Investing in AI & Space Tech

Jayden Sage is the Founder and CEO of Global Crypto Council (GCC) and Celestial Ventures. GCC provides advisory services on Web 3.0 and Generative AI to startups, industry leaders, and governments while investing in early-stage ventures. Celestial Ventures focuses on investments in the space industry. As an advisor and speaker, Jayden offers strategic guidance to startups worldwide, driving blockchain, AI, and space technology innovation.

How is the space tech industry progressing compared to emerging fields like AI or blockchain?

The space industry is waiting for its eureka moment. What I mean by that is 1849, in San Francisco, when there was a moment when suddenly there was money to be made in the space industry. Until that point, it's still a government-led up. Until it is a government-led effort, the funding is limited to the common understanding of these nations and the representatives as to how much money and capital allocation they want to make. Whether they want to go to the moon or how many space stations they can afford. But in space, we haven't found the gold. We haven't found tobacco. So those are the things we're waiting for. And I'm very confident we're going to get there. We're going to have resources there that we need on earth. And when that moment occurs, space will go from an industry in the background to an industry in the forefront.

Are your AI investments specific to space tech, or do they also span other sectors?

If you have an employee and you invest in them and send them for training, you don't know what the employee will discover or come up with. For example, somebody within Google had Fridays to do whatever they wanted, and they came up with Google Maps.

“Investing in AI is like investing in a human. “

So the reason why I'm going into that is that AI is such a denominator industry that while you may be eyeing it for your specific parameters, in my case, for space, supporting AI companies automatically means that it can wind up supporting or making another business model so much better.

Can you share some insights into the current state of the AI hype cycle, especially from your experience working with early-stage AI companies?

The AI hype cycle is still there, but I think people are sobering out. They're now recognizing that many different dynamics are at play. You can't just attach AI to your startup and hope that funding will come in. However, we're still in the AI hype cycle. If you have a half-good product, you'll find money for it, right? But that doesn't mean that you'll survive the long term. People think that funding automatically means that, you know, that's it. You got funded; everything is awesome. That doesn't mean anything because funding means you have some runway. They're confusing funding with the exit. When you get funded, you're put to the grinder, and you've got to keep growing the operations. And the bigger your operations, the bigger your headings.

There is another thing I want to touch upon, which is very important, as being on the receiving end of all these pitches. There are some patterns you detect. The individual people pitching are not capturing, and I'd rather have them have that horizontal perspective because there are too many dupes, first and foremost. You need to look around to see what the competitor landscape looks like. Don't stop at YouTube. Don't stop at Google. I like to say that YouTube is like a newspaper. Even Google. It's yesterday's news. The way to find out what's happening is generally by networking and meeting people. And that's how you know what's coming, different from what has happened. So that's the only way a young startup can get out there and be able to say, oh, OK, I see the pulse. I see where I need to tweak. You better look at the competitor landscape really well. And that just doesn't apply to AI. It doesn't matter which industry you're in.

How can startups succeed in a crowded AI market, and is there such a thing as too much competition?

The answer is not in the quantity. It's in the quality. So let's say you have five competitors, and a guy like me says if you have at most 15, you're good. And you look around and say, great, I've only got five competitors; I should be good to go. It's not about that. You could have 10000 competitors. But. Are you sufficiently differentiated from them and have a competitive advantage over them with your tech or with your concept that would trump you over the hump beyond all 10,000 of them? So that's the biggest thing you have to consider. So if you only have one competitor, just one on the planet, but if they've got those things taken care of where they have that deep competitive edge over you, go do something else. Or come up with a different model.

What other key mistakes do you see happening in the early stage of the AI startup space?

It goes back to the human tendency. We all have a natural tendency to relax. We desire to make it easy for ourselves. You'll notice a lot of people chasing low-lying fruit. And you see that in AI all the time - okay, we'll build this digital AI assistant. Or let's take AI to medical, let's take AI to legal. But look at that industry. While it seems like you're going after low-lying fruit, there's a reason why that industry has its challenges, and an AI-infused startup will run up against those challenges.

Look at medical - it has all these laws and regulations in place to protect the privacy and data of the patients. So, if you have that, you cannot aggregate the data that AI will use to connect those data points and achieve inference from those data points. So you're going to run into some of those issues. We lean into these companies and operations that have this low-lying fruit. But there are so many people chasing low-lying fruit through. At the same time, that's not an operation that can deliver something in the long run. Because in the short term, you may have some operation, but it will be an uphill battle until all the dynamics of that operation change out. So you want to watch out to avoid chasing so many of the low-lying fruits that people have been. It's coming down now because we probably already have about a hundred thousand medical AI startups. We've hit those high numbers of legal AI and medical AI. So now nobody's like going into there because of the oversaturation. But in any industry, you'll first have that happen where people will just run in because they think they can hit that low line.

What sets successful early-stage AI companies apart from the rest?

It's probably not an answer you want to hear, but I will say it anyway. Don't be a "dweeb". If you're passionate about AI or whatever tech you're passionate about, do not run off to work for a giant corporation. Go build something. Give yourself that opportunity to try something before you run into a quote-unquote plantation. Make something happen. Break the walls, change things out, try it.

“You fail your way to success.”

Here's the most important point. When you fail, you still succeed. So, how do you succeed if you fail? Because you solve so many challenges before you hit failure. So that one or two things that failed you, you will figure out the next time around, but you solved all those other challenges. Once you solve it, you've solved it. So the next time you start, you start right here. That's how it works. It's always a trial and error.

Do you believe AI could pose a threat to humanity?

The question of whether AI will be a competitor, if not a threat, to the intellectual prowess of humanity has already been answered. The answer is yes. And how we wrestle with and deal with it is the bigger dialogue and narrative we need to have because it's already there. If you don't believe it, go to chat GPT and type in - write me a poem about whatever; pick the stupidest topic, let's say a marker, write me about a marker - and it'll give you this amazing poem. And what I find hilarious is the speed. Our greatest creatives were taking so much time to write. It wasn't done in seconds. That should give us an idea that these things are changing and becoming so robust.

The only thing we could do was learn how to float in this new flood of AI-induced technological growth. We face technological obsolescence, a whole new world for us and AI. So we need to come to terms with that. We need to figure out how we are going to sustain it further. Right now, AI is our tool. And it's being marketed as such. It's there to serve us. And it's our servant. And we're the master. But we will soon discover that the servant may become the master. And we need to be ready for that. We need to build in mitigations that are not regulatory. It's how we will live in a world with a sentience that can access all human knowledge in milliseconds. And we can't do that. None of us, our brightest minds, can access that knowledge at that speed. Can we actually compete with it? Not possible. So what do we do? We need to carve out a place for ourselves in this equation. And it would be perfect if we got out of the denial mode and went into the mode of, OK, how do we sustain as humans?

“The greatest thing humans have going for them is their ingenuity. Ingenuity will give us new ways.”

If these handpicked highlights have sparked your curiosity, you won't want to miss the full conversation with Jayden Sage on our YouTube channel or your favorite platform. The episode dropped on June 18th, 2024.