Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Be in the theme before momentum
Winners of fund two
Looking back at the second fund at Founder Collective, the winners read as applied AI: Shield AI, which carried that name in 2016, plus Verkada and Whoop. For the most part the firm was one of the largest investors, or the single largest, in each company's first institutional round.
Commoditized platforms
None of it was a hot theme then. Hardware had been commoditized, video cameras had been commoditized, and a drone can now be bought for $20 to $50. The work was putting AI around those commoditized platforms ten years ago, before anyone called it a theme.
The next theme
Today those same businesses are called applied AI or physical AI. In five or ten years there will be a new theme, and the investors who win will already be in it, in companies that are not where the momentum is.
Why did cameras and drones become so cheap?
Smartphones created demand for billions of tiny cameras, sensors, batteries, and processors, and that volume pushed component prices down. Chris Anderson, then editor of Wired, called the effect the peace dividend of the smartphone wars. Cheap parts let hobby drones reach the mass market, and software could be added on top of hardware that no longer needed custom engineering. DJI released the first Phantom drone in January 2013.
How do technology hype cycles work?
The research firm Gartner introduced the hype cycle model in 1995. It describes a technology moving through an innovation trigger, a peak of inflated expectations, a trough of disillusionment, a slope of enlightenment, and a plateau of productivity. Prices and attention are highest near the peak, long after the earliest companies were founded. Gartner publishes new hype cycles for many fields each year.
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