The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:10:15 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
The next shoe to drop is, okay, OpenAI, you paid your 70% card, now we're going to play our still it's 10x growth card, or is it going to be the 5x growth, or is it going to be, hey, we've slowed down a lot. It will be super interesting to see where that anthropic Q3 number comes out. And I won't say it's no accident, but it's worth noting that the timing of the IPO now is such that that number will be in the prospectus, but it will be known at the time they go public. [00:10:42] S3: If we disentangle the revenue from the price in the round, and, Rory, as you quite rightly illustrated, should have done. Poor Harry. 1,400,000,000,000, the largest private round, $30,000,000,000 more. I mean, I thought we had dried up all private capital. Clearly, there's more. How do we think about this, Rory? [00:11:01] S0: This would be the first ever venture round above a trillion dollars. That's pleasing. The first ever private trillion dollar plan. I remember in the mid nineties, I remember the first above a billion dollar round, and we were like, woah. That's kinda crazy. Yeah. Moving right along with three orders of magnitude. [00:11:18] S3: Rory, congratulations for becoming the new head of CalPERS pension fund, and you are now in charge of directs. And you have the chance to OpenAI at 1.4 or Anthropic as they go public at two. What would you like to do?
00:11:18 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:11:18] S3: Rory, congratulations for becoming the new head of CalPERS pension fund, and you are now in charge of directs. And you have the chance to OpenAI at 1.4 or Anthropic as they go public at two. What would you like to do? [00:11:31] S0: Oh, I think you lean to liquidity. It's a lot better to have liquidity than not have liquidity. You separately have to value the two companies, which is worth more. But then separate from that, you really ask the question liquidity versus illiquidity. I would much prefer to be in the liquid stock when the amount of information is as unknown as it is. You might want the liquid stock or you accept that you're holding for three or four years because that's what the risk of being private is. Yeah. You think it can go public next year, and it should be. It's... Damn it. It's big enough, but you never know of the world. So I probably would lean to liquidity at the margin. Sorry. Boring answer.
00:11:31 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:11:31] S0: Oh, I think you lean to liquidity. It's a lot better to have liquidity than not have liquidity. You separately have to value the two companies, which is worth more. But then separate from that, you really ask the question liquidity versus illiquidity. I would much prefer to be in the liquid stock when the amount of information is as unknown as it is. You might want the liquid stock or you accept that you're holding for three or four years because that's what the risk of being private is. Yeah. You think it can go public next year, and it should be. It's... Damn it. It's big enough, but you never know of the world. So I probably would lean to liquidity at the margin. Sorry. Boring answer. [00:12:03] S3: We can go to Anthropix IPO, or we can go to the the slightly salacious one, which is factory and cognition. I think we should go there. I'm gonna just throw my hat in the ring there. So I'm gonna provide some context. Chris Deignan, sales leader, legendary from Snowflake for many years, was a board observer at Factory, spoke to Mattan every day according to the founder, and was very close to him. And whilst he was very close to him, was interviewing for a role at Cognition, according to the founder Matane, this is, and then took the role at Cognition as CRO. And that is when Matane came out and said, you're barred. This is wrong. And how bad of you? Let's start on that before we discuss Vinod. How did we analyze this?
00:12:03 · Harry Stebbings, Dev Ittycheria
[00:12:03] S3: We can go to Anthropix IPO, or we can go to the the slightly salacious one, which is factory and cognition. I think we should go there. I'm gonna just throw my hat in the ring there. So I'm gonna provide some context. Chris Deignan, sales leader, legendary from Snowflake for many years, was a board observer at Factory, spoke to Mattan every day according to the founder, and was very close to him. And whilst he was very close to him, was interviewing for a role at Cognition, according to the founder Matane, this is, and then took the role at Cognition as CRO. And that is when Matane came out and said, you're barred. This is wrong. And how bad of you? Let's start on that before we discuss Vinod. How did we analyze this? [00:12:48] S1: Yeah. So I just wanna be clear. I know Matane personally. I'm an angel investor, Sequoia's investor in Factory as well, and MongoDB is a partner with Cognition. But the fact that an adviser has access to a founder's confidential plans, there should be clarity on... You know, with with the founder that they're thinking about going in different direction, especially if that's a potentially competitive situation. But if I was the CEO, I'd be pretty annoyed to to see someone who had access to my plans go to a competitor. Again, I don't know if that had happened. That would be quite upsetting to me if it did.
00:12:48 · Dev Ittycheria, Jason Lemkin
[00:12:48] S1: Yeah. So I just wanna be clear. I know Matane personally. I'm an angel investor, Sequoia's investor in Factory as well, and MongoDB is a partner with Cognition. But the fact that an adviser has access to a founder's confidential plans, there should be clarity on... You know, with with the founder that they're thinking about going in different direction, especially if that's a potentially competitive situation. But if I was the CEO, I'd be pretty annoyed to to see someone who had access to my plans go to a competitor. Again, I don't know if that had happened. That would be quite upsetting to me if it did. [00:13:22] S2: On the other side, like, as a CEO, you're... It's gonna be profoundly frustrating, right? Your advisor goes off and joins a competitor, right? It's happened to us all at some level. I would think 95% of the CROs we would talk to would say, this is fine, man. This is the way it works. Like CRO is a risky job. There's a lot of turnover, jobs come in fast and a lot of CROs, if it's a hot job, they move very quickly. And so I just think that a lot of CEOs would be frustrated. I think 95% of CROs would say this is how I found my last job.
00:13:22 · Jason Lemkin, Dev Ittycheria
[00:13:22] S2: On the other side, like, as a CEO, you're... It's gonna be profoundly frustrating, right? Your advisor goes off and joins a competitor, right? It's happened to us all at some level. I would think 95% of the CROs we would talk to would say, this is fine, man. This is the way it works. Like CRO is a risky job. There's a lot of turnover, jobs come in fast and a lot of CROs, if it's a hot job, they move very quickly. And so I just think that a lot of CEOs would be frustrated. I think 95% of CROs would say this is how I found my last job. [00:13:51] S1: Jason, I'm going to respectfully disagree because remember that CROs also hired other people to work for them, selling them on the company, selling them on the vision, selling them on how they're going to make money and how it's going to be transformative for their family. If that person were to leave, they basically burnt their reputation with everyone they recruited as well. So I've never seen a CRO flip from one competitor to another. I've seen a CRO go from one company to another company in a different space because they think that's a better opportunity, But I've never seen a CRO, at least that I can remember, that's ever flipped from, you know, one company to a direct competitor of another.