AI’s biggest fan? Healthcare

👇🏼 I’m hosting the annual DECODE conference in 2 weeks!

Apply to join the conference, and let’s catch up in-person!

• DECODE is the largest founder community co-hosted across UC Berkeley and Stanford. The DECODE annual conference focuses on helping founders in their earliest stages of starting a startup. I’ve had the honor of serving on the DECODE board since 2016.

• What makes this gathering unique is that speakers host an invite-only roundtable discussion with a dozen of handpicked founders, after the main stage session. This provides an opportunity for speakers and founders to have more intimate and deep conversations.

• You can sign up with SHUO_VIP for 30% off.

Past attendees have …

• Successfully raised pre-seed, seed and series A rounds from top tier investors they met through DECODE roundtables and dinners, including a16z, Sequoia and Y Combinator.

• ​Identified advisors and mentors (including experts from Apple, Google and Microsoft) who’ve helped them 10x their startup’s growth.

• ​Found co-founders and early hires for their startups through DECODE community members, like the founding teams of Databricks ($62bn valuation), Agora (IPO) and FlowGPT (Series A).

3 trends in startups/tech/venture

💊 AI’s biggest fan? Healthcare

• Think healthcare is old school and resistant to change? Think again.

• The healthcare industry, which represents one-fifth of the U.S. economy, is now the leading adopter of enterprise AI. 22% of healthcare organizations have deployed commercial AI, double the 9% adoption rate of the broader economy.

• Despite old school giants like Epic (which controls 42% of the hospital electronic health record market) trying to offer more AI features, 85% of all generative AI spending in healthcare has gone to startups.

• The takeaway? It’s time to rethink the age-old idea that healthcare has high barriers to entry. After all, it’s hard to say no to something that’s better, faster, and cheaper.

🤖 AI-generated workslop is destroying productivity

• Since 2023, companies have doubled their use of AI—but most don’t have any productivity gains to show. Why?

• Research from Stanford and Harvard found that employees are using AI tools to create "workslop" — low-effort, passable work that ultimately creates more work for coworkers. 41% of respondents encountered such workslop in the last month.

• Companies must limit workslop by encouraging employees to use AI to enhance their own creativity, not just to avoid doing work.

💰 Goldman Sachs acquires VC fund

• Goldman Sachs is acquiring a venture capital fund with $7bn in AUM (assets under management), signaling that even VC funds are looking for alternate ways to “exit.”

• Major venture funds are hiring dedicated staff to manufacture non-traditional exits, including secondary transactions, continuation funds, and buyouts. In fact, tech buyout funds now account for 25% of all liquidity in the entire venture ecosystem.

• The takeaway? VC funds are behaving like startups. It’s no longer enough to just raise a fund (just as it’s no longer enough to just start a startup). You also need an intentional exit strategy.

2 theses on what’s next

🤖 We’re the last generation to manage only humans

• If AI continues down its current course, future managers won’t just have humans to manage. They’ll also need to manage intelligent machines.

• In fact, the line between “employee” and “AI” is already blurring. Many teams now include “AI agents” (software behaving like humans) and robots (hardware behaving like humans).

• Leaders must learn to manage, integrate, and ethically govern AI systems alongside people.

🤔 The best founders know when they’re dealing with a tech problem vs a people problem

• As I share in my Berkeley and Stanford entrepreneurship courses, the most common startup problems fall into two categories: tech problems and people problems.

• Founders often try to solve tech problems by hiring people or solve people problems by building tech. However, tech problems need tech solutions, and people problems need people solutions—and the best founders know this.

1 tool I love

🎓 Fully accredited Masters of Science in AI on monthly subscription

• As an advisory board member at Woolf, I’m excited to see Woolf partner with Udacity to launch one of the first fully accredited Masters of Science in AI. Instead of expensive tuition fees, this program has a monthly subscription. Previously completed Nanodegrees at Udacity will count towards this degree.

• This will absolutely lower barriers of entry to higher ed and unlock career opportunities in tech for a broader student base. You can learn more here.