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$250k for your AI-first product startup

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Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#41

Post by rckoepke »

alecfreudenberg wrote: post #22

Fuck yes. This is the type of program that can actually hear a proper pitch. I teared up reading it. As someone who has a lot of tinkering and research underway on a big idea, this motivates me to scrap and scrounge to get the demo party together. Spending 8k-ish to build a product demo for my friends rich uncle is too uphill for me to risk. But for this, I mean fuck yeah.

> Spending 8k-ish to build a product demo for my friends rich uncle is too uphill for me to risk.

That’s something I could potentially fund. No equity, just pro-bono / repay if it works out. Feel free to reach out and chat if it’s a dream you believe in.

But $250k from this might go a lot further.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#43

Post by alecfreudenberg »

hellohowareu wrote: post #39
alecfreudenberg wrote: post #22

Fuck yes. This is the type of program that can actually hear a proper pitch. I teared up reading it. As someone who has a lot of tinkering and research underway on a big idea, this motivates me to scrap and scrounge to get the demo party together. Spending 8k-ish to build a product demo for my friends rich uncle is too uphill for me to risk. But for this, I mean fuck yeah.

"8k-ish" I read this as k8s-ish... which makes me thing maybe 8k-ish could be your product name, as a play on k8s-ish. That said... ive been learning kubernetes lately and it doesn't necessarily relate to AI.

I like that. It's a very on the nose name right now. I'm considering a flight to Anguilla to see a man about a parked domain (after the competition), if that gives any context to the brevity and nature of the name.

The fundamental product is large and physically involved, with the 'AI' under the hood to sort of Pixar the whole experience and make the 'game' more satisfying, connected, and fulfilling. Sort of a means to progress, in a general sense.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#44

Post by moralestapia »

wrs wrote: post #38
kmlx wrote: post #33

something is not mentioned or i missed it: $250k for how much equity?

MFN SAFE means it converts to equity in the next funding round, at the price set by the lead investors in that round. E.g., if the next round had a $2.5M post valuation, this would become 10%.

Thanks, I was looking for this as well.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#45

Post by alecfreudenberg »

encoderer wrote: post #23
goethes_kind wrote: post #17

So like 1 experienced researcher or 2 college grads for 1 year's worth of salary. Putting it through that perspective, it does not seem like much. Wondering now how much hours of compute this would buy.

It’s a call option on a more lucrative and fulfilling career path.

Well said

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#46

Post by cfeduke »

seibelj wrote: post #25

Is anyone actually using co-pilot? They claim “millions of users” but I seriously doubt millions of programmers opted into paying $10 per month for it. A lot of these stats seem highly suspect.

I am using it for Elixir and Python. It surprises me at times, and sometimes it just misses. Most of the time I end up with a template that is just a little bit off which is fine.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#47

Post by cpersona »

azhenley wrote: post #2

Interesting pivot. They used to call themselves a "non-profit distributed AI research lab" that gave small chunks of cash to AI researchers. Now they've changed to much larger investments for products/startups. See their HN announcement 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806

As someone on the outside of AI tech, I wonder if this is also a reflection of how difficult it can be to make create a differentiated product in the AI space on a small budget. The mission statement also indicates that they would like to find products that are complex, likely to create a moat and make it difficult for competitors to move into the same space quickly.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#48

Post by zaroth »

in3d wrote: post #9
mousetree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very clear section titled "Wait, is this a grant or an investment?"

Exactly, and yet they still call it a “grant.” Would you have no problem if Amazon called themselves a charity?

Huh?

>> Wait, is this a grant or an investment?

> It is an investment.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#50

Post by echelon »

flaque wrote: post #34

Hey folks, this is Evan from AI Grant! We're excited to support founders building new AI products. AI Grant is investing $250k on an uncapped, no-discount, MFN SAFE, as well as providing more than $300k in cloud credits. AI Grant used to do small grants in lots of AI research projects. Now, we think there's plenty of research, and what's needed is products: so we're doing bigger investments in founders building produ…

How does the "uncapped, no-discount, MFN SAFE" work? What does that mean in terms of the percentage of equity you'd take?

I'm self-funding fakeyou.com from a previous exit. My AI/ML startup is called "Storyteller" and my team is about to launch real time voice conversion (you -> Trump, Adele, etc.), music generation (instruments + vocals), and real time motion capture (for film and animation, essentially super high quality VTubers) in a matter of weeks, plus a bunch of other stuff by EOQ3. From there it's AI musicians, story generation, etc. A takeover and democratization of Hollywood and Nashville.

I have no idea what I'm doing in terms of fundraising. We have 5M+ MAUs and I don't even have a deck. I'm in Atlanta grinding out product and I'm not plugged into this VC/fundraising world, but I know I need to grow this.

The $300k cloud credits sounds right-sized. I also started buying a metric ton of 3090s and running k8s both in the cloud and on-prem. :)

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