Crazy Until It's Not: Startups, Venture Capital & Big Ideas
firstminute capital
45 episodes
6 months ago
🔗 Humans, Connected: The Age of the Exocortex 🌐 Imagine a world where you’re seamlessly connected to the internet, not through screens and keyboards, but directly through your brain. Our minds are already a marvel of evolution, with three layers: Reptilian Brain: The ancient core responsible for keeping us alive by regulating basic functions like breathing.Mammalian (Limbic) Brain: The “monkey brain,” managing emotions like fear and excitement.Neocortex: Our human layer, dedicated to logic, r...
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🔗 Humans, Connected: The Age of the Exocortex 🌐 Imagine a world where you’re seamlessly connected to the internet, not through screens and keyboards, but directly through your brain. Our minds are already a marvel of evolution, with three layers: Reptilian Brain: The ancient core responsible for keeping us alive by regulating basic functions like breathing.Mammalian (Limbic) Brain: The “monkey brain,” managing emotions like fear and excitement.Neocortex: Our human layer, dedicated to logic, r...
🔗 Humans, Connected: The Age of the Exocortex 🌐 Imagine a world where you’re seamlessly connected to the internet, not through screens and keyboards, but directly through your brain. Our minds are already a marvel of evolution, with three layers: Reptilian Brain: The ancient core responsible for keeping us alive by regulating basic functions like breathing.Mammalian (Limbic) Brain: The “monkey brain,” managing emotions like fear and excitement.Neocortex: Our human layer, dedicated to logic, r...
DNA is an alien programming language - that can be learned That's the mind blowing idea of Stef van Grieken, the founder of Cradle, which is unlocking the keys to human biology. What does he mean here? Well, DNA was not designed like most languages, but it evolved, and so it's hard to understand and harder to engineer. But what if, similarly to how we have learned natural language, we might be able to engineer organic chemistry? That's exciting because most of the things around us...
In the global AI race, product will matter more than tech. That's the prediction from Mehdi Ghissassi, the Head of Product & Deepmind Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discover more about why it's the builders who bring AI tech to life that will conqueror the world.
In the future, buildings will be grown not built That's the prediction from Tim Fu, the Generative AI architect and founder of Studio Tim Fu. We're already well on our way, with advances in synthetic biology. But there is so much further to go. Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discovery the future of biology.
In the future we will be able to program biology. That's the prediction from Dr Mark Kotter, the founder of three synth bio companies bit.bio, clock.bio and Meatable. We're already well on our way, with the ability to perform feats like turning bacteria into lightbulbs. But there is so much further to go. Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discovery the future of biology.
Welcome to another episode where we plunge into the world of artificial intelligence and its rapidly growing influence on the media landscape. This podcast explores the revolutionary assertion that all media - yes, you heard that right, ALL media - will soon be AI-generated or AI-assisted. Our journey begins with a comprehensive overview of current trends in AI technologies and how they are disrupting traditional media production. We unravel the inner workings of AI applications in news repo...
What’s next in Generative AI? Could it be LLM-powered implants in our skulls directing us everywhere? That’s something that Julien Simon from Hugging Face (a platform with over 120k open-source machine learning models) expects to see in his lifetime. “A lot of tech innovation is just reading science fiction books and just inventing stuff that makes it happen…” he says. One sci-fi innovation that has not happened yet is the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy translating a...
Society needs to brace itself. Tens of millions of people around the world work in call centres - but the latest advances in Generative AI and synthetic voice are set to make around 🤯🤯 🤯 80% of their jobs redundant 🤯 🤯 🤯 . That's according to Nikola Mrkšić, the founder of PolyAI, a machine learning platform that buildings chatbots or voice-based agents for call centres. In this episode of Crazy Until It's Not, we talk about the story behind PlolyAI and Nikola himself. And we also talk abo...
Welcome back to Crazy Until It's Not, a podcast about big ideas and the amazing people behind them. Every episode we bring on a new guest who has a prediction for the future, which on the face of it, sounds a little bit crazy. I'm your host, Michael Stothard, an early-stage tech investor at firstminute capital. And today I'm joined by Jonas Andrulis, the Founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha, the generative A.I. Company from Heidelberg, which has built a generative A.I. model that is ...
We are going to see 10 Tesla-sized companies springing up in the coming years tacking big issues in climate. That’s 10 new companies with a market cap of over $520bn 🏢💪🏻♻️ That’s the big idea of David Helgason, the founder of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s two largest game engine companies, who is now a prominent climate investor through his fund Foobar. David spoke to us last autumn about the advancements he’s seeing in sustainability and his journey as a founder and investor. D...
In the future, viruses will no longer cause disease. 🦠😷 That’s the big prediction of BaseImmune’s Ariane Gomes, who says that in the future vaccines will be so good that viruses and other pathogens will not make people sick. We spoke with Ariane last autumn about her background as a PhD in Clinical Medicine from Oxford focused on immunology and vaccine development with 11 years of experience in basic and translational medical research. She is the co-founder of Baseimmune, a ...
Are AI and automation going to lead to mass unemployment? We spoke to King’s Riccardo Zacconi about his ‘crazy’ prediction for the future, and he said that we are going to have the opposite problem. He believes that big problem in the near future is that, with an ageing population, we are not going to have enough workers. He believes unemployment rates will effectively be at zero for many areas as demographic make it hard to find enough young people to do certain jobs. ...
Are you reading this on your smartphone? Nothing’s CEO and co-founder Carl Pei’s ‘crazy’ prediction for the future is that nothing will displace the smartphone. Last fall at an FF event, we discussed the trend-driven nature of tech where fads come and go as Carl used VR, AR and drones as examples. But he predicts that 10 years from now, we’ll still be scrolling on our smartphones. In 20 years, he sees technology becoming more seamless and fading into our everyday lives. This is also...
A glass which is impossible to drink from, sustainable diapers and an email paywalls. Here are just some of the business ideas going through the head of Jim McKelvey, one of the most extraordinary entrepenurs we know. Jim was a cofounder and now board member of Block (the $50bn fintech formerly known as Square) also is also chairman of the St. Louis Federal Reserve and founder of Invisibly, a startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Science is making MOOOOOOOves to eliminate cow farming! At the FF event in Scotland last autumn, we spoke with Dan Widmaier the CEO and co-founder of Bolt Threads about his ‘crazy’ idea for the future. Dan originally trained as a scientist at UCSF where he holds a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With that degree, he went on to create Bolt Threads, a sustainable material solutions company. He and his co-founder, David Breslauer, grew Bolt Threads from a couple of scienti...
In the future, there will be no private cars in cities. That’s according to Bolt’s CEO and Founder Markus Villig. Many European cities have already passed legislation to reduce traffic — from London’s congestion charges to Paris making every first Sunday of the month car-free. The move to ban all private car use would provide major environmental and social benefits from a reduction in noise and environmental pollution to a rise in safety. Markus hopes bolt will help make this chan...
Currently, 75% of the US and 62% of the UK drive to work*. Now imagine if that commute looked more like a relaxing session in a first-class airport lounge than a dull and stressful experience in a cramped seat. 🚗🧘 As the automotive industry and EV technology advances, the thought of self-driving cars becomes more of a reality and less of an abstract futuristic concept. CEO and co-founder of Aurora, Chris Urmson believes self-driving vehicles will displace driving and vehicles as we ...
While on a video call, if you’re boss asked you to open a link, would you do it? If the answer is yes, maybe you should think again as it could be a cyberattack! 🏼🕵🏻♀️ We spoke with cybersecurity software Darktrace’s CEO, Poppy Gustafsson, at an FF event last year about her predictions that cyberattacks will use deep fakes in live videos. The craziest thing is, these attacks will be happening in the near future as they are already happening over audio. She also discusses the fact th...
Is cash really king? 💳 >💵 Physical coins have been around for 28 centuries. But that is all coming to an end in the next decades. During a chat at FF’s event in autumn, Cyril Chiche predicted that cash will no longer exist in the next few decades. He has seen this trend of moving away from cash for digital alternatives accelerated by Covid. Cyril is CEO and co-founder of Lydia, a Paris-based fast-growing mobile financial services platform with over 4 Million users and a 30% market shar...
On this week’s “Crazy Until It’s Not”, Lubomila Jordanova discusses her ‘crazy’ prediction that every product and service will have a real cost. What does she mean by real cost? At the moment, the price of products and services do not take into account their wider environmental and social impact. Ludomila gives the example of a t-shirt. Traditionally, elements which contribute to the final value of the garment include materials, production, transportation and distribution (to name a...
Crazy Until It's Not: Startups, Venture Capital & Big Ideas
🔗 Humans, Connected: The Age of the Exocortex 🌐 Imagine a world where you’re seamlessly connected to the internet, not through screens and keyboards, but directly through your brain. Our minds are already a marvel of evolution, with three layers: Reptilian Brain: The ancient core responsible for keeping us alive by regulating basic functions like breathing.Mammalian (Limbic) Brain: The “monkey brain,” managing emotions like fear and excitement.Neocortex: Our human layer, dedicated to logic, r...
