Chapter 1: 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?
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Chapter 2: 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.
Being on the inside and seeing all the disruption that's down the pipeline, what's your framework for figuring out what AI disrupts in the near term future and over long term?
In the near term, it is easier to disrupt things that are less regulated. And so the areas that will be slower to change are the ones that are more regulated, spaces like the law or healthcare, where there are merchant guilds that protect those industries and accredit and license the individuals that work in those industries, working in concert with government to license those individuals.
Those things are going to be a lot slower to change, but they will eventually, as safety is proven not to be better with AI, as efficacy is proven not to be better with AI, but it's just going to be a lot slower.
Last time we chatted, you said that there's a couple of players in the market that saw this agentic future years ago and they have a head start. Tell me about these companies.
Working on AI internally at Meta, we knew where things were going. That's actually what led me to leave and start Perceptive. We saw that future coming because we were part of the group building. Our vision at the time, even if we were to pull people internally at the company, though, would have seemed crazy. People probably in the company might have thought that was pretty futuristic.
But those of us working on these topics realized it wasn't that crazy because the models were getting there. So there is a head start that some of these big incumbents have, but it doesn't mean that this is the end all and be all. We are in the early innings of LLMs, and we don't fully know if LLMs are the right architecture for developing AGI or superintelligence.
So it's still a question mark if even this is the right path long term. It could be some other new company comes about and develops a new architecture that it's actually more efficient and better for developing EGITBD. But certainly when it comes to the LLM landscape and the big platform models, there is certainly a head start that these big companies have.
Seed stage venture capitalists in general have a difficult job of predicting the future 10, 12, 14 years from now. Today, that's even more difficult with the pace of AI. How do you create a framework investing 2026 for 2036 and beyond? One of the hardest things of investing is seeing what's shifting before everyone else does.
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Chapter 3: What defines an agentic AI and its implications for decision-making?
And these investors are investing at the Series A pre-revenue. Basically, they realize that gap between the future and the current state, and they're willing to subsidize even from a revenue basis. They're looking for something fundamentally different in terms of milestones.
Um, yes, I know. So it depends on the industry, right? So, uh, in B2B we've historically seen, or in the last couple of years that it is very easy and quick for AI companies to get to revenue quickly. So by the time they get to series A, they're doing substantial amounts of revenue. Uh, so from that perspective, they're de-risked.
Um, but, but also there's, there's, you can look at Kozla being the, the only venture investor at OpenAI back in like 2017, 2018, something like that. Um, when OpenAI, it's still, it was pre-revenue then, and it certainly still leads cash today. So there, there is, there an element of both of being that visionary, willing to back pre-revenue, but also.
You know, there's a lot of companies that are getting very quickly these days based on just AI.
You're on the bleeding edge of agentic AI as an investor. How much do you build a thesis around different parts of the market and how much do you let your founders draw you into what they see as the future?
A mix of both. Sometimes there are industries that we haven't sat down and thought about and fleshed out in terms of what we think that future looks like. And so we can chat with the founder about what they think is going to happen. And then we try to sit down and say, all right, does that make sense to us based on what we see happening in other industries as well?
But it is often that we have already come to a place of understanding or having a general rough sketch of what we think the future is going to be for that space. It's interesting as a former founder, like you're just stuck in the weeds pretty often. And so it's often hard to see the bigger picture.
So it's rare as a founder that really understands what the bigger picture looks like and how they're going to get there.
A lot of people have trouble conceptualizing an agentic AI future. How does that work? Let's say I'm a business owner. Do I just go in, grab my coffee, press play and then leave and come back at the end of the day?
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Chapter 4: How is AI expected to disrupt labor markets and create new opportunities?
How are you surviving this extension level event and how are you preparing yourself for the next era of VC?
One of the reasons it's occurring is because too many venture managers came out of the pandemic high when Anyone with a pulse and a deck could raise a fund, frankly. And it wasn't necessarily people who should have, to be honest. There's a lot of skills required in order to raise a fund, build a firm.
And you made that distinction. A lot of funds don't know the difference between running a fund and running a firm. How are you building your firm and what lessons have you learned from building a firm?
A firm is a brand. And most people don't realize that to be a successful venture manager, you have to be consistently marketing that brand to founders and to LPs, founders and LPs constantly. They think that it's just a function of having deal flow and making the investment. And it's not. The only reason your firm exists is because you have
been able to bring LPs into your capital base, and stewarded that capital well, and then continue to market your performance and your ability to continue doing that over and over and over again. Venture, if you look at the studies about successful venture firms starting all the way back Sequoia, etc.
They are successful today because of the success they had in the past, and they continued marketing of that success. And a lot of venture managers don't like marketing and they don't like fundraising and they don't like investor relations. But that's the key to building a successful firm.
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Chapter 5: What factors determine which industries AI will disrupt first?
And people think that that just means a founder network. I think that's half of it. And the other half is having a strong LP network. Again, if you don't have the money, you're not an investor. So you have to have a strong LP network to begin with. It just happened in terms of how my life came together, my career, that I did know a lot of LPs and I had raised money as a founder.
So I already knew how to do that. So I already had the network built in to go out, tap it and start my firm. And from there, Word spreads. LPs are very insular, talkative group of people. They like to share their deal flow in terms of venture managers that they're finding. And that's how my LP base was able to grow is through that word of mouth with these investors.
Talk to me about these AI tools. What AI are you using internally that gives you an edge over your competitors?
I believe that you can encode and build models of what a successful founder looks like in B2B startups, and then also in consumer startups, because I think they're actually different. And so that psychographic model I think is key. And I think it's something that's repeatable and scalable.
If you look at some of the character traits that really define the best founders of the history of technology from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, et cetera, they all share common things.
And so I think that you can actually model this and use that model just like any other AI model to say, this is the right founder to bet on versus using just gut instinct, which is what a lot of precedency venture investing is a lot of gut instinct, but gut instinct is just data. It's just accumulated data in your mind and body that I think can be actually modeled.
It goes without saying, AI is a hyper-competitive seed market. How do you compete against other firms? And also, how do you compete? You mentioned Cosla, Sequoia, Founders Fund. How do you compete against these multi-stage platforms as well?
We are of the size where we don't have to compete with the big boys. We can collaborate with them given our check size. And so we're in deals with a lot of the big guys, Founders Fund, Cozlo, etc. So this is due to size. Where we do compete is the other pre-seed and seed firms. And where we win is because we are exited AI founders.
We've been down the road as founders before, and in particular in AI. And so it's a very, I don't want to say it's easy, but it's a pretty straightforward argument to make to any founder. We've just been there before. What can help you with the challenges you're facing today and will face tomorrow from inception all the way through exit?
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Chapter 6: How do venture capitalists prepare for an AI-driven future?
And is this the right person to make money for my LPs, period? So it's taking yourself out of the framework that you often are in in terms of being led by ego and about pain and whatever and hurt and saying, what actually matters?
Is that a specific case where you had to just burn through all your relationships in two, three years because there's a short window? Or is there some general wisdom there for highly disruptive startup founders?
At the end of the day, the best founders in the world have all the leverage. They can choose their investors. And so they will have leverage in that dynamic always. Once you come in, they still will have leverage over you, even if no matter how big your position is in the company, because they can always raise more from someone else.
So I don't think from a founder perspective, you just have to be conscious that that's the dynamic now. And that's okay. I'm not here to be in the spotlight. I'm here to support founders. I like how Vinod Khosla says he's not a VC. He's a venture assistant. He helps founders. He assists them. And a service provider, that is the role.
You have to own that and let this ego of the VC push that aside. And it doesn't mean that your relationships are fraught. It just means that you have to be careful with those people. I'm fortunate enough to know people who worked with Steve Jobs or were on board with Steve Jobs. And they all knew, you've got to be careful with him. It doesn't mean that you can't have a relationship with him.
It doesn't mean that he's not extraordinary. It just means you just have to be careful.
Would that be the case if you were a customer of that entrepreneur? Clearly that would be counterproductive to scaling, but it's really your seat, your commodity to that entrepreneur. So he didn't find the need to use niceties and waste time with you as a commodity versus if he was trying to secure a large product or a large contract, that would be a necessary condition for him to succeed.
Yeah, and again, these founders, It's not that they're perma-assholes. They are quite charismatic, very friendly people when the moment is right. And so they know how to turn on the charm when it comes to sales, when it comes to customers, clients, et cetera. And that's their magic is that they can be both.
Now, when I look at my portfolio and we look at our top companies, top founders, unicorn founders we've backed, they all have that ability to from one second go ruthless to the next second being like the nicest guy in the world.
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