📝 VC Memos (Week of May 22 - May 28)

"The issue of cross-border payments is often convoluted, with the estimated value of these transactions in India alone reaching an astonishing US$150 trillion, and experiencing continued growth. On top of this, according to the World Bank, India is on track to become the world’s 5th biggest economy, with millions of developers, small businesses, and contracted employees joining the Indian workforce."

"3.5 billion people in the world do not have access to reliable electricity, and over $1T in renewable energy investments are needed in emerging markets in the next decade. Achieving this coverage can only happen if we can greenlight a large number of small projects across many geographies, “leapfrogging” the grid to create a decentralized network of energy resources."

"Procurement departments… tend to be unloved. Typically tacked-on to the finance team, procurement teams can be viewed by others as penny-pinchers and process-jockeys focused on risk mitigation, not innovation… 90%+ of them are stuck using the Microsoft suite. Microsoft is great for many things, but it’s not great for procurement."

“At Poolside’s full potential, an artist could dream up a video game, a doctor a specific app for a patient, a genomics researcher a data pipeline for advanced analysis, an educator a tailored product for a child’s specific learning style, and then those visions can be made into reality — 1,000+ times faster than is possible today.”

“Claude can take a limited amount of the highest-quality human feedback, create synthetic data modeled off this feedback, and train itself on this data. This allows Anthropic to provide increased transparency and steerability while still maintaining high degrees of natural language fluency. ”