Yiwen sits down with Deedy Das for a candid conversation about early-stage AI investing, the economics of neolabs, and what makes a founder worth backing.

Deedy leads Menlo Ventures’ $100 million Anthology Fund in partnership with Anthropic. His investments include OpenRouter, Goodfire, Modal, and Pangram. Before venture capital, he was on the founding team at Glean and worked at Google and Facebook.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Deedy Das
02:19 Deedy’s investment thesis
06:02 How to choose a startup to join
12:48 Neolabs and their economics
28:05 Goodfire and mechanistic interpretability
33:38 World Labs acquisition and Neolab exits
40:11 China’s AI ecosystem
43:27 Manus and the race to build AI agents
51:38 Why Deedy invested in OpenRouter
1:00:12 Silicon Valley’s young AI talent
1:09:16 Betting on Anthropic
1:18:24 Inside the Anthology Fund
1:26:06 AI data and RL environments
1:29:43 Deedy’s next big bet
1:33:57 The future of humanity and technology

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