A peek into the future as Sam Altman sees it

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Ryan Cohen, the billionaire activist investor and founder of the pet commerce company Chewy, has built a stake in Alibaba Group that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars and is privately pushing the Chinese e-commerce giant to accelerate and further boost its share-repurchase program, according to the WSJ. Cohen, known as the meme-stock king for helping ignite explosive rallies in GameStop Corp. and others, built the stake in the second half of last year, say the WSJ's sources. More here.

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Late last week, in a rare sit-down before a small audience, I spent an hour with Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator and, since 2019, the CEO of OpenAI, the company he famously co-founded with Elon Musk and numerous others in 2015 to develop artificial intelligence for the "benefit of humanity."

The crowd wanted to learn more about his plans for OpenAI, which has taken the world by storm in the last six weeks owing to the public release of its ChatGPT language model, a chatbot that has educators in particular both dazzled and alarmed. (OpenAI's DALL-E technology, which enables users to create digital images by simply describing what they envision, generated only slightly less buzz when it was released to the public earlier last year.)

Because Altman is also an active investor -- one whose biggest return to date comes from the payments startup Stripe, he said at the event -- we spent the first half of our time together focused on some of his most ambitious investments.

To learn about these, including a supersonic jet company and a startup that aims to help create babies from human skin cells, you might tune in for the roughly 20 minutes we spent on them. (You'll also hear Altman's thoughts about Twitter under the stewardship of Elon Musk, and why Altman is "not super interested" in crypto or web3. "I love the spirit of the web3 people," Altman said with a shrug. "But I don't intuitively feel why we need it.)

We'll feature more from our fuller conversation, including about OpenAI, soon. In the meantime, what follows is an excerpt from our discussion about one of Altman's biggest bets: a nuclear fusion company called Helion Energy that, like OpenAI, is aiming to turn another long-elusive promise -- this one of abundant energy -- into reality. The excerpt has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

What makes a Sam Altman deal?

SA: I try to just do things that I'm interested in at this point. One of the things I have realized is, all of the companies I think I have added a lot of value to are the ones that I sort of like to think about in my free time on a hike or whatever, and then text the founders and say, 'Hey, I have this idea for you.' Every founder deserves an investor who is going to think about them while they're hiking. And so I've tried to hold myself to the stuff that I really love, which tends to be the hard tech, [involving] years of R&D, [is] capital intensive or is sort of risky research. But if it works, it really works.

More here.

Aerones, an eight-year-old Latvian startup that uses robots to inspect and maintain wind turbines, raised a $30 million round co-led by Lightrock and Haniel, with additional participation from Blume Equity as well as existing investors Change Ventures, Mantas Mikuckas, Metaplanet, Pace Ventures, and Future Positive Capital. The company has raised a total of $53 million. Tech.eu has more here.

Locad, a Singapore-based logistics startup whose platform connects e-commerce companies to a network of third-party warehouses and shipping carriers, raised an $11 million Series A round led by Reefknot Investments (a joint venture between Temasek and logistics company Kuehne + Nagel), Access Ventures, JG Summit, and WTI. Previous investors Sequoia India, Surge, Febe Ventures, and Antler also participated. TechCrunch has more here.

Kwara, a four-year-old Kenyan startup that aims to upgrade the back-office operations of credit unions and help them to shift away from paper-based processes and physical branches, raised a $3 million seed extension from One Day Yes and Base Capital, as well as existing investors DOB Equity and Globivest. The company has raised a total of $7 million. TechCrunch has more here.

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Four years after it began building a portfolio of early-stage startups focused on infrastructure for web3, SOSV’s dlab startup development program has been spun out as a standalone fund, says the outfit. Former SOSV general partner Shawn Broderick and partner Nick Plante are the founding general partners of the newly launched dlab fund, and SOSV is its anchor limited partner. More here.

Amber Atherton has joined the early-stage, Santa Monica, Ca.-based venture firm Patron as a partner. Atherton spent the previous two years as the head of community growth at Discord after it acquired her startup Zyper. More here.

Bain Capital co-chairman Steve Pagliuca is retiring after a 34-year career at the private-equity firm, says the WSJ, noting that when he joined Bain Capital in 1989, it had around $200 million under management. It now has $160 billion in assets. More here.

Michele Romanow, the CEO of venture-backed Clearco, which provides capital to e-commerce businesses in exchange for a cut of future revenue, has resigned, according to The Information. Romanow cofounded the fintech with Andrew D’Souza, who himself stepped back as CEO of the fintech company a year ago. (Romanow and D'Souza were in a romantic relationship for many years and parted ways during the pandemic. ) D'Souza became executive chairman when he transitioned out of the corner office; now, Romanow will reportedly become co-executive chairman alongside him as Andrew Curtis, a consultant to the company, assumes the role of CEO. More here.

Electric-vehicle sales crossed a global milestone last year, achieving around 10% market share for the first time. More here.

The future energy required to run just the computers on a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today, according to MIT researchers. More here.

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