Andy Konwinski co-founded both Databricks and Perplexity before starting Laude Ventures, giving him a rare track record of building two multi-billion-dollar companies from research projects into widely adopted products. He runs Laude Ventures alongside the Laude Institute, a nonprofit that creates Berkeley-style AI research centers, making him unusual among VCs as he actively shapes new research environments that become sources for the spinout companies he backs.

• Fascination with independent artificial intelligence and its underlying infrastructure. The core belief is that the technology is shifting from being a helpful tool that waits for commands to an independent operator capable of managing tasks constantly. An interesting example is the observation about how progress currently stops when a person steps away from the keyboard, but future independent systems will keep driving workflows forward on their own, even employing other automated programs to help.
• Strong advocacy for transparent and publicly available research. The central idea is that building in public is the most effective way to drive technological impact and prevent power from being centralized in a few massive companies. A specific example is the celebration of a fully accessible thirty billion parameter system outperforming its competitors, along with active support for groups that rank developers based on how openly they share their building methods.
• Focus on creating much harder evaluation methods. The point conveyed is that the industry needs vastly more difficult hurdles to prove true maturity and ongoing learning capabilities. A notable example is a public commitment to fund testing environments where human success rates are perfect but automated success rates hover around one percent, which forces developers to build smarter systems rather than just passing easy tests.
• Interest in the security layers that allow automated programs to operate safely in real business environments. The underlying point is that before these systems can be truly useful, they need secure ways to access live company data. A relevant example for a founder is a recent investment made into a team that developed a specific authorization protocol that a major tech company recently adopted for safe deployment.