33: Ash Fontana, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners

“Data is the new oil” has become one of the most common catch phrases in popular media. It makes sense right? Wrong. At least according to Ash Fontana, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners and one of the most nuanced thinkers on AI today.  Ash believes we are squarely in the fourth era of computing, the intelligence era. In this era, data aggregation is less interesting than matching data sets to tactical problems. And with good reason. The intelligence era is an inflection point; traditional I.T. infrastructure will change to enable the development of self-learning software and previously data-starved markets — from agriculture to sales — will benefit from the information generated by self-learning software.  Ash thinks about AI companies with an incredibly human centric approach; when he evaluates data sets and companies, he asks how much human activity can the company free up if it works at scale.  In this episode, we chatted all things AI with Ash. We talked about a number of topics; some of my favorite included: (1) the utility of data for AI first companies, (2) why data strategy is fundamentally different for an AI driven company vs. a normal software company, (3) why Ash is bearish on SaaS and (4) how do you compete with Google, Amazon and Facebook in a data driven world. It was a pleasure to have Ash on the show to get his thoughts on the future of AI. His perspective was incredibly thoughtful and I personally learned an incredible amount from him in this conversation.