Which 8VC portfolio companies are you interested in working with and why?
I’m most interested in Anduril and YugabyteDB.
Technology has spurred globalization at unprecedented rates. The economic gap and cultural differences between developed and undeveloped countries has widened, and the level of competition between world powers has only increased. Furthermore, weapons technology reached new heights in the last century. Atomic and nuclear bombs simultaneously maintain and threaten peace: a single action can destroy the entire world, but equal opportunity to such weapons holds the world in an extremely fragile, tense equilibrium. Anduril is seeking to improve stability in defense, and not only is the mission extremely critical, but the business model is extremely promising. Traditionally, defense companies lock the US government into decade-long contracts and then underperform. Anduril, founded by tech veterans with defense experience, seeks to win with top tier products created by top engineers. The technical challenges are also fascinating because they combine both hardware and software. I spent a year at UCSD researching energy efficient classification, and our work has immense applications in real-time data in defense (we were largely funded by DARPA).
Having worked in infrastructure at DoorDash, I’ve seen that the traditional AWS Aurora databases leave a lot to be desired. We used CockroachDB, but even CockroachDB offers less emergency availability than our critical systems need. Consumer technology applications, such as DoorDash, lose inordinate amounts of money if the site is down for even seconds, compared to SaaS products. Yugabyte’s global replication and resilience empowers other technology companies to build more reliable infrastructure, reducing downtime, which is critical for consumer technology companies. In addition, the focus on scalability across regions allows for more interesting and stable schemas; our schemas at DoorDash were often limited by AWS Aurora’s limitations. From infrastructure, I’ve learned that most infrastructure tools suffer from poor UI/UX, undetailed documentation, or bugs and limited technology and scalability. I want to innovate in infrastructure in the future, and the best way to start would be to work at a software infrastructure startup.
