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issue #6

Hello World!

Over the past weeks you’ve heard from each member of the Deep Tech pod and now I’m excited to say it’s my turn again 👋. If you haven’t yet joined our Deep Thoughts gang, now hundreds strong, could there be a better time to sign up here?

In this issue, I wanted to share stories of two pioneers in our portfolio who have overcome challenges, changes and crises on their road to building valuable businesses. Stories of resilient leaders like Amir Nejadmalayeri, CEO of Phoelex and Aileen Ryan, COO of UltraSoc should remind us that challenge can be the catalyst for change. After all, Cisco emerged from the Black Monday of 1987; Google and PayPal from the Dot com bubble of 2002 and AirBnb and Stripe from the ashes of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Putting Covid-19 aside for a while, we've been…

  • Challenged by this paper highlighting the limitations of cultured meat.
  • Impressed by this analysis of the UK’s capabilities of commercialising deep technologies.
  • Intrigued by China’s use of UV light technology to wipe out germs in public spaces, in a post-C19 world.
  • Provoked by a16z’s podcast on new challenges online platforms face as gaming and live streaming sees a surge amid C19.
  • Thankful for this take on enterprise IT and the acceleration of the digital transformation across the F-500.
  • Enlightened by Nathan Benaich’s overview of AI in Q1 2020.
  • Charmed by this collection of virtual museums!
  • Interested to continue seeing ML in audio; here machine learning being used by Google to improve the quality of its calls on Duo.
  • Noting the shared learnings that may be available to the scientific community from the open source software community in solving seemingly unsolvable problems.
  • LOL’ing at the abstract of this.
  • Excited to see if this breakthrough will bring us any closer to a real quantum computer?
  • Wondering how long Moore’s Law will continue to hold.
  • Internalising the hard truths about the autonomous driving industry.
  • Spooked to be close to a system that will be able to interpret our thoughts directly into text.
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I have to confess I’ve been re-watching Star Wars lately (now I’ve got the time) and Yoda’s quote, ‘You must unlearn what you have learned’, seems pretty much the go-to motto right now. As lockdown continues and events/conferences go virtual, we at Octopus are wondering what we will unlearn and what new habits will come to life? Any thoughts and suggestions welcome – write, Tweet or LinkedIn us.

I have also dusted off my game consoles so if anyone wants to challenge me to FIFA2020, God of War or Super Mario email me at akriti@octopusventures.com and let’s exchange gamer IDs!

#KeepThatGameFaceOn

Akriti
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