Building physical tech is back in fashion thanks to AI, robotics, and defense

This week on Equity Wednesday, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Louis, co-founder of America's Frontier Fund, to discuss the pressing trends in tech innovation. From robotics and AI reshaping manufacturing to Silicon Valley's embrace of defense technology, plus Louis shares his main predictions for 2025. Listen tot he full episode for a deeper conversation on: Silicon Valley's deep roots in defense tech The advantages and challenges facing founders seeking government contracts rather than VC funding The role startups play in shifting American leadership from the digital world back into physical manufacturing Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bellan and this is our Wednesday episode where we home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Today, I'm talking to Gilman Louis, the CEO and co-founder of America's Frontier Fund. We talk about the push for American startups to help build leading frontier tech, how robotics and AI will change manufacturing, Silicon Valley's embrace of defense tech, and his predictions for 2025. Gilman, welcome to the show.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  It's great to be here, Rebecca.

• 0:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Now, Gilman, you, I'm so excited to talk to you because you have, what, 30-plus years of national security and investment experience. You were the former CEO of Incutel, which is the tech investment firm funded by the CIA. I believe you worked on the Biden administration's Science and Technology Advisory Council, Commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence from 2018 to 2021, and now America's Frontier Fund. Am I missing anything?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  There's probably a few other things on the list, but it's good to be here.

• 1:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, tell us a little bit about America's Frontier Fund. It's part nonprofit, part investment fund, part foundation. There's a lot going on there. Studio, I think, is involved.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  At the highest level, when the founders, myself, Jordan Blaschek, and a few others, got together to think about what the US needed in terms of leadership and technology from a global perspective. You know, the US has a lot of advantages, but we did not have capital really organized around the kind of the priorities of what in the national security side of the House or the economic security side of the House focused in on the areas that are necessary to compete on a global basis, particularly on this kind of strategic competition we find ourselves in with other nation-states. So the idea was to create an organization that not only informed both government and

• 2:04Speaker 02

  the financial markets, including the venture community of what the opportunities are, but also to It's a beacon, a lighthouse of places in which industry could go, the financial services could invest in, the governments can de-risk, that will move the ball forward. So America's Frontier Fund is really dedicated to helping the US continue its leadership in these kind of frontier technologies like AI and next generation energy and bio and ag and a number of other areas that's going to be really important for competitiveness.

• 2:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. And so do I take it right that a lot of these have kind of a dual use application?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, in fact, many are dual use because they're foundational. So let's take the example of next generation energy, whether it's, you know, down the road, this idea that we may be able to conquer and solve the fusion issue, clean hydrogen, right? Those energy needs have multi purposes, not just, you know, security technologies, you know, funding and supporting things like compute, but also, you know, in the commercial world. Same is true with bio. Clearly, AI has multiple purposes. So, you know, some people are really focused today on what we call mil tech, right? That's just a tiny use of all the kind of technologies that go into that dual use bucket.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  But even food has dual use, right? I mean, you gotta be able to move food around and have food security.

• 3:31Rebecca Bellan?

  Speaking just briefly on clean energy and everything, you know, we're coming into a new administration. Trump has signaled that he wants to cancel any unspent dollars of the Inflation Reduction Act, which puts a lot of money towards, you know, specifically loans for clean energy startups and companies building battery tanks, solar panels, et cetera. How are you thinking about the coming administration, specifically as it relates to clean energy?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Well, what's said on the campaign trail and what actually gets implemented, sometimes are two different things, right? I think one of the clear things that the Trump administration realizes is the energy demands that we're going to have for powering up next generation manufacturing, next generation compute is greater than our capacity than we currently have at the rate in which we're consuming that level of energy. So this is really about bringing all the forces of Technology and science together to really kind of unlock that. Now, as we do that, they tend to, these new technology areas tend to have cleaner footprints. They tend to be able to take advantage of the natural environment in a way that's more efficient.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Even things like unlocking gases and oils, doing that in a way that is more healthy in an environment is fundamentally economically better. So I don't think there's this grand disconnect between an energy policy, which is focused on production and the need to do it in an efficient way that leads to a cleaner environment. I think all those things are consistent, but it requires forethought and requires kind of a new class of energy extraction and production that we currently don't have. And that's part of the frontier that we're going to be on the journey of.

• 5:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, like I think that it's pretty bipartisan to say that America has kind of fallen behind when it comes to manufacturing. And that has given us a risk in many ways, security and economic and national security.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, here's some kind of scary numbers, right? I mean, today, the US consumes, you take a look at the total consumption of goods that we consume. We only produce now 10% of that. 20 years ago, it was 80% was produced here in the United States. So one is we have a problem because not only are supply chains at risk, but we have actually lost the ability to actually build things again, right? Kind of take a riff off of the prior campaign, you know, make America great again. It's make America build again, right? And it's not just the STEM folks. It is the trade talents, the skills, right? Plumbers and welders and electricians. My father was a machinist in World War II.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I mean, he raised us as a blue collar family with the idea that there's honor to be building things. And we kind of outsourced that from the 1980s forward. If the US really is going to become and continue to be a powerhouse of the future, it really has to be able to build again. And if we could do that, I think the economy will be stronger. I think, you know, it's not just an employment issue, but the quality of work will be higher as well.

• 6:35Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. And then how can startups take advantage of that? So I'm not sure if you're going to be focusing more on early stage or later stage startups with the America's Frontier Fund. But what are ways that startups can be thinking about this? I mean, obviously, it's a, you know, we say frontier tech, that's pretty broad. It can mean anything from energy to aerospace to biotech to quantum. So yeah, I guess broadly, and then maybe we can drill down. What is your advice for startups looking to take advantage of this?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  We spent the last 20 years going fabulous and focusing on the digital economy. And we led the world in that, and it was great. But we also did on the fact that 20 years before that, we had invested in infrastructure. You know, we were building chips. We had fabs. We had the ability to actually engineer and build things like rockets and airplanes in a way that was the envy of the world. So the phrase I use to startups is, show me the path from bits to atoms. Right? Can you take the technologies, digital technologies at hand? Digital twinning, artificial intelligence, next generation design tools,

• 7:41Speaker 02

  and apply it in a way that actually builds out our manufacturing infrastructure? So things like robotics, next generation robotics, not like the big machines that will like cranes, but the ability to manipulate things much more efficiently and safely. Can we think about using smaller footprint manufacturing flexible facilities that basically can take what you imagine and in 24 hours, switch it into an actual production of actual goods? You know, the promise of additive manufacturing and CNC and many of the other tools hasn't yet really come together in a way that we can go from thought to object in 24 hours.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  And if we could do that, that would change everything that we think about, not only how we make things, but actually the unit economics that allows startups to get to profitability much more quickly than having to be in an environment where you basically design overseas. You send it to contract manufacturing, you know, in places like China. You know, six months of turnaround and having to produce hundreds of thousands of items to kind of get it down to a unit volume that can actually make money. It feels very archaic, right? It hasn't really changed in the last forty or fifty years. I mean, the tools are a little bit better, but you know, economics really hasn't changed. These new tools can change all of that, and I think that revolution could happen here

• 9:07Speaker 02

  in the US.

• 9:08Rebecca Bellan?

  So are there any startups that you've noticed or types of startups that are kind of solving for those pain points in manufacturing today?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  I think there's a big movement in large language models to kind of go from the ability to create, you know, images and text to actually helping design of physical goods, right? There's a whole field of study around the use of LLMs in describing everyday physical environments, which is the first step that you need to be able to use these kinds of tools for design and manufacturing. I also think there's a big effort right now on robotics and engineering. Now, China, it's the world's largest producer of this current generation of robots, but

• 9:56Speaker 02

  there's a next generation of robotics that's on the near horizon, which is not just, you know, make them look more like human, but having all the advantages that a human has over something that looks like, you know, a crane with a, you know, a pincer on the other side. That dexterity, that level of accuracy, the ability to do things at a very small scale or at a very large scale, right? It's happening right now. I mean, a lot of companies are beginning to look at these problems and these challenges.

• 10:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  You know, LEGO has put out two generations of kids who grew up on LEGO robotics, and as these younger folks who have grown up on robotics begins to get into startups and industry, the return of the mechanical engineer.

• 10:48Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  It's cool. It's exciting where you got these young 20 year olds who want to change the world by what they can build. I mean, you know, to Elon's credit, you look up, you see SpaceX or Starlink, right? Or you see a Tesla driving down the street and that is, you know, the power of building things. So it's now in vogue. It's in fashion and people want to say, hey, yeah, do I need another piece of social media tools? Is that what I want to be known for? Or do I want to be known for, you know, creating something that's great and physical?

• 11:19Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's certainly like a push, almost like away from even just SaaS in general and like consumer tech that that doesn't like solve anyone's problems or help make the world a better place. Right. But I mean, that said, I just did notice a very large round going to a mobile games company that I was like, hmm.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  But even the gaming space, you know, this is a whole, there's a whole movement now to retro games. I was, you know, Palmer Lucky, you know, the creator of Oculus is investing in the little companies beside some of his defense tech work in recreating handheld Game Boy style machines, right? That kind of return back to actually fidgeting with a machine.

• 11:56Rebecca Bellan?

  A simpler time.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  A simpler time, right?

• 11:59Rebecca Bellan?

  We all love nostalgia. I mean, that's probably why the Stranger Things did so well, right?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, you know, you brought up Palmer Lucky. I did want to talk to you a little bit about defense tech and kind of the Silicon Valley embrace of that. Specifically, we talk about Anduril, which is Palmer Lucky's current company. And, you know, they're using, you can probably speak to this better than I can, but they're using kind of like consumer off the shelf parts to create these like really cheap drones, giving them to Ukraine. And they're using them to take down $20,000 Russian tanks. Right? So there's this interesting movement that we're seeing in Silicon Valley's embrace of defense tech. And it's a step change in a lot of ways from what we've seen in the past. And we've talked about this on the show before.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:38Rebecca Bellan?

  But yeah, curious to hear your thoughts.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I know Silicon Valley tends to rewrite our history, right? Based on the last great thing that we created. But you go back to the history of Silicon Valley. It really was built on the base of defense tech. You know, the engineers, the scientists all got together in World War II. Silicon Valley was, you know, where a lot of the radar and electronics work was being done for the US military. That kind of created Silicon Valley. Multiple generations later, from places like Lockheed, who was pretty much kind of owned the valley back in the 50s and the 60s, to, you know, today, the modern versions of that, like Andro, are trying to not just use tech to improve defense, but the realization

• 13:24Speaker 02

  that the nature of warfare has completely changed. If you watch what's going on in the Ukraine, as you pointed out, cheap, in many cases, wooden drones being built by Ukrainian furniture manufacturers teamed up with kids who used to do drone racing. You know, Ukrainian drone racers before the war were like, were best of class. And how they use that tech, that everyday tech, to transform the battlefield. And everybody, all the military forces are kind of studying what's going on in the Ukraine as we speak. And it's a very unfortunate situation because there are a lot of, you know, lots of displaced civilians, or there's, you know, war is ugly, it's not something to glorify.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  But the reality is, big systems are vulnerable to swarms of little systems. And I think the way we think about, inside the Defense Department, particularly the Pentagon, building out these kind of multi-billion dollar platforms, that everything requires these 10 to 20 year development cycles, right? While there is a place for that, if we don't have the muscle to be able to build large amounts of low cost systems that can change the battlefield, we'll be on the wrong end of the power curve, in other words, we'll be the Russians, and somebody else will be the Ukrainians. And so I think the valley is really to realize this.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Now, the issue of whether defense... Is something that technologists want to work on, particularly here in Silicon Valley. It's kind of self-selecting.

• 15:00Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  I think there's a, there's a group of technologists who believes in a strong national defense, right? If you have a strong national defense, it reduces the temptation of somebody else from doing something to you that you don't want to have happen. But if you find yourself in a fight, or a partner or ally finds itself in a fight it doesn't want to be in, it will have the tools to defend itself. And I think there's a strong body of evidence that shows that Silicon Valley isn't this kind of view that many people have, that, you know, it's pacifism, it's, we don't want to deal with military, we don't want to deal with the world that these technologies can hurt people because they're seeing what's happening, playing out in real time.

• 15:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Hmm. There's, it's been a shift, and like, certainly in my lifetime, I mean, I, you know, grew up thinking like, yeah, it's just a bunch of very liberal people in Silicon Valley who, you know, do no evil, right? That was Google's slogan, and you had developers and engineers walking out protesting if any of their tech was sold to the Israeli military. But there's, yeah, now that there's a shift, and certainly in, in the beats that I cover, I'm noticing a lot of companies just actively being like, and we got DOD funding and we're working with the military. And it's exciting for them because there's been like a funding drought, and this is like a surefire way to get money so that it can continue to build their tech, which, you know, in a lot of cases, it's autonomy, or it's, you know, EV tolls, right? Like, Androl and Archer just both teamed up to build a defense aircraft. And there's kind of like, not that they should be shamed, but there's no shame in it.

• 16:30Rebecca Bellan?

  There's just like a, yeah, well, we need to work on American defense. Like, that's the mood of the day. But I guess the ideological shift that I've noticed is not only that we're embracing defense tech, but it's like embracing defense tech because America needs to be first, so our enemies don't get to us, rather than America needs to be the world's superpower because we're a liberal democracy, and it's important that that, like, to balance the scales of, you know, China, which is a, a one-party state, you know, effectively run by a dictator. So it feels like that has become like, almost like a, a children's story, and like, it's like, oh, that's nice, but no, really, it's about wars coming. I don't know how you think about it.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Well, I think that the views kind of covered the entire spectrum. Right between, you know, we had to have a strong national defense to dissuade a country like China or North Korea or Iraq from doing some, I mean, Iran, excuse me, from doing something that we don't want them to do. We don't want to tempt our competitors with weakness. I think there's a strong view of that side. But the other side of it is also true. If you find yourself or an ally in the middle of a fight and they're unable to protect themselves, it's not good for the world. This is the whole Ukrainian situation where everybody thought the Russians

• 17:50Speaker 02

  were going to march in to cave within two weeks and Ukraine would fall. And it didn't because, you know, it had a relatively strong military, but it also understood how to fight with the tools they had. And I think companies like Andro and some of the new defense tech entrepreneurs are saying, we can have better tools than these kind of blunt instruments, you know, where we have to send in aircraft carriers and the use of, you know, cruise missiles and all the expensive technologies that we spent the last 50 years creating. And we think about this, that it allows us to be much more agile, much more flexible. I mean, here's another

• 18:32Speaker 02

  statistic that is kind of shocking. If you look at all the dollars the US military spends in military systems, you know, you take away the people and the infrastructure, you just talk about systems, over 50% of the US defense budget is spent on systems that are over 30 years old. Right? Wow. I mean, you know, we got a $900 billion budget, almost a trillion dollars, right? And you take about half of that and you apply that to systems, that's a lot of money to be keeping up with systems that were done by, you know, that my father or in some cases, my grandfather worked on, right? I mean, it's, I think it's time for this kind of new revolution

• 19:16Speaker 02

  to take place. And we think about the Defense Department and how we build systems and what does it mean to have technological and numeric superiority?

• 19:33Anthony Ha?

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• 20:00Rebecca Bellan?

  When we think about the startups and the technology players that will be trying to get DoD funding, as an investor as well, do you recommend that they kind of, is it time to focus fully on defense, right? Or do you kind of still build the dual use at the same time? Like Motorola was, I think, a defense company at the start.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. They did the radars, right?

• 20:21Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, yeah, they made the radars. And then you talk about World War II. I'm pretty sure all the companies that were in Detroit making cars started building tanks. They switched at some point. I don't think we're quite there yet, but I don't know. How do you recommend that companies that have the dual use case think about where they should be focusing their, at times, limited funds and resources?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things I'd like to recommend to startups who are interested in working with things like defense tech is the US government needs, both in defense as well as in its other capabilities like intelligence, right? Requires a level of sophistication that exists to solve a problem they have today. Then in many cases, the commercial world will have that same problem tomorrow. It is how we went from doing satellite imagery that was clearly in the realm of governments to being used every single day to look at what house to buy on Google Earth or Google Maps.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  The advantage that the US government has isn't its money. I mean, yes, you can get money from the US government, but it's probably easier to get money from a venture capitalist than the government, right? Lot less paperwork, lot less headaches, right? You can go down Silicon Valley and pitch 20 venture capitalists in a day, whereas, good luck in getting your forms in over the next year, that's hundreds of pages of competition. But... The advantage the government has is its problems. You solve a big data problem in government, you probably solve a big data problem in the commercial world. You think of companies like Oracle. Larry's first project was for the intelligence community on Project Oracle.

• 22:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Right? You know, SpaceX, you know, first missions were US government funded missions, you know? Even even Tesla, the cars, right? Had, you know, a large grant from the energy department. Because they're trying to solve these kind of problems at scale.

• 22:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Okay, so like, try to cut your teeth with government, but like, you know, make your bread in the commercial space?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and and look, government contracts are big, right? And they're larger if you win them.

• 22:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  And they will give you development dollars as you down the path.

• 22:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, if you get the contract, right? If you get that, we're moving our hands in the same way, but the listener can't see.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  They get you the hands.

• 22:49Rebecca Bellan?

  The ongoing funds, rather than just like, you know, a little bit of an investment to see what you can do.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 22:54Rebecca Bellan?

  Okay. Speaking of startups and how they can stay competitive, what are your predictions for 2025 in terms of what are going to be the hot frontier tech dual use, et cetera, sectors? You mentioned robotics earlier.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so let's kind of go through their kind of range, their kind of things that we're seeing.

• 23:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Maybe top three, let's see top three, where do you think the money's going?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  So first of all, lots of money is going already to large language models, right? So we all know about AI, but this idea of large language models being used in the physical world.

• 23:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Is it still a large language model then?

• 23:28Speaker 02

  It's still large language models because we basically take a description of the world, turn it into its own symbolic language, and then we process that in a way for the LIMs to understand.

• 23:41Rebecca Bellan?

  So that you can get that kind of generalized robotic intelligence.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Right. It's coming out of a new language. In fact, you're kind of coming up with a new language of expression of the physical world that a LIM can process. I think that's going to be a big area.

• 23:54Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  So lots of people working on that, these kind of early startups worth a billion dollars or more already. Right, beginning of work.

• 24:04Rebecca Bellan?

  Already, it's wild evaluations.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  It's kind of crazy, but but we're going to see a lot of that. I think we're beginning to see robotic startups being taken very seriously. I mean, in the past, it was like, great, you can build a robotic startup, but all the manufacturing lines are in China.

• 24:22Rebecca Bellan?

  Yes.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  But today, because we're trying to de-risk and either onshore or French shore, we have a problem. We have a labor shortage. We don't have enough skilled labor, uh, just to throw people onto the assembly lines and start building things. So you have to use automation. We're going to have to figure out how to build an order of magnitude more goods with an order of magnitude less people.

• 24:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, Japan's been really good at this, that they're so good at this because they have that population problem. And so you're seeing a lot of robotics take over over there.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  So you're going to see robotics in Japan, you're going to see robotics in Europe, and you're going to see robotics in the US, which makes the opportunity set for robotic startups, particularly those who leverage those large language models, who understand the physical world. You blend those two together and you have a whole new capability, you know? Elon pushes the concept of these giga factories. Great, giga factories have a place in the world, but I'm looking for small factories, the size of factories that can be fit into half a Walmart or Target.

• 25:29Rebecca Bellan?

  I feel like we've tried that a little bit. I feel like there have been a couple of startups that have tried this and fallen.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  There are a few of them.

• 25:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, but there's a few that have like tried this kind of like micro factory, hyper local, super quick, you know, make it off the production line, it's there with the customer, but then they just like haven't worked out.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Two reasons. Sometimes you're on the bleeding edge versus the leading edge. So if you tried it a couple of years ago versus today, the man function is I got it onshore. A few years ago, that may not have been the case.

• 25:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Second, the tools are much better. So with the tools and manufacturing being better and more efficient, particularly with new materials, the unit costs can become competitive. And so you got to do both. You have the unit cost has to be down, you have to be agile, and you have to solve a demand function, right? Of what it is that needs to be produced in the US. Defense tech is pretty good because, you know, we. We do not want to be building our next generation cameras in China.

• 26:23Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Right? So in some respects, which goes back again to our earlier discussion around defense tech. That's, you know, perhaps a really good place to start about teaming up with the US government for these manufacturing capabilities and the US government will de-risk it for you, right? They have the Office of Strategic Capital from the Department of Defense, whose job it is to provide capital at a lower cost and incentivize funds and companies to produce things here in the US that are critical to the United States. Now, the other areas that I think that could be kind of transformative this year to think about is this whole area around digital twinning, right?

• 27:03Rebecca Bellan?

  I mean, we've been talking about it for a while, but now it feels like, you know, with world models, it seems like now is the time we're actually gonna see some progress. I mean, I don't know if you've been in the VR of certain digital twins and you're like, yeah, I guess this is fine.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, in full disclosure, I'm on the board of Niantic. So, you know, I see Pokemon everywhere when I put on my goggles. But I think digital twinning is gonna be really, really important because you can't really apply AI in an aggressive way to try things out a billion times before you build it, unless you have a model of it. LIM solve a certain class of problems, but you still have to verify what it comes up with. Is it, is it gonna actually work? And using more traditional AI methodologies, you need those digital twins. So there's gonna be a big push on digital twin everything.

• 27:54Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  That includes things like biology. Can we do a digital twin of a, of a cell? Can we do a predictive model on energy consumption based on devices that we're building? Those models will define whether a company produces a product that really is competitive or not in the near future.

• 28:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Those are kind of like my big bets that I would be making.

• 28:16Rebecca Bellan?

  Cool. Yeah, good to know. And then is there any advice for startups that want to pitch you that are? Interested that have startups in these realms that you speak of.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  So whether it's myself or any other venture capitalist, right? There are a couple of things I tell all entrepreneurs to do. The first thing is don't worry about getting a lot of no's. Because the best ideas tend to have been turned down many times before they actually got the funding. I mean, think about it, I was in the, I remember I was much younger. I was sitting in Kleiner Perkins office, I was a, I had my video game company that Kleiner Perkins had backed. And they said, hey, we got this guy, he's going to come in and pitch this idea of having a virtual bookstore.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Anyway, so what a dumb idea. Like, books have no margin. You mean, what do you mean? You're going to buy books across the mail? You don't get to browse it and have a cup of coffee? How are you going to compete with the big box bookstores? And this, you know, crazy young guy named Jeff Bezos was sitting in and saying that he was going to change the world by having the world's biggest bookstore in the warehouse. The other thing I tell entrepreneurs is think big and think bold. Don't try to pitch a pitch that what you think the VCs want to hear. Pitch the pitch of what you want to build. And find the venture capitalist who shares that vision, who wants to build it with you.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Versus just trying to get money at a high price. You know, it's just like, no, well, you know, I got funded. The art is not to be funded. The art is to be funded by somebody who shares your vision to build something that's great. And the last point I'm going to make, which is a piece of advice I got when I was a young entrepreneur. I was fortunate, I didn't know it at the time, I was 26. I got my company funded by Kleiner Perkins and Excel. I had these two young partners, Fino de Coleslaw. That was Jim Breyer's first deal, right? That he ever did out of Excel. And I asked Vinod, I said, what are you looking for when you make an investment? You know, I was a game company and the guys who were trying to get money also were, you know,

• 30:26Speaker 02

  people who were doing life extension and cancer drugs and, you know, I'm a video game company. They chose to invest in me and not in those other companies. But note says something that was really important to me. He goes, look, at the end of the day, we got to believe entrepreneurs will be successful, otherwise we wouldn't give them any money in the first place. But there's nothing worse than actually investing in the successful company that many years post-investment, you look back and nobody really cared. It didn't make a difference in the world. It didn't move the needle.

• 30:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  So this is the big and bold. The last part is it's got to make a difference, otherwise do something else. If you just want to make money, there's plenty of easier ways to make money than to start a company. But if you're going to put your life and soul behind building something, a good portion of your life and not all of it, make it count.

• 31:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, that's great advice. I love that. Make it count. Okay, well, we're about out of time. Is there anywhere that our listeners can connect with you online?

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Yes, they can always connect to me either on my Facebook account, you know, you just go off and look for Gilman Louie or send an email to [email protected] and you'll find us.

• 31:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Amazing, thank you. Thanks so much for joining us on the show. Really enjoyed this chat. To our listeners, you can find me, I'm on Blue Sky, I'm on Threads, I'm on X, and you can find Equity at EquityPod. Talk to you all Friday.

• 31:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.