Last week, at our first StrictlyVC evening of the 12 months, outstanding AI investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo joined us in San Francisco to speak about how they give thought to AI investing in a world where deals were getting bid up feverishly two months ago, and where reportedly, some startup teams at the moment are trying to sell due to the prices involved with constructing their software.

We talked about a few of their deals, whether valuations have gotten wildly ahead of themselves, and in addition how the 2 — who cohost a well-liked AI podcast together —  operate.

Gil, for instance, has reportedly raised greater than $2 billion from investors within the last couple of years, money that he’s investing almost single-handedly. On the event, he declined to verify that quantity but said that he at all times pulls in support of some kind. For instance, after a former chief of staff founded his own company, Gil hired a few “highly technical” hired hands to assist him understand a number of the latest tech bubbling up. One in all these is Shreyan Jain, a former software engineer at Ramp who has two computer science degrees from MIT,  and who has “built an embedding playground” with one other engineer in Gil’s orbit so that they can “mainly swap out and in any underlying vector [database] in any embedding framework, so we are able to mess around with different tools,” said Gil.

Gil — who also pours his own capital into deals despite raising a lot from outsiders — also underscored the importance of making clear guidelines with one’s own investors to get ahead of perceived conflicts of interest. “If you’ve got that clarity of the way you’re going to act, it makes an enormous difference. It removes ambiguity, it removes uncertainty, it removes the [bad] feelings,” he said.

Guo is taking a more traditional approach together with her year-old firm, Conviction. Calling it a “baby little $100 million fund” compared with Gil’s billions of assets under management, Guo says she has already brought aboard two other investors, a talent partner, and an operations person. She also said she has enough skin in the sport that she doesn’t take frivolously any decisions within the “relatively concentrated portfolio” that her team is constructing. “I’m a big investor in my very own fund,” she said. “Like, I really need the businesses to work over time.”

If you desire to hear more specifics about their respective approaches to funding deals (they’ve each invested in Harvey and Mistral, amongst other firms); how they protect themselves in case they fund AI tech that’s later abused; what they see as the largest questions because it pertains to today’s foundation models like GPT-4, and why Gils is concerned with “French values,” do try our conversation.

For what it’s price, Gil says during this discussion that he has probably invested probably the most over time within the defense tech company Anduril, whose cofounder Trae Stephens, is speaking at our StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles on February 29.

If you desire to check that one out in person, you’ll be able to learn more here. Our San Francisco event sold out (and was very fun). We expect this next one to sell out, too, so don’t wait too long for those who’d like to return.