Post by @urlyman@mastodon.social

…Bond Capital are the people who put up most of the money for Substack’s $100 million Series C funding round last year: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/substack/__p24iniy6ZkhjH1kHKlzDUc3zpmnVgDfLZNx8RkxXs2I/funding-and-investors.

Here are the businesses they are investing in, including Substack: https://www.bondcap.com/investments/

So it’s these people that Zeteo has chosen to swim with.

I must say I almost admire the ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ approach of CockroachLabs (an AI-optimised DB tech stack)

11 Replies

5 Boosts

par ticke

@pt_ickle@mastodon.social 1 hr. ago

@urlyman
>but nowhere does it say what that costs
tbh i read that and thought
~id be surprised if the answer
is not "your data"
🥹

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 1 hr. ago

@pt_ickle indeed

Androcat

@androcat@toot.cat 5 days ago

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 5 days ago

@androcat it’s true that I am temporarily embarrassed in that regard :)

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 2 mo. ago

…“Let’s change the news together. Because it’s time for a British media organization… that isn’t afraid” say Zeteo UK.

But on its mission to publish the fight against oligarchy on a platform funded by VC money that also backs OpenAI, SpaceX, TomorrowHealth (pushing AI into social care), Suno (AI for music creators), Weights & Biases (an AI developer platform), to name but a few…

Zeteo seem afraid to say what the price of their journalism is 🤔

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 2 mo. ago

Here are the businesses they are investing in, including Substack: https://www.bondcap.com/investments/

So it’s these people that Zeteo has chosen to swim with.

I must say I almost admire the ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ approach of CockroachLabs (an AI-optimised DB tech stack)

par ticke

@pt_ickle@mastodon.social 1 hr. ago

@urlyman 😶‍🌫️

David Gerard

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 1 hr. ago

@urlyman oh AI is Cockroach's new pivot? I remember 10 years ago they were just pretty good sharded Postgres. So my first guess would be they were slapping the "AI" label on for marketing. I could be sadly wrong of course.

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 1 hr. ago

@davidgerard Don’t know.

But that will be an interesting dynamic to observe in the months to come. As in, the people who can just shed the ‘AI’ label because it was not at the base of their business

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 2 mo. ago

…I took a look at the 80 businesses which Bond Capital cite that they are invested in.

Of those 80 brands:

- 27 self-declare themselves to effectively be in the AI Kool Aid space
- a further 5 are what I would describe as AI-affiliated
- 3 are more in the space of machine learning (i.e. without full-on AI-goggles wrapped around them)
- 3 are in the crypto space (one in NFTs!)

So I wonder how Substack’s funding runway looks when the AI bubble bursts for 40% of its principal investor’s bets?

Jonathan Schofield

@urlyman@mastodon.social 2 mo. ago

…Here are the 27 I viewed and speedily judged to be AI-addled. (Links to each are on the BondCap URL posted above.)

Akasa
Alphasense
Applied Intuition
Baseten
Canva
Carbon Robotics
Checkr
Clickhouse
Decagon
Genies
Grin
Heygen
Hipcamp
Ineffable
Ironclad
KoBold Metals
Nultiverse
OpenAI
Open Evidence
Physical Intelligence
Retool
Suno
Sword Health
Vast
Vise
Weights and Biases
Zip