Comment by pwthornton
4 months ago
It's incredible how easy it was to raise money in that time frame and how hard it is to raise money now. They would throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest ideas.
It's important to note that the AI Pin powered by ChatGPT was a bit of a pivot. If ChatGPT never came out, they wouldn't have even had that. It would have been more like having a dedicated Siri or Alexa device to do really basic stuff with. I can't imagine how much worse the product was going to be. What investor say that early pitch and work and was like, "sign me up?"
> It's incredible how easy it was to raise money in that time frame and how hard it is to raise money now. They would throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest ideas.
Humane's series C was in 2023, long after the end of ZIRP. They will still throw huge sums of money at you for the dumbest idea, provided that you say the magic term 'AI' enough.
Even Perplexity got funding, so yeah, even an absolute piece of trash business can raise money with the right group of people.
To be fair, it was not clear if ChatGpt will launch Web search or not.
Perplexity investors probably think it will get acquired some day by some big co.
Perplexity continued to raise at insane $30 bil+ valuations after chatGPT's web search and Gemini search.