PrivTech ‘24 Highlights
Every year Grit Capital Partners hosts Privtech Invest, an invite-only gathering of entrepreneurs, innovators and investors from the industries we helped create – media, martech, commerce and fintech. Our 2024 conference was, without doubt, our best yet.
Two featured speakers, Carolyn Everson and Warren Packard, started off the program with insights on Applied AI for commerce, media and society.
Carolyn, who helped Facebook grow from its earliest revenues to $60 billion over a decade, and now serves on the boards of Coca Cola, Disney & UnderArmour, spoke about falling in love with figuring out what the consumer wants. She shared several examples of how AI is transforming those three businesses, as well at Columbia Medical School and on the New York Islanders home ice.
“The speed of this transformation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
Her parting advice to early stage entrepreneurs was stark, “Over 340 AI HR companies have reached out to the execs at Coca Cola. How can you stand out with all that competition? By making it about them, and not your company. Think about how you can be in service to your prospects. How can you help them succeed? That’s how you stand out.”
Warren, who incubates 12 startups per year at AI Fund, sees first hand how entrepreneurs are leveraging this technology to solve real business problems. “85% of our work is in the Applied layer – Agentic AI, local AI, multi-modal AI plus the ML/AI ops and training tools required for vertical companies to build on top of.”
Both Carolyn and Warren were expertly interviewed by Louis Gump, former exec at CNN and Cox and current best selling author of The Inside Innovator.
After a proprietary deep dive into Retail Media and AI from LUMA Partners’ Conor McKenna, we launched into a series of panel discussions. A few of the many highlights included:
- Kelly Ingham, VP of Wearable Devices from Meta sharing highlights from the company’s roadmap for AI integrated wearables, including several use cases and the business model underpinning it all.
- Patrick Miller, co-founder of Flywheel Digital and one of the most insightful entrepreneurs in the changing commerce world, sharing his thoughts on the evolving supply chain and regulatory landscape.
- Naré Vardanyan, CEO of Ntropy, digging into the challenges of Applied AI in fintech, especially at the transaction layer. “85% of financial services data is unstructured… despite that, we’re going to see a much more holistic workflow in these businesses thanks to AI.”
- Joey Levy, co-founder of Simplebet and Betr, shared his journeys in both companies including the announced acquisition of Simplebet by DraftKings.
As a wrap-up, Paul Palmieri, founder and Managing Partner at Grit Capital Partners interviewed Deric Emry, Gregory Bedrosian, and John Lambros on “The State of Late Stage”. Three of their many interesting topics were the continued shift away from public markets and towards privates, a “double-digit IPO market” next year, and expectation mismatches around AI ARR growth.
At this point, you may ask yourself “What is a seed stage venture firm doing putting on a conference with participants and conversations of this quality?”
Paul Palmieri explained it this way, “Our investors and our network share in the amazing community we are building here at Grit Capital Partners. Everyone gains a deeper understanding of how we are leveraging our network superpower in the industries we serve. Along the way, we support our companies and drive outcomes for our portfolio, while offering a multi-value experience to our investors.”
It wouldn’t have been possible without our collaborators and friends at:
Thank you all!
If you’d like to be considered for an invitation next year, please request an invite by emailing events@grit.vc.