This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube talk titled "From Investor to Founder | Ubiquity 6 Co-founder Anjney Midha" (posted 2020-04-23) in which Anjney Midha recounts his career shift from interning and later investing at Kleiner Perkins (founding the KPCB Edge fund) to leaving venture capital to co‑found Ubiquity6. He explains the problem he wanted to solve—enabling precise, shared AR/VR experiences to unlock word‑of‑mouth distribution (using Pokémon Go retention and lack of shared camera experiences as examples)—and describes teaming with a former roommate, Ankit, to build computer‑vision solutions, grow the company (about 70 people across San Francisco and Toronto), and stop being an investor to become a founder.
Chapters
A lot of really talented founders were pitching to me at Kleiner, delivering really cool AR/VR gaming or interactive experiences to consumers. And one of the things that venture capitalists are supposed to do for a living is to identify really talented people like you all and figure out what is the gap between the vision they have and how to take that vision to being a really big business. And usually that gap is distribution, right? How do we get as many people to use your product as possible? I got to Stanford, I came from a pretty pretty conservative family that wanted me to become an academic, so I thought I was going to get my PhD in CS and become a publishing academic and researcher. When I was in my second year in the Bay Area, I got introduced to a guy by the name of Bing Gordon who was looking for an intern to come help do a little bit of coding at one of the venture capital firms. I did not know at the time what venture capital was. And I learned that this guy, who happened to be one of the co-founders of Electronic Arts, the gaming company, got paid to give away money to other people as a living. And I was like, that's pretty awesome, and I want to learn about that. So I ended up going and interning for Kleiner Perkins when I was— Kleiner Perkins is a venture capital firm that's been around the Bay Area for 40 years. I did not know what that meant. I ended up going there as an intern, staying for 4 and a half years, and starting a venture capital fund there called KPCB Edge. That invested in AR, VR, and computer vision tech. I was the gaming and AR guy there. And it was a chance for me to help out seed-stage founders, many of whom like are you, who are just getting started with this really great new emerging medium and were traditionally pretty underserved by traditional venture capital. So as an immigrant myself, I felt that there was a lot of lip service in Silicon Valley towards helping folks who wanted to take risks. But at the time, in 2011, 2012, most venture capital firms were going through a shift where a lot of them had seen early success and were starting to write later and later checks to larger and larger companies and firms, startups. And a lot of folks who were 1 or 2 person teams, like you might end up being, were being told they were too early and they were too risky for all the best firms. So I said, well, that's a problem. And so I was lucky enough to start a fund that was solely focused on investing in the earliest, most risky types of entrepreneurs. So I did that for 4 and a half years, and at the end of that period, got pretty obsessed with a problem that I wanted to solve. A lot of really talented founders were pitching to me at Kleiner for companies that were aimed at delivering really cool AR/VR gaming or interactive experiences to consumers. And one of the things that venture capitalists are supposed to do for a living is to identify really talented people like you all and figure out what is the gap between the vision they have and how to take that vision to being a really big business. And usually that gap is distribution, right? How do we get as many people to use your product as possible? And in consumer software land, which is what I was focused on, the key to that has always been word of mouth, right? So whether you're talking about Snapchat or Instagram or Facebook, most great consumer software products get their consumers to tell their friends about it and bring on large networks online instead of relying on traditional marketing. Now the problem with AR and VR at the time was it was really hard to get word of mouth adoption. Because in the case of AR, you didn't have the ability to have multiplayer shared experiences. So if you rewind with me to 2016, Pokémon Go had just come out, right? Half a billion people had downloaded this thing and were playing it. But then suddenly usage and what's called retention fell off a cliff about 30 days in. So if many of you remember, many of you may have downloaded Pokémon Go to play it and then forgotten about it. And one of the problems that this medium had— I'll get to questions, right? at the end of this, was that if you were playing with your friend, you guys, the two of you didn't actually have a shared experience through your camera. One of you was catching a Pikachu in one part of the room you were in, and your friend would be catching a Pikachu 30 feet away in a completely different direction. And Pikachus are cute, but at the heart of it, the problem there was any digital information, any digital asset, any piece of digital content needed to be precisely showing up to the same people in the same part of the world, precisely a few centimeters, and that didn't exist. But if 2 people could have it, 2 or more people could have a shared experience, then we would be able to unlock word of mouth, because then you tell your friends, hey, play with me, we're gonna be able to catch this Pokémon together. So as an investor, I was looking for somebody to solve this problem, and nobody was, and it became increasingly hard to back founders who relied— needed this key piece to scale up their businesses, but weren't able to find anyone giving them that solution. And they were hoping that somebody else would solve that problem for them, maybe Apple or Google, one of the platforms. That ended up being the kernel of the company that is Ubiquiti6 now. I ended up teaming up with a former undergrad roommate of mine, Ankit, who had taken a different path in tech. He had gone and worked at a computer vision company called MetaMind. that got acquired by Salesforce. They ended up spinning out a company from there called Pilot AI that was focused on solving computer vision problems for consumers. There was this GoPro drone that came out in 2016. They built the autonomous navigation system on there. It was called the Follow Me feature. You would throw this drone up, you would start running or hiking, it would follow you, it would stitch these beautiful videos of you on a single RGB camera. So we teamed up to solve that specific need that I was pretty obsessed with that I I didn't see— I saw nobody else solving. So that was the founding of the company. I decided to stop being an investor, become a founder, and that's what we've been doing for the last 2 years. We're now 70 people across San Francisco and Toronto. You might be able to use that experience that I've just told you about to your benefit over the next few weeks. Thank you.
