Nicolas Sauvage believes it takes four years for the best bets to look obvious — thinking that he shared on stage last week at StrictlyVC’s San Francisco event, which TDK Ventures co-hosted. It’s a theory he’s been working to prove since 2019, when he founded the corporate venture arm of the Japanese electronics giant, which is now managing $500 million across four funds. The AI chip startup Groq , valued at $6.9 billion during its most recent funding round last fall, is the highest-profile example of this thinking. In 2020, well before the generative AI boom made infrastructure bets look obvious, Sauvage wrote a check into the company, which was founded by Jonathan Ross — one of the engineers who built Google’s Tensor Processing Units. Groq was focused from the start on inference: the computational heavy lifting that happens every time a model responds to a query.…