Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era
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What is the background and focus of the episode with Ethan Kurzweil?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots Podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Oddlots listeners, you are gonna be listening to a special uh recording of the podcast, one that we recorded live in San Francisco.
Yep, that's right. This was a conversation that we had at the San Francisco MoMA on November twentieth. It was an event sponsored by Principal Asset Management. And our guest is Ethan Kurzweil, the founder and managing partner of Chemistry VC.
Yep, we talked about all things tech, software investing, how investing today is different than it was, say, in twenty fourteen when rates are at zero. We obviously talked about AI and how that changes the game of software investing. Take a listen. Thrilled to be here with the perfect guest, Ethan Kurzweil, at his new fund, Chemistry. It's a it basically launched like three. Three weeks ago, or something like that. And prior to that, 16 years at Bessemer. So literally the perfect guest to talk about. You know, VCs the landscape changing over time or something like that. Well,
thanks for having me. This is actually the first episode of anything we've done since we launched chemistry. So that's a good thing. Amazing. Amazing. So
nice. We're we're um thrilled. There is obviously so much. There's so much we could talk about. We could talk about the macro environment, we talk about AI, we could talk about the political environment. Maybe we'll touch a little bit on all of it. So I'm just gonna ask like a really simple question to kick it off. Which is in the 2010s, you know, people talked about the ZERP era, and some people even look on that period. Quite fondly right now with nostalgia, even though at the time Zerk was sort of seen as like this negative thing, didn't seem that bad out here though. Strictly from a macro standpoint, you've been in this game, so to speak, for a long time. What's the difference right now versus say we were having this conversation in twenty fourteen?
Uh
The good old days of 2014. I miss those days too. I wish we could go back. So right now, there's lots of things happening in sort of the tech landscape broadly as well as like venture. And so maybe just taking a few around venture, you had this era of explosion of different things, lots of different funds, new products. Money being kind of invested in the asset class beyond what it could take, beyond the capacity of those companies to absorb the capital and do good things with it. I'm an optimist about tech and venture. I think more is generally better, but there's a limit to that. I think everyone would now agree kind of in hindsight, we went a little bit beyond that limit. Now we're in this kind of new era where that's happened.
We're kind of digesting the impact of that, of all this. capital coming into the space and you have this kind of new technology phenomenon. And by the way, it's not really new. Yeah. It's maybe new as it applied to startups.
You've heard about it for a while.
I've been hearing about AI for I don't know, a few decades or something like that. We'll talk about that. We'll we'll get there. That's now kind of it the the building blocks are now there, the technology startups without a lot of capital can take advantage of it. And so that's getting people kind of very, very excited again. Even as everyone knows, there's still this fresh memory in everyone's head of how we kind of overcapitalized everything. And so those two forces are sort of countervailing. Yeah. And it's having some interesting impacts that I I think we'll probably get into.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the background and focus of the episode with Ethan Kurzweil?
0:00–9:31
2
How did the venture capital landscape change from the ZIRP era to today?
9:31–19:53
3
Why did Ethan launch Chemistry VC and what makes it different from larger firms?
19:53–33:24
4
What was the fundraising experience for Chemistry’s first $350 M fund?
33:24–42:48
5
How does AI reshape the way venture investors evaluate startups?
42:48–49:01
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Odd Lots
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