Day One Ventures & Masha Bucher: Big Ideas For Humanity

How do we know it's a human?

How can we use Nature to save Nature?

How do we know it's Art?

These are some of the largest questions confronting humanity. You may imagine that addressing these would be the province of philosophers, academics, or scientists – and they are, but they also animate the investments of Day One Ventures, and Masha Bucher, its founder and General Partner.

"I think tech entrepreneurs have the highest capacity to influence the future, and I think it's really important to support them," Bucher told me recently.

At the same time, Bucher is also concerned that the primacy of technologists doesn't lead society down a path that ignores humanity.

"What's been happening in the last year," Bucher said, "is that as technology has been accelerating, the disconnect between the tech world and tech society has only been increasing. I see our firm's mission as a connected uniter. I think it's extremely important to connect the tech sector back to society."

To that end, Bucher and Day One Ventures have sponsored events where technologists and artists are brought together.

If all this sounds different from what we often hear coming from Silicon Valley or San Francisco, that is because Bucher is a unique person in many respects.

Bucher was born in Tambov, a city of 300,000 in Central Russia, about 260 miles southeast of Moscow, which gave birth to composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. As a teenager she came to prominence as a leader of a nationalist youth organization and moved to Moscow where she attended the prestigious Lomonosov Moscow State University, from which she received a graduate degree. However, Bucher fell out with the Russian State and immigrated to the United States.

The throughline here is that there is something powerful in Bucher's ability to be passionate about a venture and to communicate its potential to serve and transform society, a unique ability that has served her and her clients well when she opened a PR firm, as an angel investor, and currently with Day One Ventures.

"My inspiration is to back the most important technologies for the future... for humanity and for humans," Bucher told me recently.

Day One Ventures, according to its own materials shared with me, "returned its first fund in three years, backed 8 unicorns early, achieved 22 exists and now manages over $500 million in assets. Their latest fund, Fund III, raised $150Million, one of the largest raised by a solo female General Partner." So, what are these companies that Day One has funded and worked with? Here are three:

World is a company started by Sam Altman (now CEO of OpenAI), and Alex Blania (Tools for Humanity), who are creating a global digital currency, WorldCoin, that promotes identity authentication through images of your face and eyes that are permanently encrypted and then stored across secure databases. Although you may see World as some sort of crypto play (and it may well be), its greatest benefit may be its individual authentication protocol, which becomes increasingly important in a world of AI, and AI bots. It will be one way to know whether we are dealing with a human versus a machine.

Living Carbon is a company that uses reforestation with proprietary seedlings on degraded agricultural lands and unproductive soils at no cost to the landowners. Living Carbon then works to find buyers and sell carbon credits, providing income for nonproductive land. It is one way to use nature to help nature.

Similarly, Rainmaker , a Geoengineering startup, uses both geomapping radar, and a cloud-seeding technology, in which drones to fly into the clouds and disperse small amounts of chemicals, around which moisture freezes and turns into rain, providing freshwater to arid land or even to help make snow and tackle water scarcity.

These are just three of the many companies that Day One Ventures have invested in. Others include Orchid , an embryo genome genetic screening company, Cradle , a cryogenics company, and Moonhub , an AI recruiting platform, among many others.

In the last five years, Art has become increasingly important to Bucher, with artists such as Heidi Bucher, Hilma af Klint, and James Turrell that have, Bucher said, "totally changed my life, my worldview, my understanding of my own existence, the way I feel in the world."

Day One Ventures and Bucher have been involved in supporting artists using innovative technologies, organizing an art exhibition with OpenAI in October 2022, called "Artificial Imagination," the first-ever DALL-E art exhibition, featuring innovative artists such as Alex Reben, Refik Anadol, Suhail Doshi, and August Kamp. This was, Bucher said, "the first time AI created art was [shown] in the space of a prominent gallery." Bucher feels that the exhibition helped legitimize a new artform. Bucher analogizes AI as a tool for artists not unlike photography, which started out as a new technology whose artistic adopters used it to create artworks.

For Bucher, that initial exhibition was just the beginning. Day One CEO Converge was an event that brought together over 100 tech leaders and artists. Bucher now intends to convene every quarter in different venues, including possibly galleries and museums, "a gathering of a very select group of artists and technologists who are working on the most important projects," she said.

"There are three agents of influence [that are] the connective tissue between society and tech. It's media, art and culture, and policy makers," Bucher said. "My goal is to find... the most talented people who actually care about the future, get to know them, build a relationship, and to introduce them to the founders [of tech companies] that are building the future so they can start collaborating early on."

"I just feel connecting technologists with artists will create something unique." Bucher said. "I envision it as a new renaissance."

Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (her husband's grandmother) is a great inspiration to her. "She's an exceptional artist," Masha Bucher said. "She persisted in her art, even without recognition, even when society didn't take a woman seriously as an artist, or when she was told to stop making art because she was raising young kids... Everything was against her." She finds in Heidi Bucher's art a message "that reminds us that we are being reborn all the time. There's so much meaning in that... And to trust her own intuition as to what's valuable and what needs to be brought to light, that's also very inspiring to me."

"I got lucky by finding my life's work and calling very early on when I was 27," Bucher told me. "I was lucky to meet exceptional founders. At this point, [there are] more than 50 Unicorn founders that I had a chance to learn from." She also credits psychoanalysis as helping her "discover who I am, my desires, and [to] better understand others."

In sum, Bucher said, "I do believe in inspiration as a driving force much more than in violence or limitations. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to change future of humanity and technology through connecting them to the most interesting, talented artists."