Chi-Hua Chien saw Facebook coming; now he says the real AI winners won’t be selling AI
Key takeaways
- Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist.
- We talked last week; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
- More founders and investors have been publicly sharing their grievances about VCs lately.
Chi-Hua Chien has spent more than two decades as a venture capitalist, but he thinks like a cultural anthropologist. As a co-founder of Goodwater Capital, a firm focused exclusively on consumer and prosumer technology, he has built a portfolio spanning entertainment, healthcare, fintech, and live experiences — with investments in companies like MIDI Health, Fever, and Monzo. He was also, as a 27-year-old associate at Accel, the person who initially found a six-person company launched from Harvard called The Facebook.
That ability to read human behavior at scale informs everything from his view that Americans will never trust a single app with both their social lives and their finances, to his belief that the gap between the most advanced AI model and what you can run on your phone — once as wide as two years — will shrink to three months within the next year.
These days, he is also willing to say out loud what many in venture capital are only thinking: that the commoditization of the model layer is already underway, and that the biggest winners of the AI era won t be the companies selling AI at all.