Welcome to edition 02 of Noteworthy Things for Founders (and ambitious professionals). The special motto this week is human progress. You can also listen to me talk about the content of this article in the video above if you prefer. In case you read this in your email inbox, you have to go to the website/in the app for that. Enjoy!
Startup to watch
Figure.ai is another extremely ambitious company with huge potential. Their goal is to build AI-powered humanoid robots. While AI is progressing at rapid speeds in the digital world, there are many problems that still need to be solved in the world of robotics. The space is often limited by physics and progress in material sciences. Within that difficult space, Figure is moving at a breakneck pace. Founded in only 2022 but already valued at 2.6 billion dollars, they were the fastest company ever to build a commercially viable robot after inception. They purposefully designed their robot in the human form since most items that they need to handle and most processes that they want to automate were designed with humans in mind.
Figure has prominent investors including Nvidia, Elon Musk, and OpenAI. To build advanced vision models and improve its ability to process human speech they partnered with OpenAI. On top of that, they are partnering with Microsoft and use Azure for AI infrastructure, training, and storage. As a side comment, I think I heard Azure being mentioned more in the last 18 months than in the 5 years before that combined. Microsoft made some strong moves in the AI world.
Their first robot, Figure 01 is a general-purpose humanoid robot designed to perform various tasks but is specialized in simple manufacturing or warehousing tasks. It stands 5'6" tall, weighs 60 kg, and has a payload capacity of 20 kg. The robot is fully electric, with a runtime of 5 hours and a speed of 1.2 meters per second (so for now you can easily outrun it).
I think there is something special about robots in humanoid form. The question is whether this is iRobot or a utopian future in which much manual labor can be done by machines and we humans can focus on other endeavors. I hope for the latter.
Content to consume
While we are talking about humanoid robots: Does the progress the world is moving at feel fast to you sometimes? You are not alone and there is a very good reason for it. For millennia, human progress ticked by at a glacial pace. There was simply not much progress humans had to interact with in ancient times. Each tribe might stumble upon a new plant or hunting ground once in every blue moon but there were few novel inventions that changed the way things were done. They still tried to hunt animals or look for berries as their parents and grandparents did.
On the contrary, for us, most things are surprisingly different from when our grandparents grew up. They grew up without the internet, without smartphones, without MRIs, and depending on how old they are, without microwaves. Their grandparents on the other hand grew up without airplanes, air conditioning, penicillin, the TV, or the radio. This seems like a radically different life just within a couple of generations.
In fact, most of human progress has occurred in the last 500 years, rather than in the preceding 50000 years. In our modern world, we produce more new inventions every week than our ancient forefathers were used to experiencing over their whole lifetimes. Why has this not always been the case?
All of the above and more is the premise of the following blog called Roots of Progress. Here is an introductory article that talks about this surprising conundrum: Smart rich and free. It is a short piece outlaying the foundation of what the blog is about: The science of progress, its underlying mechanisms, and what we can learn from it about the future. It is a treasure trove of knowledge about the history of innovation and arguably one of the best places on the internet to learn about this subject.
Tool of the week
I have a special relationship with private markets. My first startup, Blair, raised capital from many different private market sources including angel investors, VCs, Family Offices, Hedge funds, and global asset managers. At the same time, my personal investment strategy has a disproportionate focus on private market investments since I enjoy investing in early stage startups. Pair all of that with my utter distaste for slow bureaucracy and my core belief that access to private markets should be much easier and you will understand why I am a fan of this tool of the week.
Bunch Capital is a Berlin-based Fintech company that wants to improve private markets in Europe by building an all-in-one digital platform for investors, funds, and founders. They automate and simplify the investing, administration, and diligence processes in private market investments.
You can think of Bunch as a one-stop-shop for fund operators to offer all of their stakeholders and partners a single source of truth as well as the ability to quickly go through all necessary processes involved in running a fund. The platform streamlines tasks for the investment team, lawyers, accountants, LPs, and Founders who are raising money. In my mind, bunch is a European alternative to Angellist. I love Angellist and what they have done in the US (and beyond) and I am glad that bunch exists with a stronger European focus. Other people seem to agree with that assessment, which I can tell from anecdotal evidence based on how much they are being mentioned to me but more importantly based on the fact that they just raised a 15M Series A.
On a personal level, I like that bunch facilitates investments in German startups by eliminating the need to visit a notary—a requirement that may seem weird to those unfamiliar with German regulations. According to German law, any transfer or issuance of company shares must be notarized, a rule that significantly deters many foreign (and domestic) investors, especially Angels. Among my American investment circle, there is a running joke that our friend who was an equities lawyer for 10 years would rather shoot himself in the foot than invest in a German company again. I still vividly remember the first time he had to drive for an hour to find a notary so that the company he invested in could raise their next round. He was involved in closing hundreds of VC deals in the States and had never visited a notary before. I am still more careful of German entities since the bureaucratic effort is not worth it if you are just angel investing on the side. With Bunch, the whole process becomes more bearable.
That is such a huge win that I am considering making more angel investments in German companies again. Although the process remains more annoying than ideal — German company founders often require numerous approvals from their whole cap table that their U.S. counterparts do not — eliminating the need for a notary is undoubtedly a move in the right direction. I can tell you that the investment I made via bunch is much less work than the ones I made directly into German companies, though it still does not match the simplicity of investing directly in US C Corps. This, for once, will have to be changed on the regulatory side instead of through technology. If I were to open a VC fund in Europe, bunch would be the first place I look to run my fund more efficiently.
If you are the founder of a European startup or a European fund operator, you should take a look at bunch and see if they can make your life easier.
This is it for this week’s noteworthy things for founders. If you know someone who would enjoy this kind of content, feel free to forward it to them. As always, let me know if you have feedback or suggestions for any future editions.
Share this post