The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:48:19 · Dev Ittycheria, Harry Stebbings
[00:48:19] S1: I think this is really interesting about the point that Jason made is that agents are picking or making decisions. But for the last twenty five years, every marketing person, every company has optimized how you show up on page one of Google, right? You educate human buyers. Now you have to make sure that agents can find you, understand what you sell, have current accurate information about you across the sources they read. And if you're missing from an AI generated answer, it's like being invisible on Google. Full disclosure, Sequoia is a company called ProFound that helps companies with those helping them. But I will tell you, this is a massive problem, and it's not just in tech. If you're an e commerce site or you're a retail company trying to sell through e commerce and agents are now making the buying decisions, you gotta figure out how to educate those agents, otherwise your business is going to zero. [00:49:06] S3: You know, when I look at this market, we too have a company, Dave Peak, and everyone's like, well, this is like a next generation of SEMRush. Is it just a next generation of kind of SEO analytics providers with your Profounds and your Peaks, or is this actually a much larger category?
00:49:06 · Harry Stebbings, Dev Ittycheria, Jason Lemkin
[00:49:06] S3: You know, when I look at this market, we too have a company, Dave Peak, and everyone's like, well, this is like a next generation of SEMRush. Is it just a next generation of kind of SEO analytics providers with your Profounds and your Peaks, or is this actually a much larger category? [00:49:23] S1: I think the opportunity is more than just analytics, but telling you where you're missing and all that. I think the opportunity for these companies does not just tell you what you're missing, but to help shape the content and create the content to help you solve that problem. If they can close the loop, that becomes a very compelling solution versus just telling you, you're here, you're not here, this is what the other guys are doing. [00:49:44] S2: I'm just looking today, for example, it's smaller, but look at recent. So for example, the first agentic purchase we made was resend for email. Okay, when I was trying to set up a bunch of agents last year, I kept getting recommended SendGrid, but because they need the CO to go, but founders to go back, I just couldn't get the damn SendGrid thing to work. They kind of deprecated free. I couldn't figure out the key. Kept breaking. So I asked my agent what I should use. I said use resend. Resend April 106,000 MCP calls to September 3,000,000. That's agents saying to use products. And I'm not saying ProFound isn't doing that. They may well be. My limited experience is this is different.
00:49:44 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:49:44] S2: I'm just looking today, for example, it's smaller, but look at recent. So for example, the first agentic purchase we made was resend for email. Okay, when I was trying to set up a bunch of agents last year, I kept getting recommended SendGrid, but because they need the CO to go, but founders to go back, I just couldn't get the damn SendGrid thing to work. They kind of deprecated free. I couldn't figure out the key. Kept breaking. So I asked my agent what I should use. I said use resend. Resend April 106,000 MCP calls to September 3,000,000. That's agents saying to use products. And I'm not saying ProFound isn't doing that. They may well be. My limited experience is this is different. [00:50:19] S0: I want to kind of disagree you all. How did your agent decide? Because I assume some part of it is the general how I show up initially in the answer engines, how I show up on OpenAI. And then what else does your agent look at? Is it just It
00:50:19 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:50:19] S0: I want to kind of disagree you all. How did your agent decide? Because I assume some part of it is the general how I show up initially in the answer engines, how I show up on OpenAI. And then what else does your agent look at? Is it just It [00:50:34] S2: looks at your infrastructure, it looks at the application you're building, it looks what's trusted, it looks what it thinks the right match is. And once in a while, it'll make wacky choices that are very specific to your use case. But you got to be that one. Got to, it's not that a chat GPT is going to give you a generic answer based on a number of fact. I'm not saying they're using the same LLMs, right? So some of that is being into it. But an agent knows your whole stack. It knows every it knows your application. It knows what you've built on top of the system. So it will make a very specific recommendation what to use.
00:50:34 · Jason Lemkin, Dev Ittycheria
[00:50:34] S2: looks at your infrastructure, it looks at the application you're building, it looks what's trusted, it looks what it thinks the right match is. And once in a while, it'll make wacky choices that are very specific to your use case. But you got to be that one. Got to, it's not that a chat GPT is going to give you a generic answer based on a number of fact. I'm not saying they're using the same LLMs, right? So some of that is being into it. But an agent knows your whole stack. It knows every it knows your application. It knows what you've built on top of the system. So it will make a very specific recommendation what to use. [00:51:04] S1: And this problem is even more profound, no pun intended, for early stage companies because there's so much corpus of data for your incumbent who's been around for ten, fifteen years. And if you're trying to disrupt some incumbent, the agent's gonna see all this data about the incumbent and very little about you. So when it makes a decision, it can very easy just basically pick the incumbent solution. So it's actually incumbent upon the startup to figure out how they basically educate agents on what they do, the documentation, the APIs, and all the infrastructure and the wrapper so that they can then show that they are truly a first class experience for an agent to make a decision on?
00:51:04 · Dev Ittycheria, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:51:04] S1: And this problem is even more profound, no pun intended, for early stage companies because there's so much corpus of data for your incumbent who's been around for ten, fifteen years. And if you're trying to disrupt some incumbent, the agent's gonna see all this data about the incumbent and very little about you. So when it makes a decision, it can very easy just basically pick the incumbent solution. So it's actually incumbent upon the startup to figure out how they basically educate agents on what they do, the documentation, the APIs, and all the infrastructure and the wrapper so that they can then show that they are truly a first class experience for an agent to make a decision on? [00:51:41] S2: For what it's worth, here's what I tell my portfolio companies I've or worked with. I'd say, find 10 folks you know that have agents in production doing different things, 10 folks you trust, and ask them every two weeks, what would you recommend in this category? What would you recommend? And see what the agents recommend. This product doesn't exist today. I think the four of us should fund it. It's not the same as ProFound, which is guessing what LLMs do. These are live agents in the field in different applications asking the agent what should be used, right? [00:52:09] S0: And just let me understand, where is that agent who will answer the question? I mean, that agent presumably is doing some other job and you'll just go on and say [00:52:16] S2: Agent could be at any tech company, any startup is going to have agents running today that's worth their salt.