The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
37 episodes
20VC: Who Wins the Inference Market | Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute | The Real Limits of Post-Training and RL with Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO
- Modal has reached $1bn in annual recurring revenue and grew 15 times over the last twelve months, which Stebbings calls a steal at a $15.75bn valuation.
- Bernhardsson predicts the inference market will be enormous, but warns that selling tokens alone leads to a race to the bottom, so providers must bundle post-training, sandboxes and agentic tools.
2 Nov · 1 h 2 min
20VC: David Tisch on Why High Ownership and Concentration is BS | Why No Manager Actually Wants to Stay Small | Why Competing with the Mega Platforms is a Losing Game | Why the Lean Startup is a Fake?
- David Tisch says concentrated funds overstate their win rates, claiming 90 percent when he puts the real figure near 20 percent.
- Box Group, which writes 1 to 10 percent entry checks across two $275m funds, says its win rate ebbs between 70 and 90 percent and that its main loss is arriving too late.
31 Oct · 1 h 17 min
20VC: Anthropic Files S1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO | Instinct's Rumoured $30 Billion Fundraise | Microsoft Laysoff 27,000 While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95 Billion Capex Spending Spree
- Rory O'Driscoll says Anthropic's S-1 was strong on almost every measure, including margins, operating income, and compute efficiency, though it gave no Q3 revenue figure.
- Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 of its 223,000 employees, roughly 27%, which Jason Lemkin reads as a signal it does not want those staff.
29 Oct · 1 h 0 min
20VC: Satya Nadella on Open vs Closed Models: Who Wins | Whether to Trust Frontier Model Providers | Why Companies Need to Own Their Own Intelligence | The Importance of Verticalisation: From Chips to Models and More
- Satya Nadella says Microsoft will license its MAI models as weights rather than fully open because he wants a simple software business, not a network effects intelligence business.
- Nadella argues companies must own their intelligence through context, fine-tuning on their own traces, and private evaluation benchmarks that every model must beat, rejecting a single vertical stack winner.
26 Oct · 26 min
20VC: Why Robotics Will be 100x Bigger than Coding Agents | Inference Will Be a $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Why Software Investors are F***** Today with Naveen Rao, Unconventional
- Naveen Rao says the US must build far more energy capacity, since one gigawatt costs about $50bn and the grid cannot keep up with AI demand.
- Rao argues that physical chip efficiency gains have largely stopped, so future AI gains will come from model and hardware co-design rather than smaller transistors.
24 Oct · 1 h 9 min
20VC: Trillion or Bust: The New VC Game | Coreweave Sell-Off Creates Panic | Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Revenue Multiples Out of Control | General Atlantic Eyes IPO & Modal Raises $750M at $15.75B
- Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8bn, up 45% on the prior quarter, and said it turned profitable on an adjusted basis.
- Jason Lemkin says large funds need billion-dollar positions, so seed entry prices of $50 to $100m make early checks and ownership harder to win.
22 Oct · 1 h 1 min
20VC: You Need $1BN To Do Seed Today: The Untold Truths of Venture | Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next Decade of VC | Why Margin and Price Matter Less in a World of AI with Sameer Dholakia, Bessemer
- Sameer Dholakia of Bessemer says AI's market will exceed oil because intelligence powers all humans, while oil only powers machines.
- Bessemer's Anthropic Series D stake at a 15bn dollar pre-money valuation was so unpopular internally that Byron Dieter called it the lowest-voted deal in the firm's history.
19 Oct · 1 h 15 min
20VC: Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value | The Future of the Inference Market | Why Founders Should Take Discounts for Tier 1 Firms with Harrison Chase, LangChain
- Harrison Chase says LangChain must erase parts of its own product as models improve, citing its switch from parsed JSON to OpenAI's native tool calling.
- Chase argues that owning your intelligence means controlling the model, harness and context, and advises vertical agent founders to start at the harness and context layers before post-training models.
18 Oct · 1 h 2 min
20VC: The Pro-Rata Battle: Valar Atomics Sues Day One Ventures | Meta Returns to the AI Frontier With Muse Wonder | NVIDIA Eyes $30B Reflection Deal & Jev Raises $870M at a $7.5B Valuation
- Valar Atomics is suing seed investor Day One Ventures over pro rata rights, with the fight centred on a $1bn Series B at a $6bn valuation led by Sequoia.
- Rory O'Driscoll argues the fight is pointless for Day One's roughly 5% stake, since the springback amount is small compared with the cost of litigating.
15 Oct · 1 h 13 min
20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models | Why The Jury Is Still Out On The Benefits of Specialised Models with Mike Cannon-Brookes
- Mike Cannon-Brookes says giving up on the user interface is a brainless bet, since agents will handle purely functional tasks but not work involving taste and collaboration.
- Mike Cannon-Brookes says enterprises will not use Chinese models in production at Atlassian, though he sees customer pushback only against Chinese models, not open ones.
12 Oct · 55 min
20Sales: Inside Ramp's Sales Playbook: How to Build a Sales Machine with Max Freeman, SVP Sales @ Ramp
- Max Freeman, Ramp's first sales hire and now SVP of Sales, says sales is an engineering, data and math problem, with performance split into three buckets: you are God, I don't know yet, or you're fired.
- Ramp hired investment bankers early, including Mike Weber from Citi and Sam Buck from Goldman, because Freeman says bankers are programmed to work and gave Ramp credibility when cold-calling CFOs.
10 Oct · 1 h 8 min
20VC: Cognition vs Factory: Vinod Khosla Creates a Storm | OpenAI Nears $70B Run Rate: Anthropic Under Threat | ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B & Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B
- OpenAI is nearing a $70bn revenue run rate while seeking $30bn at a $1.4tn valuation, which would be the first venture round above a trillion dollars.
- Vinod Khosla's public tweet calling Factory a struggling second tier competitor handed rivals a weapon, and Rory O'Driscoll calls it a mistake and not venture's finest hour.
8 Oct · 1 h 13 min
20VC: Is Seed Investing Dead Without a $1BN Fund? | Does Ownership and Price Matter When Companies Can Be $1TRN Exits | Are AI Revenue Numbers Real and What to Watch Out For with Venky Ganesan, Menlo Ventures
- Venky Ganesan argues firms should be more selective, sizing up positions only on proven outliers rather than chasing every hot round.
- Venky Ganesan says he would rather own 2% of a trillion-dollar company than 20% of a $100m company, and that ownership must come before an outlier is proven.
5 Oct · 1 h 7 min
20VC: The Future of Datacentres: What You Need to Know | Why Everyone Gets GPU Depreciation and AI's Energy Costs Wrong | Who Really Makes Money From AI & Why Most Moats Don't Exist with Chase Lochmiller
- Crusoe, led by CEO Chase Lochmiller, raised a $3.9bn Series F at a $30.9bn valuation to fund its AI data centre build-out.
- Lochmiller says power and skilled labour are the binding constraints, and Crusoe cut a 100-week electrical component lead time to 28 weeks through vertical integration.
3 Oct · 1 h 1 min
20VC: Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation | AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B | Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO | Bessemer Raises $5.75B | Oura Pulls IPO & Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover
- Leaked Anthropic draft S-1 reportedly shows about $4.6bn of 2025 revenue, an $8bn operating loss and $518bn of compute commitments.
- Instinct closed a $1bn Series C at a $10bn valuation, and Jack Altman says Benchmark sees consumer agents as a major new paradigm where many players can win.
1 Oct · 1 h 19 min
20VC: $1BN ARR in 18 Months; The Untold Story of Higgsfield | Spending $4M Per Month on Models | Why Moats in AI are BS | Scaling a Content Team to 150 People with Alex Mashrabov
- Higgsfield, an AI video company with about $1bn in annualized revenue and roughly 300 staff, is rumored to be raising at an $8bn valuation.
- Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield calculates revenue from the last four weeks times 13 using live revenue, the same method he says OpenAI and Anthropic use.
28 Sept · 1 h 10 min
20VC: Five Predictions for a World of Agents | The Ads Business Model Will Die | Biggest Lessons from Working with Elon Musk at Twitter with Parag Agrawal, Parallel
- Parag Agrawal, CEO of Parallel, argues agents will use the web 1000 times more than humans, forcing web search to become 10 to 100 times more efficient.
- Agrawal says ads do not work with AI agents in their current form, so Parallel will pay content owners each time an agent benefits from their content.
26 Sept · 57 min
20VC: Meta's Muse Hits No. 1. ChatGPT Finally Has a Rival | Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm | Factory Triples Its Valuation to $5 Billion | Keith Rabois vs Airwallex: Who is Right? | Crusoe's $3.9 Billion Round. Is the Data Centre Trade Overheating?
- Meta's Muse assistant hit No. 1 on the App Store, and Jason Lemkin calls it the first real ChatGPT competitor because it is free and offers autonomous agents.
- Rory O'Driscoll says Anthropic's roughly $2tn IPO delay to November reflects a cleaner financial story after a strong second quarter, not market stress.
24 Sept · 1 h 21 min
20VC: Why AI Cannot Replace Humans in Enterprise | Why Work Processes Not Models Will Be The Most Valuable Asset in AI | Why Europe Has Lost and Building in the US vs EU with Daniel Dines, UiPath
- Daniel Dines argues current AI does not truly learn on the job, since models store notes in memory while their weights never change.
- Dines says exact work should run on deterministic software because a 99% per-step success rate over 100 steps leaves only about 60% overall.
21 Sept · 1 h 11 min
20VC: "Anti-Data Centres is a Chinese Psyop" | How Many Planned Data Centers Will Actually Get Built? | Is Energy AI's Biggest Bottleneck? With Thomas Sohmers, Co-Founder @ Positron
- Thomas Sohmers, cofounder of Positron AI, says he is overall opposed to the current pace of frontier AI development and calls data center opposition almost entirely a Chinese psyop.
- Sohmers argues inference is memory-bound because each generated token requires reading model weights, with GPU FLOPs improving about 120 times from 2014 to 2024 while memory bandwidth improved only 17 times.
19 Sept · 1 h 12 min
20VC: Why "Pacing the Frontier" is BS | Instinct Raising $1BN at $10BN & Meta Launches Muse | Miro Sells for $1.35BN After a $17.5BN Valuation | Mistral Raises €3BN & Could Sam Bankman-Fried Win His Freedom?
- Rory O'Driscoll calls Dario Amodei's proposal to pace the frontier widely panned, saying the 10 percent extinction claim is overwrought while cyber risk is real.
- Jason Lemkin argues Meta should not back Instinct's $1bn round at a $10bn valuation, since Meta can out-compute any startup and Muse threatens the app layer.
17 Sept · 1 h 16 min
20VC: How LPs Allocate to Venture in 2026: What They Want, What They Do Not Want | Why Fund Multiple Does Not Matter Without a Timeline | Why Velocity of Cashback is the Most Important Thing with David Morehead, CIO @ Baylor
- David Morehead, CIO of Baylor's endowment, says funds stretching to fifteen to eighteen years misalign with endowment math and should compound capital faster through shorter funds.
- Baylor allocates about 45 percent to private assets within a 35 to 55 percent range, reserving the upper end for market drawdowns and focusing on venture, growth equity and buyout.
14 Sept · 1 h 9 min
20VC: 7 Predictions for How AI Changes the World: Labour, Engineering, Social Media, GrokBots Buying Cybercabs and more with Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder @ Eight Sleep
- Matteo Franceschetti says Eight Sleep's engineers stopped coding around a year ago, and that Claude is now its main engineering tool with millions in monthly spend.
- Eight Sleep replaced a two-person email team with AI bots built within three days, and email now runs with zero staff and generates close to $100m.
12 Sept · 1 h 16 min
20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody
- Brendan Foody denies Meta shifted spend to Handshake and calls the reported $13bn Amazon acquisition attempt false, while saying Meta's relationship is currently paused.
- Mercor says it added $300m in net new ARR over the last sixty days and expanded relationships with all frontier labs after a security incident.
1 Jun · 1 h 15 min
20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina
- Carles Reina, who joined ElevenLabs as its fourth employee and first investor, says its revenue organisation has grown to over $330m in three years.
- Reina says ElevenLabs asks every rep to bring in 20 times base salary as quota, far above the six to ten times he calls standard in SaaS, and more than 80% of reps hit it.
14 Feb · 1 h 15 min
20Growth: The $6.6B Growth Engine Behind ElevenLabs | Why ElevenLabs Do Not Have PMs | The 7 Part Launch Playbook to Crush All Launches with Luke Harries, Head of Growth @ ElevenLabs
- Luke Harries, ElevenLabs' Head of Growth, says the company runs launches in three tiers, with tier one led by the product's growth lead starting from audience, KPIs and messaging.
- ElevenLabs has no product managers because engineers own the product and growth teams, largely made up of former PMs, handle marketing.
11 Jan · 1 h 14 min
20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy
- Alan Chang says leaders should ask whether they would have done more with a gun to their head, and a yes means they are failing.
- Fuse Energy grew revenue tenfold each year to over $400m annualised, yet Chang names hiring quality engineers, not capital, as the biggest barrier to a billion.
5 Jan · 57 min
20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato
- Federico Simionato, a Bending Spoons product lead, says the company ranks ideas by top-line impact but Evernote features are hard to quantify, so it estimates how many users might need them.
- Simionato says Evernote's retention is the central metric, and defends a 2023 price rise of about 50 to 60 percent because the product is worth more than users pay.
5 Dec 2025 · 1 h 5 min
20VC: Mercor: From $1M to $500M in 17 Months: The Fastest Growing Company in the World | How to Think About Margins and Revenue Sustainability in AI | Why Evaluation Benchmarks in AI are BS Today with Brendan Foody
- Brendan Foody says Mercor grew from a $1m to $500m revenue run rate in 17 months, faster than Cursor's path over the same range.
- Foody says Mercor's average marketplace pay is $95 an hour, against about $30 at Scale AI and Search, because it sources high-caliber experts like bankers, consultants and doctors.
15 Sept 2025 · 1 h 1 min
20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang
- Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang says he nearly accepted Stripe's roughly $1.2bn offer in 2018 before a leadership vote changed his mind.
- Zhang admits Airwallex put most of its $100m DST round into new products like card issuing and merchant acquiring, and aggressive international expansion failed.
27 May 2025 · 1 h 27 min
20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries
- ElevenLabs Head of Growth Luke Harries says the company has no product managers because engineers own products and growth teams merge product and marketing.
- Luke Harries says ElevenLabs runs a horizontal audio-model API, reader app and creator platform, admitting it is not the norm and not something he would recommend.
23 May 2025 · 1 h 16 min
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
- Mercor raised $100m at a $2bn valuation led by Felicis, scaling to $70m in ARR within 24 months.
- Adarsh Hiremath argues human expert data is the bottleneck for AI labs, pushing back on Harry Stebbings' view that synthetic data often beats low-quality human data.
20 Feb 2025 · 46 min
20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia
- George Sivulka, founder of Hebbia, says AI companies are undervalued and that XAI could overtake OpenAI and Anthropic within 12 to 24 months.
- Sivulka argues that retrieval augmented generation fails enterprises because almost 90% of customer questions require analyzing documents rather than searching them, so Hebbia scales at inference with hundreds or thousands of model calls.
22 Jan 2025 · 1 h 6 min
20VC: Revolut Founder Nik Storonsky on When and Where Revolut Will IPO & What Revolut Need to Do to Hit $100BN Valuation
- Nik Storonsky argues a UK listing is irrational because UK-traded shares are less liquid and carry a stamp duty that US trading avoids.
- Storonsky says hiring about 55 senior managers through executive recruiters was his biggest mistake, with 49 or 50 later fired.
4 Dec 2024 · 46 min
20VC: Bending Spoons: The Most Untold Success Story in Startups: Lessons Scaling to 500M Downloads, $360M in Reported 2023 Sales and a $2.55BN Valuation... Bootstrapped with Luca Ferrari, Co-Founder and CEO @ Bending Spoons
- Luca Ferrari says Bending Spoons bootstrapped its way to a $2.55bn valuation by buying existing apps with users and rebuilding them, not by seeking product-market fit.
- Ferrari admits Bending Spoons has never priced a deal correctly and calls predicting user acquisition the hardest KPI to project, after a Playyond shutdown that cost about $6 to $7m.
15 Mar 2024 · 53 min
20VC: Ribbit Capital's Nick Shalek on How To Think Through Ownership and Price Sensitivity, When More Money and Pre-Emptive Rounds are Good vs Bad & Investing Lessons from Yale's David Swensen
- Nick Shalek calls Ribbit Capital's early view that digital payments were commoditizing a naive mistake that cost it great returns.
- Ribbit led a multibillion-dollar round into Robinhood in roughly 24 hours, wiring $500m the day Vlad called about a collateral issue.
26 Jul 2021 · 37 min
20VC: Revolut Founder Nikolay Storonsky on His Leadership Style and Relationship To Ambition, His Biggest Lessons From Scaling Revolut Globally; What Worked, What Did Not & Why Speed of Product Shipment is The Most Important Thing
- Revolut founder Nik Storonsky says speed of product shipment is the company's secret weapon because faster iteration gives more chances to win.
- Storonsky says Revolut adds five to 10 countries a year, but a new market can take up to two years and $10m to $20m to launch.
12 Apr 2021 · 24 min