Preservation and Advancement in 2023 & Beyond

Keeping the American Dream Alive

Published in

Start-up Society

7 min readJan 10, 2023

Welcome to the 108th edition of Start-up Society! This blog highlights some of the most exciting start-ups in the country striving to keep the American Dream alive.

Make sure you check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

Happy New Year!! There has been a lot of reflection and new technology released in the past year. We are seeing the rise of many new and interesting ways to consume energy, consume information, and interact with each other. Today we are going to dive into arguably two of the most pressing and important concepts for humanity today; Preservation and Advancement.

Climate tech and innovation are critical for the preservation of our species (as long as we refuse to consume less as a society).

Artificial Intelligence seems to already be widely accepted as a tool to multiply the output of everyone who touches a computer! Let’s take a quick look at these trends and a start-up worth keeping an eye on in each category.

Climate Tech

Time to take climate change and global emissions seriously. Forget about the buzzwords and abbreviations, it’s 2023 and we are beyond overdue. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork put out an interesting article on substack on 2023 predictions a few weeks ago and we noticed a great quote:

The next big thing in 2023 will be decarbonization being cheap! The combination of compounding technology development curves for clean power and the Inflation Reduction Act’s injection of $300B+ in climate funding will make low-carbon technologies cheap faster than anyone expects. This is a big deal, especially now — as a tight economy forces every company to scrutinize every dollar, they’ll rush to carbon solutions that save money. — Taylor Francis, Co-Founder at Watershed

Well said, Taylor. Now let’s highlight your start-up!

Watershed

HQ: San Francisco, California

Founded: 2019

Employees: 211 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Watershed is on a mission to bend the climate curve. The start-up helps companies like Stripe, Spotify, Walmart, DoorDash, Twitter, and Airbnb measure, reduce, and report their carbon emissions with real-time, audit-grade emissions data to power business value creation, regulatory compliance, and global climate impact.

The enterprise climate platform enables users to upload raw data to generate carbon footprint insights. It also enables them to set up carbon reduction plans through clean energy trade and carbon offsetting using high-impact carbon removal projects.
On February 9, 2022, Watershed raised a $70 million Series B financing co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. The funding valued the company at $1 billion.

MEET THE TEAM

Christian Anderson, Co-Founder

Previously, Christian spent a critical six years working at Stripe — the financial infrastructure platform for businesses. He kicked off the company’s climate commitment in 2019.
Christian joined Stripe in 2013 as an Engineer, quickly working his way up to Head of Engineering & Product for Core Payments in 2016 and then Head of Merchant Intelligence (Engineering & Product) in 2018.
Christian is a prestigious alum of Harvard University, having earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Master’s degree in Physics from the esteemed institution.

Avi Itskovich, Co-Founder

Avi worked at Stripe as a Software Engineer for five years — alongside his two Watershed co-founders.
Prior to Stripe, Avi was arguably the most accomplished software engineering intern of all time, having held internship positions at Twitter, Facebook, and Airbnb.
Avi is an alum of “the MIT of Canada,” having earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

Taylor Francis, Co-Founder

Previously, Taylor spent nearly five years at Stripe.
While at the payments innovator, he worked on New Markets and Stripe Atlas — the company’s start-up formation platform.
As a college student, Taylor secured internships at Square and Coursera. He was also a Partner at Dorm Room Fund — the student-run venture fund.
Taylor is an alum of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Production value chains are complex and involve various stakeholders like suppliers, vendors, and logistics partners. Therefore, it is challenging for companies to track and reduce the comprehensive carbon footprint of their products … until now.
Watershed is undeniably changing the game by giving companies clarity into supply chain emissions, streamlining supplier engagement, and accelerating real carbon reduction — with the end goal of accelerating the path to a zero-carbon economy.

GO DEEPER

Introducing Watershed Supply Chain

Emissions tracking startups are attracting cash

Climate Solutions Platform Watershed Raises $70 Million, Reaching $1 Billion Valuation

How data helps companies achieve their climate pledge

Artificial Intelligence

Consumer-focused AI is taking off like a rocket ship. The most obvious apps will be focused on business efficiencies. We see this already with ChatGPT creating all sorts of efficiencies around copywriting, note-taking, emails, and several other tasks typically taken up by assistants (virtual and in-person). The big debate now is, will Artificial General Intelligence ever be possible? Well, in order to answer that question let’s take a look at Adept and their useful general intelligence.

Adept AI

HQ: San Francisco, California

Founded: 2022

Employees: 23 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Adept is a company focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI) that can interact with humans through natural language. They believe that building generally intelligent interfaces for human-machine communication requires real people to use and improve their models through feedback.
Adept’s AI models need to be able to process large amounts of contextual information, understand and manipulate multimodal information, learn from user feedback, and teach themselves how to use software tools with limited supervision.
The company was founded by a group of researchers from Google Brain who created the “Transformer” AI architecture, which has been used for many AI advances in natural language processing.

Adept’s software will be able to learn through human feedback, not just by ingesting pre-existing data, and will be able to perform tasks and build things for humans, not just have conversations with them.
In April 2022, Adept AI raised $65M in a series A funding round led by Greylock and Addition.

MEET THE TEAM

David Luan, Co-Founder & CEO

David graduated from Yale in 2013 with a B.S. in Applied Math and Political Science. He founded Dextro, a deep learning startup for categorizing video footage, and served as CEO for six years.
In 2017, he joined OpenAI as their Director of Engineering and left as a VP of Engineering almost three years later to join Google as a Research Director.
Shortly after leaving Google at the end of 2021, he founded Adept AI with his compatriots in the A.I. space.

Niki Parmar, Co-Founder & CTO

Niki graduated from the University of Southern California with a Master’s in Computer Science in 2015.
She spent almost six years at google between Google Research and Google Brain working in a variety of roles, starting as a Software Engineer and ending as a Staff Research Scientist.
Niki & Ashish are credited with inventing the Transformer, a neural network that has been widely successful in various AI use cases.
She left Google Brain in November 2021 to Found Adept AI labs and join as CTO.

Ashish Vaswani, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist

Ashish graduated from the University of Southern California with a Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer science in 2014. He spent two years after graduating at the Information Sciences Institute.
In 2016 he joined Google Brain and served as a Staff Research Scientist for almost five and a half years.
Ashish & Niki are credited with inventing the Transformer, a neural network that has been widely successful in various AI use cases.
After leaving he Co-founded Adept AI and joined as the Chief Scientist in January 2022.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Adept AI is building something extremely interesting. We have seen many applications trying to stitch together a version of Adept AI using Zapier and OpenAI’s API for their Large Language Models (LLM). The ability to communicate with Adept via chat box and watch it execute actions live in real-time is taking the Virtual Assistant thesis to the next level.
Unfortunately, many interns and assistants will soon be out of work as this tool can help plug knowledge gaps, complete tedious tasks, and increase overall productivity and efficiency.