I went to SVEF which was pretty interesting. It’s expensive to get into this so it was pretty high signal.

I am absolutely super awkward at networking in most situations and now we are networking in the highest signal room I’ve ever been in. Good thing I’m not panicking.

I came in here absolutely intrigued because I had been repeating an experiment that I was so interested in that I redid it multiple times. My question was, “Where do you think we are in the Gartner hype cycle for AI?” I was super interested especially after AI INFRA, because compute is the bottleneck and is interest and build in AI outpacing AI INFRA sentiment? So now we are in a room full of heavy investors with people representing clients who write checks for breakfast and where do they think we are in this giant AI hype cycle?

I’m not raising though, I’m using all this data to build. The market moves the rise and fall of these companies and if you don’t know where the market is, it’s going to be a lot harder to predict which mini hype cycle is going to pop up when. There’s a lot of triggers, it’s not just buyer sentiment, but it is also buyer sentiment.

As expected, the most votes were for stage one, which is still on the way to the peak. Interestingly enough, this was where I got the most inbound, but also where I got the most referrals. Seriously, people wanted to know what their friends thought and this one guy was like oh man I was just talking about your research.

One guy answered on the first day and then on the second day came back to ask me about it. We had a crazy long conversation and now we’re having a meeting about it. He must be pretty serious because he followed up and everything with his calendy. I’m not sure where this is going yet. It’s cute, I met another person who started her own fund and she was so excited, yay! fun! I love it! This guy has been in the business for decades though so his enthusiasm was totally different.

I learned so much! There were some real estate investor types and financial advisors there in addition to tech investors.

There were a couple of founders too.

This one team was lowkey mansplaining their product to me and sometimes I’ll push but usually once that starts I think oh, they don’t know their audience, unfortunate, and depending on the severity of it, I might bail but not always because sometimes it’s just a calibration issue. Like if I feel like they really have something I’ll say something that shows I know something so we can hurry tf up. It’s also pretty rare so I notice more when it happens. This time it didn’t feel like it was worth continuing and then the next day I ran into one of them again and I said, “Everyone is doing this, what’s your differentiator?” And he said, “Ours doesn’t [REDACTED]” and I said, “Oh yeah, how?” and he laughed and said it was a secret.

I was talking to one of the angels I met about it and I was like, “You felt like you had to mansplain your agent but gotta keep your super secret [REDACTED] technology a secret in case I steal it, sure ok.” Like, know your audience, these are high value investors, everyone in here should know what an AI agent is. For most people, if you can’t read your audience, that looks like a red flag.

Another guy though, in cyber had an ULTRA INTERESTING strategy and was closing on a couple deals already to implement it. Like no lie, I was impressed AF, and I can’t say it here because this is this person’s actual strategy but HOLY SIGNAL BATMAN, imma be watching you. I really love when I see traction. I guess that’s what investors are chasing too, that feeling. Maybe that’s all it is? They just go around talking to people and then “bloop” this feels like a winner. No that can’t be because not everyone is a winner.

ANYWAY

Somehow I ended up with a handful of fun contacts, a meeting, and a bunch of data.

Tomorrow is another set, SIGH, I need more than a couple of days between these things, but I’m iterating this in real time and it’s like watching a photo develop in real time and everything affects everything and it’s just so fascinating.

Last minute expo passes that I just found out about for more data yay!: 1
Companies I evaluated for an angel for fun: 1
Times people told me they love obsession: 2