The ROI on AI is obvious in these industries

0:00Hi everyone, I'm Rana Elcal UB, host of the Pioneers of AI Podcast. And I'm here to share some exciting news. Masters of Scale Summit is returning this October 20th to 22nd in San Francisco. If you've been to Summit before, then you know that it's unlike any business or tech conference in existence. The room feels really intimate, the attendee list is highly curated, and the stage program is unparalleled. I've experienced it from the audience and from the stage, where I sat down with some of the most exciting voices in tech for a special live episode of Pioneers of AI. This year, I want you to be in the room with me. Join us. Visit MastersofScale.com slash summit. The business world is moving faster than ever. And when change hits, we need to learn in real time. On Rapid Response, you'll hear candid conversations with CEOs and leaders making tough calls about AI, human talent, responsibility, and the bottom line.

1:09How they navigate uncertainty, pressure, and high stakes moments. Unbob, Safian, former Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company, and I'll be your host as each episode breaks down what you need to know right now. You can find Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts. We back a lot of founders, and one of the questions we ask is, are they open to advice? Any in a environment like right now where capital feels like the commodity of commodities? How do you assess it? How do you build the trust up front so that they know this is not just a transaction, there's more that comes with it? What is the biggest mistake you've made as an investor? I love all my companies. And anything you know about investing tells you that you need to focus on the winners.

2:15It goes counter to how I'm wired. That is a constant struggle. I've gotten better at it, but I do not do what I do. What is the one that got away? Depending on the day that you asked me, it's perplexity because we saw it many, many times and passed on it because it was really a thin layer, wrapper, and we were looking for more of a mount. And that's why you said depending on the day you ask me because there are days where you're like, yeah, I called it, okay, great, I don't feel so bad in there. There are days where you go, oh my god. How is Rudina Ciceri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm investing in AI-powered companies? From AI-automating prescription fulfillment to AI that's reinventing cybersecurity, Rudina has always been ahead of the curve. Today I'm talking to Rudina about the AI investing landscape, where she sees the real value in AI and what she looks for in founders before she writes that first check.

3:16I'm Rana Elcalyubi and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution. Rudina, welcome to Pioneers of AI. Thank you for having me, Rana. I'm so excited for our conversation. First of all, congratulations because you and Glasswing Ventures were named as one of America's top venture capital firms of 2026 by time and sadista. Thank you. That was great. Lots of hard work, but you know, backing the right founders dollars in returns out, but it's along the way it's nice to see this. Yeah, that's awesome. So I want to start with a personal story. Okay. This is about six years ago now. It was the fall of 2020, so it was during COVID. I took a walk by a river that's close to where I live and I was really thinking about it. It had been 10 years since I was running affectiva. I know what this is going. And I was like, I just need some advice.

4:16Who can I call? And I texted you on my walk and I was like, Rudina, do you have a few minutes? And you were like, on the spot, sure, call me. At the time I was contemplating whether to raise an addition round of funding for the company or explore exits. We hopped in a call and I asked for your advice on what to do. Do you remember that? I remember, I know exactly where I was sitting as well. Yeah. I turned one of the bedrooms into an office. Okay. So I was literally in front of the computer and sitting in a desk. Yep. Do you remember what you told me? I did. I said at some point, make a call. You know, you can keep going and going. But in so many words, make the tough decision and get it done. Yeah. That's exactly. That's about right. You were very, I think the thing that struck me is the clarity of your answer. Sometimes when people give advice, it's like, wishy washy. And you were like, very Rudina style. Because I've got to know you fairly well since then. And yeah, you just said you've been doing this for 10 years. It's time for a new chapter.

5:17Just get it done. It really helped clarify what I wanted to do next. And I think it was particularly sort of evident to me at the time because you had done all the hard work. It was just, you know, a question of had you taken it far enough? And, you know, I said, baby, I know. I know a thing about starting a firm, right? The glass wing and it's very, very hard to let go. But you hit the success time to call it. So do you get a lot of these calls from founders? I do. I usually get them in the context of my own founders or founders that I've backed previously that are trying to figure out what to do next. It's funny because we, you know, we back a lot of founders. And one of the questions we ask is, are they open to advice? And in an environment like right now where capital feels like the commodity of commodities, where, you know, oftentimes especially with younger founders is a one-term negotiation, valuation, being able to sort of how do you assess it?

6:18How do you build the trust up front? I talk about paying it forward so that they know this is not just a transaction. There is more that comes with it. And invariably you see that more pronounced and a positive way with founders who have gone through the journey first and then know that who you partner with in terms of a backer is not just around valuation. And not even just the brand of the firm is actually a lot more nuanced. Is the person you pick and how and what will they do when they go and get stuff that VCB there for you? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, you've been investing for a long time. I am now an investor. I took your advice and now we're both investors. Yes. And I believe we're actually co-investors in one company. Yes, yes. And then some of us, I'm a little bit of a stake in some of you. Yes, yes, exactly. You are an LP in my fund. Thank you for the support. I really appreciate it. I would love your take on what it's like to be an investor in today's AI landscape. My sense is like every company is an AI company and every investor is an AI investor.

7:19I mean, it's an incredible environment. The closest sort of sentiment to what I'm experiencing and we're all experiencing right now. It was in 2000. But even then, I think it wasn't as pronounced as it is today. There is a lot of innovation that's going on. So with AI, building is no longer the challenge. Building is not the mode. We can all build. I sat down two weeks ago, wanted to create a nap or an artifact or, you know, whatever we want to call it these days, an agent whereby, you know, I could see all the additional opportunities that would come in Boston. I wanted an entire format, bum, bum, done. You know, that's not the advantage. So when you had talent, there was building, you had different type of mode. Today, I think the advantage is more around the data and the access, the totality of building systems. Because I think models and building in and of their own can become monetized. If we've seen anything, is that you swap one model out and, you know,

8:22you place the next, but it's a data architecture combo and to what purpose and how deep can you go in that space. So tying it back to the founders, a lot of demand now for the infrastructure layer, particularly around GPUs. You know, what sits on top of that, you see tons and tons and tons of those companies. And they're able to raise a lot of money. You have to decide am I in for the journey or not with very little data. And, but also you don't have the 18 months from now, we will be able to call it one way or another because races are 50 and 100 million and everything is sort of a goal of setting up a lab. And I'm being a little euphemistic. I don't think everything is the goal, but many, many labs that are being funded. So the time for the winners and the losers to sort of emerge is going to take longer. So it's a very different model. It's also very different from what you and I do,

9:22liking to be the first check in. How do you become the first check in, roll your sleeves, help build the company when their first race is 30 million. The economics don't work. So we're thinking very carefully how we tackle that. And I don't think anyone has a good answer, write this very second. But I think we have ideas on how we go very early and make it so easy and bespoke for founders to build the business faster than otherwise would that we might be able to get into that incubation stage. You know, this is interesting because I was doing kind of a look at our portfolio. But it's almost like bifurcated into two buckets. One is typical precedence seed stage. So the valuations are under 15 million. We come in early. The companies are early. And then we've made a decision to also invest in these horizontal AI, bigger physical AI infrastructure. Their early rounds are like, you know, $100 million, $1 billion valuations.

10:23And we're a small check, but we still decided to do these because I think there's a lot of upside. How do you think about valuations and how do you evaluate? They're important. They're not everything. It's not really how I think about valuations. You want to be part of the bigger journey. So the way that I think of it almost like different products, we have this access check where we've gone into some of the biggest robotics companies around town and beyond. So in the physical AI space, we've invested in unconventional AI and recursive AI. And a bunch of other sort of 100 million, 200 million type raises of 500 some instances where we want to have a seat at the table because for access, not just to the deal and potentially follow on capital with our LPs, but also the ecosystems that spin out. It's the whole community, the whole machine. So that's one piece. The other piece is the redefinition of seed preceding, incubation formation, whatever, you know, flavor of the day label one wants to give it.

11:26I'm finding that I'm pretty convinced that the seed round now represents the old A. The old A was 8 to 10 million. Many, many, many, many of the seed rounds are in that range, maybe 68, but many others are just raising 30 and 50 right off the bat, right? So too early stage, it hasn't come to where the seed is, and the seed has gotten later stage, and no founder wants to take capital in between. This is a very interesting sort of dichotomy, and so by design, you try to tap into both knowing that you better be messing in a company that's dearest enough if you're writing a bigger check. And then in the smaller ones that you will do a lot of sweat, blood, and tears, have you lifting alongside founders? And those are fun. You have to do a lot more of those because failure rates will be higher. I don't know if you saw this program Tech Track that came out of... I don't know if you saw it. John Warner, yeah, yeah. Exactly. I'll just give a kind of a summary of what it is. They basically selected a number of students from MIT Harvard and Princeton

12:28and sent them to the West Coast to spend the summer there. They all lived in a house together and kind of built their startups, and they came back to the demo day. And some of them were really interesting, and we were starting to meet with them to see if we want to invest in them. I would love your thoughts on this, because most of them are undergraduates or just like freshly out of school. So very little business experience. And part of me is excited to back these young, kind of super ambitious talent. But I have question marks on their commitment to the project or the startup, because some of them are kind of still kind of maybe taking a leave of absence from school, but they might want to go back as a parent. I'm a little biased. I would love for them to finish school. Have you backed? Oh, yeah. I mean, on my way here, I was talking to two Nises named from Provonones, and I think he's a junior and he's dropping out. And he had like a full married scholarship, and they're basically trying to become the platform for analytical financial models presentation.

13:32So a really interesting take with their AI. It's fun you say that, because the first thing I will say is, oh my gosh, you're poor pair. So it's just a notion. But, or not. I mean, if they do great, amazing. Not everybody's motivated by money, though. Because I grew up in a culture of Albanian, where education was your most precious. Famous. Yeah. You know, gift, because no one could take it from a special in a country like mine, where communism, wealth was taken, what was private became government owned. So some of us are wired in a way where education is closer to the English books. Because I have the same wiring clearly. Yeah. So I put that aside. So I have a fundamental view that to fold one, there are some people who are special that even if they don't have the answers, no matter the age, they will somehow figure their voice and figure it out. There is also a mentality that we've worked very strongly to overcome.

14:3310, 15 years ago, Boston-based VCs, I would say the back professors, and the West Coast was backing students. And if you think about mobile and a lot of the application ecosystem, really the innovation, the transformation was driven by the students rather than the professors. And I think that has something to do with naivete. So I always sort of go back to the Uber example. You know, the kids, I mean, Paris, it's raining. Why in the world can I not call, you know, a car or a cab, which we can't remember? On my phone, as big as that. And the barriers that came about, that they had to overcome, they tackled along the way. Yeah. So there is something about that naivete, I don't know too much to know that it's done this way. That has to be balanced, of course, with driving adoption and the hustle. And we go in and out of waves as backers. The downside is, I hope that they know how to quickly get adopters to embrace them

15:37because there is value in the relationship. In fact, domain expertise, especially when we're talking about a vertical domain, domain expertise and depth of trust and depth of understanding of workflows, could be one of the few modes that remains in AI-started companies. I'll be right back with more of my conversation with Regina, but first a quick break. On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds. Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest reward always come from the greatest risks. That's it, the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death and more.

16:38Here from the founders who've changed the game, it's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts. I know a big focus of your investment thesis is Vertical AI. I definitely know Vertical AI is basically AI-fying legacy industries like supply chain, manufacturing, financial services, insurance, construction, all these like unsexy industries, but where there is an opportunity to reimagine how work is being done. Where do you see AI creating value in these industries? Maybe the best way to do this is if you can give us some examples of companies from your portfolio. I will give you a one-to-punch answer. I think it's contemplated. First, there is a low-hanging fruit opportunity set across these verticals. That is to drive productivity orders of magnitude higher by way of understanding workflows.

17:43I think the easiest and outdo that in air quotes path to creating values to go in and saying, pharmacy fulfillment is being done in this manner. There are five different systems that have been stitched together, different software providers, human touches, the prescription for example, in every step of the way it gets digitally faxed, they have to take it, you know, type it up in the other system, etc., etc. So that, to me, feels like low-hanging fruit, but the key is going to be to have access to actually the deeply vertical data that takes place to get the performance, and perhaps even more importantly, understanding the workflows. A lot of the challenges that we have in different industries is not that it can't be done, is that the workflow is in the mind of somebody or in a 600 page binder that collected dust, and there have been hundreds of deviations from it. So, but if you understand it, I think that's a low-hanging fruit to drive quick productivity in rich and experience,

18:48be able to actually deliver the technology in a different way than what it has previously been delivered, and make the ROI quite obvious. So I've just described a company called the SAFYMAD portfolio, whereby that's literally what they do when they give visibility, also on how effectively prescriptions are being filled, because little non-fect, 30% of prescriptions do not get picked up. So you go on to the doctor, you've bothered, they've given you a diagnosis, they've given you at a minimum of treatment if not a cure, and you don't go to pick it up. So there's a whole process and a lot of waste for them that are important. One of the concerns I generally have, and that's like kind of materialized even stronger in the last six months, in the vertical AI space, is the frontier labs are moving so fast, but they're also adding capabilities really fast. And so you can imagine how a supply chain company, they can build their own cloud agent to do a lot of this work,

19:48and then these companies become obsolete. To come obsolete. So I think there are two schools of thought competing right now. One is you go deep and specialize. The other school of thought is what a lot of the agents, large language models and players like Microsoft with Fabric and OpenAI and Anthropic were by their saying, you can just buy us as the layer and then build the agents on top of us. And therefore you don't need specialized tools. I think the reality will be hybrid, as is always the case in this world. So we will be if everybody's coding internally and building their own agents, I have a lot of questions around the long term sustainability of those agents, the quality performance compliance. That's why there's still opportunity in vertical AI, right? Not only that, but it also begs the question, how else do these companies that are vertically continue to move up and down the stack, whereby the advantage is not that the foundation model has seen it all.

20:50The advantage is the depth, is trust, is governance. They're all these other facets that are very, very important. You know, the other thought I had, and I'll use the legal industry as an example, companies like Harvey AI have developed AI solutions for law firms. And they have seen success. But I'm also seeing this idea of reimagining what a law firm, like an AI native law firm, right? Where do you see the opportunities in, it's an end or is it an or? I can make both arguments with the same level of conviction and be an opposing views because we really truly don't know. I'm increasingly believing, and this is the second passage that is a one-two puncher. I'm increasingly believing that the company of the future should really start with a clean slate. So coming back to the law firm of the future, it could look completely different. So as you look forward and you look to the future, why can't I have my legal agent be there?

21:51And the lawyer just provides the judgment. I'm really focused on this judgment piece. Because think about agents. A model, whoever's model you pick, has been trained on all web data. And we can use that as the best, at least digital proxy for society's humanities data. If a human had that kind of data, they would have been sort of a super overlord of source, right? We would have been way smarter. The models are not. So, and I think it's this notion of, you know, their neural nets. So they're really dealing with the brain, not with the mind. While we humans, as limited as we are, interrelative to the speed that are processing and other capabilities that agents and models have, we humans actually can draw a lot of decisions with very imperfect and limited data. Yeah, and that. And that. The models are dumb. Yeah, and that judgment, I think for the safety of our species,

22:53I think we need to retain the judgment. I'll be right back, but first, a quick break. So I want to move us towards like more of the horizontal AI and AI infrastructure, but I will start with the governance and safety part. I believe that that is a very important area to invest in, but we haven't made any investments in that space because I don't know if that's something that the labs need to take on. Is there space for companies that sit on top of the frontier models to ensure governance and safety? So I'd love to hear your point of view. So we invest actively in cybersecurity and now say the security plus safety plus governance,

23:58and honestly, not just digital, but physical security are kind of coming together under one umbrella. So I do think that there's high demand for governance. Every enterprise is trying to figure it out. Do they go to their established security partners because they are offering a new module or a governance agent? What do you do? So for example, for my own AI usage, I get so many emails, I actually know exactly. I get 45 to 63 emails per hour. Wow. It's incredible. And so I need some sorting and prioritizing and in some instances, prefilling, pre-drafting, and then I go and sort of change it and press send. But that means that the agent gets to look at all of my content, all of my emails. So we have a company called D2 that's basically providing that MCP security. And we couldn't be in compliance if we didn't have that capability applied.

24:59So it's both regulation and safety and security. So I actually think that that's one of the areas that will get a lot of funding and the demand for purchasing it, whether it's delivered as AI service or as software plus service, it's almost sort of in different price, almost, because you must have it. This is an existential question. So it's actually a nice area to look into. Yeah. Okay. Great. So you have invested in Liquid AI, which is a frontier lab based in Boston, which is awesome. Tell us more about that and your thesis around like where is the opportunity in horizontal AI? So Ramin has Sunni and the amazing Daniela Rufs founded that business out of MIT, unlike the other frontier models, what Liquid AI and Ramin is doing is actually computing at the edge. So that in and of its own sort of has different ramifications for computer efficiency on the positive.

26:01They also do something really interesting. So when you think about the pipe of any sort of agentic action that gets taken, how you use the models, the pipe is hungry the same whether they need that full computer or not. So the lay person's analogy that I give is it's a concrete pipe and it doesn't change and you're flowing data and compute and it's calculating it and giving you outcomes whether it needed to do the whole thing or not. That's how it's set up. What's amazing about Liquid is that it's flexible sort of the notion of liquid. So it shrinks if it doesn't need all that compute and it expands as it needs it. So by default those two facets really stand out to me because effectively it makes it a lot more efficient and by the way for some of the kids of ours who are in TIAI, environmentally friendly and all sorts of other ramifications. So there I think there is a real advantage not just in performance but what it takes to deliver that performance.

27:06So I think there is a wave of opportunity with these big models, Recursive AI again with self-learning, that are pushing it to the next paradigm because at some point I do think that we will run out of sort of improvements we can make to the large language models. And the next big breakthrough will be a paradigm shift. And I think this frontier labs represent the potential for that next paradigm shift. We've made an investment in a company called Odyssey, which is a world model company. And then we're also investing in several like physical AI and also like AI native interfaces to an area that is so interesting. So I'm actually quite excited about our local ecosystem and what we're doing with physical AI. I was going to ask you about that because obviously we're both Boston-based. We invest all around the US. I think it's the same for you as well. We've always had more of a tendency to stick to the East Coast and we do West Coast investments but more selectively.

28:07So what is your point of view? Because there's a kind of a narrative that a lot of AI is happening in the Bay Area. But what's your view on what's happening on the East Coast? So I think we need to acknowledge and then we need to own our strengths. We need to acknowledge that the ecosystem in San Francisco in particular, even the Bay Area is extremely well developed. Having the big technologies be there just by sheer density, there's a lot of blessed density. And it's just not bothered like it is. Where I think we have the capability is we have the highest quality students, professors, we have that kind of density. And with initiatives like what Ryan Durkin has done with Mass AI, we're finally waking up and taking pride in what is being built. I mean, look at how many robotics companies there are. Look at all that is happening across industries. Let's just not worry about what we are not.

29:10I want to speak to what we are. A lot of founders, big ideas, speaking of students and undergrad, Merck or came out of where, cursor came out of where, where I think we need to be sure is to capture and support these teams before they move to the West Coast to build out. I also think, you know, you are your MIT person, you know, and through, but MIT has not been as picked over as some of the West Coast schools. So there's also this moment in time, but not only do we have density, not only do we have the drive, not only is a non-Sally and Sally, so the Provost and President, driving this, you know, renewed energy around entrepreneurship. But actually we have the talent that's still here and now can do both and the desire. So I think we should capitalize on that. Again, you want to create multi-generations of students who contribute to industry and vice versa. Also research funding has dried up, so partnering with industry becomes a lot more important than it used to.

30:16And we are all asking a lot of questions, at least from outside in, this is my take around the future of education. What do you, if Livy, if your daughter said, please don't do this to me. Yeah, if she said, you know what, Mom, I have a billion, multi-billion dollar idea I would rather go build. What would you say? First of all, I would support it, but it cannot be at the expense of an education. So she does it before, she does it after, she does it along. Whatever form education takes six years from now, right? I might look very, very differently. So an education may be higher ed form, again, maybe something else emerges that we don't even know about. But what I do not want my daughter to be is rich and ignorant. Yeah, yeah. I'd rather be happy, well adjusted. Well, worldly, like your daughter is very multi-disciplinary and she's a lot of interest.

31:17I wanted to be a full human in our fullest capacity and I wanted to embrace AI to know more, to discover more than she otherwise would not be able to. For many, many generations higher ed has been that path. So if it continues to be, that will be very important to me, we'll see if she listens or not. If it's another form in whatever form, but otherwise we become so narrow, so focused. And with algorithms that are reinforcing in their nature in terms of what information we get fed, we confuse knowledge with information and sort of we lose that worldly point of view that brings us together rather than points fingers separates us. What is the biggest mistake you've made as an investor? I love all my companies and anything you know about investing tells you that you need to focus on the winners and getting sort of the middle performers to move up.

32:19It goes counter to how I'm wired, like I want to save. So that is a constant struggle. I've got them better at it, but I do not do what I do. You've got to put your effort truly and I mean this. I mean it for myself. I'm saying it to you, but I'm saying it to myself. You've got to put the effort where you can generate the biggest returns because I want to support my founders. That's why I'm in the journey. That's why I love it. I want to see transformation. But we're also managing money for endowments, for pension funds. Everybody's mind goes, oh yeah, it's the rich guys money that you have and you're just making them richer. No, no, no, it's also the scholarships that need to be funded for families that can't afford them out of these endowments and they give us a piece of you know that endowment for us to create you know multi-fold returns or is the teacher's pension funds or you know or firefighter's pension funds. This is their livelihood. So it's very easy to say I'm founder friendly and lose that perspective. So you got to balance both.

33:20But yeah, I'm I'm I'm feel so vested. What is the one that got away? Depending on the day that you asked me is perplexity because we saw it many many times and passed on it. My partner played that so many times. Got a martyra and passed on it because it was really a thin layer wrapper and we were looking for more of a moat. And that's why you said depending on the day you ask because there are days where you're like, yeah, I called it. Okay, great. I don't feel so bad. And there are these we go. Oh my God. But it also speaks in full candor to that execution piece of how can you reach the market getting adoption because at some point like you know think in the year of mobile apps. It wasn't your app was so much better than mine or vice versa is that you caught that virality. However, they got in the hands of consumers. It was very hard for a second player or third player to replicate.

34:20So you know, there's more to the moat. Yeah, absolutely. How are you using AI within glass wing? I know you're using it in all sorts of ways. We have gosh like eight AI engineers full time. So over the last few years we've actually build out what I call the brain to diligence platform. Not only is it multi agent, they all interact with each other. There is a you know, supervisor agent that understands the meta task. But it's wonderfully trained on huge amounts of data and yet probably very little data one can all considered. But it's an incredible tool that maintains the depth of diligence, but helps us move much faster. So what we have done around the AI platform has really really made a difference. Where basically I would estimate about two to and a half weeks worth of work in half a day. That does two things in environments like this.

35:20We can ramp up quickly, especially because we invest within certain thesis. So we live deeply in those thesis, but also sort of be able to line up the human experts to augment and customers. Why are you buying it? Etc. So that piece is quite interesting. We also have done we have you know, the sourcing mechanism, which now we've pulled from like archives and all sorts of different sources to predict who could be a who's starting. So you know, and last week it was about a hundred and four thousand founders this week was over a hundred and five thousand and they get ratings. And this is an attempt to basically go discover them before they tell the world working progress. Yeah, but but really sort of unique and and also it helps you look at the founders in the last three, four years that have made it big. And you go, what are the characteristics and what are the characteristics? I know it's been interesting. So you know, square ventures always used to say when it comes to it, it's founders that have known each other since childhood.

36:23Yeah, that is so interesting. I mean, that's one data point. I think it's probably a much more complex formula. If you're listening and you're thinking of starting your company, who's your bestie started with your bestie? Started with your bestie that you know, you've seen and you trust trust, but also if you've managed to stay friends through the years of you know, college separation, that there's some going to bond there then when they're going to get stuff, that bond can carry you through. So that has been important, but back to your question. So there's a lot of around that. There's a lot around automation of tools. Again, you know, my email bit has been just life changing. And I think it's only the beginning. Yeah, so exciting. What do you think the job of a VC will look like in the next few years? How will AI change it? Judgment at the end. Yeah. At the end, I think speed of research and due diligence and all that will happen. It's about how we weigh the analysis. Again, I think analysis will be automated. It's about the judgment and the patterns that may not be captured in the numbers that are hard to quantify.

37:33Yeah. What are you most excited about in the kind of near future? I mean, we're changing the world. I hope we're doing it for good. And I hope it's human centric. But I know we are in our own immediate sort of worlds. But yeah, I mean, I think this is bigger than the industrial revolution. What will the social norms be in the future? Will we need to work in the same manner? I mean, it's an incredible idea to contemplate and it's not far-fetched. What do we do in new spaces, outer space? What new avenues do we open? What does exploration look like? It's a whole new world. Whole new world. I love it. Redina, thank you so much for joining us on the show. This was great. Thank you for having me always fun. Always fun. That was such a fun conversation with Redina. Three things stuck with me. First, I can so relate to her biggest mistake as an investor, which is she loves all her founders just the same.

38:34And you're supposed to really focus on the winning companies. I feel like that's a lesson I'm learning as an investor myself. So it was great to hear her share, her experience there. Two, we spent a lot of time talking about human judgment and the importance of human centric AI, which is of course something I care deeply about. And I'm very passionate about. So it was great to see that that is something she thinks about too. And then third, what she looks for in founders. I thought it was really cool how she looks for founders that are coachable, especially when we are investing kind of super early in their journey. And you want to be able to be a helpful partner on the journey for these founders. Thank you for being here. I'll be back next week with a new episode. Hi, I'm Ears of AI is a weight-watt original. Our executive producer is Eiff Tro. This episode was produced by Megan Tan, video editing by Eric Purcell. Our senior talent executive Stephanie Stern, mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh, original music by Ryan Holiday.

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