The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Rory O'Driscoll, Dev Ittycheria, Jason Lemkin
[00:00:00] S0: It will be super interesting to see where that anthropic Q3 number comes out. [00:00:05] S1: I've never seen a CRO flip from one competitor to another. [00:00:08] S2: But I just think in the AI age, the definition of loyalty has changed. [00:00:12] S1: I think the reputational damage that you can do long term is going to come back and bite you. Basically handed every other firm a weapon when they're competing on deals saying, Is this the partner you want when things go bad? [00:00:24] S2: When agents pick you, it's a force of nature right now. [00:00:27] S0: There's a lot that's got to happen between now and the Anthropic IPO in the middle of November.
00:00:32 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:32] S3: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, the biggest news in tech. And we have a special guest joining us this week, Dave, the returned CEO of MongoDB. And today, we discuss OpenAI. They are closing the gap on Anthropic, nearing a $70,000,000,000 run rate. Then we have the factory and the cognition debacle. Salesforce then buys Listen Labs for $2,000,000,000. Reflection, could they be The US's best hope for an open source model that can compete with China? This and so much more in today's show. But before we dive into the show today, Base 44 is one of those products I used, and I just thought straight away, man, I wish I 'd had this when I started 20 v c with $50 and no contacts in venture. I wanted to see what it could do, so I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsor contacts, follow ups, all in one amazing location. I described it in plain English. A few minutes later, I had the product open in front of me. Database, login, back end, and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy. And that's what I loved. I didn't write a long spec. I didn't stitch five different tools together. I built the thing, and I started using it. For any founder listening, that's the point. The faster you turn an idea into something real, the faster you launch. Apps, dashboards, internal systems, agents, whatever you need to build, Base forty four gets you there. Go to base44.com/20vc. That's Base four four dot com slash two zero v c. While Base forty four helps you build, Alphaceunt helps you find answers really, really fast. We used AlphaSense on an investment that helped us close an $8,000,000 deal. $8,000,000, baby. That's a lot of money. That's why I'm genuinely excited to have them as a partner on 20 VC. C. AlphaSense combines AI with one of the world's deepest libraries of market intelligence, including expert interviews, broker research, earnings calls, company filings, and real time news. Every answer is grounded in this incredibly trusted evidence and fully traceable to the original source, which is so important. So you can make really high conviction decisions with confidence. But the best part, they're building super analyst and always on AI analyst.
00:02:46 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
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00:04:10 · Harry Stebbings, Dev Ittycheria, Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:04:10] S3: Boys, it is so good to be back, and we have a phenomenal guest joining us today. Dave, thank you so much for joining us, dude. [00:04:17] S1: Thank you, Harry. Thanks for inviting me and being part of this amazing group. [00:04:21] S3: Do you know what? Actually, I don't know if you guys know, but Dave gave me feedback that we needed to move on faster from just OpenAI and Anthropic. [00:04:29] S0: I love it. [00:04:29] S3: And we really took it to heart. And so taking it to heart, I thought we'd start on OpenAI. [00:04:34] S2: Well done. [00:04:35] S3: OpenAI nears a $70,000,000,000 run rate and goes for 30,000,000,000 at 1,400,000,000,000. But the IPO is gonna wait until 2027 despite Anthropic going out in the next few weeks, it would seem. What do we think, boys?
00:04:35 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:04:35] S3: OpenAI nears a $70,000,000,000 run rate and goes for 30,000,000,000 at 1,400,000,000,000. But the IPO is gonna wait until 2027 despite Anthropic going out in the next few weeks, it would seem. What do we think, boys? [00:04:50] S2: The crazy thing to me when I think about the story is, I mean, OpenAI is back. Right? 70,000,000,000 in revenue. But more importantly, if you look at your portfolio companies and others, Astra, Sol, and Loon are everywhere, right? Everyone's using them. Everyone is using them. And when you think where we started this year, a lot of things in B2B only worked like at the end of last year and like only Anthropic could get this stuff to work. And even coding at the start of this year only worked on Anthropic. And then we went into the summer and it kind of seemed like, know, OpenEye in some ways was on the rope because consumer was the wrong path and they couldn't get back. So only October something if I mean, rate of change here and the rate at which the OpenAI team got back in the game and made something that is truly, epically competitive to the point where people are switching out their models for real because it's better and cheaper. It's crazy that pace at that scale and it's 70,000,000,000. It says it all, right? So, I mean, when you counted them out three or four months ago, not literally, but figuratively. And now if they launch a truly competitive set of model LMs, it's true... It's all, like, instantly massively competitive. It's crazy. Massive kudos, I think.
00:05:57 · Harry Stebbings, Dev Ittycheria, Jason Lemkin
[00:05:57] S3: What happens if Anthropic's numbers for q three aren't blow out? Like, every team that I speak to has at least deviated some meaningful portion from Anthropic to Codex, everyone says how amazing it is. What happens if they're not blow out numbers like the world really just assumes Anthropic always has now? [00:06:16] S1: The interesting thing that we should also learn from this and having sold sold to developers the last twelve plus years is that there's not a lot of loyalty. Developers are very quick to use... To switch from one tool to another or, frankly, use multiple tools. And and I think what we're seeing is that developers are are quick to find the shiny new toy. The question is, you know, what will Claude or Anthropic come out with next? And what are the other alternatives? The other thing that's I think interesting also is that what OpenAI has done is shown that when you have essentially a billion people using ChatGPT a week, that's a great distribution channel. But the... Potentially where the moat is where the enterprise business is. You have to sign contracts. You have to train thousands of employees. You have to build workflows, and it may be hard to switch the DP again to the enterprise. That's kind of a little bit of reaction I had. [00:07:07] S2: Yeah, guess in that sense, OpenAI's run rate's even more impressive, right? I mean, maybe they're already embedded, maybe they're already through procurement, but that's pretty fast changing the enterprise too. [00:07:16] S1: Yes. Yeah.