The Next 3 Years Will Deliver 30 Years of Innovation | John Lin - E725
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
39 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 13 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is John Lin and what is his background in venture capital?
I read a stat online recently that said one in five to one in seven companies actually reach that a mark from the seed round. I always ask each one of my founders, what makes you the best person in the world to do this and to solve this problem? Hey John.
Thank you for taking the time to do this FireShot chat as the founding partner of uh VC that's joining us from San Francisco. We'll be taking this time to learn about your decade investing across AI, enterprise software, SaaS, and FinTech. And we'll be learning more about what today's founder and investor attention is concentrating today, what areas are becoming crowded and how investors are thinking about defensibility as the AI landscape continues to evolve. So John, could you introduce yourself?
Yeah, hey, I'm John. I was a former Berkeley alum as well. I graduated in 2011 with dual degrees in computer science and business. So excited to speak to all everyone here. Since then, I've been an entrepreneur. I worked as a consultant. I've led product and engineering. And for the last 10 years, I've been an angel investor and in venture capital. spending much of my time at two firms, one Trinity Ventures and the second F Prime, which is Fidelity's investment arm. Currently I have started my own firm called Linea Ventures, focused on investing in AI infrastructure and AI applications. And that was started earlier this year.
Amazing. And John, could you share when you look at the world today of investing? Let's get to it. What's exciting? What's hot? What's scary?
Yeah. If we back up a little bit, investing has changed a lot in the last 30 to 40 years. One thing that people don't realize is that venture capital is a relatively new industry. In the 1970s was when the first venture capitalists really got started, maybe 1960s. And since then it's gone through a really big evolution, first with the internet bubble. Yeah.
Is AI a transformative wave or just hype according to John Lin?
then with the mobile wave and SaaS startups and now with the AI wave as well. Along that time, the financial vehicle has also shifted a lot and the way venture capital is done. Maybe about twenty years ago, there were only a handful of companies in Silicon Valley that were doing investing. And now there's thousands of venture capital firms. And much of the money is shifted not only towards the early stage where there's a lot of seed stage small firms now, as well as there's now this post this pre-IPO market, which is becoming really hot lately. So in the last four to five years, more and more money is shifted towards that space. And today, companies that are worth over a billion dollars make up about
Two-thirds, if not more, of the funding rounds these days. So it's quite a shift in the venture capital environment.
So that's a big shift on the venture capital investing side. And also there's a lot of buzz around investing in AI. in Silicon Valley, people think about it as the biggest technology wave. What do you think about AI? Is it huge? Is it overhyped?
How is AI‑assisted coding making engineers 5‑10× more productive?
How do you think about it? Yeah.
Oh, I think it's gonna be one of the biggest shifts in our generation. There's A bunch of factors that I think about with AI, but one thing that I want to put in people's minds is. This is almost like the industrial revolution in the eighteen hundreds. In the eighteen hundreds, there were some different types of vehicles. We used horses, we had plows, we had some basic railways, etc. And If you think about how much mechanical work was done at that time, you could say that maybe 40% of the work was done by machines and 60% was done by humans. More than a similar time frame now for knowledge work, where yes, there are a lot of knowledge work things that are currently being done by humans, and there's some
That are being done by machines, and we have great computers right now, but over the next 10-15 years, I think that number will very quickly go from 60% of work is done by humans to close to 80, if not 90%, are done by computers. So it's a really big shift. And one thing that I like to point out in particular is over the last two or three years and especially this year, there's been one major shift, which is people are now using AI to do coding.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is John Lin and what is his background in venture capital?
0:00–2:06
2
Is AI a transformative wave or just hype according to John Lin?
2:06–3:16
3
How is AI‑assisted coding making engineers 5‑10× more productive?
3:16–5:38
4
Where will the economic value of AI be created over the next 5‑10 years?
5:38–7:41
5
What criteria does John use to pick an AI startup (market size, growth path, founder fit)?
7:41–10:21
6
What can we learn from the Numeral case study on AI‑driven tax filing?
10:21–14:06
7
How have seed and Series A financing metrics changed in the AI era?
14:06–17:35
8
What’s the difference between investing personally and through a venture fund?
17:35–39:08
Speakers
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