Angel and founder Jason Burke is building an invest tech platform business called All Stage. Jason discusses companies he has founded or invested in, including TBD Angels, Moolah Kicks, and Folia Health. Learn more about All Stage here.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Jason Burke
All Stage and the Problem it's Solving
"... Because unless you've done sales a lot, it's really hard to deal with rejection, especially for scientific founders..."
"... It's an example of some of the connective tissue between Showcase, the founder tool, and Community, the investor tool, to allow for that collaboration to happen..."
Moolah Kicks
Folia Health
Jason's Entrepreneurial Journey
"... I built the Tufts cross-country site, which today in 2023 doesn't seem groundbreaking, but at the time having a password on a site and detecting the IP address of who's using it and greeting them, that sort of stuff was absolute magic to do..."
"... which came first? Angel investing or starting a company?..."
"... Was it a personal relationship, the first investment that you made as an angel?..."
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Angel Investing Made Better”
Guest: Jason Burke
Sal Daher: Hey, this is Sal Daher. I'm delighted you found the Angel Invest Boston podcast, in which I interview people who know a lot about building technology startups. I now have a Substack about losing and keeping off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s. It's called Aging Fit. My goal is to build a community of people interested in keeping fit as they age. Look for Sal Daher on substack.com. Daher, by the way, is spelled Delta, Alpha, Hotel, Echo, Romeo. Enjoy the podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Jason Burke
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we have an angel and founder who is doing something really, really interesting. Welcome, Jason Burke.
Jason Burke: Sal, thanks for having me. I feel like I'm not really actually part of the angel investing scene unless I've been on your show. I've listened to quite a few friends who have been guests on the show, so I'm glad to join you.
Sal Daher: It's my honor to have you on. Jason is building a really interesting company. He is an angel investor. He is a technologist angel investor. The company he is building is doing something that's really fundamental for angel investing. It's called All Stage. What All Stage does is it has a platform that is really the one that's powering TBD Angels, for example. Jason is a co-founder of TBD Angels, which is a really interesting group. We've had Yael deCapo and David Chang on the podcast. This is a third person from TBD. Oh, not counting Ben Littauer. It's like everybody is carrying a TBD card. We don't know who they are. Are you a card-carrying member of TBD? Have you ever been a member of TBD? Anyway, Jason, tell us about All Stage and tell us the problem you're solving with All Stage.
All Stage and the Problem it's Solving
Jason Burke: Yes, absolutely. I can give a little bit of history as to how All Stage came to be. At the highest level, All Stage is an invest tech platform business that's helping bring collaboration to early-stage investing and fundraising. The reason why this is important, and I'll talk about what collaboration is, but the reason this is important is that investing in fundraising is being done by people.
Those people look to be able to interact with each other. Those human beings want to interact with each other, whether it's investors within an investment group or founders who are raising for their company, wanting to engage with investors throughout the process. The way that early-stage investing and fundraising has happened to date has been very transactional. A founder sends their DocSend or a PDF to an investor and says, "Do you have any questions? Are you in or out?"
That's not the way an investor looks at an opportunity. They want to create a relationship. We think about building product in a way that helps marry both the human beings alongside product and technology to streamline the process to enable that collaboration back and forth. That's what our products are doing. We have two products that are being used by investment groups, and that's called Community. You mentioned, Sal, TBD Angels is a customer of Community. The 300 or so members of TBD Angels are using this for all the activity that happens leading up to a decision to invest or not invest.
Deal submission, voting, feedback, questions and answers, all the things that have in the past been Excel documents flying back and forth over email, that doesn't scale, and it certainly doesn't scale with seeing deal flow of upwards of 800 deals across the history of TBD and 300 members. Our other product, Showcase is a founder-centric tool that founders are using to, one, share their deal information like they would by sending a deck over email, but also being able to engage with those investors and solicit feedback and be able to accept questions and answer those questions and ultimately collect commitments to invest in the company.
We see a lot of opportunity to create connective tissue between those two products. That's it at the high level. We think the timing is right for products like this. There is a real push from the market to be leveraging purpose-built products in early-stage investing and fundraising. There's a lot of supporting tools and technology in place that allow for the creation of these products. We're excited about what the future holds.
Sal Daher: You're describing Showcase. I think that is addressing a very, very important aspect of fundraising because a lot of founders who don't come from a sales background have a really hard time understanding the need to have a methodical approach to connecting with people and talking to them and nurturing those conversations and following up on those conversations and so forth. It's too tempting to be scattershot about your fundraising. You have to be methodical.
I think Showcase has potential to nudge the founder in the direction. I assume it has some kind of a CRM aspect to it, a customer relationship management aspect that allows follow-up, allows them to look at how many people they've contacted, and that kind of thing. Does it do that?
Jason Burke: Yes, that's exactly one of the key elements of it. To your point around founders need guardrails around how to approach the fundraising process. I won't name names here, but I've been a mentor at a handful of entrepreneurial programs at some of the Boston area business schools. Some of these are the best schools in the world, the best students coming out of these schools.
These new founders don't know how to interact with investors, whether it's in telling a concise and crisp story, figuring out how to talk differently to Sal versus to Jason, because they have different perspectives, they have different experience, and also using the right tool sets to interact with those investors. The reality is that investors are flooded with deal flow. Sal, your LinkedIn feed and your email inbox is probably loaded with cold outreaches or even warm inbounds. You really, as a founder, need to think about the other side, and how can you cut through the noise and really remove friction? It's not a sexy concept, but removing friction is key to the process.
"... Because unless you've done sales a lot, it's really hard to deal with rejection, especially for scientific founders..."
Sal Daher: What the founder is trying to do is try to gain mind share with the angels. Part of that process is having a sales process in place. My question is, to what extent does Showcase support a founder having a sales process? Leads, winning them down to prospects, nurturing those prospects, keeping in touch because one of the things is that somebody says, "No, I'm not ready to invest. I'm not going to write a check." Doesn't mean they're not going to write a check ever, it means at that moment.
You have to maintain, to do follow-ups, and that kind of thing. There is a very important aspect to having a methodical approach to your race, which is, it lifts the emotional burden of rejection. Because unless you've done sales a lot, it's really hard to deal with rejection, especially for scientific founders. A scientific founder is someone who is the pinnacle of her or his profession, has gotten cited a lot, is someone who is highly regarded. All of a sudden, some 65-year-old with just a college education is telling this PhD, sorry, you don't make the cut.
It's very galling. They're used to having all their peers approve them. This element of having a method relieves that emotional sense of context to that. Salespeople have a tick sheet precisely because of that because most of your conversations are going to be rejections.
Jason Burke: Yes, at the end of the day, a fundraise is a sell. What you're selling is an opportunity to invest in the company. Oftentimes, early-stage fundraising, it may just be an idea on the napkin, or it may be one customer and a prototype product. Really what you're selling is often yourself or the team, but it is a sales process.
To your point, there are steps within that sales process. What we think about when building, showcases both sides or both types of stakeholders. There's the founder who needs to sell the opportunity to invest in the company and why she is the best founder or that team is the best one to invest in, and why this market is really strong. There's also the investor, the audience that's listening to this.
Showcase helps guide these founders around, one, helping them put together that story and structure the data room and structure the opportunity to put an introductory video to give a human element to this, but also, making it really easy to solicit engagement from that investor. Allow then investors to ask a question about-- if that investor is thinking about when is this company going to enter the European market. Without Showcase, they're needing to pick up the phone or send an email. That's friction, and friction kills activity. If you can make it really easy to address what both sides need, then it becomes a product that is driving value to both sides.
Sal Daher: Increases engagement between angel and founder. A recent podcast that I had that I launched that was titled Number One Peeve of Angel Investors, and that number one peeve with David Kessler, shout out to David Kessler, my colleague at Walnut Ventures. That number one peeve is you invest, and then you never hear back from the founder. I know that Showcase is tied in. I see from TBD Angels that there are regular updates that come through.
There's an infrastructure for the founder to provide ongoing updates to the angels to maintain mind share because I'm always telling you got to maintain mind share because you're going to be coming back for more money. These are people giving you money. You have a responsibility to keep them up to date on what you're doing. They care about you. Very often, founders find that the burden just too high. If you have a low burden way of providing updates to investors, that also is very powerful, very helpful.
Jason Burke: Yes. David Kessler is also a part of TBD Angels, so further explaining that.
Sal Daher: That card-carrying member of TBD. Yes.
"... It's an example of some of the connective tissue between Showcase, the founder tool, and Community, the investor tool, to allow for that collaboration to happen..."
Jason Burke: Yes. If we walk up the ladder to 50,000 foot view of All Stage, it's really enabling these relationships across the human beings that are in the mix. If you think about, to your story around the founder, when a founder is fundraising, that opportunity might not be right for George, the investor, today, but you still want to keep George apprised to the progress of the business because maybe George can mention the opportunity to marry his colleague, or maybe George is interested once there's traction.
Founders need to appreciate that you can't be holding your hat out for money in a fundraise at the last second when you need money. You want to manage that relationship, you want to provide updates, and do this in a way that is easy for you as a founder and easy for George, the investor, to be able to receive these and provide feedback and ask questions. It's an example of some of the connective tissue between Showcase, the founder tool, and Community, the investor tool, to allow for that collaboration to happen.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Would you be interested in talking about some other startups you've invested in that you find particularly compelling?
Jason Burke: Yes, absolutely. I've been angel investing for maybe a little over 10 years. The reason I got into angel investing is, and this applies to most everyone with a job, is that when you're working for a particular company, you're probably thinking about that company's business 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week. Sometimes you get tunnel vision to what else is happening out in the ecosystem.
Here in the Boston area, there's amazing things happening, but sometimes you're blind to that. Angel investing exposes you to those amazing innovations that are happening, not only necessarily within Boston, but elsewhere as well. As a longtime startup guy myself, I also enjoy engaging with these founders. While I'm investing in these companies, I read these investor updates, and I scan through them and identify areas where I might be able to make connections for them or provide feedback on some of their strategy.
I started angel investing about 10 years ago and was using a lot of my own network or folks that were in the industry that I was spending 40 hours a week in, which was advertising technology, and investing into those-- That was sort of my deal flow. Then about three and a half years ago, and then this is a little bit of the history on TBD Angels, three and a half years ago, about five or six friends in the Boston area and I, we're all active angels, grabbed lunch, and we were griping about the fact that despite all of the great things that we all know about Boston, the university scene, the innovation, the VCs, there really wasn't a great community of investors that could come together and leverage the collective knowledge of the group to make better investment decisions.
Also, we also saw a handful of elements that-- elements related to angel investing through groups that we saw as suboptimal, is just slow moving, it's not terribly collaborative. The engagement was third Thursday of the month, we're all going to get into an office park and meet. We thought we could make some improvements. We could do some things a little bit differently and make some improvements. TBD Angels was born, and now the group is about 300 members. We're not perfect on delivering on that vision to enable deep, deep collaboration.
There's always improvements we can make, but we've put together a group that has a diverse membership as it relates to some of the diversity attributes that you see in the headlines, but also diverse as it relates to geography, diverse functional areas and expertise. Leveraging all of that together allows us to make better investment decisions and see diverse deal flow. At TBD Angels, we've invested over 3 years in about 90 deals, which is probably about 65 companies.
We've done a handful of follow-on rounds. Back to your question around, some of the favorite ones, it's almost like asking for my-- whether I like Lily or Simon, my daughter or son better. I'll talk about a couple of ones that just have fun stories behind them.
Sal Daher: Sure.
Moolah Kicks
Jason Burke: One that we like to talk about a bit is a company called Moolah Kicks. What Moolah Kicks is, it's a number one women's basketball brand shoe.
Sal Daher: How is that spelled?
Jason Burke: M-O-O-L-A-H Kicks. The way this one came to be is that Natalie White, the CEO and founder, was on the women's basketball team at Boston College. She was frustrated by the fact that when it came time for the season, and she had to buy her latest shoes, it was always built for the male foot. Why is that? 51% of the population is female. A big portion of those playing a Division 1 College Basketball are women. Why isn't there a women's basketball shoe? That's how that came to be.
She's been doing really well. The Moolah Kicks shoes are on the shelf at Dick's, who is also a strategic investor in the company. That's really good traction there. Another one which was our first investment at TBD Angels, and we've since done two additional follow-on rounds, is Folia Health.
Folia Health
Sal Daher: Oh, yes. I'm an investor in Folia, and I met Nell early on.
Jason Burke: Yes. Nell and Dan are the co-founders of Folia. Really impressive couple of co-founders. It's another Boston-based company. What they do is enable home-reported outcomes of an individual's health. If you think about when you go to your primary care physician every 12 months or maybe every 6 months, and that doctor asks you, "How have you been sleeping? How is your appetite?" You're trying to rack your brain, and you remember, "Oh, this summer, I was having trouble getting to sleep, and I kept waking up," but that's not terribly actionable.
With home-reported outcomes, they're building product to enable the end user to use an app to note how much sleep they got or what medicines they may have received. This data is hugely valuable. It's helping identify subtle changes in health conditions and just physical well-being. This is another example similar to Moolah Kicks where both of these founders were solving a pain point that they had. Natalie recognize there were no shoes built for her foot or her teammates' feet because they're built for male feet. At Folia Health, both founders have someone close to them who has a complex--
Sal Daher: A chronic condition that has to be followed. Nell talked about that in the podcast and how in her family, they see this doctor frequently. Frequently might be six times a year, but in between that time, it's really important for the patients to be keeping track of symptoms, response to medication, and all these things, which they could then provide in an organized way to the specialist and the primary care physician when they're in the doctor's office.
That is the low-hanging fruit, but I think it has potential, obviously, to go well beyond patients with chronic conditions. I can see it be of a great value to pharmaceutical companies or people who are providing treatments, the therapies, just to see how these things are working in the real world. Then you end up with hundreds of thousands of data points instead of just a few hundred data points, which is what you get when you do a clinical trial, Phase 3 clinical trial, for FDA approval on a drug.
Jason Burke: Yes, that's exactly it. The data is the real gold with this. To your point around pharma companies, maybe research companies, this is new, this is novel, incremental data that they don't have, proprietary data that these massive billion, trillion dollar companies don't have, and it will drive real improvements to human health. Speaking personally, I'm a Type 1 diabetic, so I have a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor, that I wear that is every five minutes passively measuring my blood glucose level, and it feeds into an insulin pump that modulates how much insulin to give me.
For someone without diabetes, their body is just doing that; telling their pancreas give a little bit of insulin because Sal's blood sugar is going up or pulled back because it's going down. That's what these technologies are doing. It's a huge, huge improvement over if you flip the clock back 25 years. There's a lot of really huge potential, in my thesis, around big investment opportunities around the application of software and data to improve human health.
Imagining that scenario, Jason is a Type 1 diabetic, not only is the CGM measuring his blood glucose in that snapshot of time, but there's also something saying it's raining outside, and Jason went on a run in the morning, and he ate a steak last night, and using that confluence of inputs along with some learning and seeing a lot of data to modulate the insulin in a way that is different than just looking at a snapshot in time. It's an example of one where what Folia Health is doing, and collecting this data, is something incremental. We'll see big, big innovations coming out from the use of data in this way.
Sal Daher: Yes, that is very, very exciting. I use the Whoop app for exercise and to help me sleep. I got it for exercise, and then I'm surprised to discover that it was really helping me with sleep, which is tremendous. When you're in the late 60s, sleep begins to become an issue. Tremendous. Jason, we've talked about the founding journey of All Stage, and the problem it's solving. We've talked about a couple of startups.
What I thought I would do is I would do a brief promotion for the podcast, and then in the second half, I want to get a little bit into your entrepreneurial journey, your career journey, and how you got into entrepreneurship and how you got into angel investing, which I think can be very helpful to other people who are trying to decide their direction in life. If you happen to be a listener who is enjoying this conversation with really dynamic people like Jason Burke, and you think that there are other people who could learn from this, the best way you can help support us is first follow us in whatever app or platform you're listening to the podcast, wherever you found us, follow us, and so you get content like this every week, and you should also consider giving us a written review.
Written reviews get a lot of attention from the algorithms. It shows that people have taken up trouble to write something. It doesn't have to be a lot, a couple of sentences. The episode gets shown to a lot more people, and that knowledge gets spread to more people. We all benefit from this, from learning important things from other human beings, and also, of course, leave a rating. It's amazing how much of a difference it can make. If an episode gets one or two reviews, all of a sudden, it jumps to the top of the queue. It gets shown to a much larger audience.
Anyway, Jason Burke grew up in a town nearby, Waltham, Massachusetts, and he went to Tufts University, and studied engineering. Tufts is my wife's alma mater. Jason, what is it that you discovered this urge for technology in your life?
Jason's Entrepreneurial Journey
Jason Burke: As you mentioned, I went to Tufts just outside of Boston, and my major was engineering psychology. Interesting story behind this is that at the time there were only two universities in the United States that had this major; Tufts and University of Maryland. A more interesting story is that another Jason Burke graduated the same year as I did from UMD with a human factors engineering degree, which is one of the branches of engineering psychology. This engineering psychology and human factors engineering is really marrying the human being with the ultimate product or with product.
There's two branches to that. One is ergonomics. Within a vehicle, it's designed the steering wheel and the display in a way that works with the human body and the way that the human thinks. The other branch was in software usability. I went down that second branch as it relates to what I did during my time at Tufts and supplemented a lot of my coursework for the major with computer science and programming coursework, and really enjoyed building product that way. Also thinking about how is the end user going to be using this, and structure product and the design in a way that works with the end user.
"... I built the Tufts cross-country site, which today in 2023 doesn't seem groundbreaking, but at the time having a password on a site and detecting the IP address of who's using it and greeting them, that sort of stuff was absolute magic to do..."
During my time at Tufts, I started to dabble with a little bit of entrepreneurship in some side gigs where I was building early e-commerce sites for clients. I ran cross-country at Tufts and another friend on the team. I built the Tufts cross-country site, which today in 2023 doesn't seem groundbreaking, but at the time having a password on a site and detecting the IP address of who's using it and greeting them, that sort of stuff was absolute magic to do.
That was a lot of fun, but it also just cut my teeth in that world, and building software that others were actually using. I came out of Tufts and spent about eight years building product as an engineer. Spent time at Capital One in Richmond, Virginia, building early e-commerce for what's become a massive Fintech and financial business. As I was building product across my handful of first jobs, I was pulled into a handful of sales conversations with prospective customers or existing customers.
I was at a company called Lavastorm. We were building product to enable the application of business rules to data. I was being brought into some of these sales conversations as a technical subject-matter expert. I was really enjoying seeing how these customers were using the product that I had put the puzzle pieces together to create, or hearing the hopes and dreams of these prospective customers around what they want.
That was my first move across the spectrum into product management, where product management is at the hub of a company. It's working with the engineers, actually, coding and building, working with the sales and customer success teams to understand what the customers are asking for, and also looking more holistically five miles out onto the horizon around what changes are to come, and using that to create roadmap, and spent some time in corporate strategy and business development, helping participate in the acquisition process to sell a company that I was part of.
Those sort of things are what exposed me to a number of areas that are required in building a business. Then, when you become a founder, you need to build the product, you need to sell the product, and you need to figure out what are we going to do in the future, what products are needed in the future? There's the creation, there's the make it successful, the business part, and then there's figure out what the heck we're going to do in the future, and how are we going to grow this to be a massive company.
Sal Daher: The roadmap for the company so that you can keep coming up with new products and sustain your business.
Jason Burke: Right.
"... which came first? Angel investing or starting a company?..."
Sal Daher: What is it that pushed you into the idea of starting a company? Actually, which came first? Angel investing or starting a company?
Jason Burke: Angel investing came first. Angel investing led to, ultimately, building TBD Angels along with a handful of colleagues. That led to what eventually became All Stage. We were looking to execute on our vision at TBD Angels to enable collaboration amongst a bunch of investors, growing that group to what has now become 300. Unbeknownst to us, two weeks after we founded TBD Angels, we were hit by a global pandemic.
Sal Daher: That really enabled TBD. It was wind behind the back. You guys were sailing before the wind. All of a sudden, you have possibility of having meetings virtually, communication asynchronously. Let's step back a little bit about your first angel investment. What is it that got you over the hurdle of investing in a new enterprise?
Jason Burke: Early-stage investors are often looking at three high-level elements as it relates to making an investment in a company. It's usually product, market, and people. Different investors will focus on one or two of those legs of the stool over the others. I tend to be a people person and want to spend time with those people, whether it's spend time virtually or spend time in a coffee shop and really getting to know each other. My perspective is the team or the founder is the most important driver or indicator of whether that company will be successful.
Sal Daher: I think that is a non-controversial statement among angels. I think that's unanimous. There's unanimous agreement that the most important thing is the founder. If the founder isn't up to it, it doesn't matter, it can be the best technology, it can be the most attractive market opportunity, it's not going to go anywhere.
Jason Burke: Yes, if you look at the mirror image of that, if the product the company decides to build doesn't work, the right team will be able to pivot, will be able to figure out and pick themselves up and figure out the direction to go. You'll have other investors that argue that the market is what drives the success. At the end of the day, I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer.
For me personally and to your point, for a lot of investors, it's the team and having conviction that this is the team that can grow this to be a successful organization. That's the approach I took in the early days and still take today, and also think about enabling that through our products. At All Stage, our products are digital products, they're web-based products, but that doesn't mean that investing in fundraising in the future will be all software driven, automated robots.
It also shouldn't just be investor and founder going to the coffee shop and having telephone conversations. It's somewhere in the middle. The role of All Stage is to marry purpose-built product and enabling those human beings to work more effectively together and collaborate on that process.
"... Was it a personal relationship, the first investment that you made as an angel?..."
Sal Daher: Very interesting. Was it a personal relationship, the first investment that you made as an angel?
Jason Burke: It was. The deal flow within TBD Angels is driven by our members. We have 300 members. They have their own networks. They know founders across the world. Those deals are being brought into the group by the members. That's one of the great benefits of being part of a group is expand that deal flow and the network itself and being able to collaborate with others. As an individual, you are often relying on your own network. You may have folks that reach out to you to say, "You should chat with this particular founder. I met her at a coffee shop. I think, Jason, you'd be interested."
Generally, it's folks that are on your own network. For me, personally, I was also investing in what I knew. I was in the ad tech space with a handful of companies building optimization products to optimize the delivery of ads whether in the digital world or TV world to the right audiences. That's what I knew really well, played roles in product and strategy in ad tech. That's what I knew.
I felt like I could predict the future with respect to where it was going, and I had a finger on the pulse of the market. That is limiting though because if I'm only looking at ad tech, that's not diversified. To answer your question, yes, the first investment I made was in a company where I knew the space and I knew the founder.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Jason, as we think about wrapping up this interview, take a moment and think about what you would like to communicate to the audience of angel investor founders or people who are thinking of starting companies.
Advice to the Audience
Jason Burke: There is a lot of talk. You can't open up your browser and not see articles about the role of AI within our lives. I think the reality is that there is a lot of products and companies being built with AI for the sake of AI. That is not completely wrong. There is value in learning and testing.
Sal Daher: Yes, creating a more accessible conduit to allow people to use AI in their existing processes. It's like, shall we say, originally when electric motors came into the factory floors or even steam engines had been-- because the steam engine they usually had one steam engine in the whole mill, and they had all these belts and conveyor and drive shafts to tie the workspaces to this central power plant. With electric motors, you can have power anywhere, but the plants were still organized in this peculiar way that the central engine, one big engine in the middle, which is a steam engine.
We're in that situation right now. We don't know what the world is going to look like as it gets reorganized by AI, but this certainly is a lot of room to use AI around the edges in the existing processes to make them more efficient. Ultimately, that may be swapped by other developments. Yes, so this is what you call AI for the sake of AI. It's just basically making it more accessible to more people. What else do you see? What is the point here?
Jason Burke: That's the current state of the world. There's certainly value being created with AI, but I don't think that any of us can predict what it's going to do in the future. I think what we can say with conviction is that it will create innovation. It will allow for us to do things that weren't possible in the past. Earlier we were talking about the role of data and how that can inform decisions. There's a limit in what the human brain can do, even if it's 100 human brains around a table, but software is able to crunch through this. When you hear the term machine learning, the key word in that phrase is learning. Using data, which changes over time, being used to make better decisions. If we come back to the example of the role of software and data to make improvements to human health, there's the way that learning can be applied to take this data in and start to understand how different external elements are impacting the way that Jason's blood sugar reacts is hugely, hugely powerful.
When you think about it in the context of human health, that is a huge improvement to life. Everyone loves to talk about the scary things with AI. Frankly, when I go on a run around Boston, when I cross Beacon Street in Brookline, I could get hit by a car. Should we take all cars off the road? No. Yes, bad things can happen with anything, but we will start to see a lot of improvements to the way that businesses are run, the new innovations with food, all sorts of things that will come out of that.
What I encourage founders to always be thinking about is not necessarily jumping out and building these things right away. Fine, if you need to have AI on your pitch deck, put it on your pitch deck, but focus your resources on creating real value today that is possible today, but always be thinking about ways in which new technology and new innovation might be able to turn your company into an outlier in the future because you're finding a way to do something better.
Sal Daher: Yes, that's very important advice I think. The astonishing thing about the recent developments in AI, these transformer networks, creating the ability to ingest novel-sized chunks of data at a time and comprehend it, it is going to generate understanding of things that we have no clue about. No clue. Human beings just couldn't understand. Years ago, a friend of mine who is engaged in another startup now, he was at a company called Inference. One of the things they were doing is looking through our academic literature for certain kinds of connections that they could suggest to scientific researchers that they might pursue.
Usually, scientific researchers would do a review of the literature and come up with one or two of these connections, things that they might want to look at. Inference, four years ago, was able to come up with dozens where a human being might come up with one or two. They're way ahead of it now. Better architecture, more powerful chips, more accessible data is going to do things that we have no idea. We have no understanding what that could be. One thing is for sure is human beings will benefit from this ultimately. This fear, the sky is falling, people have about new developments and technology, I think, is tremendously misguided.
[music]
Sal Daher: Jason Burke, I'm grateful to you for having made time from your busy, busy schedule of being a founder and operating this really important company, All Stage, is enabling angel investing in the age of AI. I thank you for being at the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Jason Burke: Thanks for having me. Great to finally get on the pod with you.
Sal Daher: My pleasure. Listeners, thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.