Rick Heitzmann: The Gray-Area Deals Funding the AI Buildout

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**Dan Nathan** (1:07)
All right. Welcome to the Okay Computer Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan. That is Rick Heitzmann. He is the co-founder and partner at FirstMark Capital and my dear friend, hey Rick.

**Rick Heitzmann** (1:14)
Hey, what's going on? It's good to be back. We haven't been doing this in a bit.

**Dan Nathan** (1:17)
We haven't done it in a bit.

**Rick Heitzmann** (1:18)
You got a little bit of summer swoon.

**Dan Nathan** (1:20)
Yeah, you were early and often on the pod and we've been reworking, as you know, the Okay, Computer concept. This is going to be a very special series that you and I are doing. We're starting off right here. You are my new landlord, FirstMark Capital.

**Rick Heitzmann** (1:33)
And this is our pod, this is our studio.

**Dan Nathan** (1:36)
I think you made it for me. You're slumming it here. I think you made it for us. Yeah. And I'm psyched to be here.

**Rick Heitzmann** (1:41)
We even have the branding up here. All new branding. It's great.

**Dan Nathan** (1:44)
It's pretty good. No, and we appreciate being here. You and I are going to do a series over the course of the summer. We're starting with you. We're going to end with your partner, Amish. I'm really excited about that and a lot of your partners, investors between the two of you. So we're going to bookend this series. And we're just going to go through. I mean, part of it is the stuff that you guys are most focused on. You guys have been early machine learning and AI investors long before we had ChatGPT come out in late 2022 Those perspectives are really, really useful. We're going to go through your sector stuff. Like some of your guys are doing great, great work and great investing in different parts of the VC ecosystem. I thought what we'd start here, and I know these are things that you talk about. I think it's fascinating. You were down on Capitol Hill a few months ago, and you were talking about AI, AI regulation, how some of these Congress folks should be thinking about it. Earlier this week, you did a podcast, a presentation I think for JP Morgan private wealth clients. Is that correct?

**Rick Heitzmann** (2:39)
Or more broadly over the whole research team, and they did a little bit of a teach-in with AI, and they brought in a couple of people that they thought might be able to teach them something. Hopefully, something happened there, but just kind of where we are, where we are in this whole thing. And I think even going back to the Capitol Hill thing, there's a little bit of the doomerism of any new technology that's being pushed against, especially in today's political backdrop.
And now the issues are getting more complex. There's a geopolitical issue of US vs. Chinese. There's an economic issue. There's financial issues that I'm sure we're going to talk about. So there's a lot of crosswinds, headwinds, tailwinds that's worth unpacking.

**Dan Nathan** (3:21)
So we'll do a bunch of that, and then we'll end with the IPO market, because this is something that's near and dear to your heart. You'd like to see some of your companies.

**Rick Heitzmann** (3:27)
And yeah, this gives us a chance to kind of stay high level, keep it on the geopolitical financial side. I'm excited to have my partners come, maybe drill a little bit deeper into their specific areas of focus, and that are particularly be affected by AI, whether that's cyber security, whether that's the new level of, my partner Matt calls it the mad landscape, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data enablement, or even what we're seeing in new technologies in the financial services, the financial technology market.