Investing Where AI Meets the Physical World | Red Glass Ventures Founder & Managing Partner Bilal Zuberi

Bilal Zuberi (0:00)

Elon Musk is going to Mars. He's been talking about it nonstop for more than 20 years. Now, along the way, he's built a multi-trillion dollar company, but the narrative and the story and his passion and mission is still the same. I think a lot of the times, you're too caught up in solutions and then looking for a problem that this solution applies to. This is the wrong way of building a company. You can't take a hammer and then go around looking for a nail. NVIDIA was this GPU chip on the side, couldn't be used for a lot of things. And then over the next few years, it became the biggest company. The same thing could happen in robotics. Some of the biggest robotics companies were Japanese companies. Precision robots, but didn't have the intelligence layer on top of it. Now you can take a $10,000 arm and put an intelligence robot on it and that company becomes worth tens of billions of dollars.

Tiffany Kayo (0:55)

Hello, Bilal, welcome to the Coral Capital Podcast.

Bilal Zuberi (0:59)

Hey, hey, hey, nice to see you.

Tiffany Kayo (1:02)

Yeah, likewise. I'm super excited for this conversation, not just because you're obviously a phenomenal investor, but also because the area that you focus on, physical AI, is very relevant, and I think it has a lot of overlaps with Japan.

I'm super excited for that conversation.

Bilal Zuberi (1:22)

I'm looking forward to this.

I haven't been to Japan in two years, which is too long. I was there two years ago. Oh no, that is too long. Yeah, it was gorgeous, it was beautiful. I met a bunch of founders and I met a bunch of investors. I have some portfolio companies with significant presence in Japan and it was just awesome. It was interesting to see the energy that's being fed into the Japan ecosystem. And frankly, US VCs and startups are spending a lot more time in Japan too, which I'm sure you would have noticed as well. So pretty excited to talk about what's happening here in Silicon Valley and all the way to the other side of the world on what's happening in Japan.

Tiffany Kayo (2:01)

Yeah, super. Today we're actually just getting hit with the typhoon, so it's good that you're not in town. Hopefully we can get you back in Tokyo very soon.

But to kick things off, can you share a little bit about your background? What does your upbringing look like? What was your path leading up to starting Red Glass Ventures?

Bilal Zuberi (2:22)

Fantastic.

My upbringing, I grew up outside the US. I grew up in Pakistan. My dad's from India, my mom's from Pakistan, but I grew up in Pakistan. In a lower middle-class family, I have no business being here, but America has this amazing idea that they got 50, 60 years ago, which was to find the smartest people from around the country at early age and give them full scholarships to come study in the US.

I was a beneficiary of that, one of the lucky ones. Came here, did my undergrad, did my PhD. I had my PhD under a Nobel Laureate at MIT, and I thought I'd become a faculty.

And then I decided that that's not the right thing for me. So I ended up becoming a founder and an entrepreneur and started a deep tech startup in advanced materials and advanced ceramic composites, which is what took me to Asia and especially Japan for the first time. I built that for five years, and we eventually had a couple of acquisition offers, including from some of the big ceramic companies in Japan. But eventually that technology was acquired by a US company in upstate New York. And then few funds that had followed my journey and wanted to invest in my startup, they couldn't, they asked me to come join them. And I ended up, this is now 18 years ago, so long, long time ago. I ended up joining the early team at General Catalyst. And I spent five years at General Catalyst helping build their deep tech portfolio. It's an incredible fund. It has obviously grown tremendously when I was there. It was eight or ten investors, all of us sat in a room. Now it has global teams and hundreds of people working there.

And then when GCE opened offices on the West Coast at the same time, I decided to move. But as I was moving, a fund called Lux Capital reached out to me and asked me to join them as a partner. This is now 13 years ago. So I joined Lux Capital when it was still 100, 200 million under management, became a GP there. And while I was there, you know, Lux Capital grew to 5.5 billion under management. I invested in about 70 companies.