GFT Ventures' edge in frontier technology investing

Transcript

My name is Jeff Herbst and founding general partner of GFT Ventures. I started the firm with my co-founder Jay Eum last year, and we're off and running to a great start. 

So, GFT Venture stands for Global Frontier Technology Ventures. We believe that every business model in the world is going to be disrupted by some of the leading-edge technologies that we're involved in, and those are artificial intelligence, data science, and blockchain.

So our investment strategy is to invest in early-stage companies that are leveraging AI, data science, and blockchain to build their businesses. And we like to get in early, and we look for the best entrepreneurs who are solving the hardest problems in the largest markets. So is it a big market? If that company is successful, is there going to be a big opportunity for them to succeed? We tend to like people that do things that are really difficult because once they do that, we know that they'll have a protectable moat or a protectable fence around their innovation, and we look for the best entrepreneurs who are doing it.

So I met a company, maybe about four or five years ago, while I was at Nvidia called TuSimple, and the founders one was from China, one was from the U.S., and they decided that they were going to make trucks kind of a soft landing. Everyone thought they were crazy, except for me. I think they recognized that there was a big problem in trucking that people were not recognizing. Everyone at that time was focused on autonomous driving technology or cars, and no one was paying attention to trucks. It turns out that the problem in trucking is actually more solvable than it is for cars because trucks mainly drive on the highway. They actually have multiple drivers. So even if you eliminate one driver and you still have another through autonomy, you can still save money. And there's a huge amount of money that's made in the freight business. I invested in the company, and through grit and determination, they made it all the way to being a publicly-traded company. It's called TuSimple, and it's traded on the NASDAQ. And one point, they were worth over 8 billion dollars before the market corrected, but they're still extremely valuable. 

Frontier technology requires you to actually take a little bit more technical risk and really understand the technology. So both Jay and I come from very strong technology backgrounds. Jay was a chemical engineer. I was a computer scientist. Jay has a very strong background also in blockchain crypto companies, and he was making some amazing investments as the previous one in transit, many of which have done quite well. And for me, I basically grew up running business development at Nvidia. The most important thing I believe I did for that company was helped them really establish a patented ecosystem development. And what that means is helping them find companies that were leveraging AI and GPUs to build businesses, and so when I started getting ventures with Jay, I wanted to bring that entire ecosystem with me.

We're also extremely well-networked in the corporate sector, and I am actually the co-chair of what's called the Global AI Council for an organization called Global Corporate Venturing. And this has been extremely valuable for me throughout my career, and it's extremely valuable for GFT Ventures. Global Corporate Venturing basically has over 800 members, and they're all the major corporations, Samsung, LG, IBM, Google, Microsoft, all part of Global Corporate Venturing. Because of my background in AI and my experience at Nvidia, we already have early indicators that this is working for us. For example, we've been able to lead deals that most venture firms would never be allowed to lead. For example, we led a 12 million dollar round for an autonomous trucking company in Korea with a $3 million check. This is highly unprecedented. And why did the company choose us? They know, I spent 20 years at Nvidia, connected not only in the autonomous industry, and the technology industry in general. Another example was a company we invested in called Imperativ. They were founded by the former head of data science at Nvidia. They could have taken money from any venture fund, and they literally waited for me to leave Nvidia and start the fund with Jay so that we could lead their round. And so we know we're punching above our weight. And it's because we help people and because we add value. 

It's not just about giving money. It's about introducing them to customers and partners, and new investors. We also genuinely love what we do, and we're extremely passionate about it. So, we've already had successful careers. We started the fund with the idea that our careers that came before this are going to be a footnote, quite frankly, to what's about to come.