Through the ScOp Playbook, we’ve refined our strategy for identifying, building, and investing in successful companies.
I too often see marketing plans “focused” on everything: podcasts, site redesign, name change, conferences, awards, etc. When you focus on everything, you are clueless; you will fail at everything and spend all your money. FOCUS. Get one thing working, then move on to the next high-conviction item.
Below is a very brief overview of the three pillars of marketing.
I’m often asked for career advice. People think linearly: I get my degree, work for two years, return and get my MBA, etc. I like to challenge people to think non-linearly if they want to be massively successful. Here are the four career tips I give people:
Guava, one of our investments, is a free app aggregating ALL your healthcare data in one place. They pull data from your consumer, commercial devices, and over 50,000 healthcare providers (physicians, hospitals, blood labs, etc.). You can have a comprehensive view of all of your health data. They added a cool feature called "Insights" that looks for correlations between factors, like how the number of steps impacts sleep.
Jason and I go back to the early days of the Internet. Back in 1996, Jason started “The Silicon Alley Reporter” while we were building DoubleClick. We finally got to catch up on Jason’s “This Week in Startups” podcast. Enjoy.
From writing to finance, the AI Revolution is changing every industry worldwide, and now it is poised to drive Electronic Design Automation (EDA). ChipAgents is reinventing semiconductor design and verification with AI chip design. Founded by Dr. William Wang, a UCSB professor specialized in AI, and recently achieving state-of-the-art performance on NVIDIA's VerilogEval benchmark, ChipAgents is providing a first-class agentic AI EDA environment.
I became convinced back in 1995 that the Internet would be transformative: providing access to the world’s information from anywhere, free of charge. That was a very compelling value proposition. People rushed to develop content for the exploding user base. Our company, DoubleClick, helped to monetize those sites through advertising, now a $700 billion industry. Over the following years, the Internet expanded from a relatively small number of sites to millions of sites and billions of pages. It took Google to bring order to our world, and that order made them the gatekeepers.
Authenticity in education and academic honesty are paramount to a robust learning environment. The rise of AI poses a significant set of challenges for educators seeking to preserve honesty and integrity in the classroom. At the same time, AI tools for education allow students to gain experience with cutting edge technologies changing the world of work. Properly teaching students to use AI in ways that supports their authentic work instead of replacing it is a paramount task facing educators in the 21st century.
Cheating on essays and academic papers has existed for centuries. From plagiarism to Wikipedia, too many students have always found ways to avoid the hard work of writing. But today, a new tool has rapidly become the preferred shortcut: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. Hence, the desperate need for AI detectors.
Pangram, the developer of the leading AI detector for written content has added plagiarism detection to their suite of products.
A few weeks ago, we signed a term sheet with Alpha Design, an early-stage company developing AI to assist in the development and testing of digital chips. The company was founded by William Wang, an accomplished professor at UCSB who has led the university’s AI efforts over the past several years.
