What to Build: Navigating Deep Tech in the Age of AI

Most founders fail before they even start by picking the wrong idea. In this talk, Scott Phoenix shares hard-won insights on choosing what to build as we race toward AGI.

Scott built Vicarious, one of the first AGI startups, raising $250M from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos before selling to Alphabet in 2023. Now, as a partner at Fifty Years, he helps scientists and engineers leverage AI to push humanity's frontiers.

Come Learn:

• What becomes exponentially more valuable on the path to AGI (and what becomes worthless)
• The physical constraints and bottlenecks that will define our thriving future
• How to identify ideas worth a decade of your life
• Why most AI startups are building the wrong thing

Come for Scott's unfiltered take on the opportunities that matter as we approach the hinge of history. Whether you're validating an idea or just curious about deep tech entrepreneurship, see you at Princeton!

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At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech companies from the earliest stages and helped them raise over $4.6 billion. This includes companies like Solugen (makes carbon-negative chemicals, now a $2B company), Astranis (delivering internet to billions of people via satellites, now a $1.4B company), and Opentrons (low-cost lab robots, now a $1.8B company).

We've distilled everything we know about deep tech entrepreneurship into 5050, a free program to help great scientists and engineers become great founders.

Applications for our next cohort are open: https://fiftyyears.com/5050