Ernestine Fu from Brave Capital explains why timing matters in startups. She's focused on decisive technologies, recently enabled innovations like generative AI that are finally ready to commercialize, and is incubating a company at the intersection of AI and data streaming.
Chapters
If you were a student today at Stanford, what type of company would you start today?
So I think— so I'm actually incubating a company right now, so I have a little bit of bias on the specific field since the company that I'm working as an incubation effort within the firm is at the intersection of AI and data streaming. But I think the way I would think about it, more broadly is I have this thesis around what I call decisive technologies. Decisive technologies to me are technologies that did not necessarily exist 5 years ago, but they can be commercialized today. The most clear example of something that's a decisive technology today would be generative AI, for instance, where a few years ago with AI, we could barely classify cat images, we could barely filter out spam. But we're seeing applications of AI and starting to create businesses, several, several businesses just in the last several months. And then I think more broadly, when you think about starting a company, I view it as taking advantage of— I think the most successful startups take advantage of certain inflection points in time. And those inflection points could either be technology, like I just described, or they could be cultural inflection points, or they could be regulatory inflection points. So that's kind of how I think about really addressing that problem, that customer market need, but then also thinking about the timing from an inflection standpoint.
