Daisy Cai, B Capital General Partner on AI and Technology Investing

**Grace Gong** (0:03)
One second, oh my god. Every day there is a platform that's being stopped for some reason.
Okay, we're good. Oh my god. Hi Daisy, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Daisy Cai** (0:19)
Hi Grace.

**Grace Gong** (0:21)
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Okay, to start off our show, I want to give the audience a little bit of your quick background. So you started as a chip architect at AMD, and now you invest across like AI, robotics, enterprise software.
What would you say were some core lessons that you have learned early on in your career kind of shape you into who you are today?

**Daisy Cai** (1:14)
Great. Thanks for the question, Grace. Very happy to be here. Hi, everyone. One lesson from my engineering days at AMD that has stayed with me, is that great technical outcomes are rarely just result of one single breakthrough. It's always results of hundreds of small decisions made by the right team. So if we, if we explain that a little bit, it's like when you are designing a chip, there are always trade-offs like performance versus power, flexibility versus complexity. So the best engineers aren't the ones who optimize a single metric. They're the ones who understand the entire system and make the right set of decisions for the problem they're solving. With that, it gives me the unique advantage as an investor.
I prefer to engage founders on a technical details, understand why some of the key decisions were made, and whether they're assembled the right team to execute it. I find that so interesting. So for example, in AI and robotics, we're living through the technology-driven cycle.
Being able to evaluate technical judgment, not only the business metrics, has become increasingly important. So ultimately, great companies are built by a team that repeatedly make the right decisions, technically business-wise, and the world changes around them. So this is the takeaway from my engineering career.

**Grace Gong** (2:42)
I really like what you said about like small, like so they understand both like the small decision, as well as like the entire system. And maybe we could talk about like, you know, since like you have invested through multiple technology cycles, what would you think is like one belief about innovation and investing that you have completely maybe change your mind on?

**Daisy Cai** (3:08)
One belief that I completely changed my mind. I would say is the relationship between technology and company building speed. So early in my career, if I recall, I believe great technology eventually won. So if a team build a product that make meaningfully make the product better, the market will catch up.
That was true in many previous cycles like the enterprise software cycle, cloud, mobile cycle, technology adoption often took years.
But now today, I think distribution, velocity and execution matter just as much as technology, sometime even more. So during years of these fantastic platform shifts, the winners often aren't the ones with the deepest technology only. They're the teams that can turn technological breakthrough into products and habits at extraordinary speed. So I want to emphasize this in AI, this principle has become even more extreme because model capability diffuse so quickly. What looks like durable technical adventure today can become a commodity in a few months. So as investor, I used to spend most of my time evaluating technology. But today, I also spend a lot more time evaluating founder velocity, how quickly the team can learn, can ship, can hire, adapt. In a world where technology frontier moves every quarter, the ability to evolve has become more durable advantage than purely the technology itself. So ironically, AI made me more focus on people, not less. Technology cycles accelerating, but founder quality has become even more important.

**Grace Gong** (5:04)
For sure. I feel like I'm seeing the same trends as like, we recently did a whole summit on GTM. So we invited a lot of top GTM leaders from Anthropic, from 11 Labs among other top companies to talk about how people actually distribute their product and then build out the entire go-to-market funnel in general. I think I'm seeing a very similar trend. So before we dive into some of your amazing portfolio companies, I want to maybe let the audience to learn more about B Capital. So obviously B Capital, we have a few alumni from B Capital were on our podcast.