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D. Scott Phoenix
Ex founder + CEO of Vicarious AI (raised $250M, acq by Alphabet). Partner at @fiftyyears investing in hard tech. Twitter: @fuelfive
Professional Background
D. Scott Phoenix is a highly respected partner at Fifty Years, an innovative venture capital firm dedicated to investing in deep tech founders during the earliest stages of their entrepreneurial journeys. His career showcases an impressive trajectory filled with groundbreaking achievements in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, making him a significant figure in the tech industry. One of Phoenix's notable accomplishments includes cofounding Vicarious, a pioneering startup within the AGI and robotics sector. With tremendous support totaling approximately $250 million from notable investors like Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, Vicarious developed into one of the most successful AI and robotics companies. Under Phoenix's leadership as CEO, Vicarious contributed substantially to the publication of peer-reviewed research in prestigious journals such as Science, NeurIPS, and ICML, marking its significance in the tech landscape.
Following the acquisition of Vicarious by Alphabet in 2022, Phoenix transitioned to the role of Chief Product and Revenue Officer at Intrinsic, Alphabet's dedicated initiative centered around robotics and AI. In this capacity, he worked on leveraging the advancements made at Vicarious and focusing on developing cutting-edge technologies that would shape the future of robotics. His experience emphasizes not only a commitment to innovation but also an ability to lead teams toward achieving remarkable technological milestones.
Prior to his tenure at Vicarious, Scott made significant contributions as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund, where he supported emerging tech startups and strategized investment opportunities. His entrepreneurial journey began at Y Combinator in 2008, where the spark of innovation and collaboration led him to create an open-source game and cofound Frogmetrics, a company focused on innovative solutions.
Phoenix's extensive involvement in the venture capital space highlights his deep understanding of hard tech startups. He has made impactful investments in notable companies such as Sila Nano, Psi Quantum, Verge Genomics, and Science, showcasing his keen eye for promising technologies and disruptive innovations. Furthermore, he actively advises several venture funds, including Felicis Ventures, Base10, and 8VC, where his insights and expertise are invaluable for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.
Education and Achievements
D. Scott Phoenix's educational background is rooted in his studies at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania, where he pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree in Individualized Computer Science, Business, and Design. This multidisciplinary approach has equipped him with a unique perspective on technology, allowing him to bridge the gap between technical expertise and business acumen.
His time at Y Combinator, a leading startup accelerator, further honed his entrepreneurial skills and provided him with rich networking opportunities that would later facilitate his significant contributions to the tech ecosystem. His academic pursuits and hands-on experiences align seamlessly to form a robust foundation for his successful endeavors in the tech industry.
Notable Achievements
- Co-founded Vicarious, an influential AGI and robotics startup that attracted approximately $250 million in backing from high-profile investors.
- Pioneered advancements in AI + robotics, leading to peer-reviewed research publications in respected academic journals like Science and NeurIPS.
- Led Vicarious through its successful acquisition by Alphabet in 2022, highlighting the company's substantial value and innovation in technology.
- Served as Chief Product and Revenue Officer for Intrinsic, developing groundbreaking projects in robotics and AI post-acquisition.
- Significantly contributed to the ecosystem of hard tech startups, providing strategic investments in companies like Sila Nano and Psi Quantum.
- Actively involved in advising venture funds, bringing his wealth of experience and insights to emerging tech projects and entrepreneurs.
- His educational journey at the University of Pennsylvania and Y Combinator provided him with the interdisciplinary knowledge crucial for tech innovation and entrepreneurship.
Highlights
Hard truth: 99% of founders pick nearby problems instead of valuable ones. How do you build a company that matters?
Richard Hamming’s advice changed my life: https://lnkd.in/gMYRJK_Q
Big news: I’m joining Fifty Years to help more founders build deep tech startups!
Last year, Alphabet bought my startup Vicarious AI ($250M raised from Elon, Zuck, Bezos…). Why switch to VC as my next thing?
When I was in my early 20s, I realized I got the most joy from helping others. I looked at lots of different ways to help at scale, like policy and science. AI had the best reward-to-effort ratio of every idea I evaluated. But, was I 100 years too early? AlexNet didn’t exist, the ecosystem was in AI winter, and nobody wanted to fund AI. After extrapolating out compute speed, data availability, neuro understanding, I decided to go all in on AI.
Vicarious was born with Dileep George. We invented great tech, published in Science, raised a lot of money, shipped a lot of robots, and sold to Alphabet.
After the sale, I was at a crossroads. Should I start another AI company? Lots of brilliant people are already building at every level of the AI stack now, so it seemed like the marginal AI contribution I could make was much lower than when I started Vicarious. At the same time, I still wanted to help people and was excited about lots of new frontiers: materials, energy, computation, space… Maybe I could help others, help others?
I found Fifty Years. Their mission: solve the world’s biggest problems with deep tech entrepreneurship. I love the team, the founders they’ve backed so far, and helping other pioneers navigate many of the challenges I faced at Vicarious. Thanks for inviting me to join the team Ela Madej, Seth Bannon, Alex Teng, and everyone at Fifty Years!
And if you’re a scientist or founder developing a ‘big if true’ idea in atoms, electrons, cells, bits, or beyond, let’s talk about how we could pull forward the future together.
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.