Deus Ex Machine, AI & Data with FirstMark's Matt Turck

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**Dan Nathan** (1:58)
Welcome to the OK Computer Podcast. I am Dan Nathan. I am joined by a friend and actually a returning guest to the podcast. That's Matt Turck. He is the VC and managing director at First Mark Capital. We are continuing Matt, our Better Know of First Mark Investor series while we are in your studio.
Do you love what we've done to the place? Because I feel like we are intruding to some degree. You are also a prolific podcaster. You host the MAD Podcast. You are author of The MAD Landscape, which I really want to get into because that's something that you have been doing for 13, 14 years or something that MAD stands for, Machine Learning, AI and Data, which means that you are not a Johnny come lately to this whole thing and you also host an event series here in New York with the founder community, tech founder community, VC community called Data Driven and you get big crowds for that sort of thing and it's a great event that you do quite frequently over the course of a year. So welcome to your podcast studio. Welcome to my podcast, Matt. Thanks so much, man.

**Matt Turck** (3:00)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Dan Nathan** (3:01)
Yeah, so one of the things what we've tried to kind of capture throughout the summer with some of your partners, we started with Rick and Mies joined and Dave joined and Adam also. We're trying to hit some of the different focuses that you guys all have. As always, we try to bring it back a little bit through the lens of the public markets using some of your views, that sort of thing. But let's start here because again, when I think about VCs and the pivot that a lot have made over the last call it five years or so, this is not something that's new to you. You've been tracking a lot of evolution from machine learning to AI, how they overlap, some of the, all that sort of stuff. And then obviously, how big companies, how small companies, how new companies have looked to adapt this sort of technology. So let's start a little bit with your framework and how things have changed over the period. We don't have to go all the way back when you started doing MAD, but let's describe what that is and how that's been helpful to you to develop different thesis along the way as it relates to machine learning and AI.

**Matt Turck** (4:03)
Yeah, sure. So the MAD Landscape is an effort at putting together a landscape of all the companies in that ecosystem of machine learning and data. So it's a mental model.
The big part of the purpose is to force me to do the work every year to just look at all the companies in the space and categorize them. But yeah, I mean, like this year, we're just starting to work on the next version and it's probably going to be the biggest effort that we've had to produce so far because obviously it's a time of profound market dislocation and recomposition. And interestingly, it seems to be accelerating rather than slowing down. So all the changes that have been afoot for the last couple of years or three years are compounding. And it's fascinating. I'll tell you what, it's not boring, right? I think all of us VCs are running around like crazy 24-7.