The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:19:20 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:19:20] S1: I want to be clear, was that humor? [00:19:22] S0: I don't think it's humor. What I mean is I think Automattic will stay private forever. I don't think it will, it has raised its billion, as 40% of the web. I don't think Automattic will become an agentic company and I think Matt is fine with it. And I think it will stay private. I genuinely think it'll stay private forever. I don't know what the the VCs do with it. Right? But I don't think it'll ever go public. And I don't think it'll ever get acquired, Automattic.
00:19:42 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:19:42] S1: The only comment I'll make is software companies in particular. They're not moving forward. You know, it's like the shark. You're moving... You know, you're you're going down. Right? And over an extent... I mean, it might take an extended period of time, but, you know, you're you're... And I remember I remember these three mainframe companies in the nineties and early two thousands that were still, you know, living off their twenty year old contracts, but the asset just becomes very terminal valued. So yes, you can stay private and continually cut costs and live off your installed base or do your own little bending spoons on your own. But it's a tough place to be, and it's hard to get value from it as an investor. It will be interesting to see what many of these companies decide to do. You know, can you clamber aboard, even if it's a little late, the AI train and get enough traction to maybe not be the winner, grow 5%, 10%, 20%? I don't know. But I think if you don't do that, if you decide to just not play that game, I think over the medium term, you're just heading to quiet obsolescence. [00:20:35] S2: I'm so picking a fight here because Cliff Cliff always matches me. I mean, Cliff loves the show, and he always matches me like, you guy... You guys are harsh on me, and I'm like, you know, Rory and Jason. I never say I'm a thing.
00:20:35 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:20:35] S2: I'm so picking a fight here because Cliff Cliff always matches me. I mean, Cliff loves the show, and he always matches me like, you guy... You guys are harsh on me, and I'm like, you know, Rory and Jason. I never say I'm a thing. [00:20:47] S0: I'm just I didn't say I'm a You know what the surprising thing from all... Where I've gotten surprised guys going to this point? Listen. Obviously, if you're doing what we're doing, you have 21 agents running, and they're running agentically, and they're using Higgsfield and Opus and the other things. It makes sense you turn off Canva, right? Because your agents don't log into it, right? And it's really not useful for our agents. The surprising thing from all of this is that the real world isn't buying much of this crap anymore, right? If I would have thought that a Canva, a Squarespace, which just launched 20% layoffs, a Wix, which is going be bailed out by Base44, others, I would have thought like Shopify, they'd be doing fine because most of the world isn't running 21 agents and Hugging Face, and everything. We're not all tech nerds, but but it isn't really playing out that way. And obviously some of this is because ChatGPT is so good for images. There are things that are so good. Grok is great for images, but I'm surprised that a lot of these core businesses are being so severely impacted. Maybe it's a limit of my knowledge. It worries me. [00:21:46] S2: Grok's amazing for images.
00:21:46 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:21:46] S2: Grok's amazing for images. [00:21:48] S0: Grok's great, but in your news, Elon just had to cut back Grok use because it's too expensive. He can't afford it. I think I underestimated what the costs of Grok were because I didn't understand how persistent the VMs can be. Yeah, I think Grok could cost as much as $20 a month per user to service Grok the way it's supposed to work today. [00:22:04] S1: Way more. [00:22:05] S0: More than 20? Yeah. Then it's a moronic business model at $40 or $50 per user per month. I got it wrong because the lovable replet thing, right, which is a highly tuned on off VM is about $4 to $5 a month. Okay? They have large teams tuning that so that you can have a little bit of AI, can have a little bit, but the VMs spool up and down very carefully. They've gotten it down to 4 to $5 a month. So I assume that Manus and Friends were like, Manus could even be cheaper, I assumed, And Grok might be twice that because they don't have the resources, but it's much higher. It's much higher to have these persistent agents running. It's much, you think it's more than $20 a month? I know you want to do it at $30 Harry, but how does this math pencil out at $30 or $40 a month per user? All these tickets we're going to buy?
00:22:05 · Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:22:05] S0: More than 20? Yeah. Then it's a moronic business model at $40 or $50 per user per month. I got it wrong because the lovable replet thing, right, which is a highly tuned on off VM is about $4 to $5 a month. Okay? They have large teams tuning that so that you can have a little bit of AI, can have a little bit, but the VMs spool up and down very carefully. They've gotten it down to 4 to $5 a month. So I assume that Manus and Friends were like, Manus could even be cheaper, I assumed, And Grok might be twice that because they don't have the resources, but it's much higher. It's much higher to have these persistent agents running. It's much, you think it's more than $20 a month? I know you want to do it at $30 Harry, but how does this math pencil out at $30 or $40 a month per user? All these tickets we're going to buy? [00:22:46] S2: Well, I admit that that seems relatively paradoxical to believe that it's more than $20 a month and to want to do it. It's a very good argument from you there. But my thing for the power users, it's very significant. And I think for people that use it once or twice a day with limited automations, it's very, very cheap. And so I think your blended is probably much cheaper. But like for me, I will be terrible as an economic profile for them. I mean, the worst.
00:22:46 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:22:46] S2: Well, I admit that that seems relatively paradoxical to believe that it's more than $20 a month and to want to do it. It's a very good argument from you there. But my thing for the power users, it's very significant. And I think for people that use it once or twice a day with limited automations, it's very, very cheap. And so I think your blended is probably much cheaper. But like for me, I will be terrible as an economic profile for them. I mean, the worst. [00:23:07] S1: Look, I think the real truth is just like every digital product, it always takes off at a point in time when the economics don't quite work. I remember when Facebook was ramping early on and people like, oh my God, the server bill, it was using scads of servers, and it was maybe gonna have CapEx of a $100,000,000, and people are like, that's the end of the world. And the bet you take over and over again is digital goods get reduced in price 50, 60% year on year. If people like the shit and they get hooked on it, over two or three years, the math gets better. And that's really what's going on here. [00:23:39] S2: YouTube, one of the best businesses in the world. [00:23:41] S0: Or maybe we're gonna see these waves where for all but a handful of folks, the subsidies just can't last. We've also seen this in AI. The subsidies just can't last. It's too expensive, right? I don't know whether Grok is on that side or not. Crosby barely pulled it out. The Crosby V2 would have died reselling Anthropic tokens.