Bilal Zuberi
Related people
Episodes
- Why a Chemist Left $7B to Bet on Physical AI Before Everyone Else | Bilal Zuberi, Red Glass Ventures
Notes
The Peel with Turner Novak · Why a Chemist Left $7B to Bet on Physical AI Before Everyone Else…
-
What Does Red Glass Ventures Look for in a Founder?
Bilal Zuberi says Red Glass Ventures looks for a first check at the earliest stage, whatever the round is called, and a founder with a missionary belief that the idea has to exist. The belief has to have a reason behind it. A mood is not enough.
Applied Intuition is the example. While much of the industry said car companies were just metal benders and that Silicon Valley would replace them, the founders believed those companies run the economies of countries and are not going away. The job was to give them technology for the next phase: digitizing, electrifying, and adding autonomy so the machines can do work a person sitting inside them cannot. That round was their Series A and their first
-
What Is Physical AI?
Bilal Zuberi says physical AI is the third bucket on the chart Jensen Huang put up in January 2025, next to AI and energetic AI. Jensen's picture is narrower, mostly robotics and autonomy. The Red Glass Ventures thesis is wider. It is AI and the physical world: the table, the glass, the food, the energy people use, the industrially made products, and defense.
Turner Novak asks what people get wrong when the investment is not software. Eighteen months earlier, when Bilal was telling limited partners he might raise a fund, many of them said they had never invested there. They called it capital intensive and said only a large fund could write big checks and hold the positions. That resistance
-
What Are Founders Buying Besides a Venture Capital Check?
Bilal Zuberi stays on many Lux boards with no compensation, no equity vesting, and no salary because his reputation matters and because the pledge he made when he won the investments was that the founders were buying a partner. Skipping the hard moments, or handing the seat to a young associate, would be unfair and would be lying.
A founder who only wants capital can get it from many places. People assume the big fund is the cheap source, but every large firm has a bigger backer, and someone else will often write the check, maybe even at a lower price. At the smaller end he offers 3 million or 5 million, money a founder could also raise from 1800 other places. The reason to take his money i
-
Can Venture Fund Fees Make Someone a Billionaire?
Bilal Zuberi says a partner in one of the big venture funds can become a billionaire on management fees alone, without having to show investment returns.
Venture funds keep raising bigger pools of capital, and the partners get rich on the fees. For each dollar raised, the fund collects roughly 20 percent in fees. A $10 billion fund therefore produces $2 billion in fees over 10 years, and raising the fund locks the fees in as guaranteed income. Few people can raise a fund that large. In the example, a sole managing partner spends a billion dollars over the 10 years on the team, events, and the operating budget, and keeps the other billion dollars.
Most people cannot raise a $10 billion fund
-
Why Do Venture Funds Keep Raising More Money?
Bilal Zuberi says the extra fees from raising another $2 billion, $40 million a year, go mostly straight into the managing partner's pocket. Venture expenses do not rise by $40 million when the fund gets that much larger.
A firm might hire a couple more people and spend 2 million or 5 million more. Assets under management are increasing while funds shrink, because teams use AI and power is consolidating in a few people. A partner who must decide on $100 million needs a couple of junior associates to judge which voice recognition company is better, then writes the check personally. Few people are needed in between. Stopping at $2 billion makes little sense when a firm should raise a $5 billi
-
Why Did Bilal Zuberi Take a 90% Pay Cut?
Bilal Zuberi took a 90% plus pay cut when he left Lux because he treats the job as a mission he already holds with conviction. He refuses to believe someone has to be an asshole to succeed in the industry, or loosey-goosey on ethics because the world is too complex. He wants the work to impact human lives.
He grew up with posters of scientists in his room and thought he would become a scientist and a professor. He studied science, then did a PhD with a Nobel laureate. What he enjoyed most was reading how discoveries changed lives. His PhD professors' discovery of reactions in the polar stratosphere and polar stratospheric clouds was leading to discoveries of destruction of the ozone layer,
-
Is 2021 the Best Vintage in Venture?
Bilal Zuberi says the 2021 vintage is not the best vintage in venture, and what the 2026 vintage will look like stays unknown. Some companies will be amazing because incredible talent is coming in, solving incredible problems, with technology developing fast and capital available to move fast. The wins will not include everyone, and because of that there will be lots of losses.
Thinking you can play the entire landscape, roll the dice, and wait for something to work out is the wrong way to invest. Portfolio construction has to separate early bets from middle stage and late stage. A very high price belongs to only one or two companies, where conviction in the founders and the market or oppor
-
Why Do Investors Now Talk About Hundred Billion Companies?
Bilal Zuberi says a unicorn is a quaint word now because the target has moved past 10 billion to 100 billion.
Desktop Metal was the first unicorn in the Lux portfolio, only a few years ago. The company went public at a very high valuation, the valuation went down significantly, and then it was sold. The Lux portfolio now has many unicorns. He invested in six, seven, or eight companies there that became unicorns. Friends started saying a company could be worth 10 billion. People told each other not to invest unless a company could be worth at least 5 to 10 billion. When he asks how many 10 billion companies they backed early, the count he gives is zero. The prevailing logic stayed that every
-
Why Do Technical Founders Still Have to Pitch?
Bilal Zuberi says technical founders still have to pitch because most investors are not technical enough for the product to sell itself. He invests in fairly technical companies. Those founders, even after they have had business experience, often expect to add a little color and then let the product, the solution, or the customers do the selling. They picture investors treating the market as a trillion dollars just from using the product. He leaves that outcome open only when the investors already know the industry, and he marks that case as a maybe.
Most investors are not in that position, so the founders still have to convince them. The convincing depends on the investor. Some people live
-
Why Can't Bilal Zuberi Get Paid for Advice?
Bilal Zuberi cannot get paid for sharing intelligence every now and then, so he built a business model that pays him for that work.
A chief executive he funded kept calling him back after a very competitive round, one where Bilal still received a serious allocation, and after that chief executive had already talked with many other investors. The calls were useful for a company just getting off the ground. They were not happening because he is good looking. Asked for $250,000 a year for intelligence shared every now and then, that chief executive would probably say bug off. The company can hire people to do the work, needs full-time help, and does not need a part-time consultant charging 250
-
What Are Bilal Zuberi's Four Core Values?
Bilal Zuberi set four core values for his fund before he had a name or an office: curiosity, intensity, integrity, and humility. Every employee hears them at least once.
He sat down and asked what the values for the firm should be. Most venture firms do not have values. Ask a firm and you get a statement. Ask a random person there what the core values are and the answer sounds like add value, be nice, or make money for LPs, or for the partners themselves. Some people do both, but most often they do not. A beautiful office might count as an accomplishment, and some offices are insane because there is too much money in some venture firms. People at the fund have to stay curious. What is happe
-
Why Do Founders Have to Chew Glass?
Bilal Zuberi says founders chew glass because the path is hard and there is no easy way through it. Founders go through fire, the way glass is molded in fire into beautiful objects. From the outside the work looks glamorous.
His children named Red Glass after his glasses when he could not come up with a name. The options he tried felt like venture capital gobbledygook, and friends told him the name was pretty cool. Red means passion and courage, and red is the color of good luck in Asian cultures. Glass means transparency and clarity, values he wants for himself and for the fund.
He never calls himself a founder of companies he only invested in early. Investors do that all the time. Some h
-
What Is Dyna's Scaling Law?
Bilal Zuberi says Dyna recently put forward a scaling law: when the company gets 1 million hours of data, real scaling starts to happen.
Physical AI, robotics included and the wider field too, will have to care about real revenues, real margins, real customer traction, and real churn. Language-model research labs already had to worry about real dollars and cents, a real business, real revenues, and margins, and the same shift is coming here. The deployment layer is where it shows up. Putting machines in the field and doing services is not the whole task, because the work requires data collected in the field. Simulation engines still need enough of that field data for good physics and good s
-
Why Is Physical AI a Venture-scale Business?
Bilal Zuberi says physical AI is a more venture-like model because one model can do a job and hundreds of other things, so the solution generalizes. A robot built only to pick an object up and put it down is not a very big venture-scale business.
Robotics used to be deterministic. A robot arm had to be almost hard coded for the grab, the pressure, the move, and where to put the object down, and every potential path lived in the code base, roughly like if-then statements. Robotics then became probabilistic with AI. Real-time vision models, robotic control models, world models, and VLAs identify an object, choose a path, and figure out in real time how to grab it without crushing it. The chan
-
Why Is Hardware Still Hard?
Bilal Zuberi says hardware is still hard, and in some ways it has become harder. Supply chains in China have been cut off. A product designed here used to be made in China. Now the builder has to do everything alone. Firms are reinventing motors and actuators that used to be bought in bulk in China and rebuilding them here.
The shift is the founder set drawn to hardware. Silicon Valley is more familiar with founders in the space, and the new founders understand how to build fast-moving companies. Technology is a great differentiator for a startup, but speed is the real differentiator. Move fast and a relatively commodity product can still become an interesting company, because rival sellers
-
Why Must Venture Founders Get Customers to Pay?
Bilal Zuberi says founders need to be commercial and know how to get customers to pay them, because a company is started to be commercial. An investment firm can take one shot on the goal with research, but research cannot be the majority of the portfolio.
Some professors who cannot get money inside a university start a company as an alternate form of a university and keep doing research. Vinod Khosla and others funded OpenAI when it was not commercial and was a nonprofit. Vinod Khosla can give a billion dollars to somebody as a nonprofit grant because he wants the work to exist. An average venture investor trying to do remarkable investments and make a mark on the world is in a different p