115. The 'D' Got Deleted: How VC Funding Broke the Innovation Ecosystem

About this episode

Kence Anderson discusses how venture capital has disrupted the innovation ecosystem by prioritizing hype over development.

The 'D' Got Deleted: How VC Funding Broke the Innovation Ecosystem Last week's whitepaper isn't production-ready. But someone's already pitching it to your board. Kence Anderson has deployed 100+ autonomous AI systems for Fortune 500 companies—and watched venture capital create a research-to-PR pipeline that skips development entirely. The 'D' in R&D got deleted. Hype cycles got amplified. Rule-based AI—systems encoding expertise as decision logic—was the 1980s breakthrough. Overhyped, then abandoned when it couldn't do everything. But engineers kept deploying it where codified rules excel: industrial controls, diagnostics, compliance. It's running critical infrastructure today. Every AI wave follows this arc. For leaders, the lesson: stop asking which technology wins. Ask what each does well—and build modular systems that match capabilities to tasks. The fix: if AI can learn, someone should teach it the right way. Machine teaching—goals, scenarios, strategies—creates modular agents that compound capability through orchestration. Paradigm Shifts: 📌 Components > Algorithms: LLMs excel at language. Reinforcement learning excels at practice. Engineering matches superpowers…

People in this episode

Host: Dyan Finkhousen

Guest: Kence Anderson

Topics covered

• venture capital
• innovation ecosystem
• artificial intelligence
• machine teaching
• R&D
• technology development

Keywords

• venture capital
• innovation
• AI systems
• machine teaching
• R&D
• technology
• autonomous AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Fortune 500, Shoshin Works

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