Oct 22, 2021
Alan Cohen is a partner at DCVC, a highly regarded venture
capital firm who pioneered the concept of investing in Deep
Tech.
Alan has helped lead and grow some of the most influential
enterprise IT companies in the world. This includes serving as a VP
of Enterprise for Cisco. He has also advised companies like Box,
Cohesity, Netskope and Mobile Iron. He has been on the leadership
teams of breakthrough companies like Nicira and Illumio.
At DCVC he tracks innovations across multiple sectors of the
economy and helps steer investments. He also sits on the boards of
several DCVC portfolio companies, many of which we talked about in
this OODAcast.
We certainly talk tech with Alan, and he is the perfect guy to
examine some of the more exciting breakthroughs being achieved
through Deep Tech investing. But were pleased to learn his
foundational story was not in a high tech field. He was an avid
reader as a child and for his education pursued an English
undergraduate and then completed a Master of Arts in English. In
our discussion it becomes clear his love for a good narrative story
paid off in his ability to seek out the deeper meaning of tech and
express its impact in the language of business decision-makers.
In our review of the narrative of Alan’s own career we suss out
a significant lesson that informs his mental model for
decision-making. There is a threat to good decisions, especially
decisions in due diligence. This threat is the human mind’s ability
to deceive itself, especially through confirmation bias. In Alan’s
view, the hardest thing about being an investor or decision-maker
is avoiding this confirmation bias. Things that make a person
successful earlier in a career can be the things that trip you up
at other stages. He sites Tony Soprano, who used to say ‘Remember
when’ is the lowest form of conversation. Too much nostalgia leads
to too strong of a confirmation bias.
Note: At the time of our interview with Alan one of the partners
at DCVC had just returned from Space, having flown on the same Deep
Blue flight with William Shatner. We discuss some of the relevance
of this to technology innovation and leadership with Alan.
Some of the firms we discuss with Alan include:
Evolv: Applies sensors, data, and machine
learning to detect and prevent a wide set of global threats to
people.
Planet Labs: Planet uses over 150 of its
satellites in orbit and powerful AI to image the entire Earth every
day, making global change visible, accessible, and actionable.
Rocket Lab: Delivers a range of complete
rocket systems and technologies for fast and low-cost payload
deployment.
Capella Space: Persistent and reliable
information from space independent of weather and light conditions
using synthetic aperture radar.
Atomwise: Breakthrough products for pharma
and agricultural companies with novel AI for atom-by-atom
chemistry.
Recursion: Discovers transformative new
life science treatments by applying breakthrough AI and computer
vision to understand the behavior of millions of living human cells
in parallel
Primer: Primer helps parse and collate a
large number of documents across several languages
Illumio: stops cyber threats by
dynamically enforcing segmentation and policy on every point of
compute and storage, on premise or in the cloud, with lights-out,
hands-free management.
Agility Robotics: Bi-ped humanoid robots
to automate pick/place tasks in logistics.
Pivot Bio: Fueled by an innovative drive
and a deep understanding of the microbiome, Pivot Bio is pioneering
transformative advances in fertilizer and crop nutrition.
These are just a few of the Deep Tech firms the DCVC team has
been investing in and helping grow. These and many others have
already made direct positive benefits in terms of helping fight
global warming, defeating pandemics, reducing death from terminal
diseases and helping defend democracy from hostile threats.
For more see:
