The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:02:34 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[01:02:34] S1: The biggest advice I would give is get great at copywriting. When you think, like, the actual writing copy, writing words, how do you make something engaging, how do you get your message across is so fundamental to any bit of growth you do. So whether you're running LinkedIn ads, if you're doing organic LinkedIn, if you're doing a blog post, a tweet thread, if you're doing copy for your landing pages, get great at copy as that's the foundation for all other growth. [01:03:01] S0: It's fucking fantastic podcast. You know why you're actually a brilliant podcast guest as well? And this would be a big advice that I should actually tweet, and I probably will do later. You repeat the question at the start of your statement, which is so helpful for shorts. Do see what I mean? Yeah. Say...... In mind. Totally. But you say the biggest problem people make with x. [01:03:22] S1: Yes. [01:03:22] S0: Because the worst thing is when people just go, oh, they do this. Yes. That's really hard to short formify. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Many reasons why I'm single. It's because I get excited by that. What would you most like to change about the world of growth? [01:03:36] S1: I'd most like to... You've made me aware [01:03:39] S0: I'm Fuck. Now doing Come on. Exactly.
01:03:39 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:03:39] S0: I'm Fuck. Now doing Come on. Exactly. [01:03:41] S1: The thing I'd most like to change about the world of growth is you just should not launch products which aren't actually ready. The biggest villain I see doing this at the moment is Apple. And so we've always held Steve Jobs in our mind as just like this beacon of marketing and product and engineering. And now you have Apple pushing that the reason you should upgrade to the newest iPhone or upgrade to the newest laptop is because of Apple Intelligence. Well, as no one actually knows what Apple Intelligence is or how to use it or gets any value from it. [01:04:10] S0: And it's not coming out until 2026. [01:04:11] S1: It's still not out. So why are they pushing in their marketing? Instead, make sure your product is actually ready, that it performs great, and then ship it and push it hard. [01:04:19] S0: They did kind of change their whole AI team, I think, as a result of What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months?
01:04:19 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:04:19] S0: They did kind of change their whole AI team, I think, as a result of What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? [01:04:26] S1: The biggest thing I changed my mind on in the last twelve months is whether voice AI agents or conversational AI agents actually work. And so when I joined ElevenLabs, we had this fantastic box where you could type in text, generate life like speech. And Matti was saying, like, oh, soon you'll be able to have full AI agents that you can have natural conversations, and it'll sound really human like, and you could use that for sales and for customer support and for relationship coaching. And I was like, that will never work. The latency will just be too high. You won't be able to have these sub two hundred millisecond interactions. I was completely wrong. And so on about the twentieth customer that us at ElevenLabs had helped build these conversational AI agents, we were like, okay. Let's actually turn this into a proper platform and build conversational AI as a feature. And now it's... I actually prefer speaking to an AI customer support agent than a real person because they're more knowledgeable. They know exactly how to solve your problems. They can escalate. They know all the policies.
01:04:26 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[01:04:26] S1: The biggest thing I changed my mind on in the last twelve months is whether voice AI agents or conversational AI agents actually work. And so when I joined ElevenLabs, we had this fantastic box where you could type in text, generate life like speech. And Matti was saying, like, oh, soon you'll be able to have full AI agents that you can have natural conversations, and it'll sound really human like, and you could use that for sales and for customer support and for relationship coaching. And I was like, that will never work. The latency will just be too high. You won't be able to have these sub two hundred millisecond interactions. I was completely wrong. And so on about the twentieth customer that us at ElevenLabs had helped build these conversational AI agents, we were like, okay. Let's actually turn this into a proper platform and build conversational AI as a feature. And now it's... I actually prefer speaking to an AI customer support agent than a real person because they're more knowledgeable. They know exactly how to solve your problems. They can escalate. They know all the policies. [01:05:25] S0: You also don't have to be fake polite. You know what I mean? You're like, I know that you don't have feelings. It's like, what's this? What's that? Yeah. Yeah. I totally percent. When does the infrastructure layer become the application layer? And what I mean by that specifically is, like, you could be Synthesia. Mhmm. You could be, hey, HeyGen. Yes. Why does the infrastructure layer not become the application?
01:05:25 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[01:05:25] S0: You also don't have to be fake polite. You know what I mean? You're like, I know that you don't have feelings. It's like, what's this? What's that? Yeah. Yeah. I totally percent. When does the infrastructure layer become the application layer? And what I mean by that specifically is, like, you could be Synthesia. Mhmm. You could be, hey, HeyGen. Yes. Why does the infrastructure layer not become the application? [01:05:44] S1: I think it does, but you as the infrastructure player really need to partner with companies and be very explicit around which areas you want to go deep on. We want to build the best platform to make these end to end conversational AI agents, but we explicitly don't want to be building full digital avatar platform. So that way, we're able to be trusted partners to companies like HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions, who rule customers, but we're able to build these fantastic infrastructure layers on top. [01:06:14] S0: You know, I invested in Captions. Really? Yeah. They're doing great. So I I invested in Captions. This is... It shows how theory driven I am as an investor. And... Invested when it was basically a BeReal competitor. [01:06:26] S1: Wow.
01:06:26 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[01:06:26] S1: Wow. [01:06:27] S0: And then a year later, a friend of mine texted me saying, like, we've got to invest in this company, Captions. And so I found the founder on LinkedIn. I messaged him. Like, oh my god. We'd love to find a way to invest. We love Captions. And he's like, dude, you already invested. And I'm like, say what? And he's like, we're a pivot. You remember me? You remember me? I'm Gaurav. Wow. And I was like, oh, shit. [01:06:51] S1: Anyway... But I'm sure you really helped him through that pivot, and it was very useful having your advice. [01:06:57] S0: Listen, I didn't wanna say I'm like a cofounder, but Yeah. I was it was up there. Why is inbound SDR as a role dead?