233. Investment Decision in < 3 weeks; the Challenges and Opportunities with 3D Printing; and the Future for Industrial Automation (Kane Hsieh)

Kane Hsieh of Root Ventures joins Nick on a special Crisis Coverage installment to discuss Investment Decision in Backstory/Path to Venture Tell us about the the thesis at Root and your focus areas. Any unique outcomes or behaviors you are observing as a result of the pandemic? What's your investment position on 3D printing... bullish or bearish? I used to work in the industrial automation area... developed two different products there and saw limitless opportunities but also many challenges.  From your standpoint, what have been the biggest challenges to progress in industrial automation? What excites you most about industrial automation going forward? How will jobs in the industrial space, or any space for that matter, change with the immersion of automation and robotics? Is this a net job eliminator? Startups w/ hardware as a part of their solution (whether off the shelf or developed internally) are often are more capital intensive than their pure software counterparts.  How do you balance progress and capital efficiency for  these businesses? Do you think the expectations of progress/traction, at different stages, is different for hardware as a service vs. software as a service? One piece of advice for founders of industrial automation startups... what would it be? What are some of the deep tech or capital intensive investment areas that you're avoiding? Heard a rumor that you're starting podcast? I came across a side project, "Transformer Poetry," a book of famous poetry reimagined by OpenAI's GPT-2 language model. I don't even know what to ask here but would love to hear what the inspiration for it was. To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.