Investing In AI
Now with AI: When Comedy Meets Caution in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
In this week’s episode of Gula Tech Adventures, Ron Gula opens with a hilarious animated short titled “Now with AI,” where the absurdity of modern life with AI-enabled appliances is laid bare through comedy. This is followed by a thoughtful and serious exploration of what it means to invest in tech startups that rely on artificial intelligence. The result? A blend of humor and hard-hitting insights that’s both entertaining and educational—particularly for anyone interested in how AI is reshaping both daily life and venture capital strategies.
🧠 Part One: An Animated Reality Check
The animated segment stars Colman, a recurring character in Gula’s Cynfeld spoof universe, who finds himself overwhelmed by AI-enabled blenders, toasters, and kitchen gadgets. Initially charmed by a talking blender named Brenda (who may or may not have a crush on him), Coleman is soon bombarded with firmware updates, wellness check-ins, and unsolicited suggestions for snacks.
The humor taps into real-world concerns: over-personalized AI, excessive automation, and the uncanny behavior of “smart” devices. When one appliance reports Coleman’s heart rate and sleep patterns, the viewer starts to wonder—who's really in control?
It's a satirical but poignant reminder that while consumer AI often feels like a helpful friend, the integration of AI into our homes and devices brings data privacy, psychological, and even existential implications. And for Colman, the problem isn’t malware—it’s being emotionally manipulated by his kitchen.
💸 Part Two: The Investor’s AI Playbook
After the laughs, Ron transitions into an investor’s-eye view of AI-driven startups—offering both encouragement and hard truths for founders.
Framework for Evaluation: The 5-Slide Pitch Deck Ron reiterates his five-slide framework:
What problem are you solving?
How do you solve it?
What’s the proof?
What’s your ask?
What does success look like?
Too often, AI startups rush to highlight “how” they use AI without clearly stating “why” it matters. “Just because your product uses AI doesn’t make it investable,” Ron warns.
Key Pitfalls for AI Startups:
Overreliance on Cloud APIs: Many startups build entirely on services like OpenAI, Amazon, or Anthropic. This can boost innovation—but it also creates dependency and limits defensibility.
Lack of Proprietary IP: If your AI model is just a wrapper on public APIs with no unique dataset, detection logic, or architectural novelty, it’s hard to justify valuation.
No On-Prem Path: For sectors like finance or defense, cloud-only solutions are a dealbreaker. Yet many AI startups have no roadmap for on-prem deployments.
Speed of Innovation: The AI space is moving at warp speed. Startups can be outclassed overnight by updates from OpenAI or Anthropic that render their core differentiators obsolete.
🧪 Real-World Examples from Gula Tech Portfolio
Ron highlights several companies in the Gula Tech Adventures investment portfolio that strike the right balance:
Conceal uses AI to assess and guide web browsing in real time—blending traditional threat filtering with intelligent risk analysis.
Pixm focuses solely on phishing detection using computer vision, looking for unauthorized logos and branding—an AI use case with a clear and focused objective.
Halcyon applies AI to ransomware detection, a tightly scoped problem that benefits from pattern recognition and behavioral modeling.
StartLeft uses AI to gamify secure code reviews, offering developers real-time feedback during Git commits—again, highly targeted.
Each company treats AI not as the product, but as an enhancer to a core capability. That distinction is critical.
🤔 Is AI the Product or the Power Tool?
Ron draws a clear line:
AI as a feature: Great! You’ve added predictive functionality or sped up decision-making.
AI as the product: Proceed with caution. What’s your moat? What’s your IP? How do you survive if the foundational model provider changes terms or pricing?
Investors want answers to:
How portable is your architecture?
Can you swap between AI providers?
Do you control your data pipeline?
Is your value proposition sustainable if someone else builds a similar app on the same backend?
🛡️ AI Security, Privacy, and Ethics
Ron touches briefly on a crucial parallel topic: security for AI. Traditional cybersecurity models—like access control, logging, and user verification—still apply. But new AI-enabled systems require additional safeguards around:
Data leakage
Prompt injection attacks
Governance of model outputs
User consent and data provenance
He predicts that securing AI won’t need an entirely new stack, but it will require new operational discipline—especially when AI interfaces with sensitive databases or critical decision-making processes.
🎯 Final Thoughts for Founders
Ron’s closing advice is grounded in experience:
If you’re using AI to supercharge your core product, you’re on the right track.
If you’re betting your entire business on access to one API or closed platform, you may be building on quicksand.
And above all—be able to clearly explain what your AI does, what it's trained on, and how it helps customers in a measurable way.
AI is exciting. It’s transformative. But in Ron’s view, the hype can blind both founders and funders to the fundamentals of startup building.
👋 Wrap-up
“Now with AI” is both a hilarious cautionary tale about AI consumer products and a serious investor breakdown of how to assess AI-based startups. Ron Gula balances comedy and clarity in a way few can—helping us laugh at our robot blenders while also reminding us to do our due diligence before betting big on an AI-powered startup.
As always, Ron invites viewers to pitch their companies, explore the Gula Tech Adventures portfolio, and keep pushing the cybersecurity and tech startup space forward—with a little less hype, and a little more substance.
Stay tuned. Stay smart. And don’t name your blender.