The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Saturday, August 1, 2026
Joon Sung Park, founder and CEO of Semily, shared his thesis that AI companies need defensible data strategies. He discussed Semily's work in simulating human behavior through agents trained on vast amounts of human interaction data, aiming to predict and influence future outcomes, rather than just predict them. Park highlighted the importance of collecting 'real' behavior data, such as from A/B tests and randomized control trials, to understand cause and mechanism.
“My fundamental thesis here is for AI companies of this generation, you need to have an interesting data strategy that's going to be defensible.”
“What people actually care about is to shape the future. They want to know, imagine you're Starbucks, does it really help them to know that Starbucks sale is going to tank in two quarters? They'll hear that and they'll be like, well, what do we do about them? That's terrible. What they want to know is how can we prevent it? What do we need to do now to change the future?”
“For us, we actually do collect a lot of behavior data. We collect transaction data, we collect observation data. We also partner with our customers, our vendors to collect some of this data.”