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$250k for your AI-first product startup

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

#81

Post by tomersagi »

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.

Well there is such thing : https://www.modela.ai

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

#82

Post by bleuchase »

vosper wrote: post #67
sebmellen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very high level explanation of a SAFE is that it converts on the valuation of your next funding round. Uncapped means that if you raise at a $200m valuation in one year, the SAFE will convert to equity at 250k/200m or 0.125% of the company. More details here https://capbase.com/how-do-safes-work/ .

> Uncapped means that if you raise at a $200m valuation in one year, the SAFE will convert to equity at 250k/200m or 0.125% of the company. How would it be different if it was capped? I went to your link but there are no mentioned of "capped" or "uncapped"

Capped means the investor is putting in a floor for the minimum stake they’ll accept in the next round. So regardless of next funding round they would get own (original investment)/(new valuation with maximum value of cap) = % of company owned. Uncapped means the denominator will be whatever new valuation is.

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

#83

Post by marc_rich »

pnw wrote: post #65
marc_rich wrote: post #63

It amazes me how many VCs or angel investors will put out all this information about what they want to see in a company or founder they invest in, but close to nothing about themselves on their website. “We have money to invest come and apply to us and we will determine if you are good enough.” Bro please. If we are building game changing AI before we take your money we want to know what you stand for. What are you m…

There’s a pretty decent set of info and links to personal profiles on their website. If that’s not enough for a founder to do due diligence, they probably aren’t cut out for VC fundraising. And someone writing small checks like this is almost certainly not going to be on the board unless the founder is clueless.

Not enough. This “apply to us” format should be deprecated. There’s a solo investor on twitter who says “DM me would love to chat if you’re building something.” And that’s much more approachable. She’s flooded with high quality founders and startups.

People who run their own thing are looking for partners not a boss or anything that resembles one. This “fill up this form job/university application format so some alleged superior being judges you” is exactly what they ran away from. Speaking from experience.

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

#84

Post by meragrin_ »

zaroth wrote: post #48
in3d wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The AI Grant program:"

Easy to misunderstand. The word "investment" does not show up until way down the page.

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

#85

Post by O__________O »

kornesh wrote: post #66
O__________O wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you scraping data from? Appears super similar to Lexica.art, but less data; for example, appears you’re missing even the limited about of parameters listed by Lexica, which still are incomplete. https://lexica.art/

From stable diffusion discord channel. That looks much better!

Yep, same place they’re getting it from; exchanged messages with them too.

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

#86

Post by b112 »

mariocesar wrote: post #69

Forgive me for this unrelated comment to the post. This website feels like it was designed and optimized to avoid typical HN commenters saying: Please change your site font size! This website is tracking me! This website isn't loading in X.

AI could fix that.

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

#87

Post by HWR_14 »

vosper wrote: post #67
sebmellen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very high level explanation of a SAFE is that it converts on the valuation of your next funding round. Uncapped means that if you raise at a $200m valuation in one year, the SAFE will convert to equity at 250k/200m or 0.125% of the company. More details here https://capbase.com/how-do-safes-work/ .

> Uncapped means that if you raise at a $200m valuation in one year, the SAFE will convert to equity at 250k/200m or 0.125% of the company. How would it be different if it was capped? I went to your link but there are no mentioned of "capped" or "uncapped"

How it matters to the founder - if it's uncapped then as the next round goes to infinity, the equity from the SAFE round goes to zero (see the 200MM example). If It's capped, then the SAFE will convert at no lower than X%.

Uncapped is better for the founder, but the difference only will ever really matter if it takes off so fast that the next round is at a much higher valuation than expected.

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

#88

Post by donio »

preommr wrote: post #61
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 and paying for it. It often helps with either typing something out or having to search for something online. As an example, it really helps with switching in between languages where I sometimes forget the exact method name or syntax. Co-pilot helps generate code that I can easily verify but would be annoying to write.

For me having to fix weirdly incorrect code is much more annoying than writing new code. Similar to the issue that I have with driver-assist tools: supervising a system that does ok much of the time but then does something batshit insane every once in a while is a lot more stressful than just doing it myself.

I much prefer predictable tools like code templates where I know exactly what I will get when I trigger it.

Unpredictability is the fundamental problem with these tools.

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

#89

Post by alecfreudenberg »

rckoepke wrote: post #41
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.

I could definitely get off the ground for much less, but having rent/bills covered to go all-in, and capital for speed-to-market / competitive advantage is real nice. As long as I have a legally maximized control of the charter considering the investment, I'm happy to give up future cash. To me, realized gains is a byproduct of viably bringing the product to the world. But doing the thing is the purpose.

And it would free up my time to focus on scaling and experimenting instead of assembling.

I'm genuinely taken back by that offer, and I'll be reaching out to your email with an introduction. Thank you for reaching out.

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

#90

Post by echelon »

chrismorgan wrote: post #72
echelon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

> a metric ton of 3090s Hmm… their weights vary a bit more than I would have expected; in a little searching, I’m finding figures ranging from 1372g for a Gigabyte (which would be ~729 to the ton) to 2157g for the Founders Edition (which would be ~464 to the ton). (Aside: this is the first time I’ve reached for Google in well over a year, because DuckDuckGo categorically failed to find anything even vaguely useful or…

I really appreciate this comment.
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