From 10 to 20: Falon Fatemi, Founder & CEO — Node
We asked 12 amazing founders and investors to share a look back and predictions for the road ahead. Celebrity photographer Ashley Batz joined in to capture these trailblazers on the cusp between decades & author Alice Berman penned an essay about decade that was. Find the full article here.
Who inspires you? Anyone who has faced great adversity to reach the height of their impact on society and have created a legacy that will outlive them. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a great example of this.
What’s one thing you find yourself thinking on a daily basis? Resilience is the key to success. Half the battle is surviving long enough to find the talent to make your moonshot of a vision a reality. Second thing I think about constantly is how can I be the change I wish to see.
What is the most important part of your routine, the thing that really keeps you on track mentally every day? I wake up 530/6a every morning to get most of my non meeting “work” completed for the day. I do this by organizing my daily/weekly priorities and goals on my calendar. I check every evening to prepare in advance for meetings the next day, Sundays to prepare for the week ahead, and daily to ensure I’ve completed my weekly tactical objectives helps me stay on track with the chaos I deal with on a daily basis.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever given? You are the only person standing in the way of achieving your dreams. Believe in your damn self.
Which trend for the coming year is your favorite: sustainability, personalization, or AI? Given I run an AI company, definitely Artificial Intelligence, and given what we have invented, Artificial Intuition.
What changes have you seen in the past decade when it comes to your field of work? Where do you see those changes continue to apply themselves in the coming decade? AI will become as pervasive as electricity. Right now there are over 100M organizations that don’t have the DNA or resources to adopt AI which means they are at existential risk. As a result the next wave of transformation will come from the enterprise because it frankly has to. In the coming decade we will see the rise of horizontal AI platforms like Node.ai that offer prediction-as-a-service that will help any organization to be able to put the power of prediction into their applications. We should see a rise of prosumer applications leveraging AI to personalize recommendations for professionals including predicting the next career move they should make or book they should read that will change their life.
Which trends do you think are most important for us to focus on in the next year? Next decade? 2019 was the year AI started to become mainstream. 2020–2021 will be the years that the AI pollution will clear and we will start seeing more applications powered by real AI.
10 year period: we don’t really know all the places in which AI will have impact but because AI is based on data, the need for accurate data acquisition and interpretation will become paramount in this next decade.
As an example, early stage venture investment has been driven historically by exclusive networks and decisions powered by human intuition. In adding AI to the mix we should see a rise of new investment models and frameworks that continue to democratize the ability for all of us to get connected to opportunity.
What’s been an obstacle you’ve consistently run up against in this industry, and do you see that changing? Lack of diversity of perspectives around the table. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take another 257 years for gender economic equality to be achieved. This is unacceptable. In the tech industry this hits home and is frustrating on a daily basis. The majority of decisions are still made by men whose pattern recognition is someone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. It’s an uphill battle with a lot of rejection to not look the part and try to break into this club. This unfortunately translates into 2% of all venture funding going to women, with even lower percentages at the growth phases and it’s not for a lack of new female investors trying to raise funds to solve this gap. In fact, similar to female founders, female investors are having challenges raising large funds which perpetuates the problem. So while there has been some improvement in a new wave of diversity focused investors with diverse perspectives, there is still is a several billion dollar gap in funding in support of balancing where the capital goes to fuel innovation. Platforms like Cleo Capital and others are great examples of unique approaches to solve this problem from a bottoms up perspective. I hope together we can help drive changes at the LP level so venture funds will put their money where their mouth is and invest in a more balanced way.
Where should we be looking for inspiration on “what’s next” in investing? I would get inspiration from the happy accidents historically that have lead to the most meaningful innovations that we use on a daily basis. It’s crazy to believe that teflon was invented by a husband who worked at a rubber factory and a wife who was a prolific cook. Or that telephones had human switchboard operators. The most innovative ideas and inventions will continue come from unsuspecting scenarios and from diverse teams thinking about how to make our daily lives better at scale.
What are you personally invested in (on an emotional level) over the next decade? Investing in diverse teams at the intersection of a massive market opportunity and deep technology.
Read all 12 profiles here.
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