The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:00:28 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[01:00:28] S0: But it's it's forgiveness permission. I don't... We talked about it at the time. We don't like it. It feels unfair. But I think the pragmatic answer that I'm willing to bet... Grock was NVIDIA, wasn't it? Right? I'm willing to bet. Let's say they have to settle and they have to chuck in an extra $200,000,000. The real answer is my lawyers, my very smart lawyers came to me and said, I found a way that we can buy this company on a Sunday night and all the employees start on Monday morning and we have the IP versus this other way where we put in an application to the US government and close in nine months. And Jensen said, is there some risk? And they said, yeah. He said, I can live with it. Done. We did the deal. And then two years later, you go, yeah. There was a little bit of risk. It turns out it's 1% extra on the price. Here's $200,000,000. [01:01:10] S3: I think an additional that just isn't discussed enough is Muse was a phenomenal launch and has been a phenomenal reception. And I respectfully think DOS has been very unimpressive. I thought that demo was incredibly poor, very tech centric. How do I do flights for enterprise usage for an OpenAI employee? I thought it was out of touch, and I thought it was very underwhelming. Thoughts?
01:01:35 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[01:01:35] S0: Obviously, you've Muse for a while, you're right. Let's do Muse, they've killed it. And, you know, I I... As as someone who taught Ian that acquisition isn't working, it seems there's a whole bunch of gear grinding, I just gotta give the executors credit. Whatever he did, whatever between Zuckerberg and Alex Wang, they put their heads down and they ship product. And as the CEO on this call... Both CEOs on this call know better than me, that cures everything. They ship the killer product. They launched it full on. They resourced it with compute. They kicked ass. You know? And it's good. I mean, I'm going to New York this week. I'm pay... It's real fun. You do instinct and you muse, and you kind of check on them and see who's winning. It's kind of a bit of a geeky joy, but there you are. They're, you know, absolute... Let's use the word frontier, state of the art. This is as compelling as any freaking start up. You guys have muse nailed it. Anyway, conversely, was trying to figure out dots today. I wasn't quite sure what it is even at the end of it. I went and looked at in anticipation of the program here, I went and looked at the whole online demo day thing, and I'm not quite sure I got it yet. I see where spaces is going, but yeah, it's not nearly as cool. [01:02:37] S3: And so you are a thirty year venture investor, Rory. How do we feel about America adopting this?
01:02:37 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[01:02:37] S3: And so you are a thirty year venture investor, Rory. How do we feel about America adopting this? [01:02:43] S0: I don't know. I'm not gonna be as opinionated as that. I wouldn't... I'm I'm not a product guru. I'd like to hear from these guys. But my point is I wanted to celebrate the good, because in the past, I'd been a little cynical of the meta thing. They nailed it. I wanna celebrate the good stuff. All I can say on the openai. Stuff is I'm still trying to figure it out. So, Jason, did you did you turn it on? Did you try
01:03:03 · Jason Lemkin
[01:03:03] S2: to help? Listen. I don't I don't disagree with Harry's point that, like the consumer PR element was definitely underwhelming considering the MuseBuzz, which I modestly contributed to. But I think it's because the initial point of Dots is that it integrates with Codex and can work as a twenty four hour coding agent. And one of the annoying things and one of the things that it's under discussed that actually a Replit or a Lovable did well in the early days is they could be on all the time, At least sort of, sort of. But it's pretty annoying to you can't really keep Claude Code or Codex going twenty four hours. That's why OpenClaw took off and others. I'm simplifying a lot of stuff. Now everyone has a twenty four hour persistent agent that can work with Codex if nothing else. So I want to give it thirty days and see what developers do for real, right, with the persistent agent optimized around codecs before giving up on the fact that maybe they weren't as excited about booking my business class tickets to Palm Beach over the holidays as other folks were. It could end up being the bigger win and in a sense, it's almost guaranteed to win in that sense, right? If it's sort of the persistent extension of Codex and building on the OpenAI stack, it almost can't lose unless they stop developing on it. But maybe it's never that consumer y. Maybe it's just a nerdy product, and like like Mongo, it's okay. Like, you can make money in these nerdy products, can't you Dev? It's... There's money to be made. Let's view it from the developer lens and give it ninety days and see what cool stuff gets built.
01:04:26 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings, Dev Ittycheria
[01:04:26] S0: It points to the thing we've said before. It's just super hard to be developer forward, enterprise forward, and consumer forward at the same time, you know. Interestingly, ties back to the Mongo comment and where your former colleague went to run the enterprise side of Meta. I think that doing one thing well is hard. Doing two things well at the same time is super hard. And I think OpenAI struggles with that all the time. Even on the kind of the product surface area, there's just a lot going on. [01:04:53] S3: Do you remember last week when you mocked me for my buying of stocks in the middle of a show. 26% up in a single week, Rory. [01:05:02] S0: Why did you buy again? [01:05:03] S3: I bought Newbank, and I have to admit, I didn't quite know the Brazilian elections were coming, and they would go in my favor. I didn't know that the Monzo deal would not happen, which would also go in New Bank's favor. But 26% in a week, got a lot of thank yous from people who made thousands and thousands of dollars. [01:05:21] S0: So let me get this straight. You bought a stock and two things that you didn't expect happened and your stock went up and you're feeling good. That's that's the takeaway here. Right? [01:05:30] S3: Well, I I feel more I feel more, you know, cherishable, and we made [01:05:34] S1: money I for [01:05:34] S0: I just wanna say. No. But it is interesting that as a Brazilian based company says stock goes up when they realize they're not investing in the third world country like The UK, stock pops. Sorry. Just being mean, Harry.
01:05:34 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[01:05:34] S0: I just wanna say. No. But it is interesting that as a Brazilian based company says stock goes up when they realize they're not investing in the third world country like The UK, stock pops. Sorry. Just being mean, Harry. [01:05:47] S2: Harry, can I do one before we lose Dev that I just would love to get his thoughts on? Yeah. I added to this because I don't think we touched enough on it. I loved on the Aura IPO. I thought this was terrible news for venture, terrible news for venture because you could argue this one is overpriced, I guess. I mean, that's an analysis. Rory had a point that Forerunner was selling, know, think them selling their whole stake was a large part of the IPO, which adds some element to pricing. But I just think it's a huge bummer that a company growing 1,200,000,000, growing 74% with pretty attractive recurring revenue portion of it. The IPO got pulled. Like we talk about liquidity is easy and M and A's everywhere and the one thousandth Frontier Labs can be bought for $7,000,000,000 But this one kind of bummed, honestly, it bummed me out that this deal didn't happen. I felt it was under discussed as as something that didn't happen. I don't know what you thought, Dev, on this one.