The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:28:50 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll, Dev Ittycheria
[00:28:50] S3: And then you've got JAV, and you've got a load of the other JAV competitors also, in a different way, attacking them. [00:28:56] S0: Yeah. And, the forward momentum has been such that all this is like, yeah. Thanks, Rory. That's super interesting. But did I mention it'll be 10 x last year and the year before? [00:29:04] S1: Other thing I think is important to understand, and Jason, I'm curious what you saw at Dreamforce, but I think there's a big gap between where the capabilities are and where actual usage is in the enterprise. I think there's a paucity of of real experience skill sets inside the enterprise. And so think we're gonna see Jevan's paradox kind of come into play where, basically, as these costs come down, people get more and more comfortable deploying it for more and more use cases across the enterprise. As they get more conversant and and skilled around these technologies, they'll start deploying it for more use cases. I see this even at MongoDB. And so I think you're going to see that frankly, this is a massive market and I think everyone can be successful. I mean, I won't comment on the growth rates of the frontier labs versus the open source model, but I don't see this like, I don't see this as being a zero sum game.
00:29:52 · Jason Lemkin
[00:29:52] S2: To answer this, the captain obvious answer to what I learned at Dreamforce, everyone I talked to, everyone was just overloaded with the amount of internal demand there is for tokens and whatever it is, it's more than they can imagine. Whether it's being used properly, whether it's being burned for nothing, whatever the cap is, demand is probably an order of magnitude more than they've figured out how to surface, right? That may lead to using sub optimal models. It may lead to a lot of waste in some ways, but everyone's got to manage it, which just that and the fear of using China based models. Again, right or wrong is just a huge opening if you can nail The only thing I will just add just for fun we can move on is man, just personally I'm getting more and more skeptical of published evals. Like of course you can make an eval look great. How fast was it? What were really the outputs? How well did it perform on a real workflow? How well did it perform on a mission critical workflow versus telling you an item was in stock when it wasn't, which is still kind of mission critical workflow. I found that every single eval needs like three asterisks and four daggers next to it today. So I am skeptical Beam is as great as they say it is, but I just asked while we're on if I get on open router and check before we end the podcast, but it's not there yet, I would try. But it's not that I don't think these are all great. I just think all the evals are so biased and focused on chess championships that I'm slightly skeptical.
00:31:07 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:31:07] S3: We have Nematron, we have Thinking Machines, we have Reflection. In twelve months' time, what percentage of token in open source flow will go through US versus Chinese? [00:31:20] S2: Well, look, just two things. As Dev made the point in the beginning, developers will change and and especially here. This is a lot easier than swapping out your database. Right? That that that could be done, but I... Having recently done it, it's some work, man. I gotta tell you. It's not... Even with an LLM, it's... I mean, listen, this is still work. You have to qualify your prompt. You have to redo your workflows. It's not nothing like the internet says, but I could see it being half in twelve months. Twelve months is a lot of time. And I think sovereignty plus U. S. Based is really important. I'm not saying it will happen because I don't know that again, I'm skeptical the parity is really there versus pretend there. But if if you're even x minus three months to Dev's point, it could be half in a year. A year is a long time. [00:31:58] S3: But that gives me a lot of confidence. I... I'm I'm an investor in fireworks, as is Sequoia. And I think the biggest concern I would have as if Fireworks or a base 10 or a Modal investor would do is that actually big enterprises are concerned about Chinese models, and that would prevent them from engaging with partners like Fireworks or Modal, and they then go to Frontier. And so the fact that you say 50% shows me that the the levels or quality you think is sufficient enough that it would be that rate, that makes me excited.
00:31:58 · Harry Stebbings, Dev Ittycheria
[00:31:58] S3: But that gives me a lot of confidence. I... I'm I'm an investor in fireworks, as is Sequoia. And I think the biggest concern I would have as if Fireworks or a base 10 or a Modal investor would do is that actually big enterprises are concerned about Chinese models, and that would prevent them from engaging with partners like Fireworks or Modal, and they then go to Frontier. And so the fact that you say 50% shows me that the the levels or quality you think is sufficient enough that it would be that rate, that makes me excited. [00:32:25] S1: I think the other thing that enterprises are gonna care a lot about above and beyond cost is safety, being able to trust these systems. And I think we're just getting focused on this. Obviously, there's a big conference last week in Washington. It's clear that there's gonna be some self regulating approach to figuring out how to address safety. The challenge is how do you define safety. Right? Because if someone knows how to define it well, I'm I'm really curious, but it's it's... Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But we need some way or some mechanism for people to be able to determine much like a benchmark. And yes, people can game a benchmark is like how safe are these models? The more safe these models are with whatever mechanisms are placed to prevent people from doing bad things, the more widely usable they'll become.
00:32:25 · Dev Ittycheria, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:32:25] S1: I think the other thing that enterprises are gonna care a lot about above and beyond cost is safety, being able to trust these systems. And I think we're just getting focused on this. Obviously, there's a big conference last week in Washington. It's clear that there's gonna be some self regulating approach to figuring out how to address safety. The challenge is how do you define safety. Right? Because if someone knows how to define it well, I'm I'm really curious, but it's it's... Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But we need some way or some mechanism for people to be able to determine much like a benchmark. And yes, people can game a benchmark is like how safe are these models? The more safe these models are with whatever mechanisms are placed to prevent people from doing bad things, the more widely usable they'll become. [00:33:09] S0: Agreed. And I wouldn't guess, by the way, 50%, Harry, but I think even 10 or 20% would be extremely significant in terms of tokens. Because if you think about it, the foundation models on OpenRider, I think, get 20%, 30% of tokens and get 90% of the dollars. If The US open weight models are even 50%, 60% of that in terms of tokens, That's a lot of traction because it'll be by definition the more enterprise centric, safety conscious customers doing it. So I think that would be a, frankly, a huge triumph for reflection. And as you point out, a real derisking for all the inference guys.
00:33:09 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:33:09] S0: Agreed. And I wouldn't guess, by the way, 50%, Harry, but I think even 10 or 20% would be extremely significant in terms of tokens. Because if you think about it, the foundation models on OpenRider, I think, get 20%, 30% of tokens and get 90% of the dollars. If The US open weight models are even 50%, 60% of that in terms of tokens, That's a lot of traction because it'll be by definition the more enterprise centric, safety conscious customers doing it. So I think that would be a, frankly, a huge triumph for reflection. And as you point out, a real derisking for all the inference guys. [00:33:45] S3: Ding. Ding. Ding. We got investment committee. Dave, welcome to the committee, by the way. We're thrilled to have you as part of the investment team. You are, as arduccio see, on the new new firm that is O'Driscoll, Lemkin, Stebbings. Jason, we have 11 labs who doubled their valuation to $22,000,000,000 Would we do 22,000,000,000?