Nicholas Kim

One of my favorite frameworks comes from economist William Nordhaus, who found that the cost of producing light had fallen by orders of magnitude more than conventional statistics suggested, where an hour of reading light that cost a week’s wages in ancient Babylon costs a fraction of a second’s work today. Once light became nearly free, people invented uses for it that had not previously been possible, whether performing surgery at midnight or keeping hens laying through winter. The same pattern has repeated throughout history, where what first appears to be an incremental improvement in cost or reliability often becomes the foundation for entirely new industries like movable type or cloud computing. I believe we're living through just the beginning of another such generational transition with AI.

Prior to joining CapitalG, I was at Bain & Company in San Francisco conducting commercial due diligence for tech investor clients, and before that I served as a military intelligence interpreter in the Korean Army. Both roles taught me how best to work in service of decision-makers making difficult choices based on limited information. Similarly, I consider my role to be a steady and thoughtful partner to the companies I work with through thick and thin, as they navigate decisions where there’s rarely an obvious right answer.