E309: Why Most VCs Firms will Die by 2030
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What insights does Camilo Acosta share from his experience at Meta?
So Kamila, you started at Meta, where you were top AI engineer, and now you run Perceptive Ventures, one of the top agentic AI seed funds in the world. Tell me about how your experience from Meta informs your day-to-day as a venture capitalist.
It's pretty critical. And before joining Meta, my company was acquired, so I was a startup founder and CEO. And both of those experiences are really critical to how I invest today. Having been a founder, I know how fast one can move and how nimble one can be. But having also been a big tech operator, I understand which large spaces big tech finds attractive and wants to move into. And the key here as an investor is making sure that we're not investing in spaces that big tech is going to dominate or be really interested in. And by the way, when I say big tech, I also mean open AI and anthropic because at this point they have sort of like a neo-incumbent power in AI.
How do you know whether big tech, whether meta, Facebook or anthropic OpenAI is going to go after space or not.
Understanding scale. I ran a $10 billion product suite at Meta, which sounds large, but in the grand scheme of Meta was actually not that big. And so there are $10 billion businesses that these large companies don't really have an interest in entering or pursuing because it doesn't really move the needle when you're a multi-trillion dollar company. That's too small for them. But a $10 billion startup is a very interesting outcome for a venture investor like myself.
If there's not top engineers on meta that are going to go after a problem, you think that's a safer place to build a startup and to build something that could be dominant there versus having to compete every day against these large LMs?
The big problem with incumbents is that they have distribution power. So no matter how innovative your product may be as a startup and how forward thinking it is or well executed it is, if you don't have the distribution power of these behemoths, it's quite dangerous to compete against them.
So when you started Perceptive early on in your genesis, you made a big bet that the future of AI would be agentic. Why is that?
A lot of AI outsiders, I think, were convinced that artificial intelligence was about building tools to help knowledge workers. But the reality is that artificial intelligence is really centrally concerned with replacing human decision-making. And that has three components at its core, prediction, judgment, and action. And these three components combined replace human decision making, which is the entire point of AI. So when you put them all together, it creates a completely agentic system. And the clearest example of that today for, you know, for layman is Waymo. When you get into Waymo, the system is performing all three functions. It predicts where the other cars are going, where it is going, how objects in the environment such as pedestrians and bikes are behaving.
And that applies judgment to those predictions. It says, like, we should do X or Y. And then it takes action by actually moving the car in the necessary direction at the required speed based on those predictions and judgments. That's a fully agentic system. And that's exactly what's happening with software. Software is becoming agentic, which means it's not only eating software, but it's actually able to eat entire human workflows.
So do you fall in the camp where you believe AI will destruct human labor, or do you think it's going to make things so efficient that more people will transact and there'll be more opportunities for business?
I think it will disrupt and destroy a lot of industries for sure. I think it's also going to create a lot of new opportunities. And there's a lot of jobs that are also very difficult for AI to replace.
How does Camilo differentiate between investing in startups and big tech?
We're always going to need restaurants. We're always going to need hotels. We're always going to need plumbers and electricians. We're going to need people to service the millions and millions of robots that are going to exist in our world. So it's going to create new jobs, but it will certainly disrupt and replace a lot of human knowledge work, human labor.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What insights does Camilo Acosta share from his experience at Meta?
0:00–2:59
2
How does Camilo differentiate between investing in startups and big tech?
2:59–8:06
3
What defines an agentic AI and its implications for decision-making?
8:06–12:54
4
How is AI expected to disrupt labor markets and create new opportunities?
12:54–15:54
5
What factors determine which industries AI will disrupt first?
15:54–22:57
6
How do venture capitalists prepare for an AI-driven future?
22:57–31:14
Speakers
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