Moritz Baier-Lentz | Investor Perspectives: Igniting Growth with AI | Talks at Google

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Talks at Google Live in San Francisco, but streaming everywhere around the world. At Google, I'm John Igletti. I lead our customer solutions team for the Americas region. Many of our folks in the room today shout out GCS if you don't know what that is. We're the team that interacts with all of our customers and is pretty important, especially now more than ever. So I have the privilege of hosting this talk with Maurice Berlentz. So can we give him another hello?

Thank you.

And in talks format, I'm going to facilitate a conversation and then you've got questions, so bring them because I think this is going to be a really interesting hour. A couple bits of context. One, the genesis of why we are doing this specific talk. I think the focus on the venture community and Google is something that we're putting more and more emphasis on and it's something we've done around the world for many, many years. But I think the last year we see the opportunity of what that could be in working with Lightspeed and a lot of other great firms. So that's part one. I think part two is the moment that we're in right now on a bunch of different fronts. We talk about AI all the time. That has massive implications on what's happening in the world. Businesses large and small that we work with are trying to figure out where they go. And us as humans are also trying to figure out what is work and what is play. And I don't know of anyone better to have that conversation with than Moritz. So I also have to say as a disclaimer, and then I'll get into flattering you, don't worry. So maybe I can sit down. I want to remind the audience that Moritz's thoughts are not to be taken as investment advice. So I have to say that. So a lot of goodness. Okay, let's get to it. I'm not going to do you justice, but I am going to flatter you. We've had many great speakers in the talks at Google and this may be one of the most interesting ones that we've had. Let me explain a little on who Moritz is. First of all, you are a professional gamer, at one point ranked number one in the world in Diablo 2. Are there any gamers out there? By the way, the gamers are quietly raising their hands if you're not in the room. For those that know this game, it was sort of revolutionary in terms of how games are developed and made. But that was in an early age and you sold virtual Goods and used that to help guide you from an educational perspective. Which got you to Stanford, where you both had an MBA and an ma you were an RJ Miller scholar and was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a young global leader. We're just getting started from there. You were on Forbes 30 under 30 in finance, you were on Capital's 40 under 40. Talking about your impact in that field. Total left turn. You also complete in, you're an ultra marathoner. You completed the world Marathon Challenge, which if you're not familiar is running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Yeah, we could just spend the hour on that if you want, but use that in that to actually fundraise for things like depression research. Now I asked Gemini and they said in summary, Moritz Berlentz's journey from a top ranked gamer to a leading venture capitalist in the gaming industry, combined with his athletic achievements and philanthropic efforts make him a truly interesting figure.

Whew.

Okay, so now we know who we have in the room. Did I leave anything out?

That is absolutely all you need to know.

Okay, let's get to it. Okay. Some fun and then we'll get into the topics. The whole Diablo thing. Can we just start there? What got you hooked? What does it mean to be the best player in the world? Literally conquering with global domination? Tell me about how you got into gaming and what this all looked like.

Yeah, I got into gaming because it was fun. I think that's how most people get into gaming. I grew up pretty laissez faire in a small town near Hannover, which is a city in Germany that everyone makes fun of. And I wasn't even from that city. I was from the town near a town near that city that didn't even have a zip code, like 1995 or so. So physical reality was not too exciting. My parents had both dropped out of school, my brother had dropped out of school, and so my bar was relatively low. It was just stay in school. And I thought it was well doable. While also playing a lot of video games. I always, I would say the first 2/3 of the Diablo 2 years, which is maybe 6, 7 years in total of like 8 to 10 hours a day if you're a professional gamer today. It's more than that. I would say it was really played mostly for the love of the game. I liked it for the complex system that it was. And I still think it's actually the greatest video game ever built. But that's a separate conversation. And I think to at some point to realize that it is this beautiful opportunity space that you can first of all completely immerse yourself and truly understand all the bits and pieces of it. I mean we were, I mean we were teenagers at the time. We're almost like running scientific research and trying to figure out the algorithms that weren't always exposed in the ux. Because these days when you play the Diablo franchise, it's all neatly presented to you. It was very different at the time. So we're kind of like solving into how the game even works. And then to chase global optima, not local optima, to try and break the whole thing apart and put it back together in ways that no one else was thinking about. That's probably what it took to be at least twice in 2003 and 2004 ranked number one. There was a built in leaderboard in the game. And then also another interesting thing that happened at the time. Ebay was in its first year in Germany and it was a wild west of digital item trading. And this became a topic when web three came around. When I was doing this, it was web one, it wasn't even web two, it was pre Facebook, pre YouTube, pre Twitch or any of that. And on a good day you could make some good money with arbitrage, selling your skill, selling your time in the game to someone who didn't have that capacity or didn't want to spend the time to obtain certain goods and ended up financing both college and grad school with a good amount of that money. Yeah.

Oh my goodness. I am curious what is wrong with Hanover that got you all into this to begin with, but we can move on. What do you play now?

I play Rocket League.

Anybody?

Still competitively, but we got two.

Two in the crowd.

It's a great game. It's very different from Diablo 2 even. I think between 18 years old and 20 years old, I noticed for myself that it was a lot harder to compete. It's just so brutally, from a cognitive perspective to deliver that peak performance. And nowadays I'm just frustrated how slow things move into muscle memory because I remember how it used to be. I still have high expectations for myself, but I get my butt kicked by 13 year olds and sometimes I solo queue and we use voice chat and I don't know the people I'm teaming up with. And it ends with me saying, oh, you know, my wife is telling me that dinner is ready and the other person says like, yeah, my mom's calling me too. My wife's asking, sorry, what are you doing again?

I love it. All right. Different end of the competitive spectrum because there were gasps in the crowd. Seven marathons, seven days. I don't even know how you do that on seven continents. Can you explain how that happens? How do you get ready for that, actually? What is that experience like?

Yeah, how that happens has two components. One, how it happens is like, why the heck would anyone do that to themselves? That's one question. And then the other, I think, which is the one that you're asking, is how does it logistically work? So we did this with a group of about 50 people. We had someone who had done it before who was helping us with the logistics. You need two different planes. One is a retired Soviet war plane, an Ilyushin 76 that can haul you in and out of Antarctica, which is the first marathon you need to start in Antarctica because it's the only continent where winds and weather can cause a significant delay. You have only 168 hours to complete everything, so there's no buffer for delays. I think the mere flight time across the world is 80 hours. So it already takes a lot of the week, and that's where you rest and recover on the plane. When you're on the ground, you're running. There's not much time you spend on the ground not running. So you need that plane. Once you make the first step in Antarctica, the clock starts, and it's 168 hours from there, which is 7 times 24. You finish Antarctica immediately back into the plane to South Africa. And then we did Cape Town, Perth, Dubai, Madrid, Fortaleza in Brazil, and finished in Miami. And, yeah, it's a full distance marathon on every continent. They're all professionally administered marathons, technically Boston qualifier marathons. And I'll say after running a marathon, I feel pretty sore, too. And, you know, at the airports, you see people kind of like, limping around a little bit. I'll just say it's quite remarkable once you start running again for like a mile or two, how quickly that pain goes away again. So I would only encourage everyone to do the same thing.

Anyone run a marathon in the room? We have a couple. Anyone run more than one ultramarathon? Well, we could go. Can I two follow up? What was the hardest part and what was the motivation to do this?

Yeah, physically the hardest was Antarctica. Even though it was the first and we started fresh, we. It's funny to say this, but we were surprised by how cold it was there. And we were planning this for three years, but we did actually catch a pretty bad day. So it was supposed to be around freezing point and it ended up being -13 Fahrenheit and we were wearing five top layers and three bottom layers and basically everyone was just wearing the stuff they had been planning on wearing anyway, plus all the recovery gear on top of extremely cold. And it took me, I think, around six hours. We had to change the course twice. We had to put up a tent with heaters to keep water liquid, to even have stuff to drink. So it was a bit of a mess. And then from there to Cape Town was, I think around 100 Fahrenheit. So it's like, oh, my God. Interesting contrast program within 24 hours. Why does someone do this? I think, first of all, I think the endless debate we could have about nature and nurture. But I do think that in my formative years spending all this time competitively playing, and I think a lot about play and the role of play, not necessarily just in the traditional sense, but when I applied to Stanford, I had to get a little bit creative in my application because obviously you want to put your best foot forward and you want to, when you want to show that you'll contribute something to the class that maybe no one else is bringing. I was actually unpacking the video gaming days from a professional perspective for the first time after about 10 years, because I had put it aside. My early career was in tech with IBM and I did not think of gaming as anything that would be conducive to. To the real world or the professional world or something to be kind of proud of. And it kind of dawned on me that there were some lessons there that were very applicable later on in academia and professional life and even in sports, which some of them are. You know, there's something very healthy around playfulness and broad experimentation and arguing from first principles and looking at everything in a way where you don't focus too much on what everyone else is doing, because that way you never get to the top, to number one. You have to actually come up with something that works better and moves the efficiency frontier forward. Or in gaming, we like to say that breaks the meta. The meta is basically the perceived best way to play a game, but it's always temporary. Even though the game doesn't change, the meta always changes because people figure out new things and sometimes they look quite different from what was the previous meta. And so. But that. That should be applicable to many things in life, right? Like what's the. What's the matter to get into Stanford? Or, you know, what, what is the matter of what one should reasonably do with their life. You only have one. It's a wild and precious experience, I think. And I think one thing that drives me in many ways is I just want to be on my. On my last breath should be. This was fucking awesome. And so on an annual basis, I actually sit down and I think about professional life. And I think many people plan that and think about it, but also just personal life. What are experiences I want to have with my family, with my wife, for my children, what are physical things I want to do? What is learning or spiritual experiences? And I'm not a religious person. But what is the full extent of life that you can take in? And then how can you creatively go about willing these things into existence? And I've been doing this now for almost 15 years. And I think that's just kind of like playing around with the life that you have. And so you get into running and then you get into marathon running and then you get into. You meet the wrong friends, they get you into ultra running. And then we do stuff like the 7 7. We also did a marathon de Sables, which is a 250 kilometer ultra marathon through the Sahara, self sufficient and self navigated. It's honestly a lot worse than the 777.

But I don't know if anyone's like, this is not like the normal thing. It's like I fell into a crowd who runs 500 miles every week. And it's pretty impressive.

I think again, you only have one life, why live it in a normal way? Mathematics teaches us that optimal solutions are extreme. So an optimal life should also be extreme by extens.

Yes. Yeah. Get the questions ready. All I think within that the whole play game theory and how you've lived your life is interesting in finding the meta and then we can get into there. You told a story, I don't know if you can tell it again, about how you figured out the meta of getting good grades at Stanford. Is that a story you're willing to.

Oh, yeah. So I mean, it's business school, so it's not that hard to begin with, frankly. I think getting in is a lot harder than staying in. But I don't think that's a secret, but kind of like the same, applying the same first principles, thinking and trying to break systems, not in a criminal way, but in trying to get the best out of it way. I realized over the internship break that there's a glitch in the curriculum. If you're doing a joint degree, which I did my master's with the school of education. At the same time, there's some language in the academic contract around graded GSB units versus graded graduate units. And I saw this over the summer break and I went back to the academic office after the break and I said, well, if I'm interpreting this correctly, under these certain conditions, I could do this and this and that. It would technically allow me to not take a single graded class in my entire second year at the business school and freeze my gpa, which was great in the first year, which I knew would allow me to get the merit recognition without taking any risk for my entire second year. And they said, yes, you're right, but please don't do that. And I said, I will, and you should change that for next year. And I did, and it worked.

So it's both how to play the game better than everyone else and then how you push the boundaries with the efficiency that you found. Let's talk.

It's kind of me to at least inform them about it. Yeah.

Did they close?

They closed the loop, unfortunately. Yeah.

Well, not for someone else. All right, let's talk business for a minute. All right, so Lightspeed, just for the crude, tell us about the firm and more specifically what you do there.

Yeah. So Lightspeed is a firm with about 30 billion in assets under management. It's a venture capital firm, which means that we're investing in early stages, sometimes also in later stages, growth stages, into ambitious technology companies across a variety of sectors. Lightspeed's heritage is an enterprise, which is obviously also interesting for Google and our partnership with Google. And then over the years we've added consumer healthcare, fintech, and also blockchain investments. It's a firm that takes pride also in its geographic distribution. I think you'll find a lot of venture capital firms, even the scaled ones, that operate in one or two GEOs. In addition to the US we have people on the ground in different locations in Europe, in Israel, India, Southeast Asia. And so, you know, it's one of the big venture capital firms. I think we also noteworthy made a big commitment around three years ago. This builds on a strong heritage in AI ML investing before that recent boom, you know, just just to be clear. But over the last three years, we've really leaned into investments in foundation models and what we consider AI native applications, again across enterprise, consumer and other sectors. So we raise money from scaled pockets of capital such as endowments, sovereign wealth funds, corporates also. And then we invest that capital on their behalf with the hope to give a multiple of that money back to them. We keep a Small piece for ourselves too. And it's a model that for many venture capital firms and their LPs, has been working quite nicely over the last, I would say, 30 decades. And I think it's a great time right now to be an investor and it's also a great time to be a founder because we're in this paradigm shift that's probably akin to the introduction of the Internet, the mobile phone. There's going to be a lot of value that's getting reshuffled. I mean, I don't need to tell you that. Right. Google needs to disrupt itself also to, to stay where it is. And I think it's going to be an interesting dynamic to see that play out. And I think, you know, from where I sit, Google's doing a pretty phenomenal job at it. But it's going to be an interesting win for a ride. Right. And there's going to be a new slate of trillion dollar companies being birthed over the next five years, I think.

Yeah, we definitely live in interesting times. How, how do you look at portfolio companies and assess they are successful, they will be successful. And how might that have changed versus 10 years ago?

Yeah, I think ironically, at least in the early stages, it hasn't changed and it might not change, I don't want to say ever, but probably not anytime soon. The most important thing, and you'll probably hear that from many investors in the early stages, is really the caliber of the founding team. Because the truth is, whatever gets pitched in an initial investment round, in a seed round or maybe in the Series A, if this actually, if this ends up becoming a company that has a scaled exit, you know, go in public or scaled M and a transaction, it most likely at that time the company will look quite different from what was originally promised to investors. And so the only thing you can bet on is that there's going to be market changes and pivots or at least movement into adjacencies and rescue missions and all that kind of stuff along the way. And the people pull it off are extraordinary founders. If I could literally reduce it to one thing and only one thing that I want to see in a pitch, I want founders to go after products that aren't. I mean, there needs to be some capacity for this to be like a 5 billion, $10 billion plus idea. It doesn't necessarily need to be that kind of addressable market today because a lot of great ideas also create markets. So I think TAM or total addressable market is a little bit of a fallacy. We like to Use the term surface area. But the best thing a founder can do is present something that is provocative and is that that if true, has profound implications. And it's usually something novel. And we spend so much time in our, our specific sector areas. Like I look at probably around like 3 to 4,000 pitches in gaming and interactive media per year and invest in about two. So you know, the bar for me to step away from a 30 minute conversation and say wow, what I just heard based on that person's personal experience or hypotheses actually does challenge my mental models and has me adjust them after it happens less than once a month. I would say even though you take a few hundred pitches a month and those are typically the founders where you want to tune in and do the work and see if a partnership makes sense.

And those are the people that are able to push your boundaries and get you to think slightly different.

Yeah, I mean the founders we invest in at whatever they seek out doing, they need to be better than us. It'd be ridiculous if they weren't. I don't think that's someone we would want to partner up with because we go broad even when we specialize. And then we just need them to obsess about the right things in the right way for five to 10 years.

Let's talk as they. So as that idea starts to gain some legs, maybe it goes from marathon one to gets to the second continent. It's on its way now and it's about scale. And maybe we start on the consumer side. How do you all think about scale and really pushing that as fast as it can? And then because you're sitting in Google, how does a company like Google help in that equation?

No company can scale without Google Cloud, the App Store.

I was like, I didn't tell him to say that.

No, I mean even you can get, I mean first of all, what scale means in venture has also changed so much over the last five years. You have companies now that are in the reaching like tens of billions of dollars in a time frame so short, we've actually never seen that. And so I think the playbooks for scale are changing as well. But obviously like we're, you know, we have an investment platform that has internally support functions for those companies. So we have an internal executive talent team that helps specifically with the right bought hires, executive hires. You know, one thing also that pops up quite often is that the founding team and who would be the best leadership team for a scaled company is not, not often the same people and it's often Also an discussion that gets initiated by the founders themselves. It's not like actually most of the time the investors can't push decisions like this. So it needs to be done in tandem with a founding team. But talent obviously is a big topic helping with go to market and this can be obviously through Google with the distribution that you have, inorganic user acquisition and all that kind of stuff. But it's also sometimes even revamping a go to market team and how you even go to your customers, how you refine product market fit. And I think it helps to have a company that's at this point taking over 200, a firm that's taking over 200 companies to exit. Actually I think it's almost 200 IPOs. In the history of Lightspeed, there's a lot of organizational DNA to tap into. And we try and be not just investors, we try and be good partners. Which is also why personally I invest in about again two companies per year. It means I want to be the person on the cap table of that company. I want them to almost look at myself as a co founder if I'm not the name that they drop if they think about their most helpful investors. I'm not doing my job right. Because the way you win competitive deals is you send your founders to speak on your behalf. Because I can talk all day long about how amazing I am or whatever. I mean to have other founders give you rave reviews to those founders you're trying to impress and those are typically also people that they trust. I think that's how you win competitive deals.

Yeah. We only have an hour to talk about how amazing you are. But let me bring. So to your point about go to market help, I think there's almost 100 of your portfolio companies that also work with Google, with our teams directly. In looking at that partnership, you, your team, what's good with Google and if you had a magic wand of in any way, shape or form, I wish Google did more of this. What does that look like?

I would probably clone our representative, Michael Carney. He already works for three people, but maybe we could turn that into five. No, but in all honesty, I think it's been a really helpful relationship for us. We send a lot of our best companies to you to kind of supercharge growth. Think between preferential treatment on COMPUTE and then I think a lot of fallacy, especially in gaming and interactive media. These people are really good at building amazing, engaging, retaining experiences. They're not often also the best people at distribution. And both is important to create something of Scale. And this is, I think, what Google has been amazingly helpful for us through the distribution you have and the ability to fine tune inorganic user acquisition as well. So, yeah, one of the reasons I'm here is because we think very highly of you guys.

Okay, we appreciate it. But you also missed on. What more would you like to see? Or you could say, everything is running perfectly. We can end the talk now.

Everything's running perfectly. We can end the talk now.

Let's switch. If you all have questions, let's go to AI because everyone talks about it, it means a million things. And I agree with you on the. I joked this morning with our team who remembers the Internet because some folks don't, but it was a game changer, I think. Smartphones, same thing. This one might be even bigger, but people may not feel it yet. Let's start simply in gaming. What's changing the world of gaming from the AI perspective?

Yeah, so this is a great example, I think, for how there's sometimes a bit of a mismatch between what founders think might make a great company and what investors have in terms of their perspectives. But most of the AI companies I see in gaming, they're still thinking about incremental changes. They're thinking about making development a little cheaper, a little faster. Things like, you know, helping generate 3D assets or helping automate testing. And those are good things. And, and you know, once they work, and some of them already work quite well, you know, studios will use that to build their games and drive down budgets and all that kind of stuff. But if there is something to be learned from previous paradigm shifts like the Internet, like the mobile phone, like the introduction of cloud, which also impacted consumers, certainly enterprise, is that the companies that really knocked it out of the park and created like $10 billion plus outcomes, they were, first of all, they were building natively for that new reality. They were not trying to port, let's say a PC or console game onto a mobile screen. Like, there's no FIFA on the mobile screen for good reasons. It's a different form factor, the touch screen, and most importantly, it's a different modality. You don't sit down to play for three hours, you sit down to play for like five minutes or while you're waiting in line for something, for a coffee, and you get lured in by a notification later that day for another two minutes. And so that's the first thing you have to build natively for a new reality. And AI does reshuffle the playing field. It is a new reality. And the second Thing and this is something I've been saying for three years. You want to look into old gaming AI blocks of mine too. You need to build previously impossible experiences. I think that's really important. It's not good enough to change the process of building games from a previous commentary. If what comes out in the end is something you could do today or, but you just get there a little bit cheaper. You have to build something that is fundamentally better and fundamentally different. So an example for that is, for example, agentic simulations inside virtual worlds. We're super good with Unreal Engine or whatever you want to use with these photorealistic virtual worlds. And then they kind of feel empty or scripted or somehow we've come accustomed with the fact that most non player characters that you engage with in these environments, they kind of robotic or, you know, too confined. Why can't we fill a virtual Manhattan with 2 million New Yorkers? Their dreams and hopes and aspirations and background stories, things they do. When you're not logged in, you log in, stuff's on fire. What happened? Some gang fight while you weren't even logged in. So now, now you have to deal with that too. And we can do that now. Like companies like InWorld, which Google is also working with, are working on these truly breathing living worlds. And if you want to go a bit crazier than this, topics like world models or vibe coding change who and how games are built, possibly completely without game engines or the necessity to understand coding. Those experiences aren't quite there yet. But it's also very easy to forget how image generation looked three years ago when the dogs had five ears and seven eyes and you know, make fun of that. And now it's almost indistinguishable from a real photo. So our job is to squint. We're not trying to predict the future, but we're trying to see the present clearly.

Yeah, I mean that's why you're the best. To put that in the layman's terms, you've already built the movie Free Guy into a game and the next will be the game builds itself. Amazing, related. And then we'll get to questions folks have from a venture perspective. So that's gaming. As you look at gaming companies, as you think about being a venture capital firm, how is AI changing all of that?

Yeah, so it'd be easy for us to run around and say we want founders that embrace this world and think about it in an AI native way and build previously impossible experiences and then sit in our nice kind of wooden offices and Write the same memos we've been writing for 30 years. So, you know, we have no illusion that we need to disrupt ourselves too. And we have a six person team that is mostly concerned with building proprietary AI tools for us internally. Those things include anything from assessing data, historical data, fairly and objectively. Our constant job is how can we put the next dollar in the best possible way to work? And it's not often the question is like, is this a good investment? The question is, is this the best investment or is this a better use of the dollar than anything else we see right now? And there's a lot of people around the table with lots of specific knowledge in lots of specific domains. And we're trying to basically build the systems that bring that all together in a transparent, sober way. And it's not easy. But yeah, we think a lot of knowledge work is going to get replaced over the course of the next few years. Probably not entirely for entire professions, but big chunks of professions. And so a big chunk of our work that we do today is getting replaced too. And honestly some of our work is still very monotonous, Writing board updates and all that kind of stuff. It's important, but it's more robotic than trying to be out there and meet the most extraordinary founders. And so the more time we can shift to that, the better.

Yeah, I think that there's a corollary to that disruption in just about any use case. If it's engaging customers, if it's all these areas. Questions from the audience are there Brave? Yeah, just I guess queue up at the mics because we are streamed and we'll go from there.

Hey, thanks for the talk. Really interesting. Big gamer here. I think a lot of gamers have kind of rolled their eyes in the past at some of the procedural things that have happened. I think of the recent release of Starfield, which is released by Bethesda Software. It's owned by Microsoft. A lot of folks were kind of disappointed with some of the procedural elements of that game. It would kind of generate planets for you randomly, but they're often empty and kind of devoid of any life. As you kind of think about the future of gaming and you're trying to evaluate companies and these ideas around procedural. What do you think needs to happen or what needs to happen beyond maybe just the tech getting more advanced that makes these procedural experiences equal to something handcrafted like a Baldur's Gate 3?

Yeah, so I think it's a very astute observation. First of all, there's a natural tension, I think in gaming between creating this vast but very uninteresting procedural world on the one hand, and then good designers really taking pride in thoughtfully curated experiences on the other. And I think it's going to take some iteration and time to figure out how this could come together. And also what I just described, this New York, I think it would be interesting for a day. And how much time do you really want to spend in there and just randomly talk to folks? I mean, you can also go to New York and have that experience, right? Somehow we don't choose to talk to strangers on the road, maybe so that will have to come together. But also easy to forget that going to mobile or how early online games looked. We also didn't get it right in year zero, in year one or year two. So products, business models also shift toward a new reality through iteration. So I think we'll just see a lot of creative experimentation, playfulness for that matter, before we find the things that we can then kind of exploit and grind out. Like what's the match 3 mobile game counterpart to AI, where people just can't get enough of it. And you're looking at it really? Do we need like number 37 of that right now? So we'll see is the answer.

We'll see. To your point about going to New York, we have. We are global, so we have questions coming in from everywhere. So yeah, it's not up, but I'll read it from New York, you kind of answered this, but if you have, what's your perspective on how gen AI is changing the way that you evaluate ventures? Now, this may not just be gaming. Do you have examples of the new skills or capabilities? You hit it a little bit. Anything more you'd want to add on that?

Yeah. So I would say we as a firm have placed a big bet on the foundation model layer. I mean, that information is public. And then the other way you can go is invest in the AI native applications across different sectors. There's a big debate. I mean, first of all, I think in AI you can debate whether a value will accrue to incumbents like Google or newcomers. And that's one discussion that we're having. The next level is kind of foundation layer versus AppStack. And I think a lot of the criticism you often hear in investing in the appstack is like, oh, Google will just build it, or OpenAI will just build that. And won't they? Ultimately, isn't everything a wrapper when you can basically spin up all kind of software and code on demand and we're not in that future, but we might get to that future. And so the question then is looking at the app stack, what is true mode going forward because it used to be product was mode. But if software can be infinitely written at will, then product is no longer real mode and can be replicated. And so I think data, unique proprietary data information that isn't codified. So if you think about our work, if there was a venture capital app that helps you find the best partners and just do the stuff we do, but as an app, why not do it yourself directly? Is there one of those out there? I hope not. But it would be hard to train that because the way we make our decisions, that doesn't live not only does it not live in the public domain like our investment memos, our investment criteria mostly don't live in the public domain. And even in the private domain and internally a lot of judgment workflows, processes are necessarily documented and codified and the same is true in different domains in health care and law. And so I think that can be a moat for an application layer for an application company or like an app layer company to have that reside within your environment because it's not part of the foundation models today. But yeah, it's wild and moving fast out there. And so velocity in itself almost becomes a mode. Speed is a mode. That's interesting.

We'll go here.

Great insights. Moritz. I loved your comment about optimizing life at extremes. I find that discussion very frequently with my kids and they are thinking in that direction. While millennials, we are more balanced. My question is around leveraging AI and I'm part of the group that pushes AI in our sales organization and we're always thinking about how to optimize and upgrade our customer engagements. You invest in a lot of cutting edge AI companies. What is the fundamental shift that you are noticing in the next three to five years in terms of B2B GTM? Is it small optimizations with AI or is it just new models of value realization, customer acquisition that AI will disrupt for company?

Yeah, I mean I'll lead by saying I'm not an enterprise expert, so I'll probably my partners will have smarter answers for you. But at least where I sit, the applications that have risen to scale, at least for now, are the ones that don't completely replace the other side. I think as of now, humans still want to speak to humans on the other side. But I think especially in sales, displaying for the sales rep or displaying for the customer rep, the correct summary, the best next questions to ask. And this is also an example of something we're using on our end. We have tools running during zoom calls that help us ask the right questions or make us look as smart as possible. Unfortunately, I don't have it running right now. Then I'll have an answer for you. But there's just more questions here.

That sounds familiar to.

Hi, my name is Margue, I'm on the agency team. Yeah, also tying back to optimizing sort of the human experience. My question is how are you using AI to optimize your human experience? And what would you say is the most optimal point? Yeah, so I, you know, this, this five year plan that I mentioned that I've been doing for, for 15 years now, I realized it's actually a pretty nice backlog to feed into a project. And, and this last year I usually do this over the holidays and I sit back and I kind of plan my life on these nine dimensions. Like looking back one year, looking forward for four years I've been feeding it all this stuff. And then I basically said based on everything I shared and other things you know about me based on my prompts, come up with 200 ideas across these dimensions that I could possibly pursue over the next four years. And honestly, like I'll say of the 200 things, it's probably 100 things that were pretty interesting. It's. I genuinely think you don't need to go, you don't need to know much about fancy tools as it comes to life optimization. I think the baseline foundation models do a phenomenal job. And then it's really just asking the right questions. And if you get something back that doesn't work, just be specific about why it doesn't work or what you were expecting instead. And typically within an iteration or two, I found it to be just as good as me at knowing myself and coming up with something that I would probably enjoy. So.

But if you'd share what's the most extreme idea it gave you?

Hmm. What do we have on there? I mean, there's always more running adventures, you know, like those. The 777 is not the craziest thing you can do.

That's a whole other talk.

That's fine.

We'll leave it there. We'll go right here.

I'm Oritz. I'm Neil. Thank you so much for this inspiring session. At the start of the session you mentioned something around Web3 or Web1 where you use Diablo to monetize on ebay. I had similar experiences with Second Life and World of Warcraft. And now we are in 2025 and I somehow feel that web3 gaming hasn't gone mainstream. It's still left a bit behind. My question is, where do you think web3 gaming is as of today and what's the scope or the future in the next three to five years?

Yeah. And so at my previous firm, Bitcraft, we started one of the early specialist gaming VC firms. And we're also early on the Web3Gaming topic with two funds that we raised specifically for Web3Gaming investments. I think one of the or two issues with Web3Gaming, the main issue actually was that coming back to what creates true value in gaming and media experiences, I think people forgot that what you really need for anything of value as a media experience is to have something that truly engages and retains over time. So if you're building a game, you shouldn't spend all your energy and time thinking about how you distribute value. And I would get these pitch decks that on page two or three, they have this complex token economy. And like actually we need two different tokens because this one does that and this one. And intuitively for me, I always thought, how can this matter so much? This is ultimately a means of value distribution. It's not a means of value creation by and large. And so to have this economy be worth anything, first of all, you need a game that's pretty awesome. And that's hard enough in itself. So there wasn't enough focus on the quality of the experience, experience and the creation of value. All the focus was on the distribution of value. And I'm not saying that these were all rug pulls. I mean, some were, but I think it's just misguided energy on what makes a good game. And then the other thing also is you didn't have the right talent go into these experience because of this dynamic. It's got this kind of grifty undertone. And then the. The good game designers were all somewhat alienated and didn't want to have anything to do with that. So you had the wrong people go into it, not necessarily for the wrong motivations maybe, but with the wrong aspirations. And none of these things really, these are not things that can change. I think you can build a great web3 game. My true answer is I don't think it matters whether it's Web three or two. I genuinely don't think it matters at all.

Thank you so much for speaking with us. Could sit here for hours and just listening to you share about your curiosities. Question for you is what is maybe number number one or top two lessons, learnings, takeaways from either your running experience or professional gaming experience that are most you consistently come back to in your everyday life. Light, speed or in life more broadly.

Yeah, I genuinely think the most important thing is not to look too much at what other people do and just come up with your own ideas. I really do love to sit down on an annual basis and come up with this generation of thoughts. And I think a lot has been said about the power of written goal setting, but I genuinely believe that I always I remember there were so many points over the last 15 years of doing this and thinking, oh man, this thing three years out or four years out feels so wild and so crazy and you're almost embarrassed to write it down and you think it's not going to happen anyway. And probably of everything I've written down over 15 years, I've done 70% or so and then the other 30%. It's not like I'm forced to do it right. And some things obviously don't work out. I try a lot of things and they fail. Okay. I mean, still better than not trying it at all, I would say. And sometimes quite scary what does actually work out. And sometimes perspectives change and I look at that thing and it's even once you have that backlog, it's also interesting to go back and say, wow, this thing I cared about five years ago is like, I kind of like frown upon that because I thought it's kind of like misguided a little bit to something sometimes that also causes things to not happen. I can highly encourage everyone to do it's just a one pager thing, whatever format you want to use, but it's legit magic.

If only we had an annual goal setting process. G2 over to you, by the way.

Okay, I'm glad you said it because we're already doing all this stuff for work anyway and for projects anyway, because we know when we plan the chance that the project works out or that tool or that app gets released on time, or that company does this or that for its shareholders, it does increase the chances of doing that. Should we really care about that kind of stuff more than about our kind of life and the experiences you want to have in your life? So why not apply the same principles to getting the most out of life?

Failing to plan, Somebody said it. All right, G2, over to you.

Many mind blowing conversations. Thank you so much again for your time. I love that comment around you holding yourself to a really high regard on how your founders reach out to you? Are you the first person they reach out to for advice? Yes or no? And here we have Michael Carney. And your comment on him was so interesting because in the age of AI, it's the humanness that really resonated with you. And I'd love to figure out how as partners, we want all our customers to look at all of ourselves as those people that they reach out to first. What does Michael Carney do? How can we decode him since we can't clone him just as yet?

I think the best, what I appreciate most is what I think also founders appreciate most. And what I'm trying to do is it's very easy and it's kind of, it's a, it's a parody almost for VCs to say, oh, let me know how I can be helpful. Google can do so many things. Here's the Chinese menu. Let me know how it can be helpful. It's actually not very helpful. The most helpful thing is to spend time yourself, thinking about what you know about the other side and proactively come up with things that might actually be really good suggestions. Because otherwise the burden is on the other side to come up, to study all this, condense it, and come up with the right things to even ask for. I mean, obviously you don't want to propose stuff on a daily basis, but to come on a bi weekly, monthly basis with three ideas where one is terrible and two are great, I mean, that's phenomenal. And I try to do the same thing.

Thank you.

So we have a queue. We have actually somehow run out of time because this has been so much fun. If you have a minute after, maybe you can stick around for the folks in the room. I will ask one last question. And I asked you this before as I was walking over and thinking about it, which is I've got some younger children, I've got a son who's 11. He codes and we debate like, will that be a thing when he's 21? Does he still need to do that? You have a daughter who's even much younger. So in the paradigm of work and play for her future self, are there professions? You're like, you should go into that. And how should someone think about that when they're just coming to a world that is changing as much as this one is?

Yeah. Similar to how we don't like to think in terms of total addressable markets, but instead of surface areas, I think here too, maybe less to think about it in terms of professions now. So very likely these professions will look very different by the time she's 20 years old. College might no longer be a thing by the time she gets to that.

Right.

I mean, I told you, we're not starting a college fund. Yeah, maybe around. So what are the right surface areas? And I think the world is getting increasingly technological, something that has also shaped venture capital over the years, because the tech industry used to be this cottage industry and now it's absolutely mainstream. That's still relatively.