The AI "FOMO Feeding Frenzy" with Amish Jani of FirstMark Capital

**Dan Nathan** (0:00)
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**Dan Nathan** (2:00)
Welcome to the OK Computer Podcast. I am Dan Nathan. I am joined by a very good friend of mine. That is Amish Jani. He is the co-founder and partner at FirstMark Capital here in New York City. Amish, welcome.

**Amish Jani** (2:10)
Thanks, Dan. Excited to be here.

**Dan Nathan** (2:12)
I know. I mean, you and I have talked about podcasting. We are off and out socially.
We do bullshit a little bit here and there about the biz, that sort of thing, but we have actually more fun, I think, eating and drinking together, that sort of thing. And Rick Heitzman, your partner, is usually involved in that sort of thing. I think you know this. We are doing a series with our friends at FirstMark, your partner, that sort of thing. And we're doing it here from your headquarters. We are now your new tenants. It's pretty cool, right? So I want to talk a little bit about your career in investing in technology. You were at one of the best sort of tech shops, I want to say investing shops in the late 90s, or for most of the 90s, it was Peacock. You and Rick met there, and you guys started FirstMark, I want to say 25 years ago. Does that sound right? 20 years ago. 20 years ago. And you guys have had just a really storied career as a VC fund here in New York City, and really like an anchor, I think, as it relates to technology investing. And so we're going to hit a bunch of that. And your focus has been on enterprise software, SaaS, AI, infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, all of it. So we want to hit on some of those prior sort of experiences that you had. You were early in Shopify. You've had a lot of great exits, whether it's M&A or taking companies public. So we want to hit all that. But let's start with AI here. And this is something that...

**Amish Jani** (3:27)
Start with the punchline.

**Dan Nathan** (3:28)
Well, let's start with the punchline because it's interesting. And going back, let's say four years, I know this was not something new to you and your partners, but Chachibutti comes out in late 22, and it seems like a lot of folks in tech were paying attention to it. There weren't too many reverberations, I don't want to say, in early 2023, about what it meant for public markets, but it all came on pretty quickly. And so, as you think about how you've been investing over the last, call it 20 years, in the private markets, is this really one of the biggest sea changes that you've seen? Let's just talk about the environment because we're four years on right now, and a lot of stuff's happened.

**Amish Jani** (4:03)
Yeah, I mean, I think this is the fastest change we've ever seen and of the largest magnitude. I think one of the things that's challenging about using the historical frame of reference is every market got bigger along the way, so the old numbers no longer make sense. So when Rick and I started back in venture in the late 90s, and you were talking about technology, a lot of it was improvement for technology's sake. And then it began to evolve into software and the cloud, and then it moved into mobile. And each one of those had a correspondingly bigger and bigger impact on the broader world. And here we are in the world of AI, which is impacting the entire economy. And it's taking a lot of our labor services and driving automation, driving better productivity, and I think enabling another wave of entrepreneurship. So it's part of the reason why when you look backwards, it's so challenging because the numbers are so staggering today, that you can't really use those historical frames of reference, whether it's valuations, whether it's capital raise, whether it's things like that. So it's a remarkable time. And this is the biggest change.