Ramy Adeeb: You know, jobs are not lost to technology. Jobs are lost to recessions,
Ramy Adeeb: and then they don't come back before technology because of technology.
Ramy Adeeb: If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Ramy Adeeb: And so we really want to solve climate change with software.
Ramy Adeeb: Climate change is not a software problem. Climate change is a material science
Ramy Adeeb: problem, a policy problem, and a capital problem. There's tremendous investments
Ramy Adeeb: by the large language models.
Ramy Adeeb: They are the equivalent of the telco providers. They are spending all the money
Ramy Adeeb: for the training. They hope to capture the value. They might not.
Malak Fouad: And they're establishing the infrastructure.
Ramy Adeeb: And they were overbuilt. We always overbuilt. Hey, everyone.
Malak Fouad: I'm Malak Fouad, and welcome again to What I Did Next from A&T Media.
Malak Fouad: Every now and again, we have an encore episode where we check in with some of
Malak Fouad: your favorite alumni guests.
Malak Fouad: Today, we're sitting down again with Ramy Adeeb, founder and managing partner of 1984 Ventures.
Malak Fouad: When we last spoke in 2023, Ramy was focused on the tech sector in general.
Malak Fouad: Today, everything he looks at has to be AI first.
Ramy Adeeb: There is a saying that is often attributed to, of all people,
Ramy Adeeb: Vladimir Lenin. And I don't know. We don't know if he said it or he didn't say it.
Ramy Adeeb: That there are decades when nothing happens. But there are weeks when decades happen.
Ramy Adeeb: And right now we're going through this period where decades are happening in weeks.
Ramy Adeeb: I think what has grabbed my attention is really trying to stay abreast of where
Ramy Adeeb: the technology is today.
Ramy Adeeb: And what the capabilities allow us to do.
Ramy Adeeb: What has also kept my attention,
Ramy Adeeb: is trying to find the signal from the noise. There is so much noise when a new
Ramy Adeeb: technology comes from scratch.
Ramy Adeeb: And eventually that noise subsides and the signal is what remains.
Malak Fouad: That's a very interesting way of putting it. I have never heard of it that way.
Malak Fouad: It's a really nice way to explain...
Malak Fouad: What we'll end up with. It's a signal, not the noise. Yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: Exactly, exactly. And right now, it's really hard to distill the signal from
Ramy Adeeb: the noise. And then last, it's just been really busy building the firm.
Ramy Adeeb: We're investing out of our third fund now, building a team.
Ramy Adeeb: We have five partners working actively on meeting those entrepreneurs.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, there's really two types of VC firms. There's like top tier and everybody else.
Ramy Adeeb: And we want to make sure we're a top tier firm where every founder is going to work with us.
Ramy Adeeb: And it's ultimately a customer service business, one where you just continuously work for your founders.
Ramy Adeeb: And then that compounds with time until you become a firm that everybody wants to work with.
Malak Fouad: And from the very beginning, Ramy, when you set up your VC firm,
Malak Fouad: it was always tech focused.
Malak Fouad: I remember that that was very much your ethos at the time.
Malak Fouad: So today, your third fund, you're talking about your third fund.
Malak Fouad: And obviously, it's AI heavy, I'm assuming, since that's where your attention is.
Malak Fouad: So how have you kind of evolved from the first fund, the first years into where you are now?
Ramy Adeeb: When we started the fund, we were mainly focused on software,
Ramy Adeeb: pure software. So good old what we call SaaS, software as a service.
Ramy Adeeb: And we avoided all the hype trends. There was a very big hype trend with cryptocurrency,
Ramy Adeeb: and we totally ignored that. We just stuck to our knitting and did software
Ramy Adeeb: upending antiquated industries.
Ramy Adeeb: Then there was Web 3.0, a lot of buzzwords, a lot of noise around how,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, cryptocurrency meeting virtual reality would create these modalities.
Ramy Adeeb: And it wasn't really, it wasn't much. It was just a lot of noise.
Malak Fouad: And that didn't pan out in the end, right?
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah, it didn't pan out. We do get the credit of like, there's an article written
Ramy Adeeb: about us in 2022, actually an interview from Fortune magazine where they're,
Ramy Adeeb: just actually featuring us as a fund that has always panned crypto.
Ramy Adeeb: Because we were one of the very few funds that said no to crypto from day ones.
Ramy Adeeb: And they asked us, what are you doing? And we're just like, yeah,
Ramy Adeeb: we're doing AI and other stuff.
Malak Fouad: What was the reason, Ramy? Why were you averse to crypto? It was so trendy.
Malak Fouad: What was your gut feeling? I mean, why did you say no to that?
Ramy Adeeb: Because we are venture capital. We have a particular mode, right?
Ramy Adeeb: Take technological risk early on, on a small team of founders and hope that
Ramy Adeeb: they build massive businesses that can then disrupt the incumbents.
Ramy Adeeb: And we know how to do that with software. We know how to do that with consumer.
Ramy Adeeb: We even could do that with hardware.
Ramy Adeeb: Crypto was an entirely different asset class. It was like commodity trading.
Ramy Adeeb: I don't know how to do commodity trading. Sure, sure. It's not really commodity.
Ramy Adeeb: It's a commodity means gambling.
Ramy Adeeb: And the way to make money in crypto, you don't need a venture capitalist.
Ramy Adeeb: Just go pick a basket of coins and own it.
Malak Fouad: It was a different beast.
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah. It was a different beast. there is a almost folk you know a story about
Ramy Adeeb: about steve jobs that when steve jobs created the very first macintosh and there was a
Ramy Adeeb: there was a big event like a gala where he was demoing the computer and all
Ramy Adeeb: of these old folks would come by seasoned you know entrepreneurs seasoned
Ramy Adeeb: financiers it was actually new york city and ask him what is this and he like
Ramy Adeeb: he would talk to them for two minutes and they would leave he would talk to
Ramy Adeeb: them for two minutes and they would leave,
Ramy Adeeb: And then an eight-year-old came to him And he spoke to him for 40 minutes He
Ramy Adeeb: spoke to the eight-year-old for 40 minutes.
Ramy Adeeb: And then a journalist came to him and said, why is it that you spoke to the
Ramy Adeeb: eight-year-old for 40 minutes and to all the old people for like a couple of
Ramy Adeeb: minutes? And he goes, well, they all asked me, what is it?
Ramy Adeeb: And then the little kid said, hey, what can I do with this? It's a really an
Ramy Adeeb: important question where a lot of the folks who are really,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, endowed in finance and in politics and government ask,
Ramy Adeeb: what is this? And you say, oh, it's like artificial intelligence.
Ramy Adeeb: The real question is, what can I do with it? What are the applications?
Ramy Adeeb: What does this unlock? And for crypto, the primary application,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, was a little bit of gambling plus evading capital controls,
Ramy Adeeb: which is a real application.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, if you're in a country with a fastly deteriorating currency,
Ramy Adeeb: you want to actually use dollars. It's just not an application that,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, we're set out to solve.
Ramy Adeeb: With the Web 3.0, it was really hard to see what the application is.
Ramy Adeeb: But with AI, I mean, all it takes is just launching chatty between your cell
Ramy Adeeb: phone, uploading your medical record like everybody in my family does these days.
Ramy Adeeb: And speaking with it about it and realizing what the possibilities are.
Ramy Adeeb: So those possibilities are endless. That's exciting.
Ramy Adeeb: As an investor, though, as I mentioned, there's a lot of nice.
Ramy Adeeb: Because we don't know at the end of AI who will capture the value.
Ramy Adeeb: Who will come out ahead? What business models will be enduring and what business models will die?
Ramy Adeeb: And anyone who claims to have an end state, their guess is as good as mine.
Malak Fouad: Sure, sure, sure.
Ramy Adeeb: And objectively, the hardest part isn't predicting an end state.
Ramy Adeeb: It's just helping founders navigate that transition while it's underway.
Malak Fouad: You're talking about that we are at an inflection point.
Malak Fouad: We're about to be, where I think, this is my reading of it as a layperson,
Malak Fouad: we could see a slight collapse in the industry of maybe extra weight or companies
Malak Fouad: that are not performing.
Malak Fouad: And then from that, you will get those diamond companies that will endure.
Malak Fouad: It's the same with the internet. The system didn't end.
Malak Fouad: We got rid of a lot of extra weight companies that were not functioning properly.
Malak Fouad: But the industry went on to amazing things after that.
Ramy Adeeb: I couldn't have drawn a better analogy. Actually, I want to go back to the late 90s for a moment.
Malak Fouad: It's very in vogue, by the way, now, Ramy, the 90s.
Ramy Adeeb: It is a little bit in vogue. It is a little bit in vogue. It's also,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, the style, the Reebok shoes are back in vogue again.
Ramy Adeeb: It's all back, yeah. There are two lessons from the 90s that I want to touch
Ramy Adeeb: on. One around uncertainty.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, and the other around value capture. But let's start with the first one.
Ramy Adeeb: I remember sitting in a panel at Harvard in 1999 that was called,
Ramy Adeeb: Who Will Capture Value from the Internet?
Ramy Adeeb: Who Will Capture Value from the Internet? And then we had three speakers.
Ramy Adeeb: One was arguing that the telco providers, the companies that laid out the fiber,
Ramy Adeeb: the internet in the ground, were the ones that would capture all the value.
Ramy Adeeb: The second speaker was arguing that it would be the browsers, the Netscapes.
Ramy Adeeb: And it made sense because at the time, Netscape and Microsoft were literally
Ramy Adeeb: at the Supreme Court at each other's throat, where Microsoft had bundled a free,
Ramy Adeeb: Internet Explorer into Windows operating system.
Ramy Adeeb: And Netscape sued it for antitrust. And the thing went all the way to the Supreme
Ramy Adeeb: Court. And the prevailing model for making money from software in 1999 was to
Ramy Adeeb: pay money for somebody to install a piece of software in your computer.
Ramy Adeeb: So if Netscape software was the gateway to this internet, it made sense that
Ramy Adeeb: it would capture all the value.
Ramy Adeeb: The third speaker, who was the least convincing, was arguing that it would be the content providers.
Ramy Adeeb: The websites, the folks who actually ended up capturing all the value from the
Ramy Adeeb: internet. But the reason it wasn't obvious is in.
Ramy Adeeb: 1999, you couldn't accept credit
Ramy Adeeb: cards online. The only way to make money online was via display ads.
Ramy Adeeb: Remember those long ads on Yahoo?
Ramy Adeeb: And as a business, you could only make, you know, you could only make maybe
Ramy Adeeb: five bucks, 10 bucks for a million ads.
Ramy Adeeb: So how many ads will I possibly see
Ramy Adeeb: in a month to make it worthwhile for businesses to make a lot of money?
Ramy Adeeb: So the point of the story is when you are going through this technological inflection point,
Ramy Adeeb: There is a tremendous investment by everybody. There is tremendous,
Ramy Adeeb: today there is a very similar analogy. There's tremendous investments by the large language models.
Ramy Adeeb: They are the equivalent of the telco providers. They are spending all the money
Ramy Adeeb: for the training. They hope to capture the value. They might not.
Malak Fouad: And they're establishing the infrastructure.
Ramy Adeeb: But they're establishing the infrastructure. And without them,
Ramy Adeeb: we wouldn't have it. And they were overbuilt.
Ramy Adeeb: We always overbuilt, right? No matter, just because the technology is here to
Ramy Adeeb: last, doesn't mean we won't overbuilt.
Ramy Adeeb: We always do. We overbuilt with the internet. You know, we overbuilt.
Ramy Adeeb: And so they will overbuild a little bit.
Ramy Adeeb: Now, you can't, of course, time it, right? But they will overbuild.
Ramy Adeeb: And then you have the folks who are actually providing the application late.
Ramy Adeeb: And then you have the incumbents, the people who have what we call the systems
Ramy Adeeb: of record, the databases, the software, the large software companies that they use today.
Ramy Adeeb: Which one of those three will capture value? Really unclear, right?
Ramy Adeeb: Now, for us, though, as an early stage fund, what's exciting is we get to work
Ramy Adeeb: with very small companies who don't have the innovator's dilemma of the existing
Ramy Adeeb: incumbents, right, and who are very nimble.
Ramy Adeeb: And so they are, in a way, part of writing the future, in a sense.
Ramy Adeeb: Many of them will fail, but the ones that succeed do end up capturing a lot
Ramy Adeeb: of value because that's what we see with every one of these technological inflection
Ramy Adeeb: points is new startups are way more nimble, come in with fresh ideas,
Ramy Adeeb: and are able to just, you know, rewrite the rule of the game.
Ramy Adeeb: But as you navigate it, it is both exciting, it's thrilling.
Ramy Adeeb: And it's obviously, especially for large tech, for big tech companies,
Ramy Adeeb: it's very challenging times.
Malak Fouad: Yeah. What would you look back at the last couple of years and think of as you
Malak Fouad: and the company's biggest achievements in the space you're working in?
Ramy Adeeb: I mean, I think the company's biggest achievements is when...
Ramy Adeeb: A business that was not built on AI has managed to transform itself to be an AI-first business.
Ramy Adeeb: We have a number of examples that have been very successful.
Ramy Adeeb: I think most notably a company called PostHog that is probably one of our better
Ramy Adeeb: known businesses at 1984 Ventures, where they were the number one product analytics platform.
Ramy Adeeb: The company started it in 2020.
Malak Fouad: What do they do, Ramy?
Ramy Adeeb: They provide data and analytics for other software businesses to monitor and
Ramy Adeeb: track how their products are used.
Ramy Adeeb: But it includes everything from how many visitors came to my website,
Ramy Adeeb: to session recordings, to running experiments, to attributing value.
Ramy Adeeb: It's effectively the operating system for online businesses,
Ramy Adeeb: if you will. And it's very successful. It's one of our, you know, best known unicorns.
Ramy Adeeb: It was not an AI company. It was started in 2020.
Ramy Adeeb: And in 2020, beginning of 2020, end of 2024, we were having a lot of conversations
Ramy Adeeb: with the founders and they're starting to see AI.
Ramy Adeeb: And in the beginning of 2025, just something lit in the mind of the founder.
Ramy Adeeb: And he recognized we have to totally rebuild everything, rethink our business
Ramy Adeeb: to first and foremost address AI. You know, every sub-company says we're AI, we're AI, we're AI.
Ramy Adeeb: And what they do, you slap a chat interface on top of your existing product
Ramy Adeeb: and you say, hour AI, you know, the chat interface, you can talk to it.
Malak Fouad: Yeah, yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: Nobody cares, right?
Malak Fouad: Yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: AI means, it's actually funny because as a consumer, you have a really good
Ramy Adeeb: instinct of what AI is. AI is Instagram or TikTok.
Ramy Adeeb: Extreme personalization. When you launch your Instagram, and not just because
Ramy Adeeb: of the people you follow or your friends, just when you go to the videos,
Ramy Adeeb: it knows you so intimately, it knows your interests, and it's able to tailor the feed to you,
Ramy Adeeb: Your closest friend, your best friend, if you launched your Instagram, it's different.
Ramy Adeeb: It's not the same. That level of extreme personalization is at the core of AI.
Ramy Adeeb: Beyond just the personalization, we want human-like one-to-one communication,
Ramy Adeeb: across every modality, whether it's voice, text, and soon video.
Ramy Adeeb: And it's one-to-one communication, as in the AI knows who you are when it talks
Ramy Adeeb: to you. It talks to you based on your context and your insights and your data.
Ramy Adeeb: And then last, we need to do all of that was like feedback, data loops and infrastructures.
Ramy Adeeb: And then like then now the product starts to look like an AI product.
Ramy Adeeb: But to do that also, I need to transform my actual organization into being an AI organization.
Ramy Adeeb: What's an AI organization? God, it's not like giving everybody access to Cloud.
Ramy Adeeb: Everybody's like, oh, hey, go take access to Cloud or we give our businesses all access to chat GPT.
Ramy Adeeb: No, it's really about rethinking from the ground up what function should be
Ramy Adeeb: done by humans. and what functions should be done by machine.
Malak Fouad: How many companies that you're dealing with are seeing this future?
Malak Fouad: Are some resisting? Are some trying to catch up? Are they already there?
Malak Fouad: I mean, where have the challenges been for you?
Ramy Adeeb: So the biggest challenge is for an existing company who has a lot of revenue.
Ramy Adeeb: And this is just a textbook example of the innovator's dilemma.
Ramy Adeeb: The innovator's dilemma, the old Clay Christensen case study around how companies,
Ramy Adeeb: don't fail because they're doing the wrong thing.
Ramy Adeeb: They fail because they continue to do the right thing when it's no longer relevant,
Ramy Adeeb: when it's no longer the right thing. And that is sort of the irony.
Ramy Adeeb: And so we started investing from fund one in 2018, 2018 to 2021, fund two is 2021 to 2024.
Ramy Adeeb: I would say our fund one companies and half our fund two companies have had to adapt. Yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: But then investments starting from like 2023 up until today, they're all AI native.
Malak Fouad: They're all AI native. Yeah, yeah. So Ramy, you're in this world. You're deep into it.
Malak Fouad: You're looking at all these incredible innovative companies looking at the future.
Malak Fouad: I'm sitting in Cairo and I am not tech savvy in terms of using AI.
Malak Fouad: I'm just beginning to use it on a practical basis but what I am doing is I've
Malak Fouad: been educating myself a lot about
Malak Fouad: it in terms of what it means for society what it means for us as humans
Malak Fouad: I'm reading I've been doing this for the last year and a half and I'm beginning
Malak Fouad: to get involved in events and panels where AI is obviously a huge focus.
Malak Fouad: One of the big thinkers that I, you know, latched onto, I think partly because
Malak Fouad: he writes in a very simple manner for someone like me, who's not tech like you,
Malak Fouad: is Mustafa Suleiman, who runs Microsoft AI.
Malak Fouad: He did this incredible book in 2020 called The Coming Wave, which he's updated
Malak Fouad: since then. Obviously, it's no longer coming. The wave is washing over us.
Malak Fouad: It's looked behind us. We're in it.
Malak Fouad: We've swam deep into the sea. And what I like about him is he doesn't make it
Malak Fouad: look like it's all going to come up roses. He doesn't make it look like it's
Malak Fouad: all going to be positive.
Malak Fouad: He really does address the scary side and the need for containment,
Malak Fouad: the need for regulation, the need for...
Malak Fouad: Controlling this, you know, this tool
Malak Fouad: And in my mind i always try and separate this sort of big picture idea of where
Malak Fouad: are we going where will we be with this industry
Malak Fouad: and then of course drilling down like you do into practical what the companies
Malak Fouad: are doing how they're providing these incredible services and tools for us as
Malak Fouad: people who want to be more productive, more creative, all of that.
Malak Fouad: But I can't help feel really scared, Ramy.
Malak Fouad: I'm really quite scared of what's coming. You know, a good example,
Malak Fouad: we had the Anthropic issue with the Ministry of Defense or Ministry of War,
Malak Fouad: where Anthropic, being a private company, did what a state should do.
Malak Fouad: And they said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to sell you this,
Malak Fouad: You know, this software, this technology, if you're going to use it to surveil
Malak Fouad: Americans, if you're going to use it for autonomous weaponry.
Malak Fouad: So, I mean, people who know this world will know the issue. I'm not going to go into the issue.
Malak Fouad: So that was one thing that a lot of people suddenly went, light bulb moment went off.
Malak Fouad: The state was being the aggressor here and being the sort of the evil one.
Malak Fouad: And the corporation was being the one trying to safeguard and protect people,
Malak Fouad: which most of the time it's the opposite way around.
Malak Fouad: And then, of course, we've got the war, which we're in now, where there's no
Malak Fouad: doubt in my mind, autonomous weaponry is being used with either no human supervision
Malak Fouad: or the bare minimum supervision.
Malak Fouad: How do you think of these issues?
Ramy Adeeb: You know, there's many fears being talked about about AI. There is sort of the
Ramy Adeeb: existential fear of AI taking over the world.
Ramy Adeeb: I think that that might happen. I think there are fears around the use of AI
Ramy Adeeb: surveillance and the use of AI at war.
Ramy Adeeb: I think, I hate to say it, but the US is a laggard in that market.
Ramy Adeeb: China's leading the way. You know, I was in, I think I was in Bahrain in 2019 where China,
Ramy Adeeb: in a conference, where China was touting the face-to-recognition software and
Ramy Adeeb: sort of full government control software.
Ramy Adeeb: They're obviously way ahead of us in drones. They're way ahead of us in the US,
Ramy Adeeb: so like just as somebody in the US.
Ramy Adeeb: I'm not sure if we're really.. I think, if anything, we have some catch up to do,
Ramy Adeeb: we really do have some catch up to do, right? In terms of the future of the war,
Ramy Adeeb: if you think of if you actually go back,
Ramy Adeeb: the US did not win World War II by having the most powerful weapons it's actually
Ramy Adeeb: the opposite you know the US won World War II by having crazy strong supply chain,
Ramy Adeeb: and then building them faster that the Germans can sink them that was the model,
Ramy Adeeb: you're never going to build something as good as,
Ramy Adeeb: a T1 German tank just so much more advanced than we are but we can build six,
Ramy Adeeb: And the same thing with boats. And if you ever actually, if you ever come to
Ramy Adeeb: the US, you go to the, there's a New Orleans, a Museum of World War II in New Orleans.
Ramy Adeeb: It's incredible that it tells a story about World War II and really emphasizes
Ramy Adeeb: this was a supply chain war, a war won by taking Ford, which was the biggest
Ramy Adeeb: automotive company, and saying, stop making cars and make airplanes.
Ramy Adeeb: Shitty, tiny little thinkable airplanes, literally like the Shahd drones.
Malak Fouad: And we just need a lot of them.
Ramy Adeeb: Which is exactly what the Shad drones are doing. And then we're,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, and the US is actually trying to copy the Shahd drones.
Malak Fouad: But, you know, just talking about this existential element for a minute,
Malak Fouad: we're so deep into this new world now.
Malak Fouad: And, you know, people have been talking about we must regulate,
Malak Fouad: we must control, we will, we will, we will.
Malak Fouad: Hasn't happened. It's not going to happen.
Malak Fouad: Governments are not going to get together and do some kind of agreements together.
Malak Fouad: This is a race to the finish by big tech companies.
Malak Fouad: And, you know, governments around the world have proven to be completely,
Malak Fouad: you know, unable to manage their current issues, let alone what we're beginning to move into.
Ramy Adeeb: So no, no, no, it is but I also you know I liken it again to the nuclear race in
Ramy Adeeb: the late 40s early 50s but nobody was going to sit down and do a nuclear non-perforation
Ramy Adeeb: treaty people are like I gotta get there first, you know, I gotta it's.
Malak Fouad: Different, Ramy. It's different because I thought of that as a good analogy but
Malak Fouad: the difference is is that nuclear weapons were it was one form of tech and it had one use.
Malak Fouad: AI is omni-tech. So it's available throughout everything we're going to be doing
Malak Fouad: for the rest of our lives for the next forever.
Malak Fouad: So how do you regulate something that's omni-use?
Malak Fouad: You can't, you can't, Ramy, you can't.
Ramy Adeeb: I mean, look, you can count in the Europeans to over-regulate it.
Ramy Adeeb: You can count in China to sort of,
Ramy Adeeb: state control it, not regulate it, but state control it. And then you can count
Ramy Adeeb: in the US to like kind of slightly under-regulate, slightly over-regulate.
Malak Fouad: Fudge it, yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: To kind of fudge it, right? I mean, it's basically where you're going to net
Ramy Adeeb: out. But I want to go back to the employment for a moment.
Ramy Adeeb: Yes. Because, like, you know, will AI, like, destroy humanity as we know it?
Ramy Adeeb: It's a possibility, but also,
Ramy Adeeb: that same applies to nuclear weapons, the same applies to chemical weapons,
Ramy Adeeb: the same applies to many other things. It's definitely a threat.
Ramy Adeeb: It's just a threat that we have to understand.
Ramy Adeeb: But does AI have the potential?
Ramy Adeeb: To cause economic havoc in the next five years. In the next five years,
Ramy Adeeb: not like the next 20 years.
Malak Fouad: Maybe even less.
Ramy Adeeb: For sure.
Malak Fouad: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: And a lot of folks are saying, a lot of folks, the counter argument,
Ramy Adeeb: and I really worry about this.
Malak Fouad: Yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, we have our entire world is built today around 2% inflation or 5%
Ramy Adeeb: inflation around economic growth, around prosperity.
Ramy Adeeb: It's almost like a massive pyramid scheme.
Ramy Adeeb: And it's so precarious.
Malak Fouad: One thing changes and the whole thing is wobbly.
Ramy Adeeb: A lot of folks, the counter argument to these concerns on unemployment is always
Ramy Adeeb: like, oh, don't worry. The technology always creates new jobs.
Ramy Adeeb: I'm sitting here scratching and I'm like, yeah, I get it. I get it.
Ramy Adeeb: Like when we switched from the horse carriages to the automotive, it's a classic story.
Ramy Adeeb: Like, you know, all the people that worked in the horse carriages,
Ramy Adeeb: like lots of jobs, but then you got mechanics and drivers and yet,
Ramy Adeeb: yes, that took freaking 30 years. It took 30 years, right?
Ramy Adeeb: When women, when we switched from typing on a typewriter into using a computer,
Ramy Adeeb: into a personal computer, people had to reskill.
Ramy Adeeb: They had a tenure to stop using, you know, to stop using typewriter and learn
Ramy Adeeb: how to use a word processor.
Ramy Adeeb: I see developers today, software engineers, people who should be at the forefront of using technology,
Ramy Adeeb: who are struggling to use the most advanced AI coding, struggling to use it,
Ramy Adeeb: because it changes their entire framework of how I write code.
Ramy Adeeb: It changes their sense of self-worth.
Ramy Adeeb: That previously, I was an engineer whose work was precious. Now I just tell
Ramy Adeeb: Claude to do something and it does it for me.
Malak Fouad: And your work was in demand and needed.
Ramy Adeeb: I mean, it's really hilarious. But if I show you this, this is just my actual
Ramy Adeeb: library. This isn't a point to every book here is irrelevant.
Ramy Adeeb: Like this is something called, you know, the mythical man month.
Ramy Adeeb: This was the ultimate book about software engineering in groups.
Ramy Adeeb: Totally, totally irrelevant.
Ramy Adeeb: This is a book in like compiler, modern compiler work. Oh, that knowledge is irrelevant.
Malak Fouad: It's gone out the window. It's gone out the window. And it's shocking.
Ramy Adeeb: And then you have to rescale. And that's a software engineer.
Ramy Adeeb: And then rescale to a world. Now, will we want more software engineers?
Ramy Adeeb: Sure. We probably would want more software to be built. And we will need more
Ramy Adeeb: infrastructure and so forth. But I think about lawyers.
Ramy Adeeb: I think about accountants. I think about brokers. I think about the entire world of the economy.
Ramy Adeeb: And then I think of, and again, I think, frankly, we're fortunate in countries
Ramy Adeeb: like Egypt where we haven't yet switched to a services economy.
Ramy Adeeb: We're still a goods economy to some extent. And these are way more resilient.
Ramy Adeeb: Pencil and paper economy.
Malak Fouad: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: Pencil and paper economy, exactly. And a lot of people, and,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, it's not the, you know, money isn't being made by low-region accounts.
Ramy Adeeb: It's being made like from real estate and from food. So there is a chart philanthropic
Ramy Adeeb: that I really think is worth taking a look back at. And the chart lists every job.
Ramy Adeeb: And how much of it, you know, is being, you know, automated today and how much
Ramy Adeeb: we think we might be able to automate in the future, right?
Ramy Adeeb: And at the top of this list, at the top of this list, you see computer and math.
Ramy Adeeb: Computer programming, 96% automatable, right? Business and finance, 94% automatable.
Ramy Adeeb: Legal, 88% automatable. And then at the very bottom, you see agriculture,
Ramy Adeeb: you see food and servicing, you see construction.
Ramy Adeeb: And you can very quickly recognize, well, how much of my GDP comes from where?
Malak Fouad: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: And instantly get an assessment of where it is false. And the more advanced
Ramy Adeeb: the society, the bigger the challenge. So we need to reskill.
Ramy Adeeb: But we don't know what the new skills are. And we have to reskill very quickly.
Malak Fouad: So that brings me to a question for you, Ramy. So I have, you met my children.
Malak Fouad: Ali is one more year of university after this one.
Malak Fouad: And he is, like all his friends, struggling to find internships,
Malak Fouad: doesn't know if he's going to have a job at the end of this.
Malak Fouad: What is he employable for? It's a real, real problem.
Malak Fouad: My younger son is about to go to university in September, in August.
Malak Fouad: And, you know, I'm thinking, you know, what should he be studying?
Malak Fouad: Should he be just, you know, if we're going to take it as a hypothetical,
Malak Fouad: Should he go more toward sciences or should he go more towards humanities or
Malak Fouad: if he likes to read, should he become a writer? You know, where should the weight
Malak Fouad: be put for future, for the future?
Malak Fouad: If you were advising a young person today, what would you tell them?
Ramy Adeeb: I don't worry too much about the young folks because this is a time where it's
Ramy Adeeb: not the strongest survives, it's the fittest who survives.
Ramy Adeeb: And they are going to be an AI-native generation.
Ramy Adeeb: Like, they are so much, they're already so much better at using chat.
Malak Fouad: They're already using it for everything, yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: It's almost, sometimes can be a little creepy because they use it to ask questions
Ramy Adeeb: that I, about, almost like a personal coach to them.
Ramy Adeeb: What should they study? I really don't know. I really don't know.
Ramy Adeeb: The signs favor increasingly like that human connection, human communication, sales, leadership.
Malak Fouad: The soft skills, basically, right?
Ramy Adeeb: The soft skills or be a plumber, which in the US
Malak Fouad: Makes really good money. Or work with your hands, right?
Ramy Adeeb: Or work with your hands. Yeah. Because robotics aren't there yet. Yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: But I want to talk, you know, we keep touching on this point of,
Ramy Adeeb: you mentioned they're very young.
Ramy Adeeb: I think this is a lot less about age and it's about a mindset.
Ramy Adeeb: It's just the very classic biology. It's the fittest. It's not the straw,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, Darwin. It's the fittest who survives.
Malak Fouad: Yeah, I see that. I see that point.
Ramy Adeeb: I think I might have shared this story. When we got started with 1984.
Ramy Adeeb: So effectively, like the whole story, the whole journey started when I was having
Ramy Adeeb: dinner with Sir Mohamed Mansour, right? He was obviously Egyptian and he was
Ramy Adeeb: visiting Silicon Valley.
Malak Fouad: And let's remind the listeners, he was a big part of your beginnings and your foundation. Exactly.
Ramy Adeeb: So he was effectively a co-founder for us. When I had dinner with him,
Ramy Adeeb: he said, Ramy, I live in Egypt. I invested in Uber.
Ramy Adeeb: And these small technology startups come and threaten my businesses.
Ramy Adeeb: I want to go and see where they start and I want to be part of their incubation,
Ramy Adeeb: instead of waiting in Egypt or
Ramy Adeeb: in London and then have them show up at my doorsteps knocking on my door.
Ramy Adeeb: And this is a guy who was 71 at the time. He was 71 at the time.
Malak Fouad: Yeah, you're right. It's a mindset. It's not a...
Ramy Adeeb: But his mindset is like, oh, there's this new thing.
Malak Fouad: Yeah. How can I be part of it? I need to know about it.
Ramy Adeeb: Because so many of us are like, you know, 30s and 40s. Like,
Ramy Adeeb: oh my God, what am I going to do?
Ramy Adeeb: So, yeah, the world is changing, but there are folks whose mindset is,
Ramy Adeeb: let me go understand what the new world is and let me go embrace it.
Ramy Adeeb: And it's a really important mindset today.
Malak Fouad: In terms of 1984, I want to ask you two questions. Remind me,
Malak Fouad: why is it called 1984? Is it from the Orwell book?
Ramy Adeeb: No, it is not from the Orwell book. It's for the Apple commercial.
Ramy Adeeb: Apple launched a commercial in 1984.
Ramy Adeeb: When it launched the computer, the personal computer, the commercial was about
Ramy Adeeb: tiny little sort of heroin fighting against Big Brother or Big Blue, which was IBM.
Ramy Adeeb: Apple was a tiny little company fighting against IBM, which was the biggest tick.
Ramy Adeeb: And that story of small tech going after big tech is the story that keeps repeating
Ramy Adeeb: itself every day in our business. Today, our startups, who are they afraid of the most?
Ramy Adeeb: Open AI and Anthropik. They are the big tech.
Malak Fouad: That's really interesting.
Ramy Adeeb: I like that. And our job is to work with, yeah. So you're helping.
Malak Fouad: The little guy beat the big guy. Exactly.
Malak Fouad: And drilling down a little bit, Ramy, into the fund, the current fund,
Malak Fouad: are there sectors within AI that you're excited about, that you're putting money behind?
Malak Fouad: Are you focused on biotech? Are you focused on medicine? Are you focused on
Malak Fouad: climate? Are there areas that you think
Malak Fouad: You know, there are clear winners for me in terms of, I mean,
Malak Fouad: it's a no-brainer that AI helping in healthcare medicine is a game changer.
Malak Fouad: You know, one of the alumni I've had on the show is this fantastically dynamic
Malak Fouad: woman called Nadine Hachach-Haram.
Malak Fouad: She's a Lebanese surgeon. She's based in the UK.
Malak Fouad: She has a startup. I don't even think it's a startup anymore called Proximy. Proximy.
Malak Fouad: And she, in the last couple of years, AI has completely transformed her business.
Malak Fouad: They connect operating rooms around the world to surgeons to help do operations
Malak Fouad: if they can't do them on site.
Malak Fouad: And obviously, AI has had the most incredible positive impact on her business.
Malak Fouad: So medicine for me, obviously, is a no brainer. But how are you approaching
Malak Fouad: it? What are the industries that you're excited about?
Ramy Adeeb: We're also excited about vertical AI in general, AI going after all these legacy
Ramy Adeeb: industries, whether it's insurance or brokerage or recruiting and staffing, software engineering.
Ramy Adeeb: There was a lot of industries that were previously almost untouchable by venture
Ramy Adeeb: that are now becoming fair play because of AI.
Malak Fouad: Give me an example, Ramy.
Ramy Adeeb: Recruiting. HR tech was always like, you don't want to sell to HR teams,
Ramy Adeeb: but now AI fully automates interviews.
Malak Fouad: Yes, Ali's doing a semester in London and he had an AI-led internship interview the other day.
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah, of course. It's phenomenal. But then there are some other industries where I maybe am less excited.
Ramy Adeeb: I think environment and climate being one of them because I think sometimes,
Ramy Adeeb: as either venture capitalists or software engineers,
Ramy Adeeb: we, you know, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Ramy Adeeb: And so we really want to solve climate change with software.
Ramy Adeeb: Climate change is not a software problem.
Ramy Adeeb: Climate change is a material science problem, a policy problem, and a capital problem.
Ramy Adeeb: Agreed. So if you want to solve it, you can make money doing real research and
Ramy Adeeb: material science and figure out a substrate, improving manufacturing.
Ramy Adeeb: You can make money by building solar farms as a capital provider.
Ramy Adeeb: You can go and work with policy and government and technological innovation,
Ramy Adeeb: but it's not software. People are like, I'm going to build this software company
Ramy Adeeb: that's going to do carbon emission measuring and marketplace.
Ramy Adeeb: How many of these can we have? It's not really the problem. So you want to make
Ramy Adeeb: sure. But you look at healthcare.
Ramy Adeeb: I'm like, wow. For the longest time, software in healthcare was about automating
Ramy Adeeb: what's called pre-care coordination. Today, for the first time,
Ramy Adeeb: we can automate clinical work.
Ramy Adeeb: The actual work of diagnosis, of bringing the data, analyzing it,
Ramy Adeeb: communicating it to the patient and working with them on a treatment plan.
Ramy Adeeb: That is incredible. The real hurdles today are regulatory.
Ramy Adeeb: Are regulatory and structural around payment.
Malak Fouad: Let's take a step back. I just want to drill down into your own kind of life a little bit.
Malak Fouad: Who would you consider to be someone that you find very influential or like a mentor figure to you?
Malak Fouad: Today? Because I know that this changes over time.
Ramy Adeeb: Definitely. I used to work at Kusla Ventures, and it was founded by a well-known
Ramy Adeeb: venture capitalist called Vinod Kusla, who was the very first investor in open AI.
Ramy Adeeb: And Vinod has continued to be incredibly influential in the world of AI.
Ramy Adeeb: And he embodies to a great extent what a venture capital should do.
Ramy Adeeb: He really lets, you know, he's willing to imagine what things can become,
Ramy Adeeb: invest in the potential of people and ideas and not be bothered by what could go wrong.
Ramy Adeeb: And that's how he was the first check in OpenAI. And that's why he has many failures as well.
Malak Fouad: You have to be a risk taker, right?
Ramy Adeeb: You have to be a risk taker, right? Which is a topic we talked about a lot last time.
Malak Fouad: We did. We did. What's your appetite for risk these days?
Ramy Adeeb: Pretty high. You know, for ideas. Yeah, I think the obvious ideas are very competitive.
Ramy Adeeb: Some of our best companies, like we're in AI interviews, way ahead of it.
Ramy Adeeb: It's like, I'm willing to take risks and idea that might or may not work.
Malak Fouad: But that also comes with experience, Ramy, I think, right? You're much more
Malak Fouad: established now. You've been around the block.
Malak Fouad: You've seen failures. You've seen successes.
Malak Fouad: I guess your appetite for risk increases as well, I guess, when you are more experienced.
Ramy Adeeb: So it's an interesting question you're saying. I think it goes back to the mindset.
Ramy Adeeb: There are folks who take less risk with time and there are folks who take more risk with time.
Ramy Adeeb: When I got started in this industry, I was working with a very,
Ramy Adeeb: very, very seasoned older gentleman called Pierre Lamond, who is today 95, still alive.
Ramy Adeeb: He was one of the founders of National Semiconductors. He was a VC at Sequoia
Ramy Adeeb: for a long time and he was at Coastal when I was there and he was, Tass was mentoring us.
Ramy Adeeb: At the time he was 80, he was the oldest person working in VC and he still sometimes practices today.
Ramy Adeeb: And I remember Pierre saying, if you learn from your mistakes,
Ramy Adeeb: In our industry, by the time you're 50, you're not going to be making a single investment.
Malak Fouad: Oh, interesting.
Ramy Adeeb: We should learn from mistakes. But learning from mistakes is a really narrow
Ramy Adeeb: subset that can preclude us from having future success.
Malak Fouad: It can make you risk averse. If you were to pick a different profession,
Malak Fouad: let's just say, you know, all this was taken away from you and you had like
Malak Fouad: a hobby or what would you do?
Ramy Adeeb: You know, when I was really young, I wanted to be a pilot because I wanted to travel the world.
Ramy Adeeb: And then when I saw more of the world, I realized I definitely didn't want to
Ramy Adeeb: be a pilot. I want to get to enjoy the places I go to, not just travel to them.
Ramy Adeeb: And then I fell in love with computers. I wanted to be an engineer to build things.
Ramy Adeeb: But now I realize that building things is about doing a lot more than writing code.
Ramy Adeeb: It's about building teams and building organizations and leading folks through
Ramy Adeeb: doing things. So I'd want to be building something and breaking it every once
Ramy Adeeb: in a while. I don't know what that would be.
Malak Fouad: You have a young son, right?
Ramy Adeeb: I have a three and a half year old son.
Malak Fouad: So are you playing Lego with him? Are you building blocks with him and things like that?
Ramy Adeeb: We're doing Lego. We're doing blocks. I had him teaching him how to use a keyboard,
Ramy Adeeb: which I think you're not supposed to have screen time. But I think computers
Ramy Adeeb: are not screen time. I think cell phones are screen time in my mindset. Yeah.
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah, it's really fun. It's really fun to see your,
Ramy Adeeb: you know, natural intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence in progress. It's incredible.
Malak Fouad: And see how quickly they learn at this age. They're like sponges.
Malak Fouad: They just take it all in, right? It's incredible.
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah. And see also how they learn how to be manipulative. It's incredible.
Ramy Adeeb: For a three-year-old, you're like, wow.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, AI is getting there, but the humans are so much faster at it.
Malak Fouad: That's right. That's right. And what's a typical day for you,
Malak Fouad: Ramy? Are you still commuting between the East and West Coast?
Ramy Adeeb: I spend probably three weeks in New York, one week in San Francisco a month.
Ramy Adeeb: I mean, New York and San Francisco are the two capitals of entrepreneurship.
Ramy Adeeb: San Francisco is more important right now.
Ramy Adeeb: And so I'm spending a lot of time in SF. Because when you're going through this
Ramy Adeeb: massive rapid technological innovation, and our portfolio is about two-thirds
Ramy Adeeb: SF, one-third New York. New York has a little better access to markets, though.
Ramy Adeeb: So San Francisco has access to technologies. New York has access to ideas where to implement them.
Ramy Adeeb: And so you find the pure technologists building in SF, the more application
Ramy Adeeb: level folks building in New York.
Malak Fouad: Interesting. What's a typical day for you? Does it vary depending on which part
Malak Fouad: of the country you're in?
Ramy Adeeb: It's a lot of meetings. I wake up. My job is to make my wife coffee.
Malak Fouad: That's always a good job, Ramy.
Ramy Adeeb: Keep doing that. She's a good job. She makes breakfast for our son,
Ramy Adeeb: but I need to make her coffee.
Ramy Adeeb: Obviously, lots of joys, lots of LinkedIn, lots of cheesy LinkedIn posts about having children.
Ramy Adeeb: Effect on your professional career and life. But it certainly provides a wonderful,
Ramy Adeeb: reprieve from work and a healthy one. And then work provides a great reprieve from them. For sure.
Malak Fouad: Because kids are very challenging, as we know.
Ramy Adeeb: It's a very symbiotic relationship. But then, you know, I probably drop them
Ramy Adeeb: off at eight and then I start my, probably from eight to nine.
Ramy Adeeb: I'll do it. I try to not schedule calls from eight to nine and leave that more,
Ramy Adeeb: maybe if I have a call with Europe, or somewhere far from the US.
Ramy Adeeb: But I typically spend that doing email and then my calls start 9, 9.30, go until 5.36.
Malak Fouad: Do you have any time for exercise and sort of unwinding or does that not figure these days?
Malak Fouad: It's very, I find it so important to clear my mind, you know?
Ramy Adeeb: I need to do more of it. I typically swim twice a week.
Malak Fouad: Oh, that's nice. I love swimming as well. So Ramy, this was an amazing conversation as usual.
Malak Fouad: I always find our conversations very eye-opening and really this drilling down
Malak Fouad: into subjects I find really inspiring.
Malak Fouad: I want to end with what I call the quick fire round. And so this is like this
Malak Fouad: really fun and light little segment. Ready?
Malak Fouad: All right. Online connectivity or offline anonymity?
Ramy Adeeb: Online anonymity.
Malak Fouad: Ha ha. Good one. I didn't think of that. Okay. Favorite activity?
Ramy Adeeb: Sailing.
Malak Fouad: Where do you sail?
Ramy Adeeb: In San Francisco and in the Caribbean. So I've owned a small boat that I shared
Ramy Adeeb: with a couple of my friends for like 25 years and I love sailing. It's an incredible...
Malak Fouad: And so you sail yourself. You've learned how to sail. That's amazing.
Malak Fouad: Yeah. So that's your downtime. That's how you switch off.
Ramy Adeeb: That is how I switch off. And you have to switch off because you have to. There's a lot going on.
Malak Fouad: Of course.
Ramy Adeeb: Lines and ropes and sails and traffic and fog that's.
Malak Fouad: Such a nice activity
Ramy Adeeb: Ramy but it's not an exercise.
Malak Fouad: Yeah what's your least favorite activity
Ramy Adeeb: Exercise going to the gym I can't get myself to do it I just can't go to the gym and,
Ramy Adeeb: And like exercise without a purpose. I will work really hard.
Ramy Adeeb: Like I love digging trails.
Ramy Adeeb: And so I love to work hard with my hands. I love to swim. I love to build things.
Ramy Adeeb: But to go to the gym and just lift weights or run on a treadmill,
Ramy Adeeb: I can't get myself to do it.
Malak Fouad: And you're more outdoorsy then. You don't want to be indoors as well.
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah, I love outdoors.
Malak Fouad: Last two things. I have a hard time.
Ramy Adeeb: Dealing with bullshit.
Malak Fouad: Is that on a work level?
Ramy Adeeb: I think there is a lot of noise on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Ramy Adeeb: Clickbait, stupid ideas that are being promoted like it's massive insights and
Ramy Adeeb: wisdoms. And I have a really hard time. I agree.
Malak Fouad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're acting as though they've invented the wheel,
Malak Fouad: right? And it is bullshit.
Ramy Adeeb: I wonder if there's a better way than saying dealing with bullshit.
Ramy Adeeb: Maybe dealing with group. I don't want to sound too cerebral,
Ramy Adeeb: but I could say dealing with groupthink.
Malak Fouad: There's also such a focus now on exhibiting yourself, right?
Malak Fouad: And trying to portray yourself as the one and only one with the knowledge,
Malak Fouad: with the know-how. And, you know, there's that side of life today that is very,
Malak Fouad: I find very, very difficult to deal with.
Ramy Adeeb: Yeah. And you know that people are seeing through it. You know that everybody sees through it.
Malak Fouad: Absolutely.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, I think it reminds me, I heard the other day LinkedIn is Instagram for adults.
Malak Fouad: I am really turned off LinkedIn. I find that it's just such self-publicity.
Malak Fouad: And it really is beginning to really bother me.
Ramy Adeeb: But there's something about what you said. It's not about bullshit. It's about almost...
Ramy Adeeb: Fake AI enabled self-promotion and social media.
Malak Fouad: Yeah. Last point. I get joy from.
Ramy Adeeb: Seeing founders grow.
Malak Fouad: Very nice. So last time when you and I chatted, I think we ended our conversation
Malak Fouad: by you talking to me about Burning Man.
Malak Fouad: And it was a big thing in your life then. Is that still even happening now?
Ramy Adeeb: It is. We're going in August. I don't know if it's a big thing in my life.
Malak Fouad: Oh, you're still into it.
Ramy Adeeb: I don't know if it's a big thing in my life. You know, it's just a fun event.
Ramy Adeeb: You know, I wonder if I've gotten, And it's funny because I don't talk about
Ramy Adeeb: it as much, not because we go less, but maybe because we're more established
Ramy Adeeb: as a firm. And now I'm becoming one of those conservative, don't talk about personal stuff.
Ramy Adeeb: Don't be that guy. Burning Man is incredible.
Ramy Adeeb: It's a very unique experience for you to leave your identity outside.
Ramy Adeeb: Go be surrounded by art. Find what you're passionate about, whether it's art, music.
Ramy Adeeb: It's a very harsh environment, particularly hard for Egyptians because we know
Ramy Adeeb: what a desert is. And for us, it's not exotic.
Ramy Adeeb: For everybody, it's like, oh my God, it's like a desert. I'm like,
Ramy Adeeb: I know exactly what it is. And we spend our entire life trying to avoid it. And so it's a...
Malak Fouad: I've outgrown places that don't have state-of-the-art designer bathrooms.
Malak Fouad: I don't do camping. I don't do any of this stuff. I'm just like,
Malak Fouad: no, show me a place with a nice bathroom and I'm all yours.
Malak Fouad: Thanks for joining me today. I'm Malak Fouad, and this episode was produced by Chirag Desai.
Malak Fouad: I'll be back again soon with a new guest. I hope you can join me then.