Jocelyn Goldfein — All Raise’s AI #womancrushwednesday
Editor’s note:
April is Artificial Intelligence month at All Raise and our third AI #WCW is Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners. All Raise’s ‘Women Crush Wednesdays’ (#WCW) is a series where we highlight genius women who are funding or founding tech companies. Please come back to the All Raise Medium blog every Wednesday to find a new profile of an awe-inspiring female VC or founder.
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Zetta Venture Partners’ Jocelyn Goldfein is an expert operator. Her experience ranges from product strategy to infrastructure to company scaling. She was an early engineer at VMware where she built core virtualization technology and ran VMware’s Desktop Business Unit. Afterward, she moved to Facebook where she spearheaded the adoption of machine learning for the News Feed ranker and led the pivot to mobile as an Engineering Director and Head of the Mobile Engineering team.
After success during high growth years at Facebook, Jocelyn decided it was time for a new challenge. She spent two years advising and investing in startups full-time before joining Zetta Venture Partners, a seed stage firm that invests in AI-first B2B startups. While at ZVP, Jocelyn has invested in a variety of AI companies including Opsani, which optimizes cloud infrastructure whenever a change is made, or Finite State, that looks to solve the IoT Security gap for enterprises through prevention, detection, and remediation.
I sat down with Jocelyn to discuss her transition from operator to investor as well as her thoughts on the importance and potential utilization of AI in our world.
Q: How did you decide to transition from an operator to an investor?
A: I was looking for the next arc in my career, to get back on a steep learning curve. I’d been running large engineering organizations for years. I spent most of my career in high growth mode, just drinking from a fire hose, and looking back, having learned so much — I just couldn’t see slowing down. If you had asked me at the outset, I would have said the likely result would be starting a company. But what I found instead was that I love the leverage of working across many companies. It’s just really challenging, and I felt I could make an impact to many founders and many markets and that was appealing.
Q: How did you decide on joining Zetta Venture Partners.
A: I joined Zetta two years ago. Mark Gorenberg was the founder in 2013; he was joined by Ash Fontana for Fund I and they brought me on at the outset of Fund II. I decided Mark and Ash are just wonderful people that I could see working with for the rest of my life. I also really believe in our thesis. Zetta stands for Zettabyte — a trillion gigabytes — reflecting our focus on big data and AI.
Q: What made you want to focus on AI? A: AI is the most important technology wave since the internet — and maybe will turn out to be bigger. Everybody can think of the companies enabled by the rise of the Internet — not to mention all of mobile, cloud, and SaaS. Inevitably there will be a next generation of companies enabled by the rise of AI. I hope I’m in the right time and place to help some of them along the way. So many investors are focusing on AI right now just because it’s novel and it’s well hyped. That’s not Zetta — we are trying to think deeply about what it means to build a business centered on learning loops — how do you rewrite and think the playbook on core business metrics for a startup to focus on data and data network effects.
Q: What specific types of technologies are you focused on
A:Zetta’s earliest investments were fundamental enabling technologies, the pickaxes and shovels of the AI gold rush. Think communities for data science like Kaggle, or tools like Domino Data Lab. Bucket number two is classic Saas, line of business applications. Sales acceleration (like InsideSales), marketing tech (like Marketing Evolution.) Third wave is verticals like energy, healthcare and fintech. All of these verticals will have specific solutions that are about optimization, prediction and discovery that are grounded in AI. Our latest category of investments are applying intelligence to the technology and development infrastructure itself. Think smart storage, AI-based DevOps, or cybersecurity. And looking forward, we anticipate a next wave coming that will address planet-scale challenges: climate change, human health, the designs of cities — every aspect of how we live and thrive will be enabled and reimagined with AI.
Q: Why is it important for us to start utilizing AI for Datacenter Infrastructure?
A: The rise of the cloud has enabled new architectures like containers and microservices. It’s become far too complex for humans to manage alone, giving rise to DevOps (programmable infrastructure) — but even rules based programming is no match for the exponential rise in surface area. We’re going to need smart networking, smart system management, smart file infrastructure, you name it. We’re going to have smart cybersecurity because AI is absolutely the only solution to the asymmetry between attackers and defenders.
Q: What do you think about when helping an advise an early stage company?
A: We aim to help startups who will own proprietary data sets that have long term compounding value through data network effects. We’ve thought deeply about how this type of company can leverage and grow their datasets to deliver increasing impact to customers over time, making it almost impossible for imitators to catch up. Just as SaaS companies had to be judged by different metrics than traditional software companies, we think AI companies will evolve new metrics as our industry comes to grips with the value of the data they are accumulating. For example, in addition to thinking about the minimum viable product, we think about the minimum algorithmic performance or the signs that a market is ready to adopt AI. We think about cases when a human-in-the-loop solution will beat a 100% automated solution. Sometimes it’s an essential supplement to reach the needed accuracy thresholds, and sometimes it’s about what your market is ready to adopt. We want entrepreneurs to experience Zetta as a thought partner who deeply understands their constraints and opportunities, not just a cheerleader hoping that AI “pixie dust” will make a company more valuable.
Q: On the topic of human-AI interaction, what do you think about the fear that AI will negatively affect the human workforce.
A: Throughout history, new technology platforms have been invented that automate human labor, from the printing press to the steam engine to the computer. In some ways, AI is just like every other wave of technology — it will render some jobs obsolete, and if history is any predictor, it will bring many more new kinds of jobs into existence. So overall, I’m bullish that AI will actually be a net job creator. However, what perhaps seems different about AI is the pace of change — when new technologies took generations to achieve full adoption, older workers had the opportunity to work until retirement, and younger workers could choose different paths at the outset of their working lives. With the accelerating pace change, it feels like we could see more displacement for mid-career workers, and it’s an issue we as a society have to collectively work together to solve. We need many more new ideas about lifelong learning, training, and career switching, flexible work arrangements, and more. This will require innovative ideas (and funding!) from the tech sector as well as academic and public sector investments to support education reform and social safety nets.
