Module Description:
Ubiquity Ventures Founder & Managing Partner Sunil Nagaraj explains exactly what "Software Beyond the Screen" means and why it is Ubiquity's sole investment focus.
Full Transcript:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to our Ubiquity University session on ""Software Beyond the Screen"". Ubiquity Ventures is a pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm that invests in software beyond the screen, specifically, entrepreneurs who are using software, moving it beyond the screen of computers to solve real world physical problems, often with smart hardware and machine learning.
In today's session, we'll spend a few minutes exploring what ""software beyond the screen"" means for investors and for founders. I'm really delighted to tell you more about this idea. So Ubiquity Ventures is a nerdy and early venture capital firm that invests in software beyond the screen, which is why this phrase is so important to us. In particular, what software beyond the screen really refers to is this idea that software used to be stuck on a computer. I mean that literally, chained to a keyboard and mouse. If you wanted to use software, you had to sit down, log on and stare at a monitor. And then, a big jump occurred. The screen shrunk, so software could come with us in our pockets, and that's important, because it allowed software to solve new problems, it allowed new companies to be formed, and a lot of value was created for a lot of different parties. Now, once software moved to mobile, we had a good run, and the Ubiquity view is now it's time for the next phase. Now software can jump off of the screen of computers, the screen can shrink to no screen at all. Software can now navigate, perceive, understand, and actuate the real physical world. This is one way to look at software beyond the screen.
Let's take another view here, different terminology. A simpler description might be that ubiquitous software transforms real world problems into software problems. One example of that would be taking a photograph. We used to solve this problem of how do I take a photograph with a chemical solution, and then a CCD in a digital camera, and then a very nice SLR $2,000 camera. This was solving a physical problem with a physical solution, and it's not where Ubiquity focuses. Instead, where we get excited is when you could instead solve a solution with software. And in this example, maybe you know where this is going, this idea that there's a very cheap camera inside of your iPhone or Android or smartphone, but that camera is actually paired with a trillion calculations per photograph. Pretty striking when you think about it. Every time you click that shutter, one trillion software calculations are occurring. And this is from 2020, Phil Schiller on stage at an Apple event. More specifically, an interesting element is that's changed. More recently, it's now four trillion calculations per photograph. So for us at Ubiquity, initially, a iPhone or smartphone camera took an okay photo, not as good as that nice SLR. Then it got better, and now I'd rather have my iPhone than have my nice SLR, which just sits in the closet.
There are three elements of software that are really important: Settings, analytics, and updates. I'll take the example of using Zoom. You may be doing Zoom meetings all day, like me, and in Zoom, you can turn on a virtual background. You can make the background blurry or make it into Hawaii. That's a setting. Now, Zoom, the company, knows how many of its users are using virtual background versus not using virtual background. The engineers and product managers at Zoom look at that analytics, that exhaust stream of telemetry, and they can then tweak the product and make it more tailored to that use case, or differently tailored, and then push out updates. So I've listed these three in a linear fashion here, settings, analytics, updates, but really what it is is it's a virtuous loop of improvement. Software gets better and better and better over time. I want you to contrast that with the chair that you're sitting in. There probably aren't very many settings. There are definitely no analytics. The person who designed and manufactured that chair has no idea how it's being used, and the chair can't get better. So if there's a bug in the chair, it always tips over, it gets squeaky, they won't know, they can't fix it. So this is, to me, is a big distinction. Software gets better over time, hardware gets worse over time, until the advent of smart hardware. In this notion, it's really about software animating, embodying hardware so that it brings its beautiful three characteristics with it. These are just a few examples of smart hardware, but they embody this loop of settings, analytics and updates. A Tesla company can learn that something is acting up a little bit in the cars. They can see that in the analytics and then push an update, and the next morning it'll be fixed. So as we think about this, to kind of bring it all together, software beyond the screen is not old school CD ROMs, or even SaaS. All of that is not in focus for Ubiquity, and it's not where we think the future is going.
http://pitch.ubiquity.vc - You can set up a meeting there. Thank you.