Bhaskar Ghosh’s Post

Need to slow down before I speed up for this AI thingy! And that too later in July in Vienna, whose post WW2 anxiety and zeitgeist was immortalized by one of my all time favorite movies "The Third Man". (Pop quiz: What single instrument was used for the entire sound track of this movie?) For ex-techies turned VC's like me who have done a tiny bit of AI-driven products indirectly in a past life (Yahoo! RightMedia, maybe some during LinkedIn Infra) but never really wrote code around AI infrastructure or models, published papers about GAN's and CNN's, or took hands-on classes on Transformers, it's hard to make deep sense of the changes happening around us in Enterprise AI, given the throughput of information and noise in social media and even technical circles. Which brings me to ICML 2024 - the premier AI conference for industry + academia, coming up during July 22-26 in Vienna. Time to clear my calendar, take some notes, listen to talks, and sit in on some workshops. If you are around in Vienna for ICML and can teach a back-bencher student like me some AI, please do give me a shout. Gratitude to my AI-gurus who will be there in person as well: Alex Dimakis, Maheswaran (Mahesh) Sathiamoorthy, Kevin Niechen and Vivek Gopalan, helping me on by back-to-school journey! Beyond Vienna, its back to London (till early August), hit me up - if you are building something interesting or want to write checks into our amazing 8VC portfolio or want to buy me a drink for no reason at all! :-) A separate London post coming - since I may co-host a few technical events with friends ( Mike Chalfen, Alice Bentinck Jonny Clifford, Mick Halsband, ..). look up our new founders (James Lo, Sol Chea, Will Taylor) and hang out with old friends (Akhil Paul, Varun Chandra, Ed Lascelles, Spencer Crawley, Alex Housley, Hussein Kanji, Niall Woodward, Indranil Basu..) cc: Pete Soderling 8VC Bela Becerra Kunal Gosar Arda Sahiner Mehul Shah Jeffrey Morgan Ollama Michael Chiang Ruzica Piskac Alex Wong

So excited to be back in NYC Jun 23-27 to meet fellow builders and friends, and excited to moderate the technical discussions with leaders of our formidable companies Ramp and Vercel, for the second edition of our technical event series -- Chat8VC NYC on Jun 25! There will be 2 technical panels and then 3-4 demos, as always. Engineers from 8VC portfolio companies always welcome. If you are a builder or want to send some technical founders/builders to our event, please let Darlina Serrano Hefler or Vivek Gopalan know. And if you want to meet me to discuss ideas good or bad, you know where to find me. :-) cc: Nik Koblov Guillermo Rauch Lee Robinson 8VC Bela Becerra Kevin Niechen Spotnana Sebastien Goddijn Opto Investments Addepar Ruchir Swarup Vijay Kasarabada Ravi Radhakrishnan Jimmy S. Yun Sayant Chatterjee Krishna Bhagavathula Dave St. Geme Luminary Arcus Alex Pall Kunal Gosar Arda Sahiner Mehul Shah Aryn Tasso Argyros Priyank Patel Alex Dimakis Raghavendra Prabhu Jason James https://lnkd.in/gnk4ijmU

Data Bricks AI + Data Summit 2024 is on and its great to see top tier talent around AI and Data congregating! To celebrate our network, the 8VC team is looking forward to seeing you builders tomorrow Jun 10 evening at Shelby's rooftop for our AI + Data leaders' cocktail gathering. We're excited to bring together an exceptional group of founders to enjoy delicious drinks / apps and productive conversation in an informal setting. Send email to Darlina Serrano Hefler at 8VC if you want to stop by and do bring a friend who builds in AI and or Data. See you! PS. To some of my friends, I might have forgotten to send you a personalized invite, but if you are in SF on Mon Jun 10 evening, please do stop by. cc: 8VC Darlina Serrano Hefler Kevin Niechen Vivek Gopalan Bela Becerra Venkatesh S.

Bangalore in full flow with the gang from 8vc - Joe Lonsdale and Vivek Gopalan and Arthur James; Jeffrey Lonsdale and one of our gracious hosts In India — Shiv Khemka . Was a real honor to spend time discussing the India-US corridor, opportunities for 8VC to partner with Wipro and Infosys, and the future of digitisation and technology empowerment in India, and the AI thesis around tech enabled services - with Rishad Premji and the legendary Nandan Nilekani! Amazing meetings and events coming up in Bangalore and Bombay next.

So excited to be back in India soon to see close friends, builders and leaders in Bangalore, Bombay, Gurgaon and Calcutta, during May 6-18. Many events, and much discovery awaits. A busy trip: May 6-8 Bangalore, May 9-10 Bombay, then Delhi-Calcutta during May 11-18. I am excited that my colleagues Vivek Gopalan and Arthur James will join me, and with us, for the first time in India , will be Joe Lonsdale: founder and GP of 8VC and serial entrepreneur (Palantir, OpenGov, Addepar, many more, ..). Bangalore May 8: We have a tech founder lunch with Joe, and then a fireside chat by Joe at Museum of Art and Photography with the legendary founders, execs and influencers in town. Bombay May 9: We are doing a founder lunch and then a dinner event with some of the biggest names from industry and finance! cc: 8VC Vivek Gopalan Arthur James Gabe Rosen Alok Goyal Sameer Brij Verma Venkatesh Peddi Priya Mohan Subrata Mitra Sathya Nellore Sampat Siddhartha Ahluwalia Srikrishnan Ganesan Pankaj Patel Joydeep Sen Sarma Nimish Joshi Ankit Bhati Vishal Verma Ushur Nile Secure Spotnana Yugabyte Karthik Ranganathan Kannan Muthukkaruppan

"Inception to IPO: The Splunk and BILL story": We are ready for the next 8VC-Sidebar event on April 24 at SF 8VC with my friend Vishal Verma (Sidebar) to learn about two generational companies in Infra/SaaS and the people who built them and believed in them : Thrilled to moderate a spectacular panel with the Rob Das (founder Splunk), René Lacerte (founder, CEO of BILL) and the OG investor David Hornik (Lobby Capital). Schedule at www.sidebarsummit.com. Wanna learn more? Send mail to Darlina Serrano Hefler, or DM me. We want to keep it super small and engaging. Big thank you to Vishal Verma and Sidebar for being close pals, and to Lobby Capital, Winston & Strawn LLP and SVB for your collaboration/support. cc: 8VC

No "White Rabbit" or Jefferson Airplane jokes allowed, but excited for the panel "Investing in AI B2B Software" at the AI Rabbit Hole Conference in SF this Apr 19 in SF with my friends Vivek Sodera (Superhuman), Astasia Myers (Felicis) and Eugenio Gonzalez (Plug n Play). Thanks to my friend Nick Davidov and DVC for the kind invite. https://lnkd.in/gYwXfqR6

Data Council, Austin 2024 is a wrap. Was a pleasure to meet so many great data and AI founders. This is a real "founders" conference, and affords so many high quality technical and product conversations. Thanks to an invitation by the intrepid brains behind Data Council - Pete Soderling, I was thrilled to do a keynote with my new friend, data-nerd and creator of the phrase "big data" Roger Magoulas. We got to cover some salient points around 3 generations of Data Infrastructure at LinkedIn. We discussed the "spirit of service" which is needed to be not just a great infrastructure builder and evangelizer, but also an effective "entrepreneur-first" VC. And much more. A youtube video should be available shortly. Thanks Pete and Roger! https://lnkd.in/gTm_YuJr I left LinkedIn in fall 2014, but was so inspired to see that the culture and technical foundations established during our time created so many pivotal projects and has led to LinkedIn being known as one of the pioneers and iterative builders of data infrastructure and high quality open-source s/w, and creator of so many top tier startups. It was an honor calling out old LinkedIn comrades - Jonathan Goldman, Shirshanka Das, Swaroop Jagadish, Kishore Gopalakrishna, Jay Kreps, DJ Patil, Jun Rao, Neha Narkhede, Vinoth Chandar, Kapil Surlaker and many more during the talk. Big thanks to Kapil Surlaker and (our 8VC incubated) stealth new-co founder Harish Butani - who helped me prepare. https://lnkd.in/gFZCq4t9 cc: Data Council 8VC Pete Soderling Roger Magoulas

Late notice, but high excitement: Eagerly looking forward to the keynote at Data Council 2024 in Austin tomorrow (Mar 26) with my respected friend Roger Magoulas (who, among many other accomplishments, also invented the term "big data"!). Data Democracy vs Data Infra Fragmentation are themes which are top of mind, and more. Looking forward to covering anecdotes from Roger's career and my journey building data infrastructure at LinkedIn and Oracle RDBMS, and to becoming an accidental Builder-VC at 8VC investing in Data and AI Infra (Yugabyte, Acryl Data, Aryn, LightBeam.ai, Airbyte,....) and incubating startups (including a most recent stealth new-co in the analytics area). Grateful thanks to the intrepid Pete Soderling and Data Council for inviting us to do this keynote! https://lnkd.in/gUJ3Xk2K