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On Venture Capital
“In venture capital… the pitches and startups coming to us are heavy on AI. Everything is AI, and it is up to us to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It’s not the AI component that we probe deeply on. It’s actually the non-AI component. It’s your industry expertise, your understanding of the use cases, and most importantly, your understanding of the humans facing those problems. That is, at some level, the real moat. How do we, as a fund, use AI? We can do a lot of diligence where previously we’d have to call somebody, but (now) we can actually put stuff into Claude. Both in our own internal operations and in what we see, we are impacted by AI on both sides. We like to think that we don’t bet on ideas; we bet on people.
We’re still judging teams, but we now have to judge them on this dimension of AI excellence. How AI forward are they? How comfortable with AI are they? How genuinely are they using AI to solve this problem that’s nagging them? We expect our startups to be AI native and AI ready from Day 1.
On Entrepreneurship
The other hypothesis that I’ve stumbled on is this: what profession is relatively AI proof? Entrepreneurship. If you’re in control of your destiny, you can use AI however you want to. And so I tell everybody in college: the two things you have to master via the courses you take are AI and entrepreneurship.
No matter the job, I believe that you have to know and understand entrepreneurship and value creation. How do you approach a problem? How do you persuade people to come together to solve a problem? At our entrepreneurship course in Berkeley, we define an entrepreneur as an ethical persuader.
On disruption
The thing about AI disruption is: I don’t know if it’s going to be bigger but I know it’s going to be faster. I think we as humans will learn how to use this technology well and coexist with it. But we don’t have much time.
“The thing about AI disruption is: I don’t know if it’s going to be bigger. I think it’s going to be faster.”
Umair Khan
AI can be the great equalizer. I believe that for folks out there who didn’t have access to many resources but have self-motivation, that burning fire, AI today can level them up. So I don’t quite see this as the haves versus have-nots. Not yet. I think it’s the leveler. I think the total impact of AI is probably no different than other tech upheavals and humans will adapt to it but we have less time.
On Zareen’s restaurant
This is a very human-centric business. AI is not going to make chicken. And you can’t replace the recipes. But what you can do is how you market, how you price things, how you predict certain things, how you order things, how you reduce wastage. AI is genuinely helping with all of that, and I think that’s a great sign. Restaurant tech is a real sector.”
Umair Khan is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches entrepreneurship. He’s also the founder of Folio3, a co-owner of Zareen’s restaurant, and a founding partner at Mentors Fund, a seed-stage venture fund. He lives and works in Palo Alto.
This profile is one of nineteen featured in the “Humans in an age of AI” portrait series. See more profiles here.
