JD Durkin: Let’s bring in our first guest, Liz Harrow. Excuse me, Harrow or Harrow?
Liz Harrow: Harrow.
JD Durkin: Harrow. Very nice to see you. Liz Harrow, VC Partner at Shakti, and a warm welcome back to the New York Stock Exchange. You’ve been here before, but it’s been some time.
Liz Harrow: It’s been some time since my Morgan Stanley days. It’s changed a lot, but it’s good to be here.
JD Durkin: It’s really nice to have you join us to kick off the broadcast today. Let’s talk about Anthropic and potential conversation over IPO land. But, of course, it’s been quite a consequential week for Dario Amodei over there. Where are we in terms of the overall AI boom right now?
Liz Harrow: Yeah, Anthropic is still on track for this fall. It’s going to be a very exciting second half of the year. Could be potentially an even bigger IPO than SpaceX. It’s hard to believe.
But as early-stage investors at Shakti, we’re looking ahead to the next decade of, ten years from now, we’ll have the next class of IPOs beyond Anthropic. And we believe Anthropic is laying the railroad tracks really nicely for businesses to be built on top of it and, you know, change industries from healthcare to financials to consumer, energy, etc.
JD Durkin: Whether it’s the railroad tracks, the picks and shovels, choose your bank of choice for the day. Where are we overall, big picture, in the AI buildout? And what most excites you from your position at Shakti to take advantage of what we’re seeing at this part of the game?
Liz Harrow: Yeah, I heard a great analogy the other day in terms of, you know, the baseball analogy. Where are we? What inning? We’re still in the national anthem.
So it’s still quite early, and the opportunity is really at the application layer for all the companies that are going to be built on top of the large language models. So that’s what we’re super excited about at Shakti. And we think that all of the building blocks are there for this to be an incredible decade of entrepreneurship.
JD Durkin: I want to get your sense on AI costs, because a lot of the hyperscalers’ buildout, we know, is very expensive. We’ve seen that reflected on the balance sheet. But in time, the idea will be the falling AI costs. Does that create the same type of opportunity we saw for, let’s say, the world of cloud computing not too far back?
Liz Harrow: Potentially even bigger. And what you’re seeing these hyperscalers doing, quite frankly, is future-proofing. They’re seeing the demand there, and so they’re just trying to buy up as many data centers as possible to be the ones to win in the space.
So I think as long as the demand is there, it has the opportunity to be even bigger. And the key difference is that AI isn’t just at the digital layer, it’s also in the physical world. So it has the potential to be way bigger than the internet era, cloud computing era, etc.
JD Durkin: I wonder how you’re thinking about AI safety, especially after the pretty incredible last couple of weeks. Dario Amodei, and then Elon Musk and Sam Altman all agreeing with what he had to say. Dario Amodei even got the Saturday Night Live treatment on Weekend Update. That tells you, you know, you’ve made it.
Liz Harrow: Yeah, you kind of know you made it.
JD Durkin: But it also tells you that the conversations over safety are reaching that point of critical mass. How are you thinking about that crucial conversation, Liz?
Liz Harrow: Yeah, it’s extremely important. And, you know, I believe there needs to be AI safety, not AI hysteria.
AI safety is paramount, and it’s really the responsibility of the companies that are creating the technology to make sure that they’re shipping products that are safe for consumers. And we saw the announcement from Nvidia today in terms of their new initiative to create guardrails around autonomous agents.
So I think that’s the direction that the industry is headed. And going back to physical AI, you have a great blueprint for what success looks like, whether it’s Waymo in passenger vehicles that are driverless, Aurora in autonomous trucking. Those companies have all had regulation around the use case of driverless cars as opposed to the technology itself, and they’ve done a really good job of shipping products that are safe for consumers.
JD Durkin: Liz, while I still have you with about a minute left or so, where else are you still seeing the strongest company-level opportunities in the space today?
Liz Harrow: Sure. So at Shakti, we’re seeing opportunities in AI companies that are reimagining large industries, everywhere from cybersecurity to commerce to insurance. Really, all over, AI reimagining large industries, and as well as in the open-source space in terms of AI, companies that are able to build using any model.
We’re investors in a really cool company called Abacus.AI that basically allows you to use any type of AI technology in order to build your models, and it’s much cheaper, cost-efficient.
JD Durkin: Liz Harrow, VC Partner at Shakti. Outstanding guest to kick off the show. Please come back and see us.
Liz Harrow: Thanks for having me.
JD Durkin: It’s really nice to have you. We’ll talk to you again soon.
