Interview #14: Ted Wong

Here is the cleaned-up transcript of your interview with Ted Wong. I have corrected the spelling of names and technical terms (like "Grok"), improved the punctuation for better flow, and applied the requested formatting.

Noah Weisblat: So I'm here with Ted Wong. Please tell me a little bit about yourself.

Ted Wong: Sure. My name is Ted Wong. I'm a longtime technology investor and I've worked in the private equity venture capital space for over a decade. In particular, I do a lot of work within the supply chain technology space. That's where I've deployed the most capital and done the most transactions in the last 10 years.

Noah: Awesome. So I've been tracking the AI space for a couple of years now and then writing about it for about six months. I'm sure you, as someone who's been working in the investment field for a while, have seen a lot of this coming along. But tell me a little bit—just your general high-level take on what you've seen from AI over the past few years.

Ted: Yeah, so I'm not going to tell you anything that you probably haven't heard, which is that AI is game-changing, life-changing technology. It's being used and deployed pretty much in every business that I know, whether it's my own business or companies that we're looking to invest in. If they haven't embraced it already, they're exploring different ways of working with different companies in order to figure out how to improve their internal operations and processes. They're also figuring out ways in which they can use it to potentially deploy new solutions that can be valuable to their customers and can help enhance their revenue and the value of their businesses.

Noah: Makes a lot of sense. Let's talk a little bit specific. So are you a Gemini guy, a Grok guy, ChatGPT? Do you use them all? Talk to me a little bit about which of the major AI tools you use.

Ted: Yeah, so I probably use ChatGPT and Gemini the most. I would say that they are it, broadly speaking. I like having two screens open; I like piping in the prompts into both and seeing what comes out of them. In many ways, it's replaced a lot of the what I'll call "simple" day-to-day Google searching, online research, and a lot of the basic internet functionality that I think most people would undertake on a day-to-day basis. I have used those engines in order to help make my life easier.

And I'll be clear, though—and I think this is probably a warning that I will share with anybody, especially in the investment space—it's not always correct. You cannot take what comes out of AI as truth. So you have to be very discerning. You’ve got to think through what's coming out of it. Even though it all looks good and all sounds good, you're still going to have to be a little bit skeptical. You’ve got to have that filter on and think through whatever output they're providing.

Noah: Absolutely. You need to double-check. You need to make sure you do a little research. Sometimes it helps if you do a little research beforehand and then feed the AI that research as a little background. You mentioned research a little bit. How are you using AI professionally? Is it mostly that research angle, asking questions? Are you using it in some workflows to source deals? Talk to me a little bit about that.

Ted: Yeah. I'm old school in the sense that for deal flow and sourcing origination, a lot of that is still done through what I'll call very traditional means for me, just because I know a lot of people within the industries and end markets that I have worked in. So, a lot of it is through introductions through people that we know, reaching out over email. I'm not using AI to generate what I'll call just "mass outreaches." I'm not using them to draft messages for me because I think anyone that I want to speak to, I assume they're smart enough to just not want to respond to an AI-generated message.

So it really doesn't enhance a lot of what I'm doing on the outreach side, but what it does help a lot with is in the research and analysis. So for example, let's say I've come across a really interesting company that offers a product or service that I've just never come across before. It happens all the time. And I'm just trying to better understand, "Okay, what are some of its competitors?" I think for that "101 level" of information and just trying to get a lay of the land, AI is a really efficient tool in order to just get up to speed. Again, you have to validate everything that comes out and you still need to do research on your own, manually, and do the fact-checking. But I'd say that it saves a lot of time in that initial stage where you're just trying to get smart and you just want to really synthesize and get really good, condensed information out of the internet and out of all these aggregated data sources.

Noah: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So the reason I actually came across your LinkedIn page and reached out to you is I saw a tweet you made about AI with founders starting companies. I started a company back in 2020, and fundraising in the past six years has been a ridiculous up and down in the venture space. Talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing with startups—where they're failing or where they're using AI in the right way.

Ted: Sure. So I guess a caveat, because of my own background and experience, most of the companies that I'm talking to are within specific verticals. As I mentioned, supply chain and logistics is kind of my expert area. So most of the founders and companies that I'm coming across are looking to raise capital around an application of AI to solving specific problems within that industry and sector. It's not just a general AI solution that cuts across industries.

But I think the insights and learnings I have from looking at all of these pitch decks and speaking to these founders is the same: AI is great. AI is extremely powerful and it's getting more powerful by the day. And the ability for this technology to solve very complex problems feels almost limitless; it's just a matter of being able to define the problem and being able to apply the technology to solve it.

The message I think you're referring to is the one where I said, "Listen, it's great that you have this awesome idea. It's great that you have this problem that you've identified, but let's not forget when you're raising capital from investors and you're trying to build a business, you still need to be able to answer basic fundamental business questions." Which is, for example: "Noah, who is your customer? Are you, in the case of supply chain, selling to a trucking company? Are you selling to a Fortune 500 company? Who's the decision-maker? And how would they end up using this product once you've developed it? How do they use it? And how do they measure its effectiveness? Are you helping them save cost in terms of not needing all these different software solutions? Is it that you're reducing headcount because with AI you can have one person versus three people?"

There are all these what I'll call really basic, fundamental business questions that you have to be able to answer. Because while you hear about it all the time—investors just throwing money at AI companies—I am of the belief, at least with most of the investors I know, that they want you to have thought through the business case. We're going to take it and assume that the AI-powered solution works, but then how do you answer all those business questions to make it a business, not just a cool technology? So that's my biggest piece of advice and what I would say founders need to focus on.

Noah: That's a great point. And I feel like that gets lost a lot, especially as new technology comes out. People forget the reason they built the business and that they need to be able to tell somebody, "This is exactly what we do. This is who we sell to, and this is why we operate." Okay, excellent. So let's change gears a little bit on the educational side. You have a strong educational background and I wanted to ask you: in the age of AI, there's a lot of concern about jobs. People are coming into college with the idea of, "Okay, I'm not sure if I should be going and getting an engineering degree. I don't know if I should be going and getting a degree in this or that." What advice would you give to somebody who's just entering college for the first time?

Ted: So I went to an Ivy League college. I have a very traditional liberal arts education in the sense that I didn't go to school for a very technical discipline. I didn't go for computer science, engineering, or microbiology. I have a major in economics. I also went to law school—arguably "squishy" subjects, as people would describe them. I think the best advice I can give to anyone who is a teenager or young adult trying to find their way in the world is that what I think university and college teaches you is how to think and how to analyze problems.

I think that is why you should go to a good university and be challenged in terms of how you think and how you go about evaluating information and constructing your own ideas, viewpoints, and how to defend them. Because I'm going to go back to one of the earlier comments I made in this conversation around, "Hey, AI is amazing. It spits out all this stuff at you." But it requires you to have a solid foundation in analysis and critical thinking in order to discern whether what it's giving you is BS or not.

If you don't put yourself in a situation where you're in a forum with your peers in a classroom, being pushed by a professor, and being able to really think through and diligence complex problems, you lose out on the ability to then figure out how best to use these technologies. I know that sounds a little bit vague and philosophical, but I think you get what I'm saying—which is that for me, going to a college and university, the greatest thing was just meeting people with all these different perspectives and just getting really pushed and challenged in ways that I hadn't been challenged before. I think that's carried with me throughout my professional career. I would encourage everyone not to give up on that opportunity. You might not have to go to a certain kind of college, or it might not have to be a four-year college—you could go to a three-year college—but my point is, you have to put yourself in a situation where you're surrounded by smart people and you're challenging yourself and your beliefs. That's how you end up making the best decisions and being able to, hopefully, ultimately build a successful business.

Noah: That's great insight. Thank you. All right, I have two more questions and then I'll let you go. So the first one is, in terms of the future of AI—five years, 10 years down the line—what are you excited about, or what do you find yourself thinking about sometimes that could be maybe a little bit far from reality right now, but in five or 10 years could be our future?

Ted: Oh, that's a big question. Listen, I think that given the improvements and the enhancements in AI, I do think that a lot of jobs will be fundamentally changed. I think that a lot of processes and roles will become redundant, and I think there is going to be a huge need for individuals to learn and adapt to AI—to learn to apply their existing professional skills in a new way such that they can continue to be productive and active members of society.

There are some industries which are very disrupted, like the legal industry, professional services industries, and a lot of what I'll call tasks which I think can be made more efficient. Recruitment is also another good example where I think things are getting very disrupted. So we are going to see a lot of industries where, again, AI will play a fundamental, pivotal role. You'll see the layoffs and redundancies I've talked about, but I'm not one of these people who is extremely bleak about the future. I don't believe that everyone's going to be obsolete and we're just run by machines.

I think far from that, it's more a question of: do we as a society, in terms of our institutions, corporate training, and our universities, adapt our models in a way such that we teach people how to use AI and how to navigate this new world? And that's on us, right? AI is just going to keep on getting smarter and better. It's on us to figure out how we can still be relevant and productive in light of all of that. That's just kind of my two cents.

Noah: Yeah, that's a good answer. I kind of see a theme of what we've talked about at least so far from your side, which is that AI is a great tool, it's useful, but at the same time, if you don't know how to problem-solve or you don't know how to actually think behind the AI, it's not going to go as well for you. So last question—it’s more of a statement than a question—but is there anything that we didn't talk about so far that you wanted to bring up? Any companies you're working on or cool portfolio companies that we should know about? Anything at all? The floor is yours.

Ted: So I'm going to go to the opposite extreme, which is things that are outside of AI. I think this is relevant because AI sucks up all the air in the room and that's what people want to talk about. But one thing that I actually am very involved with personally is in hobbies and in collectibles. That's something, if you go on my LinkedIn profile, that I do a lot of work in.

And why I engage in this is because it's all about community. It's all about people-to-people and having a human network. I think in this age of AI, it's very easy to forget that AI can't substitute for human interaction. I think for everyone and everybody who's super enthusiastic about AI: don't forget what makes us, as people, interesting—which is the ability to sit across from people, have a meal, and converse about your experience and have shared hobbies and interests. I think as AI grows and becomes a more and more predominant aspect of our professional lives, those human connections, human experiences, and our communities are going to become extreme areas of focus. So I would say think about that and think about what role that plays in your life and how you can find your community amid all the AI that's happening in the world.

Noah: Good point. Good point. Thank you, Ted. Alright, I've enjoyed the opportunity to pick your brain for a little bit here.

Ted: No problem. I really enjoyed the chat and thank you for the invitation to be on.