Yan-David Erlich is the rare person who I feel comfortable talking to about meditation. I tell Erlich, who I first met last year, that I’m a meditator who constantly fails.
"Failing to meditate is meditation," Erlich laughs. "It’s not about pushing unproductive thoughts away, though that’s part of it. The biggest thing to recognize is this: You go through life thinking you know your own thoughts, and that they’re yours. But then you try to sit for ten seconds and not think—and you find out that you can’t. So are they really your thoughts?"
It's an admittedly odd conversation to have with a C-suite executive, but it ultimately tracks. Erlich—who goes by Yanda and, until recently, was CRO and COO at AI unicorn Weights & Biases—has found overlap between AI and meditation. For one, he’s found that there are a lot of AI-focused entrepreneurs, operators, and researchers who meditate. It makes a certain sense, because the experience of observing one’s own consciousness can end up being a valuable "data point" in understanding AI.
"The minute you're thinking about how to build artificial brains and artificial intelligence, you pretty quickly get to: How does human consciousness and intelligence work? Why do we perceive the world the way we do?" Erlich told Fortune.
In a world so loud and bright, meditation helps create space. Erlich sees his own meditation practice as helping him create an environment in his own mind where the most compelling ideas have the space to emerge. He expects this will be especially important as he’s looking to spend more time with people "living on the edge" of AI development.
Erlich and I are talking because he’s at a crossroads. He spent more than five years at Weights & Biases (backers include Insight Partners, Bloomberg Beta, and Coatue). Erlich had joined after leading Coatue’s Series A investment in the company, and before Coatue, he was a multi-time founder and solo GP.
Erlich is now going back to investing, joining B Capital as a general partner to help lead the firm’s AI investments, the firm exclusively tells Fortune. B Capital’s AI investments currently include Writer and Poolside. The firm has more than $7 billion in AUM, and it was founded in 2015 by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, Raj Ganguly (formerly of Bain Capital), and Howard Morgan, who previously cofounded First Round Capital.
Erlich’s investing plans are geography-agnostic (B Capital invests globally, including in India) and he’s targeting two key areas. First, he’s interested in B2B startups developing "AI coworkers"—tools and infrastructure that help AI collaborate with humans in fields like legal, finance, and customer service. As he imagines, "we’re going to move from a world where we have AI tools and AI agents, to full-scale AI coworkers." Erlich’s also pursuing consumer and prosumer startups creating "AI staff," making personal assistants for tasks like cooking, health care, coaching, and investments accessible to the general public.
To this end, Erlich shares my fascination with the ways in which AI may (or may not) parallel the Industrial Revolution. Despite the overall narrative that AI is moving fast, I do think that societal change will be sweeping but ultimately gradual. Erlich believes AI has the potential to dramatically cut the costs of energy and intelligence, making more accessible the building blocks of producing goods and services. This is, in part, where he sees the Industrial Revolution parallel.
"Most significant improvements in human quality of life have come through the reduction of the cost of the goods that we need to have happy lives," said Erlich, adding that the emergence of mass production during the Industrial Revolution meant that many more people “could have access to the goods and services that used to be available only to the wealthy."
How exactly this phenomenon plays out with AI is part of the mystery. In its way that does bring us back to meditation—that it can open your mind not only to what we know, but all that we don’t. When it comes to AI, that will be necessary in the coming weeks, months, and years.
"I actually think if we look over a 10-, 20-, or 50-year horizon, society is going to be reconstructed," he said. "The economy is going to get reconstructed. The types of jobs we’re doing today are going to seem ridiculous. Fifty years from now, there’s going to be totally new jobs that we can’t even fathom."
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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