Ep 150: How AI Is Transforming Diligence, Decision-Making & the Future of Investing with John Melas-Kyriazi

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (0:00)
AI as a technical co-pilot for diligence is actually one of the most interesting use cases for AI as an investor right now. If you come across a really interesting company, you can get really deep within the matter of hours, and then pull in human experts to help you to go the last mile. The mission for our business is to accelerate innovation in the private markets. If people had access to better data, they could make better decisions.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:21)
Is it changing how venture capital firms operate?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (0:23)
They're using tools like Cloud and Chatch GPT to poke holes in them. What am I missing? Where's my argument weakest? Investors for decades have not had access to the kinds of tools that they need to really operate their businesses in a data-driven way.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:37)
Let's talk about how AI is changing things right now.

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (0:39)
You can go into Excel, hook it up with Cloud, hook up Cloud with Standard Metrics, and then ask it to do a discounted cash flow. It will just build it for you. It's amazing. People are going to be able to spend more time on what they're truly passionate about.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:58)
John Melas-Kyriazi is CEO of Standard Metrics. Over 10,000 innovative companies use this technology with hundreds of venture firms to do their work and figure out what's going on, how businesses are doing, how to interact with them. John is on the leading edge. He's running a really high growth SaaS company. It's becoming an AI company. It's really interesting to hear from John about how AI is transforming business, how it's transforming finance, and what's going on in the innovation world. Welcome to American Optimist. Today we have my friend John Melas-Kyriazi. John, thanks for joining us.

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (1:26)
Thanks for having me.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:27)
John, you're a co-founder and CEO of Standard Metrics. I think it's a good example of what's happening in AI with agents right now, with all sorts of other things. So I want to talk about that. But first, tell us a bit about yourself. Where did you grow up?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (1:38)
I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:40)
What were you into as a kid? What kind of stuff?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (1:42)
So I was really into reading fiction, and then over time more and more science fiction.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:48)
Fiction and then science fiction because you've studied physics eventually.

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (1:51)
Eventually, yeah. I think science fiction was maybe a precursor to that.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:54)
And your master's was in material science. That's a different area than you're working on now. Is there cool stuff happening in these areas you studied? Is that something you eventually want to go back to?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (2:03)
I don't know if I'll go back. I loved it though, and it definitely inspired me a lot. I think as a kid, being interested in science, I got really into electric guitar in high school, and then that drew me into electronics and circuits. And I think I freaked out my parents because I ended up setting up a soldering iron and printed circuit board etching station in my basement. That was my first foray into getting into engineering.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:27)
What were you trying to build in your basement?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (2:28)
I built a tube amplifier, a vacuum tube amplifier, and I also built a bunch of guitar pedals to help with reverb and distortion and stuff like that.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:37)
So you're an engineering kid, a physics nerd, went to Stanford, you started a PhD, you dropped out of a PhD, how come?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (2:43)
That's right.
I was really lucky in my sophomore year in undergrad, I ended up at this material science labs, Mike McGee, who's now a professor at CU Boulder, and he was researching next generation photovoltaics. I had this incredible PhD mentor, this guy named Ikang Ding, who took me under his wing. We ended up publishing a bunch of papers together, and it was this really cool experience.

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:09)
Papers on what?

**John Melas-Kyriazi** (3:10)
The first one was around a new manufacturing process for a new type of solar cell we were working on. The second was more of a device physics paper, so it was understanding really the loss mechanisms in the solar cell. When the sun shined on the solar cell, what happened to all the electrons and holes, which are the counterpart to electrons, and where were they getting lost, and what was degrading their performance? It was a really cool experience, and I thought, gee, this is awesome. I should keep going. I should get a PhD and become an academic. So, that's where I was originally pointing myself.