The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:52:16 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[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. [00:52:20] S0: Yes, And will allow your agents spew out what they're using internally. [00:52:25] S2: Yeah. Like for example, I literally I'm on the phone right now. I'm asking one of my, an app I'm building, it's agent. What should I use for hosting? It said first use render. Actually, honestly, I barely know render. Okay, it says use Render my pick. The agent said my pick. Number two, Railway. We know Railway. They're doing pretty well. Number three, fly.io. Number four, ADOS. Number five, Vercel not suitable for this. Interesting. I would have picked Vercel, you know, for this. I don't even... You guys may know Render. I never heard of it. And you know what? I would probably use Render. And it literally says my pick. So Render just got a lead. It just got a pretty good lead from this agent. You got to win that war. Can we get into the last round and Render? We get the Sequoia price at render? What was the Sequoia I price at [00:53:08] S3: render? Do, Anybody but I don't know. I don't think it's actually the same market as Profound and Peak.
00:53:12 · Rory O'Driscoll, Dev Ittycheria
[00:53:12] S0: I actually do. I think it is. Because I think both Profound, I know both companies actually wrote a term sheet on the Profound A, wish we got it. And I think naturally both those companies, when they're finished figuring out how you show up on ChatGPT for humans are going to quickly evolve to how do I if agents are who I need to show up for, then by God, I need to tell my customers how to show up for agents. So I think it's a natural next product extension. Don't get kind of caught up in the minutiae of, Oh, we only do it for humans. Zooming out, as Jason has convinced us, everyone, humans and agents, will make purchasing decisions using LLMs and using information they get online, and you're going to have to make sure, as a vendor, that you show up correctly. And whatever that takes, the opportunity there is to sell a solution to the marketing person who's got to solve that problem in any company. There's some dude at MongoDB who is going to be figuring out this afternoon, check how we show up on agents to make sure when Jason needs to get a database, we show up first. And if that person needs to have some way of surveying what other people are saying about them, what other agents are saying about them, that's a product that MongoDB is going to buy. And I think that's the profound opportunity, it's the peak opportunity. It's a bunch of other companies in this space. I think it's a good space. For some, I think it's going to have more depth than the SEMrush space, which ended up commodified and boring for a whole bunch of reasons. [00:54:33] S1: I agree.
00:54:33 · Dev Ittycheria, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:54:33] S1: I agree. [00:54:34] S0: I mean, reminder, we did the series, I think, see at HubSpot, and I say this over here, it was an SEO company to start out, but they just did a brilliant job of adding a whole bunch of other stuff on top. You solve the customer's immediate pain point, especially these marketing platforms, you solve the customer's immediate pain point, and then they realize they have an adjacent pain point, and you solve that, and then you solve the one after that. And I think every marketing person has a three year list of pain that they have to solve in terms of how they show up in the new world of LLMs, and they want all the help they can get for that. If you make solutions, you can make money here. So I think it's a super good market. [00:55:09] S3: What topic have I missed, boys from the list, that I have to discuss? [00:55:13] S2: Okay. There was one I liked, but I I like the one because it could change a lot of tech stuff. The engineers suing, which one was it? Which which are they? The license deals? I didn't think about that, but now it seems like an obvious claim that that, like, I lost the benefit of my consideration by doing this. I don't know where the lawyers come out on this one, but, yeah, give us the background on this one.