Loup Ventures Podcast

Special thanks to David Kroger, Steve Van Sloun, and Austin Bohlig for their work on the Non-Tech AI Portfolio. In ten years, every company will have to be an artificial intelligence company or they won’t be competitive. While traditional tech companies have been...

The sickness adoption hurdle. The timing of most tech adoption curves can be anticipated by a combination of cost and utility. The lower the cost, the higher the utility, the faster the adoption. We define mass adoption as 500m or...

If we had to sum up our investment approach in one word, it would be non-incremental. Venture capital is a power law game: the vast majority of venture returns come only from a few investments. We believe we have to...

It’s no secret that online retail is slowly killing offline retail.  In Q4 2016, 8.3% of total US retail sales were online (about $103 billion), up from 5.1% just five years ago (about $53 billion). Offline sales were 91.7% of...

If artificial intelligence is the brains, then robots are the brawn in the future of work. Earlier this week, we attended the AUVSI XPOENTIAL trade show in Dallas, the largest global gathering of unmanned systems providers, robotic software developers, and industry...

This note was originally published on Business Insider. Apple is the world’s largest company with a market cap of nearly $770 billion as of this writing. Tesla is one of the world’s largest automakers with a market cap of close to $55 billion...

Vibrant culture driven by shared values separates the best companies from the rest. Without clearly stated values, a “company” is just a temporary group of people, not a sustainable organization. Working together over the past 10 years, we’ve identified a set of four...

In an interview with Recode following Facebook’s F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his rationale for Facebook’s big bet on augmented reality: “Think about how many of the things you use [that] don’t actually need to be physical. You want to play...

Media reports suggest Apple is aggressively pursuing the creation of a non-invasive blood glucose monitor. The most obvious device to leverage this monitor may seem to be the Apple Watch; however, as we wrote two weeks ago, we think that...

Typically, when we talk about the future of AR and VR, the first companies that come to mind are Apple, Google, Facebook, and Snapchat; however, Microsoft does not receive enough credit for the strong positioning it has already built. As shown in...

This week we attended Automate, a robotics trade show in Chicago focused on manufacturing and fulfillment. As we explored the show floor, we saw a number of robots able to work next to humans for an affordable cost of $30-$40k each. Most vendors claimed less...

The Loup Ventures NCAA bracket contest isn’t as hotly contested as we thought it would be. We entered Bing’s AI bracket into our pool, and it’s just as busted as the others. In fact, Bing’s bracket will finish at the...

Google’s smartphone-powered VR platform, Daydream, represents the company’s most significant push to date in its effort to accelerate the adoption of VR. We’ve spent the last few weeks testing the platform with a Pixel phone and a Daydream View headset. Bottom line: Daydream isn’t there...

Apple Services Through 2022. We have written about the need for Apple to reinvent itself in the next decade through services and AR. The Services reinvention is already underway, accounting for 11.6% of revenue in 2016, and closer to 18%...

At this point, it might not even be that crazy to say it, but we think AirPods are going to be a bigger product for Apple than the Watch. After using AirPods for the past month, the Loup Ventures team...

The trend in computing towards more natural user interfaces is unmistakable. Graphical user interfaces have long been dominant, but machines driven by more intuitive inputs, like touch and voice, are now mainstream. Today, audio, motion, and even our thoughts, are the basis for the...

Apple’s AirPods are a step towards the future of computing. Starting with the move from the keyboard and mouse to the touchscreen, computing continues to move towards more intuitive user interfaces. Audio and motion capture are the basis for most innovative computer hardware today...

We recently hosted a panel of 8 college students from the University of Minnesota. The goal was to better understand how millennials think about social media, communications, video, VR, AR, the selfie generation, the future of work, and privacy. Here’s a...

As we watched the run up in SNAP shares since its IPO last week, we wondered how much of the move was based on potential revenue growth of more than 2x in 2017 or investors buying in to Snap’s long...

We think customer feedback is a critical (but too often overlooked) component of understanding where technology stands today and where it’s headed in the future. Our Feedback Loup series provides real customer feedback on the technologies shaping our future. Snap’s IPO is a perfect opportunity...