Crazy Until It's Not: Startups, Venture Capital & Big Ideas: Recent Episodes
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Digital JPEGs selling for millions of dollars; machines that turn thin air into food; people buying a MacDonalds with Bitcoin; an AI program that can replace illustrators; psychedelics being prescribed by doctors. What do these ideas have in common? They were all completely crazy notions until, one day, before most people had even heard of them, they were part of our world. So what’s next?“Crazy until it’s not” is a podcast by firstminute capital where we talk with tech visionaries about their predictions for the future — ideas that may seem crazy today but could be part of daily life tomorrow.We ask each guest to come onto the show with one big, bold and non-obvious vision for the next five years and a jumping-off point for debate about how the world will be tomorrow.Previous guests on the firstminute capital podcast include Tony Blair, David Bonderman, Roelof Boetha, Max & Nellie Levchin, Jeff Immelt, Rio Ferdinand, Sir Hermann Hauser, Nico Rosberg and Niklas Zennstrom.
🔗 Humans, Connected: The Age of the Exocortex
🌐 Imagine a world where you’re seamlessly connected to the internet, not through screens and keyboards, but directly through your brain.
Our minds are already a marvel of evolution, with three layers:
- Reptilian Brain: The ancient core responsible for keeping us alive by regulating basic functions like breathing.
- Mammalian (Limbic) Brain: The “monkey brain,” managing emotions like fear and excitement.
- Neocortex: Our human layer, dedicated to logic, reason, and creativity.
✨ Enter the Exocortex—a revolutionary fourth layer. Soon, we’ll be able to read and write information directly to our brains, allowing seamless integration with the internet. 🧠
Imagine this: You’re able to remember scenes from a movie you've never seen before because your Exocortex looked it up and now it feels as real as any personal memory.
🎥 Your imagination becomes your reality.
📚 Forgot what you read in a book? Your Exocortex retrieves it in an instant.
🌍 Curious about global events? The Exocortex brings you firsthand insights as if you were there.
The boundaries between “you” and the world’s knowledge will blur. The Exocortex won’t just connect us to the internet; it will be the internet.
The future isn’t just at our fingertips—it’s in our minds.
🔌 Are you ready for the Exocortex era?
Exocortex #FutureOfHumanity #NeuralInterface #Neurotech #Innovation #DigitalTransformation
DNA is an alien programming language - that can be learned
That's the mind blowing idea of Stef van Grieken, the founder of Cradle, which is unlocking the keys to human biology.
What does he mean here?
Well, DNA was not designed like most languages, but it evolved, and so it's hard to understand and harder to engineer.
But what if, similarly to how we have learned natural language, we might be able to engineer organic chemistry?
That's exciting because most of the things around us are biology, including ourselves.
So if we could tweak that or engineer that then that could open up a really exciting future. Imagine the possibilities if we could engineer life itself to solve global challenges, from health to sustainability!
In the global AI race, product will matter more than tech.
That's the prediction from Mehdi Ghissassi, the Head of Product & Deepmind
Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discover more about why it's the builders who bring AI tech to life that will conqueror the world.
In the future, buildings will be grown not built
That's the prediction from Tim Fu, the Generative AI architect and founder of Studio Tim Fu.
We're already well on our way, with advances in synthetic biology.
But there is so much further to go. Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discovery the future of biology.
In the future we will be able to program biology.
That's the prediction from Dr Mark Kotter, the founder of three synth bio companies bit.bio, clock.bio and Meatable.
We're already well on our way, with the ability to perform feats like turning bacteria into lightbulbs.
But there is so much further to go. Check out the latest episode of "Crazy Until It's Not" to discovery the future of biology.
Welcome to another episode where we plunge into the world of artificial intelligence and its rapidly growing influence on the media landscape. This podcast explores the revolutionary assertion that all media - yes, you heard that right, ALL media - will soon be AI-generated or AI-assisted.
Our journey begins with a comprehensive overview of current trends in AI technologies and how they are disrupting traditional media production. We unravel the inner workings of AI applications in news reporting, content creation, music, video production, and even the film industry.
We are joined by esteemed guests Nina Schick who shares her unique insights and predictions for this new media frontier. She paints a vivid picture of a not-so-distant future where AI doesn't just assist but actively shapes the stories we consume daily.
We also delve into the ethical considerations and potential implications of such an AI-dominated media world. From the risk of deepfakes and misinformation to the possible loss of human touch in our narratives, this podcast will leave you questioning what the role of humans in future media creation will be.
Get ready for a thought-provoking journey into the future of media. This is a must-listen for anyone interested in the confluence of artificial intelligence, media, and the future of human creativity.
Prepare to be amazed and perhaps, a little unsettled. Tune in now!
What’s next in Generative AI? Could it be LLM-powered implants in our skulls directing us everywhere?
That’s something that Julien Simon from Hugging Face (a platform with over 120k open-source machine learning models) expects to see in his lifetime.
“A lot of tech innovation is just reading science fiction books and just inventing stuff that makes it happen…” he says.
One sci-fi innovation that has not happened yet is the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy translating all languages in real-time.
“We might be getting close to that… the next step is a skull or each implant that gives you access to the all-seeing and all-knowing chatbot."
“I can just whisper ‘Is there a good pizza place 5 minutes from here?’ and I can hear it in my head: ‘oh yeah, take a left and then a right’”.
Would you like this future?
Also on a show a discussion on the difference between "useful stuff” and “fancy stuff” when it comes to Generative AI and how we should leave the big tech companies to it when competing to build the largest models.
Society needs to brace itself.
Tens of millions of people around the world work in call centres - but the latest advances in Generative AI and synthetic voice are set to make around 🤯🤯 🤯 80% of their jobs redundant 🤯 🤯 🤯 .
That's according to Nikola Mrkšić, the founder of PolyAI, a machine learning platform that buildings chatbots or voice-based agents for call centres.
In this episode of Crazy Until It's Not, we talk about the story behind PlolyAI and Nikola himself. And we also talk about what it means for society if so many jobs are getting automated.
**Welcome back to Crazy Until It's Not, a podcast about big ideas and the amazing people behind them.
Every episode we bring on a new guest who has a prediction for the future, which on the face of it, sounds a little bit crazy.
I'm your host, Michael Stothard, an early-stage tech investor at firstminute capital.
And today I'm joined by Jonas Andrulis, the Founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha, the generative A.I. Company from Heidelberg, which has built a generative A.I. model that is going up against the likes of Open AI.
Listen to this episode if you want to know about:
- How generative AI is changing the world.
- Can Europe compete?
- The fractal nature of time
- How creativity will be done by machines.**
We are going to see 10 Tesla-sized companies springing up in the coming years tacking big issues in climate. That’s 10 new companies with a market cap of over $520bn 🏢💪🏻♻️
That’s the big idea of David Helgason, the founder of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s two largest game engine companies, who is now a prominent climate investor through his fund Foobar.
David spoke to us last autumn about the advancements he’s seeing in sustainability and his journey as a founder and investor. David Helgason is the Founder of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s two largest game engine companies.
In the future, viruses will no longer cause disease. 🦠😷
That’s the big prediction of BaseImmune’s Ariane Gomes, who says that in the future vaccines will be so good that viruses and other pathogens will not make people sick.
We spoke with Ariane last autumn about her background as a PhD in Clinical Medicine from Oxford focused on immunology and vaccine development with 11 years of experience in basic and translational medical research. She is the co-founder of Baseimmune, a company specialising in antigen discovery for vaccine development.
Listen to the full episode for more about Ariane, BaseImmune and the future of vaccine development.
Are you reading this on your smartphone?
Nothing’s CEO and co-founder Carl Pei’s ‘crazy’ prediction for the future is that nothing will displace the smartphone. Last fall at an FF event, we discussed the trend-driven nature of tech where fads come and go as Carl used VR, AR and drones as examples. But he predicts that 10 years from now, we’ll still be scrolling on our smartphones.
In 20 years, he sees technology becoming more seamless and fading into our everyday lives. This is also his mission for Nothing: “crafting intuitive, flawlessly connected products that improve our lives without getting in the way”.
In the future, technology will be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, emulating that feeling of …nothing.
Are AI and automation going to lead to mass unemployment?
We spoke to King’s Riccardo Zacconi about his ‘crazy’ prediction for the future, and he said that we are going to have the opposite problem.
He believes that big problem in the near future is that, with an ageing population, we are not going to have enough workers.
He believes unemployment rates will effectively be at zero for many areas as demographic make it hard to find enough young people to do certain jobs.
Do you agree?
Riccardo co-founded King in March 2003 and was its CEO from the start, overseeing the company's rapid growth in the global mobile gaming sector to over 500 million monthly players, the company's IPO on NYSE and its $6bn sale to Activision Blizzard in 2016.
A glass which is impossible to drink from, sustainable diapers and an email paywalls. Here are just some of the business ideas going through the head of Jim McKelvey, one of the most extraordinary entrepenurs we know.
Jim was a cofounder and now board member of Block (the $50bn fintech formerly known as Square) also is also chairman of the St. Louis Federal Reserve and founder of Invisibly, a startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Science is making MOOOOOOOves to eliminate cow farming!
At the FF event in Scotland last autumn, we spoke with Dan Widmaier the CEO and co-founder of Bolt Threads about his ‘crazy’ idea for the future.
Dan originally trained as a scientist at UCSF where he holds a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With that degree, he went on to create Bolt Threads, a sustainable material solutions company. He and his co-founder, David Breslauer, grew Bolt Threads from a couple of scientists and a box full of live spiders to a category-leading biomaterials platform company that has commercialised two materials, Mylo™ and b-silk™, with greater than $1B in addressable market each.
From spiders to cows, Dan’s crazy idea for the future is that we will no longer be farming cows in 20 years. Due to advancements in agriculture and science such as the work Bolt Threads is doing, the cost of cow by-products such as leather, meat and dairy will become more expensive than their vegan counterparts making the sustainable options more popular.
In the future, there will be no private cars in cities. That’s according to Bolt’s CEO and Founder Markus Villig.
Many European cities have already passed legislation to reduce traffic — from London’s congestion charges to Paris making every first Sunday of the month car-free.
The move to ban all private car use would provide major environmental and social benefits from a reduction in noise and environmental pollution to a rise in safety.
Markus hopes bolt will help make this change happen. He founded Bolt in 2013 as a competitor to Uber. Bolt has since become the first European mobility super-app operating in over 45 countries with over 100 million users.
Currently, 75% of the US and 62% of the UK drive to work*.
Now imagine if that commute looked more like a relaxing session in a first-class airport lounge than a dull and stressful experience in a cramped seat. 🚗🧘
As the automotive industry and EV technology advances, the thought of self-driving cars becomes more of a reality and less of an abstract futuristic concept. CEO and co-founder of Aurora, Chris Urmson believes self-driving vehicles will displace driving and vehicles as we know them will be used solely for pleasure. During our chat in Scotland at one of FF’s events, Chris draws a parallel between the shift from horse transport to motor vehicles to the shift he sees unfolding.
Aurora is an American self-driving vehicle technology company. Its flagship product, the Aurora Driver, is a platform that brings together software, hardware, and data services, to operate passenger vehicles autonomously, light commercial vehicles, and heavy-duty trucks. Aurora is partnered with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem including Toyota, Uber, Volvo, FedEx, and PACCAR.
according to a 2022 Statista report* https://www.statista.com/chart/25129/gcs-how-the-world-commutes/**
While on a video call, if you’re boss asked you to open a link, would you do it? If the answer is yes, maybe you should think again as it could be a cyberattack! 🏼🕵🏻♀️
We spoke with cybersecurity software Darktrace’s CEO, Poppy Gustafsson, at an FF event last year about her predictions that cyberattacks will use deep fakes in live videos. The craziest thing is, these attacks will be happening in the near future as they are already happening over audio.
She also discusses the fact that it’s difficult to actually predict the future of technology and that’s one of the things she loves about working in the industry and at Darktrace. Under her leadership, the company has experienced significant growth and global expansion and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021. She was named CEO of the Year at the 2021 Digital Masters Awards and Tech CEO of the Year at the UK Tech Awards 2021 so if anyone can help keep us safe against these threats, it’s Poppy!
Is cash really king? 💳 >💵
Physical coins have been around for 28 centuries. But that is all coming to an end in the next decades. During a chat at FF’s event in autumn, Cyril Chiche predicted that cash will no longer exist in the next few decades. He has seen this trend of moving away from cash for digital alternatives accelerated by Covid.
Cyril is CEO and co-founder of Lydia, a Paris-based fast-growing mobile financial services platform with over 4 Million users and a 30% market share among French Millennials, who use its brand as a verb.
Co-founded by Antoine Porte and Cyril Chiche, Lydia launched in 2013. It is one of the most successful French B2C fintech having raised over $160 million in funding from investors such as Tencent, XAnge, New Alpha, Groupe Duval, and Founders Future. He has seen this trend of moving away from cash for digital alternatives accelerated by Covid.
From cashless to contactless, what’s next?
As we wrap up 2022, we’ve looked back at firstminute capital’s first podcast “My firstminute” from 2020 and 2021.
My firstminute talked to some of the world’s top investors, founders and thought-leaders about the first minutes of their careers, some of the battles they’ve overcome and their advice on navigating the world today. When discussing ‘the world today’, many guests addressed the effects of Covid-19 as this series was recorded in the height of the pandemic. Each episode concludes with a Q&A with fellow entrepreneurs.
Today’s episode (originally recorded in March 2021) features Sequoia investor extraordinaire, Roelof Botha, known for his investments in Instagram, YouTube, MongoDB, Unity, Eventbrite, Square, 23andMe, Bird, Evernote, BridgeBio and many more; alongside Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, and two-time entrepreneur, Ben Lovett.
They discuss how entrepreneurship and creativity are intrinsically linked to one another and the role that luck and humility played in their careers.
Listen to the advice that Roelof and Ben give to budding entrepreneurs alongside how he tests for authenticity in founders and how to spot a good opportunity.
On this week’s “Crazy Until It’s Not”, Lubomila Jordanova discusses her ‘crazy’ prediction that every product and service will have a real cost.
What does she mean by real cost?
At the moment, the price of products and services do not take into account their wider environmental and social impact. Ludomila gives the example of a t-shirt. Traditionally, elements which contribute to the final value of the garment include materials, production, transportation and distribution (to name a few). But we also need to consider ethical elements such as if the cotton fields are using environmentally friendly substances or the factory’s conditions for the workers.
Jordanova co-founded Plan A to do just that: help businesses achieve net-zero with their SaaS platform for carbon accounting, decarbonisation and ESG reporting. All in the hopes of helping these brands identify these ‘real’ costs.
In this episode, Lubomila talks about challenges around pricing environmental costs and ESG reporting, her advice for starting a new venture in the climate tech sector and why ESG is important from a financial perspective.
Who wants to add Dr. to their names? Soon, we’ll become our own physicians. This is the CEO and founder of Levels, Josh Clemente’s crazy prediction.
Clemente discusses his health battles and experiments he conducted while working at Space X. These all led to the founding of Levels, a monitor and service which tracks your metabolic health.
So, how will we become our own physicians?
Thanks to innovations in the health sector, we are able to access our personal health data in real-time more than ever. Although this is not necessarily new, we also now have the tools to interpret the data and control our health. We specifically discuss the significance of glucose to our metabolic health and the four key stressors that humans struggle with in our day-to-day lives. We’ll let you in on the secret, they’re stress control, nutrition management, exercise and sleep quality.
Josh also doesn’t separate mental health from physical health as he explains these are all one system working together for our overall Health.
Health is wealth and we’re investing in ourselves and our newfound control! 💸
Let us know what you think of this idea and this podcast at michael@firstminute.capital
Quantum computers will solve all of chemistry (and a large part of physics).
That's the latest big prediction on the "Crazy Until It's Not" podcast, this time by Steve Brierley, the founder and CEO of the quantum computing startup Riverlane.
What does Steve really mean though by "solving" chemistry?
The idea, says Steve, is that we will soon be able to model on a quantum computer what happens on the scale of molecules and atoms. This means we will be able to predict how they will interact on a computer, rather than having to do tests in the lab.
This has huge implications for science. Imagine what we could do if whole fields of science could be vastly speeded up by modelling them digitally. Imagine what we could create in areas such as new materials, superconductors and batteries.
At the moment, with conventional computing, modelling chemical interactions is hugely complex and computers are not powerful enough to do it on a large scale (i.e it would take a computer vastly bigger than the world to model these equasions)
But with the rise of quantum computing, the microscopic interactions of molecules and atoms obeying the laws of quantum mechanics are becoming possible to model.
How will quantum computing solve "much of physics"?
Well, much of the physical world follows Newtonian laws (e.g how ball moves around a football pitch).
But, Steve says, there are exciting areas such as cosmology where quantum computers could be helpful, for example helping us understand black holes.
Who is Steve? Steve founded Riverlane, which is building the Operating System for error corrected quantum computers, in 2016, because of his belief that fault-tolerant quantum computers will be capable of accelerating a significant era of human progress and could be built far sooner than previously imaginable.
Today, Riverlane is well on its way to achieving that mission. Steve has worked in quantum for 20 years and is an expert advisor to the UK government. He holds a PhD in quantum information and has spent almost a decade in the intelligence community as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, leading major research projects in quantum computing.
Social media will be decentralised.
That is the big bold prediction of Esteban Ordano, the co-founder of Decentraland.
How come? Well, the answer is simple: because a decentralised social media would be much better.
Find out why exactly on this podcast. Let us know what you think of this idea at michael@firstminute.capital
Soon kids as young as two-years-old will be reading.
That is the big bold prediction of Mike Maples, the co-founder and partner at Floodgate (and the host of the excellent Starting Greatness podcast).
How? Well, education apps have made it possible to ultra-accelerate the learning process. It's possible to do all the core bits of learning (reading, writing and arithmetic) in just a few hours a day.
This means that kids as young as 2 years old can be taught to read. It also means that older children can do all their core learning in just a few hours, and then spend the rest of the school day doing something more exciting (e.g building drones!)
So what is stopping this from happening? What is really standing in the way of a better education system for the whole of K–12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) is actually bureaucracy and old ways of thinking.
For schools and teachers, they are incentivised to keep teaching in the old style, focusing on keeping everyone the same and learning at the same level. They don't want apps that adjust to every kid's pace.
That's just part of what I discuss with Mike on this podcast. Let us know what you think of this idea and this podcast at michael@firstminute.capital
In a few years' time, there will be more people making a living playing video games than making cars.
So more people making money from just PLAYING video games they enjoy than in making the 80m cars that are made every year.
That sounds crazy!
That at any rate is the big bold prediction of Robby Yung, the CEO of Animoca Brands, one of the leading blockchain gaming companies.
He is talking about the mega move out there from play-to-play gaming (where you pay money for a game and then you just play it) to play-to-earn gaming (where you are in some way rewarded financially for playing).
After listening to the podcast though, you might not think it's so crazy after all!