Miles Grimshaw: The 5 Pillars of Venture Capital & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strategy | E1061

Tens of millions of engineers would become AI engineers versus, like, hundreds of thousands of ML scientists. That would beget the need for an application sort of framework for AI, um, and tooling for that computing environment. There's randomness to it. How do you measure excellence of it? And there was an opportunity for Build to empower every engineer becoming that.

(techno music) Miles, we first met in, I think it was 2016, and then we met in person in 2017. I've wanted to make it happen since then. Respectfully, you made me wait six years-

(laughs)

... but I'm so glad that we managed it. So, thank you so much for joining me.

A, a pleasure to finally do it. A long time coming.

Now, man, I would love to start with your entry into venture. First off, how did you make the first move into venture from college or university?

Yeah, yeah. I would say, um, worth winding the clock back a little further than just there, sort of where the motivation, the inspiration kind of in- in- incepted in many ways. I actually grew up in the UK. We're here recording in the UK. And, um, I went to the US because my parents re- remarried and my stepfather, who was very much a father to me, was an entrepreneur. He founded one of the very first e-commerce software companies. Powered a bunch of the big, big sites at the time. And, uh, when I moved, he'd, he'd sort of taken that public in the dot-com. And when we moved over to the US, he was starting another company out of our, our living room, uh, our kitchen table actually. Um, it wasn't a garage. Um, that was probably actually the East Coast, a little too cold in the winter. It was the kitchen table. And it was, like, two people, him and a friend, and then three people, and then four people, and then five people. I sort of didn't really know what it was in many ways, but it was, like, really inspiring to come home from school and see him working, um, you know, with, with, with friends and working hard and talking about new ideas. It was e-commerce software again. And so I kind of, at that point, in many ways, the American dream was, was his lived experience. He's a Korean immigrant. The American dream was sort of mine in some sense, coming to, to, to the US from the UK. And that, that love of being around people like him and his friends who were creating, um, it kind of just got into the blood in many ways. And then fast-forward, you know, I didn't know what the job was to, to do things with those sorts of people per se, but I knew that was really intoxicating. And fast-forward to, to sort of around the tail end of college, um, New York City and, and sort of app development, you know, was having a really vibrant moment. In some sense it was sort of really early in cloud obviously. This is like 2010, 2011, 2012. Rails-