There are two companies that the AI Fund has invested in - Woebot and Landing AI - and the AI Fund has a number of internal teams working on new projects. We usually bring in people as employees, work with them to turn ideas into startups, then have the entrepreneurs go into the startup as founders.
Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping - there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.
I think the Indian AI ecosystem is growing rapidly. A lot of Indian entrepreneurs reach out to me seeking feedback about startups and products. And some of them have very interesting business ideas.
The problems that you see startups tackling are dramatically different in different cities. Silicon Valley is unlikely to produce the same set of companies as New York or Cleveland because the region has a different set of strengths and defining institutions.
You can fake a lot in a startup these days, what with Amazon Web Services and all sorts of off-the-shelf back-end components that let any even minimally competent duffer set up a Web app that does something. Intelligent planning for growth is rare among early startups, but it's the name of the game at a large, rapidly scaling tech company.
I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.
Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.
The reason why we decided to put the focus on minority and women-funded startups is because this demographic of companies and founders is just underrepresented, they're under-invested in.
When people say they can't find African-American startups to invest in, it just sounds a little crazy to me.
