is at the forefront of creating AGI @quocleix @vkhosla @khoslaventures.
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Founders I’ve met recently don’t have a pitch deck as it’s a “waste of time”. They miss the point that a pitch forces you to focus and to articulate concisely what you believe, why, and what therefore you are building. This is actually more critical for the founder than the VC.
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I have FAITH in these Founders using AI to Transform Humanity: @VVoroninski @tachim @singhgurjeet @kaliouby @sudotong @krish_ramineni @DougWightman @agordhandas @dojiboy9 @falkonry @LuminousAI @vnovakovski @ahmad_kmr @hu_nicole @bindureddy @daveselinger @amirhusain_tx @eyalg.
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@danielgross @collision @eladgil @natfriedman @karpathy Would love to be involved and/or judge. We are investors in OpenAI and many other AI companies.
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#GenAI: Hype or Reality? AI had a ‘wow’ moment” with DALL-E and then ChatGPT, but the underlying AI paradigm shift is much more; as I told @shiringhaffary I think this is absolutely on the same order of magnitude as the creation of the internet itself.
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Thanks also to the amazing founders & researchers who attended @_jasonwei @pirroh @Galileo_AI @Altimor @jebank @blennon_ @lishali88 @nutlope @mickeyxfriedman @0interestrates @YouSearchEngine @joshpxyne @nealkhosla @AlexSkidanov @arsalanbashir @mehran__jalali @nikitabase @dheeraj.
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Join @SVenkatachalam @jmj @krish_ramineni @tommedema tomorrow at 5pm on Clubhouse as we discuss how asynchronous collaboration is changing the way we all work @khoslaventures @firefliesai @usebubbles @MichaelMarra #startups #futureofwork .
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Exactly why I invested over a year ago …we need to move beyond core AI capabilities and tech and start building magical, useful and highly usable products that will expand TAMs not just eat into incumbents. Congrats to the team for accomplishing the first big step in a big.
Everyone asks about the secret behind Galileo's AI tech. Truth is - this tech couldn't exist without the intricate collaboration between AI and design, alongside significant R&D investment. @arnaudai reveals the behind-the-scenes with @cerebral_valley of our AI development. 👇.
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How #bigdata will change the focus of #economics & policy advice @B_Eichengreen
http://t.co/8NPBk877jw.
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Working with founders like @krishramineni @sudotong @firefliesai and seeing their impact on the world is what inspired me to build @axiom_vc.
Congrats @SVenkatachalam on the launch of her $50M AI Fund 🚀. Axiom will be making $100K to $1M investments at the seed and pre-seed stages. Excited to continue working with Sandhya as she backs the next wave of breakout AI startups.
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LPs and VCs losing trillions NOT investing in diverse leaders . @MorganStanley @carlaharris finally quantifies it. Game on! .
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Top 3 trends from @pmarca tonight at @MasterCard Board reception: Deep Learning, SW eats biology & SW eats Finance @a16z.
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Proud of the team and to be a small part of their amazing journey!.
Meet Galileo 1.0: The game-changing prompt-to-UI platform now open to all. Our mission is to supercharge the creative process of designers and builders, making design easy, fast and magical. Bring your idea, let AI do the heavy lifting. Start today:
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ChatGPT took 2 months to reach 100M global monthly active users (MAUs), making it the fastest-ever to that milestone ahead of TikTok (9 months), Instagram (30 months) and Pinterest (41 months). wow!.
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Very proud to have invested in @firefliesai who use #AI to solve a tactical problem - transcribe/search meetings - while also extracting insights from one of the largest untapped, existing sources of data in a company - voice conversations
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When I say I invest in companies using #AI to upend industries, many roll their eyes as AI is such a buzzword. A few more examples here of the true breakthroughs happening that make me a true believer @jeremyakahn @FortuneMagazine .
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Great summary of new fine tuning techniques, not just RLHF.
Now, while RLHF seems to be a very popular way for finetune the latest LLMs, it's of course not the only promising solution moving forward. In the recent "The Wisdom of Hindsight makes Language Models Better Instruction Followers"(, researchers propose a
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I remember the day and the entrepreneur who explained it to me @dojideon who I quickly invested in!.
Today 6 years ago, "Attention is All You Need" went on Arxiv! Happy birthday Transformer! 🎂. Fun facts:.- Transformer did not invent attention, but pushed it to the extreme. The first attention paper was published 3 years prior (2014) and had an unassuming title: "Neural Machine
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Another useful summary paper . (I think I’ve read more research papers in the last month than I have in the last 2 years…)
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We stand ready to support in good times, bad times . and truly unprecedented times….
Some VCs are notably absent and not bridging their portfolio companies right now. @vkhosla took out a PERSONAL line of credit to bridge at borrowing cost to his. Think really hard about who you take money from. And if you’re not stepping up as a VC right now, be better.
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Bloomberg's best books of 2017 -scroll down for my favorite!
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I had a long call with @vkhosla yesterday. We talked about investing, tech companies and technology in general. He is simply the best venture capitalist of our generation. The breadth of his intellect, curiosity and success is mindboggling. someone should be documenting it.
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Received my @Levels kit today! Easy to apply; now counting down the minutes to be able to use!
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My sigh of relief is brief; the real problem is that 49% of Americans did not vote for the new President. How do we fix the great divide?.
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@gaby_goldberg Happy to chat. Just left Khosla Ventures and have my own fund now. Been doing AI since 2017.
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Send me your favorites and I will highlight them here
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Useful intro primer to explain LLMs to your mom :)
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Proud to have led our investment in @GroqInc at Social Capital way before anyone knew how to spell LLM !.
Here is a conversation between myself and @GroqInc founder @JonathanRoss321 at the RAISE AI Conference last week in Paris. Some very good tidbits in here - especially for all the Nvidia bulls. Change is slow. then all at once.
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Maybe we won’t need all those data labeling services after all.
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19 more reasons VCs have to be highly differentiated, think for themselves and take appropriate risk. The public market alternatives which have lower risk and 100% liquidity are damn good. .
Stock returns this year:. Tesla: +122%.Shopify: +40%.Uber: +39%.Square: +37%.Nvidia: +33%.Pinterest: +24%.Twitter: +21%.Netflix: +20%.Salesforce: +19%.Microsoft: +19%.Amazon: +18%.Adobe: +16%.PayPal: +15%.Google: +14%.IBM: +13%.Intel: +11%.Apple: +10%.Facebook: +6%.Oracle: +5%.
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@KanuGulati @deenashakir @saranormous @jesskah @rquintini @aileenlee @annimaniac @sarahtavel @PamKostka @Claire @anarghya503 @Kara_Egan @meghalexander @vintweeta @kbakes @julesyoo @TemiMarcella @KatieS @aunder @atShruti @jgoldfein @mayanoeth @preet1rathi @payaldivakaran @KanuGulati @veelarco @HeidiPatelSF @CackF @kshenster.
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New visual-language models that can generate images given a caption demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable #AI @techreview
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THIS is the point - great summary of what is actually possible now that wasn’t pre GPT4.
Yesterday's GPT-4 launch was **crazy** 🔥. After discussing w/ colleagues and taking some time to collect my thoughts,. Here are the top 3 things GPT-4 enables that were previously impossible or extremely difficult to achieve – including examples 👇.
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Proud user of and investor in @firefliesai & OpenAI well before they were cool.
3. AI is here to stay 🤖. Top three fastest-growing card vendors:.@Midjourney - spending up 151% from Q1.@FirefliesAI - spending up 67% from Q1.@OpenAI - spending up 58% from Q1
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Amazing panel of #femalefounders & #CEOs at #FortuneTech @birchbox @CloudFlare @FortuneMagazine
http://t.co/RDPXU0JDCP.
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I love technology and have been in Silicon Valley 20yrs. But I have only been truly wowed while doing a demo 4 times. Today was the 4th. demo-ing Apple’s Vision Pro.
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@briannekimmel I think they will also have an online-to-offline component like @lunchclubai which is what integrates into “evenings and weekends”.
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Proud to be an early investor in @firefliesai Anyone #remoteworking in teams should use this product @krish_ramineni @sudotong
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@danielgross Amazing. I've been asking people why AI can't just solve the API integration problem by reading API docs like a dev would . all said impossible . apparently not!.
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#snowflakeipo is a bet on companies using #AI for everything.-can run high compute AI more efficiently.-can store & analyze data as separate processes (& can charge separately vs AWS).
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Processing 500 billion invoices automatically - Great example of disruptive #AI #deeplearning @RossumAi .
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Proud to be a new Advisor to both Berekely Skydeck and the MET program. These young entrepreneurs are amazing and using #AI to really change the world @SkyDeck_Cal Stop by my office hours!.
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"Blockbuster probably had better cash flow vs Netflix early on too" when Levie asked re Dropbox @levie @FortuneTech @adamlashinsky @BoxHQ.
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@semil Seeing the same. Closing a SEED deal right now at $25M cap. and had to fight my way in.
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This should be up-to-date for at least another few hours….
The definitive AI market map Twitter thread:.
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Join me 5pm PT tomorrow in a chat with next-gen founders using #AI to disrupt customer service. Tune into Clubhouse
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“The development of any significant technological product is inseparable from the system and environment in which it operates…”
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I read each one of these religiously.
Ahead of AI #5: RevAIval of Ideas is out!. A particularly exciting one since a lot has happened this month!. This issue covers.• Self-supervised learning for CNNs.• Benefits of pretraining LLMs from scratch.• Open source highlights. 👉 Happy Monday!.
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@levie Yes but my sigh of relief is brief; the real problem is that 49% of Americans did not vote for the new President. How do we fix the great divide?.
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Yep.
Too much focus is on general purpose AI agents. Building lightweight AGI is an *extremely* difficult task. Focus on building a powerful agent in a more narrow domain. Travel agents, calendar assistants, data analysts - there is *massive* opportunity in domain specific agents.
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@phattyman44 @jeremyakahn @FortuneMagazine Not exactly a “read” but @withfries2 recent prezo on #AI to @a16z Partnership is excellent
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After years of watching #AI Influencers lists with the same big names, I'm highlighting the unsung heroes of AI: the founders who are applying technical developments in transformative ways.
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Please join: advice FOR great founders FROM great founders!.
Hear our own @SVenkatachalam along with @jmj @krish_ramineni @tommedema today at 5pm PT on Clubhouse. Discussion will focus on how asynchronous collaboration is being redefined. @khoslaventures @firefliesai @usebubbles.
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@Samirkaji Would you be willing to connect me to some of those Family Offices? I am raising an AI-focused early stage fund. Was most recently a GP at Social Capital and lead for AI investing.
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Wonder why #POTUS hasn’t retweeted this. .
President Trump's antibody treatment was tested using cells originally collected from an abortion.
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8/I bet on @krishramineni & @sudotong over 4 yrs ago w/personal $, and I hope I helped them Figure some of this out. If you have a 100x idea with LLMs, I’d be delighted to try and help you make it a reality.
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Amazing if you consider the subtleties….
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“shirk the endless optimization toward the objective function of others. ” great life advice!.
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Great summary of the new Stanford report on AI
Stanford just released a MASSIVE 386-page report on the state of AI. Here are the 12 most interesting trends that you should know.
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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities — and social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to billions of people. .
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So proud of my four-year-old niece donating to #locksoflove to make wigs for cancer patients http://t.co/awponsMQ06.
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Proud to be an investor in @forethought_ai Hearty congrats to the team on attracting an exceptional set of investors and thought leaders! .
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