Loup Ventures Podcast: Recent Episodes
Loup Ventures
We publish research on frontier technology, the themes driving it, and the companies making it a reality. This podcast includes audio versions of select research notes.
Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded VidGrid. Top 3...
Dr. Kevin Luhman is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University and a renowned astronomer for having discovered both the third closest stellar system, now called Luhman 16, and the coldest brown dwarf star ever found, which...
TheLlamaSir is a content creator on YouTube and Twitch. He has over 1.1M subscribers on YouTube and his videos have been viewed over 100M times. TheLlamaSir primarily creates gameplay and guide videos for Fortnite, but has also created content for...
Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded...
Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded...
We pride ourselves on contrarian curiosity. When that curiosity leads us to new conclusions, we change our minds. As part of that exploration, the areas that we find most interesting evolve over time. What was once frontier eventually becomes commonplace...
Brave early adopters are the hallmark of an innovation set to create immense human value. In this story, the innovation is cutting-edge technology for interfacing with the nervous system, and the brave early adopter is Ian Burkhart. Ian, a young man...
CNBC reported on Friday that Amazon is building a health and wellness team inside its Alexa division to work on making Alexa a better tool for healthcare. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan recently announced plans for a joint healthcare company focused on reducing...
The core insight of science fiction is that all technologies live on a spectrum of good and evil, useful and harmful, and our perception of their place on that spectrum vacillates over time. It’s a truth that we've long known innately but are now being forcefully reminded of in our real world.
Fortnite is a battle royale game, where 100 players parachute onto an island with the goal of being the last one standing at the end. A "storm" serves as a boundary that closes in at set intervals, shrinking the playable area and forcing players closer and closer together. Players begin with no equipment and must scavenge around the island looking for weapons and supplies to give them an advantage over the opposition.
We’re bullish on esports and committed to learning more about the space. The following note is an introductory piece that ‘shows our work’ as we get up to speed. Given the recent explosion in popularity of esports leagues, we wanted to...
After our first visit to Amazon Go, Amazon's automated retail store in Seattle, we're not surprised to hear the company has plans to open up to six more cashierless convenience stores later this year. The automated retail space is getting more and more crowded, but the Go store suggests that Amazon has the pole position.
We believe that automation will make customer service — delivering empathy — the most in-demand job in tech. Humans will need to take advantage of the three core capabilities that robots can't compete with: creativity, community, and empathy, and The Empathy Economy will arise as a result of job loss from automation.
Last week we wrote about simplicity as a driving force behind the world’s biggest technology offerings. We’re extending our thoughts on simplicity into a series that explores the necessity of simplicity in frontier technology. First, we’ll dive into AR.
Simplicity for AR in 2018 must start with a question: “What does AR do?” Not in the literal...
We’re investing in Enjoy as a counter-automation play on the future of retail. Enjoy enables empathic retail through a personalized product delivery and setup experience.
Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, about five times bigger in that space than Walmart and its Jet.com subsidiary. Yet despite Amazon’s deep online roots and dominance over Internet shopping, I believe it will buy Target in 2018.
Simplicity is underappreciated. In many things. But most obviously right now in our world of consumer technology. Simplicity is a requirement of mass adoption. Look at the iPhone, Google, Amazon, and Uber as examples: The iPhone never shipped with a manual...
Conclusion. Get ready for another $10 a month drag on your credit card. It’s a rebranded, all in one Apple video and music offering in 2-3 years. An Emerging Area of Investment. It’s no secret that original content will be an emerging...
Every VC says they only invest in great founders, but the majority of venture-backed businesses still end in relative failure. Does that mean we as VCs are just bad judges of founders or do we not know what great founders look like? This is a question we’ve obsessed over since we started Loup Ventures — trying to define what makes a great founder and how to test for it. It’s hard.
When Apple launched the iPhone SDK in March 2008, they correctly anticipated a gold rush for iOS developers selling apps on the new App Store. Another gold rush is about to begin with the debut of iOS 11 and ARKit.
Given...
Special thanks to David Kroger, Steve Van Sloun, and Austin Bohlig for their work on the Non-Tech AI Portfolio.
In ten years, every company will have to be an artificial intelligence company or they won’t be competitive. While traditional tech companies have been...
The sickness adoption hurdle. The timing of most tech adoption curves can be anticipated by a combination of cost and utility. The lower the cost, the higher the utility, the faster the adoption. We define mass adoption as 500m or...
If we had to sum up our investment approach in one word, it would be non-incremental. Venture capital is a power law game: the vast majority of venture returns come only from a few investments. We believe we have to...
It’s no secret that online retail is slowly killing offline retail. In Q4 2016, 8.3% of total US retail sales were online (about $103 billion), up from 5.1% just five years ago (about $53 billion). Offline sales were 91.7% of...
If artificial intelligence is the brains, then robots are the brawn in the future of work. Earlier this week, we attended the AUVSI XPOENTIAL trade show in Dallas, the largest global gathering of unmanned systems providers, robotic software developers, and industry...
This note was originally published on Business Insider.
Apple is the world’s largest company with a market cap of nearly $770 billion as of this writing. Tesla is one of the world’s largest automakers with a market cap of close to $55 billion...
Vibrant culture driven by shared values separates the best companies from the rest. Without clearly stated values, a “company” is just a temporary group of people, not a sustainable organization. Working together over the past 10 years, we’ve identified a set of four...
In an interview with Recode following Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his rationale for Facebook’s big bet on augmented reality:
“Think about how many of the things you use [that] don’t actually need to be physical. You want to play...
Media reports suggest Apple is aggressively pursuing the creation of a non-invasive blood glucose monitor. The most obvious device to leverage this monitor may seem to be the Apple Watch; however, as we wrote two weeks ago, we think that...
Typically, when we talk about the future of AR and VR, the first companies that come to mind are Apple, Google, Facebook, and Snapchat; however, Microsoft does not receive enough credit for the strong positioning it has already built.
As shown in...
This week we attended Automate, a robotics trade show in Chicago focused on manufacturing and fulfillment. As we explored the show floor, we saw a number of robots able to work next to humans for an affordable cost of $30-$40k each. Most vendors claimed less...
The Loup Ventures NCAA bracket contest isn’t as hotly contested as we thought it would be. We entered Bing’s AI bracket into our pool, and it’s just as busted as the others. In fact, Bing’s bracket will finish at the...
Google’s smartphone-powered VR platform, Daydream, represents the company’s most significant push to date in its effort to accelerate the adoption of VR. We’ve spent the last few weeks testing the platform with a Pixel phone and a Daydream View headset. Bottom line: Daydream isn’t there...
Apple Services Through 2022. We have written about the need for Apple to reinvent itself in the next decade through services and AR. The Services reinvention is already underway, accounting for 11.6% of revenue in 2016, and closer to 18%...
At this point, it might not even be that crazy to say it, but we think AirPods are going to be a bigger product for Apple than the Watch. After using AirPods for the past month, the Loup Ventures team...
The trend in computing towards more natural user interfaces is unmistakable. Graphical user interfaces have long been dominant, but machines driven by more intuitive inputs, like touch and voice, are now mainstream. Today, audio, motion, and even our thoughts, are the basis for the...
Apple’s AirPods are a step towards the future of computing. Starting with the move from the keyboard and mouse to the touchscreen, computing continues to move towards more intuitive user interfaces. Audio and motion capture are the basis for most innovative computer hardware today...
We recently hosted a panel of 8 college students from the University of Minnesota. The goal was to better understand how millennials think about social media, communications, video, VR, AR, the selfie generation, the future of work, and privacy. Here’s a...
As we watched the run up in SNAP shares since its IPO last week, we wondered how much of the move was based on potential revenue growth of more than 2x in 2017 or investors buying in to Snap’s long...
We think customer feedback is a critical (but too often overlooked) component of understanding where technology stands today and where it’s headed in the future. Our Feedback Loup series provides real customer feedback on the technologies shaping our future. Snap’s IPO is a perfect opportunity...
Snap priced its IPO at $17 per share, implying a $23.6 billion market cap. To put the valuation in perspective, we think Snap could grow revenues by 100% to ~$800 million in 2017 and believe some buy side investors think...
I always wanted to cover Tesla, but as an internet analyst, the stock fell outside of my coverage space. Despite this, I continued to study the company and ultimately invested because I believe that Tesla is not a car company, but...
While it’s still early, we think that VR gamers are already spending a significant amount on software. Based on an analysis of the top 100 VR-only Vive games on Steam, we estimate that about $35 million in software has been sold...
As digital assistants continue to improve, more and more users are integrating them into their daily routines. In our Robot Fear Index, we found that 43% of Americans had used a digital assistant in the last three months. But we believe...
Loup Ventures and Tim Cook share at least one thing in common. We both agree that AR will transform how humans interact with each other, removing the clumsy touchscreen, replacing the smartphone, and most importantly, expanding the utility of computing...
Education is shaping up to be one of the biggest under-the-radar opportunities in VR. We talked about consumer education related to VR in our VR Excitement Index. Education ranked second in terms of consumer interest in VR content in our...
Like many in the tech space, we believe robotics is changing the nature of work; however, public perception of robots is still a question mark. We developed our Robot Fear Index to measure and track the average consumer’s perception of robots. We...
As a new fund, we think it is important to share how we view the world beyond our long-term purpose to pursue The Future Perfect. Our Philosophy Series details our most important learnings from our time covering the Internet space...
From time to time, we’ll review new products that are relevant to our focus themes: virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and robotics. Our Feedback Loup series provides real customer feedback on the technologies shaping our future. We hope that our...
Human communications have done a complete reversal since the emergence of the smartphone. To prove it, let’s briefly review the history of how we communicate. We started communicating with hieroglyphics — pictures on cave walls. That allowed us to share experiences and knowledge...
Apple reports Dec-16 quarterly results on January 31st. We continue to be positive on the Apple story, given our thoughts on iPhone X and the features we expect to advance Apple’s lead in AR-enabled devices. We expect Apple’s Dec-16 quarter/Mar-17 guide...
Yesterday, we talked about the steps forward that Apple took with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. In short: we see Apple building a competitive advantage in augmented reality (AR). The dual lens camera is a precursor to greater...
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 10 years ago, he talked about how fortunate he had been to introduce three revolutionary products over the course of his career: Macintosh, iPod and iPhone. For good reason, Apple is known for major...
We’ve been talking a lot about digital assistants lately. They were a big theme at CES and a recent survey of ours showed that US consumers view digital assistants as the fourth most frustrating tech product, behind devices, poor Internet...
Alexa – you can’t live with her, you can’t live without her. Digital assistants are some of the most widely used and convenient technologies, but also some of the most frustrating tech we use. We can confirm that Alexa is “everywhere” at CES, now...
We are believers that every 10-15 years people need to reinvent themselves. It’s a natural progression. As the world changes, we need to change with it. We believe the world is about to undergo a major change in how we...
While we are big believers in virtual reality, along with many in the tech space, public perception of it is still a question mark. VR is far from mainstream with only a few million users globally today. We developed our...
The combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and augmented reality will fundamentally transform how we live — for the better. It will enable a world of infinite and limitless exploration. A world where humans find purpose in creativity, community, and experience. A world where humans can be more human. Loup Ventures is pursuing this absolutely fantastic future: The Future Perfect.