Brian O’Malley

Tell me about Tactile, your new fund.

We're an early stage fund focused on solving these problems for everyday Americans.

So we want to link arms with founders who have an intrinsic understanding of not just what challenges people have across America, but what new technologies exist.

most especially AI right now, what new business models, what new regulatory or cultural changes open the door to be able to address those.

And so we're focused on this emerging category.

There's been a trillion dollars invested in the underlying AI infrastructure.

We're now at a point where we're going to see a lot more innovation happening at the application layer.

This is something that we've seen time and again.

If you think about the Netscape browser coming out in 94,

There was a couple of years before you saw the Amazons, the Googles, the price lines up the world.

Same thing with the iPhone, the App Store coming out in 2008.

The initial apps were like popping bubbles, were very touchscreen centric.

It took a little while for people to understand that the real magic of the phone was the intersection of the GPS chip as well as the camera.

And that's when you had things like Instagram, Uber, Instacart come out.

And we're now at the similar point with AI where people are playing around and understanding what the real magic of this is and how that actually solves people's problems.

And we want to be in a position where we can be the first institutional investor to work with those founders and to work with them over many years.

I know you're limited to the startups that invest and the founders that you talk to, but I'm sure you have your views on what should exist in kind of the second wave of AI and consumer.

What are some categories that you're actively looking for companies to invest in and why?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I kind of slice it both vertically as well as horizontally across the business models.