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In the physical world, meaning out in the streets, those type of data sets are not the internet. And so that means if you’re able to efficiently and cost effectively get access to that information, feed that into your model, now your model looks very different than the one that was trained on the internet, because now it’s internet plus this unique data set equals.A different type of value proposition.
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What’s up guys? Welcome to Financial Freestyle here on Yahoo Finance. And look guys, no matter where you are on your personal journey, you can never stop learning. And that’s why you’re at the right spot, because today I’m talking to my guy, the Atlas Berry founder and general partner of Mission One Capital. How you doing, bro? My actual fellow Quaker brother, so it’s even doper now. But how are you doing, bro?
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I’m doing amazing. I’m doing blessed. I appreciate this, appreciate the time.
0:53 spk_1
Yeah, man, it’s aIt’s a big deal when you go to the number one school in the atmosphere, in the stratosphere, that being the University of Pennsylvania. So it’s lit, brother. My fellow Quaker, man, I appreciate you taking the time. Tell us about your fun,
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bro. So Miss Micion One Capital, we’re really a specialist firm. Um, so we focus on, um, basically backing founders that are helping to re-industrialize the world.So you could think, you could think about it where AI meets the physical world is really where we focus. Uh, so not just software, but also hardware and deep tech, um, areas like energy, industrial resilience, critical minerals, and other types of inputs that go into the industrial process. So, deep down dirty stuff, really
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interesting. I love it, man. So let’s get into it, right? Because I think, uh, in your seat, you’ve obviouslyTalk to, you know, tons and countless of founders and obviously reviewed, you know, maybe thousands of uh pitch decks. What would you say are like the top 2 to 3 patterns you spot in founders that, you know, that you actually see, OK, this is gonna separate the guys that will succeed versus the ones that willfail.
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We invest super early, precede seed, um, and so at that point, just a level set, a lot of the times the company is maybe 1 to 2 people, um, you know, maybe they have an initial beta product, um, maybe they have some traction, have some, some, you know, feedback from the marketplace, but a lot of times they’re very early. And so, through the years since I’ve been doing this for more than a decade, you realize that the, the patterns that really matter, um, you know, are, first and foremost.The people. Um, it’s a very human business, and it comes down to the people and the team that’s being built to actually go after this, you know, problem, or go on this journey together. And so, we really spend a lot of time on, you know, and we’ve built an entire protocol around vetting founders, but based on what we call the peak performance protocol, which is ultimately, do they have the ability to, do they have the, do they show leadership qualities? Do they show a mindset, an ability to have an endurance, to not just like have aInteresting idea, but to see it all the way through. But the first product is usually not always what ends up being the product that ends up being successful. So, um, we do vet the product, and that’s important. But really what we’re looking for is a unique, what we call like a secret that the that the team might have, or the founders might have onto, you know, the problem they’re trying to solve, or this domain that they’re going after. Something non-obvious, um, which is like a unique edge on how they’re attacking a problem. And so, that’s really what I’m looking for is like aContrarian take on, OK, yes, we understand. I don’t know, let’s take energy, for example. OK, we’re going to create a certain type of power generation, but the reason why this one’s unique is because we’re going after this unique, unique like niche use case, or this specific customer who has a very specific pain point that others don’t know about, right? And so the secret is what we’re looking for. So I would say the big things are the team, and like the makeup of that initial team.And their mindset and their endurance and all those kind of characteristics and that secret that they have on the problem that they’re going after.
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You know what I love, the first thing you said was, we’re betting on the founders. Would you say that, you know, has that evolved or is that actually coming? Is that not as powerful anymore? Just granted thatSo many founders are now utilizing AI. So, are you actually looking, you know, are you betting still on the founders, or are you kind of betting on their systems and, you know, kind of things and their model, and their, their, their data, their tech, you know, like, how is this actually evolved?
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Ultimately, still, team still matters, because like,The ability to adapt, um, and react to the market, um, to, to have a, well, previously it would be like to have a technical prowess to be able to actually build in those new new areas. Now we can talk about people spin up, um, apps, and, and, you know, vibe code using things like replit and cursor, um, to get around.That, which brings down the technical mode and, you know, changes the, like the defensibility of a product, which becomes another issue. But, um, but yeah, so to your point, like things have changed. The other thing that you mentioned that was really important, that ultimately it does come down to is that niche use case, but also specifically in the world of AI.The proprietary data set that you’re actually building, or um aggregating, or um have access to that others don’t, because all the AI models are trained on the internet, right? And so, if everyone’s, if all models are trained on the internet, that means everyone has a laying uh, you know, a level playing field. But is there some type of data, and that’s why we love physical AI cause in the physical world, meaning out in the streets,Those type of data sets are not the internet. And so that means if you’re able to efficiently and cost effectively get access to that information, feed that into your model, now your model looks very different than the one that was trained on the internet, cause now it’s internet plus this unique data set equals.A different type of value proposition, right?
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You know, I, I am a person that loves the stock market, right? And the average person that is listening to this, for the most part, they may or may not be participating in VC deals, right? Obviously, it’s a, you know, it’s an actual barrier to entry, right? You got to be inAccredited investor, etc. etc. But when we talk about energy, right, the biggest buzzword right now is AI. And the one thing we realize is that we don’t have enough energy to power all of this. So like, what are some of the things that you know the average listener right now might be able to say, Oh, maybe I want to invest in that for the next 5 to 10 years.
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AI is power hungry, right? And then everyone talks about the need for the data center to be able to train models, to do inference, to do reinforcement learning, basically to do all the stuff that allows for cat GBT and other types of apps to be spit out the other end.Um, and so those data centers need power, and they’re just, and, and when I mean power, I mean like city level power, you know, gigawatts of power. Like a city will take out a gigawatt of power, for example, just a level. There are data centers being built on multiple gigawatts, so multiple cities worth power for each one of these data centers being built out. Um.Uh, for the big ones. And so, because of that, you know, think if, if you’re, you know, um, an everyday person, how do I play that right to your point? Like, we’re playing it by investing in companies that are building power generation, whether it be nuclear, geothermal, solar, um, or power storage, which is really important, batteries, so lithium batteries, you know, um, other types of novel technologies. But from aStock market perspective, you can look at all the power and energy companies and think about like, they’re going to need to increase their output to be able to like fill this demand. It’s that’s an interesting way to look at, um, not just like traditional power, which is interesting, obviously, but there’s a lot of novel power, for example, the rise of nuclear, for example, if I’m, if I point out one specifically.Um, it’s becoming really interesting if you look at some of the nuclear companies in the stock market, um, they’re probably on a tear right now. Like, let’s say Ola, for example, I would call that one, like it’s on a tear over the past couple of years, um, and all the other different type of nuclear plays, not just like even the power generation, but also think about the inputs. So when you, when you play stocks where I play a lot of my time, but obviously,There’s the companies that are creating the power generation. They’re the people who are giving the inputs to then enable the power generation, um, and the entire supply chain related to power and energy. I think is a really great way to for, you know, for the novel person to be able to play that in the stock market.
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It was so many negative reports that came out with Oklo, for instance. Oh, they don’t, they actually don’t make money, they’re working on a deal with the US Department of Defense. Like, to a person in your seat or a person that’s at home, how do you underwrite the idea?
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Um, from like a venture standpoint, you have to have a longer term view. And so,A lot of times you start to zoom out. First, you need to zoom out and think about what are the true things that you believe over the next 5 to 10 years. Um, what are the macro trends that are happening over the next 5 to 10 years. Let’s take energy, for example, and I’ll maybe touch on a couple of others that are important to take a look at. Energy. We talked about the power demand around AI. In addition to that, we’re realizing that energy is extremely important when it comes toTo sovereignty and being able to be energy independent from other nations, right? And so, obviously, you know, Europe had a lot of those issues, you know, in the COVID and things like that, not, you know, reliant on things like Russian oil, for example. Um, and then the US is realizing, hey, we can’t just be reliant on, um, other countries to enable us to have enough energy for this growth, because energy equalsSovereignty, but it also equals abundance. Like, the more energy throughout history, the more energy you have access to, the faster your economies grow, and the more abundant your economies become. And so, that’s a macro trend, regardless of, to your point, news within each inner day. We know the big macro trend is energy is important, it will continue to be important, um, so that’s one. The second one is that, um, the world is re-industrializing, right? And so,Um, obviously, we’re doing a lot of work in the US to bring in industrial processes back in-house, shorten the supply chains, bring that all in-house. So what does that mean from, like, again, a long-term view, means manufacturing, means access to critical minerals, as we realized being negotiation points, all these are starting to come onshore. So if you think, take a long-term view, there are companies that are going to really benefit from that. And so that’s what I would really look at.
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How do you, to your point, always continue to think about it 5, 10 years down the line, especially with a company like, I don’t know, the metalcompany, TMC.
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A couple of things that if we go specifically about the metals. One is, um, you know, mining is important, you know, access to resources are important. Traditional mining methods, um, have massive carbon output, um, are not, a lot of it’s not being done in the US, uh, for environmental reasons, um, and other.Reasons, even though we have massive, you know, stores of a lot of these resources that we’re gonna need, lithium and others. And so that’s why another, another area of the critical mineral space, as you’ve probably seen, has been ripping, you know, MP metals and others in the public market have been ripping because of that. But when it comes to like deep sea mining, in addition to theThis is an interesting technology. There’s a lot of regulatory risks that you have to underwrite, right? They’ve been ready probably for a decent amount of time to actually go and pull those nodules out of the ocean, but the problem has been a lot of the waters that they want to go in to actually do that mining is it owns, you know, waters, right? Exactly. Who owns that that water. And so I’ve got there’s interesting documentaries actually on this, whichMaybe you’ve seen, where it goes into the entire history of this company and talks about the specific water and opportunities that they can go into. And then like the loopholes, because within specific islands, right? Like within a within a certain mile radius of such certain islands, they can actually create treaties with that specific island, which then lets them kind of get around the global bodies. And so all that regulatory risk has to be underwritten. And so,In addition to the technology of can they actually pull up nodules at a at a high density and actually transport that um at a cost parity to traditional mining, which is another thing you have to think about. So,Um, the technology needs to be underwritten, the regulatory risk has to be underwritten, and then also the environmental risk has to be underwritten, because there’s still large regulatory bodies, and that’s why it hasn’t gone, because the global regulatory bodies don’t really jive with kicking up dust at the bottom of the seabed, right?
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Listen, I could go on and on on this stuff. I’ll nerd out, but look guys, we gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, I wanna have more with my guy Atlas Berry.All right guys, welcome back to Financial Freestyle. We’re talking with my guy, Atlas Berry. What’s the main reason you say no? Right? I hear a lot of times founders kind of get discouraged. Oh, I had 99 nos before I got a yes. Great. But what do you think is the, the, the key reason that most founders should no? Like
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going back to what we look for, if the team isn’t the right team for the problem, that’s definitely um would be a reason, and not just they exist, the first team, but their ability to hire a players.To tackle that problem. They don’t themselves have domain expertise, and, and, but, but their ability to have access to a talent pool of people that are high quality, um, if they can’t do that and show the ability to do that, that’s one. let’s see, the other point I’ve talked about, um, you know, a lot of people can talk about a very big vision, um, of an idea, but then I say, OK, I, I get the vision, and like, yeah, let’s assume that that’s that that’s true, but how are you gonna start?Right? Like how are, what’s step one? What’s step 123? Can you walk me through? And so founders can’t actually walk me through, OK, we’re starting, our wedge is X. We’re starting with this specific niche use case, that’s gonna give us information to then go to the next stage, which then we’ll kind of like, they need to like walk me upstairs, step me.That vision. If they can’t do that and tell a story around that, that, that would be another reason for, for why not. And then not really understanding their, their, both the competitive set as well as the market. And the way to do that would be, OK, do you know all the competitors and why they’re working or not working? But also, how many people have you spoken to that have this pain point, and how have you like validated that pain point? For example, there’s a startup we talked about, talked to recently.They’re like, hey, we spoke to about 10 or 20 customers, or 10 or 20 people who said that they said they would be interested. But I was like, you need to speak to 100 people. You need to speak to a lot of people, and then also, you need to see willingness to pay is very different. I would pay for it, or I need this right now.Now, like they always talk about, are you a vitamin or, uh, what do they say, are you a vitamin or a pill? Like, are you actually solving a pain point, or are you a nice to have, right? Uh, and so you need to validate that to understand like how really strong is that market pull. And so those are some of the reasons what we, and what we try to tease out, and why we probably say no.
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You got to be able to, you know, shift. You got to be able to adapt to the way the world is changing and evolution. So that’s interesting. You, you shared something with me off screen and that was, you know, obviously we’re both, both Quakers, etc. but you said your wife’s a founder. So like, what part of, you know,I’m a venture capitalist, my wife’s a founder. Like, how are your conversations when it comes to helping her, you know, are you doing due diligence, you know, like kind of like, to, to, to anybody that’s at home, like what kind of, what are the top three forms of advice you’ve given your wife that, you know, some of our listeners could also utilize?
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You solve, yeah, what do I tell her that I’m not telling everyone else, right? Um.One of the big things we always talk about is how do you tell the story, right? The narrative, especially at the early stage, again, she’s, I mean, on paper, extremely accomplished, but you have to translate that to the investors, so they can feel that energy, and feel that confidence, and then ride along with you on what that journey is gonna be. And so a lot of that is in the storytelling. So we do a lot of time, we spend a lot of time on storytelling, positioning.Um, so people understand what you do. Um, so that’s one of the big secrets, uh, is storytelling, especially at the early stage, um, that we definitely talk about. I thought you were gonna ask me what it’s like to balance marriage and, and founder and VC life, which is a whole another conversation, and kids.
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Yeah, we, wedon’t get, we don’t, we don’t have enough time for that. That’s a whole, let’s, let’s both lay down on the couch and have that type of conversation. That’s therapy there.Right. So question, what would you say is your biggest win, and what would you say is your biggest loss, and
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why? So my biggest win, um, it’s gonna take you back, let’s take you back aboutA little more than 10 years ago, um, I’ve been doing this for quite some time. Um, when I first started doing it, I was actually running the family office for Lincoln Park, the rock band. Um, so that’s how I started invest. Um, I started with them.Um, you know, out, out of school, out, out of Penn, I was, I was a banker, went traditional, and, and it was in the US and South Africa, I was a startup operator, eventually ended up as a talent agent in LA. Um, it was a whole another story. Um, so I’ve been through many, many careers. Um, but I met Lincoln Park. We wanted to start building out kind of their family office and their alternative investing, and so that’s what I did for them. And one of our biggest wins is that we met Robin Hood very early. Um.So we met Bajo and Vlad when they still, well, they still have long hair, but they were just like these long haired kids who had a dream, um, had this office with all the graffiti on the wall. Um, they had some tra they did have some really great initial traction already. Um, I mean, free trading, who doesn’t want that? It was extremely disruptive at the time, right? Uh, now we know, now we know how it all worked out, and how they made money. Um, but so we met them very, very early, um, and we saw it early.Team again breaking down the team and their initial traction of what they built, um, and you know, we 100x um in terms of the investment. So that was our biggest win. Congrats. That’s massive, brother.Yeah, that was, that was massive for the guys. We also, we also invest in things like Lyft and Snapchat and Blue Bottle Coffee, and then a bunch of other really big wins, but I would say that would be one of the big ones, um, in terms of losses, so every VC has an anti-portfolio, and an anti-portfolio means the companies that you just didn’t, uh, you didn’t get when you met them, and you were like yeah.you know, and then you see what happens, you’re like, well, what happened, right? And so I think some of those thoughtses, I’ll give you some of my anti-portfolio. Now it’s gonna seem obvious for some people. One’s gonna seem very obvious, the other one I’m gonna have to explain. The first one being, um, uh, Pinterest.I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it.It’s not very early, um, but I was like, who wants these like boards with like pictures? What are we gonna do with that? How are you gonna monetize? I didn’t see it, so we passed on and obviously that was a miss. The second one, which is more interesting, um, and also as we started to get into more deep tech, um, I’ll give you a very interesting deep tech example. That’s why deep tech is very hard.A company came into my office and said, hey, we’re gonna bring back the wooly mammoth.And the way we’re gonna, and the reason why we’re gonna do that is because if we bring back the wooly mammoth, and then release these massive animals into the Arctic, they’re gonna pat down the Arctics, and then that’s gonna help solve climate change. That was, that was the pitch.And so I was like,I don’t get it, right? That company.That company went on to bring back a lot of extinct, uh, animals. Um, they started with the dire wolf brought back earlier this year, and they have a bunch of other, um, animals on their list that they can be bringing back. In addition to that, they spun out a lot of biotech companies from that, from all the research related to bringing back, going into the DNA, bringing back specific animals, helped to do it solve a lot of other biotech problems, um.Yeah, Colossus Bioscience, the name of that company, and they’re, you know, over a billion dollars. They’re well into the unicorn status right now. I think they’re a $10 billion company. Um, and so, missed that too. So, there’s a lot, you know, I have a bunch of others, but those are some big anti-portfolio misses that I’ve had over the years. Um, but a lot of wins though, so.
20:34 spk_1
Hindsight is always 20/20, man. That, uh, thanks for sharing that. That is very interesting. Uh, last question, what are you guys up to right now at one mission?
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I think what we think the next decade is gonna be um for AI. Right now, everyone’s focused on chat CBT.You know, and other, uh, you know, and then the wrappers you can build on top of these LLMs and these models, um, and a lot of digital companies are being built off of those, and they’re, they’re doing well, and, and, and there’s AI services, businesses going into legal and accounting, and, and healthcare, etc. customer service. Um, but we think the next, over the next 5 to 10 years, the real win is gonna be as, as AI goes into the rest of the world, as AI goes in.the physical. So AI goes into things like construction, as it goes into things like physical infrastructure, as it goes into forests, for example, as it goes into deep seas, like you mentioned, how do you map DC, uh, map the under the ocean in order to be able to do things like deep sea mining, or like, uh, cable maintenance of like these fiber optic cables that actually transmit all the data. And so we think now.Perfect example, Tesla Waymo, right? Now, driverless autonomy, um, that’s a real thing, right? And we think that now that that’s like the Cambrian moment where we’re actually proves that AI can actually start to take real world data and actually solve uh problems in the real world. So that’s what we’re focused on. Um, that requires both hardware and software, um, and we’ve invested in a bunch of companies that are doing just that.
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That’sepic, man. I, IOne, I’m wishing you the best of luck. I wanna find a way to get some deal flow. I’m trying to get in there right with you, alongside of you for the next Robin Hood, so I can 100x something. But listen guys, I really want to say thanks so much to you, Alice Berry. Thanks for joining us and I hope the people at home obviously learned something, put it to use, right? Go make some money. But that’s it for this episode, ladies and gentlemen, make sure you like, subscribe, and as always, we’ll see you next week. This is Financial Freestyle only on Yahoo Finance.
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This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.