Castor Ventures (an Alumni Ventures Fund)

“We did not raise $1.5BN. That's revenue. That is also 1/3 of OpenAI’s revenue. We might be the best thing that has ever happened to NVIDIA. They can keep the high margin training business, we can take the low margin inference business.” This is such a fire discussion with Jonathan Ross who comes out swinging. My 8 key takeaways?? 1. Why NVIDIA Will Be Used for Training and Groq for Inference - They will sell every single GPU they make for training. - 40% of their market is inference right now. - If we deploy inference chips at a much lower cost, the same number of GPUs will be sold because more inference = more training. 2. The Four Biggest Opportunities in AI Four things: - Hallucination: Solving the hallucination problem in AI. - Subgoals: Agentic AI that is best able to break down subgoals. - Invent stage: AI that creates original ideas, instead of simply predicting the most likely ones. - Proxy stage: Models that will make decisions for you. 3. Something That Has Never Happened Before in VC Is Happening - We are seeing people raising billions of dollars while their competitors are doing the same. - There is no longer a clear winner in the Keynesian beauty contest. 4. What Everyone Misunderstands About Data Centres - They are not real estate. - A lot of data centres being built today do not have real infrastructure, i.e. generators and water supply. - People are building an oversupply of data centres that don’t actually work. 5. China Does Not Have the Efficiency but It Does Have the Scale - They have a more complicated situation yet a simpler one at the same time. - They do not have the technology that we have in terms of chip efficiency. - BUT if they want to build 150 nuclear reactors, they can just do it. 6. How the Best Founders Approach Market Timing - Your job is not to follow the wave. - Your job is to get positioned for the wave. - It is the hardest thing to do because everyone is trying to talk you into coming on shore again. 7. The $3BN Company That Almost Ran Out of Money? - At some point we were so close to running out of money. - Our employees had to buy “Groq bonds” & traded part of their salary for stock - If we hadn’t raised the $300M round we would have died. 8. How Big Will NVIDIA Be In 10 Years Time? - A lot of assumptions in NVIDIA today were that they were going to run away with the entire market. - Training will become more important. - They can be 3x bigger but I wouldn’t be surprised if they stayed the same. (links in comments) #founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #seed #funding

Last month, a reckless drone operator flew his drone toward the Palisades Fires, lost sight of it, and collided with a fire suppression aircraft, causing extreme damage. Despite the FAA having flight restrictions prohibiting drones from flying in the area, the operator ignored the restrictions and interrupted the firefighter's efforts. With the news of #DJI removing alert zones with geofencing, drone-related accidents like this will continue to increase. Have you started thinking about how a drone monitoring service can help you protect your airspace? Solely relying on drone operators to make responsible choices is risky. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/gSmT4P_5 Learn more about SkySafe: https://lnkd.in/g2JPVmCR?

???????????????????????? ???????????? ?????????????? ?????????? — ?? ???????????????????????????? ?????????? ???????????????????????? ?????? ?????????????????? ???????????????? We are thrilled to announce the release of ???????????? ?????????????? ??????????, a major expansion of the current Satcat spaceflight intelligence exchange platform. What Satcat can do: ? ????????-???????? ?????????????? ?????? ???????????? ? ?????????????????????? ???????????? ???????????????????? ? ????????????????-????-???????????????? ???????????????????????? ? ???????????? ???????????????? ?????? ???????????????????? ?????????????? ”By unifying Pathfinder’s operational STC capabilities with Satcat’s aggregated data architecture, we are delivering a truly comprehensive and all-in-one experience to satellite operators and space professionals that meet key U.S. and global best practices for space safety,” said Siamak Hesar, our CEO and Co-founder. You can read our full press release on PRWeb: https://lnkd.in/gHR9jbWg Payload featured our Satcat Product Suite in their article! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gN-PNU8Y #spacesituationalawareness #satelliteoperations #spacetrafficcoordination

Today Kimberly Powell presented the future of NVIDIA healthcare at J.P. Morgan. She showcased Synchron’s next-generation implantable BCI with NVIDIA Holoscan. We are collaborating with NVIDIA on the future of BCI and have many exciting announcements to come! Last year NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in his GTC keynote spoke of the “next amazing revolution to be in digital biology…and the digitization of brain waves”. He instinctively sees the potential of BCI to be transformative. 6 days ago NVIDIA announced a ‘world foundation model’ (link below) which recreates a digital twin of the physical world environment and enables training for systems to improve. The interaction between a BCI and a ‘world foundation model’ is profound. It’s going to enable the brain to engage in digital representations of the world in ways that are currently unimaginable. This is incredible for our BCI users and people with motor impairment. The contextual data from interactions between brain data and the physical world will generate tokens that can be used for generative, agentic and physical AI layers. We couldn’t be more excited about where our collaboration with NVIDIA goes. World foundational model “Cosmos” https://lnkd.in/e-dkqCkY Synchron press release: https://lnkd.in/ehWHQfZE

Dan Orlovsky used virtual reality and Andrew "Hawk" Hawkins' StatusPRO to break down Chiefs-Bills game film on ESPN ???

In today’s fast-paced world, nearly every sector of the economy is reinventing itself with the latest advancements in technology. As the pace of innovation accelerates, companies both large and small are turning to groundbreaking approaches to create smarter, more sustainable solutions. Yet among the thousands of exciting new developments released each year, a select group of technologies stand out for their ingenuity. These are Fast Company's 2024 Next Big Things in Tech winners. The 138 honorees span 28 categories, including AI and Data, Space and Telecom, and Health. From corporate giants to ambitious startups, each honoree has demonstrated impressive progress—showing both immediate promise and potential to drive lasting change in the years ahead. You might see this dichotomy in some of our winners: Coursera, Electronic Arts (EA), Logitech, Headspace, Houzz, and Discord. It may be the first time you’ve encountered some of these brands, but it certainly won’t be the last. Whether using AI to improve disaster-response efforts, creating a hiking-friendly wearable exoskeleton, or making supply chains more ethical, each of these products, services, and technological breakthroughs reflects fresh thinking that inspires us. Read the full #FCTechAwards list: https://bit.ly/3Cz2HVj