The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:42:58 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:42:58] S2: Are we doing Mecca from our [00:42:59] S1: investment committee? You you have to do the second half of the Sequoia round that the regulatory 20 x step up or whatever it is they deem to be appropriate. So... No.
00:42:59 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:42:59] S1: investment committee? You you have to do the second half of the Sequoia round that the regulatory 20 x step up or whatever it is they deem to be appropriate. So... No. [00:43:09] S0: Well, it's just... Listen. I'm not smart enough to really know. I do think it's it's an interesting play in the sense that, obviously, the current level of interest in robotics is beyond an all time high. Right? It's it's... And and they all need training data. Right? And you can be skeptical of some of these folks, but the demand for high quality training data, even if it's just paying people to wear sensors and do work, it's just off the charts. I met a founder at YC Demo Day. He wasn't in this class of YC. He was just there that I knew from saster stuff. And he tilted his company into doing just a very niche version of training data. And he did 30,000,000 in sixty days. And he said, the problem is they just don't want to do all the stuff that he's asked to do. He's like, we have 300,000,000 of demand. It just takes so many specialized humans in so many countries to do this niche product. We're turning away two seventy out of 30 because we don't want to do it, right? So if you could nail that two by two of being able to provide the data labeling, the humans and the everything, you have the right one. Maybe I'd rather do this than invest in a bunch of robots that are gonna throw Aunt Bessie out the door or smash their fist through my kitchen when they're trying to grab the pots. I'm certainly skeptical of the residential ones. Maybe this is the safest place to put our money.
00:43:09 · Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:43:09] S0: Well, it's just... Listen. I'm not smart enough to really know. I do think it's it's an interesting play in the sense that, obviously, the current level of interest in robotics is beyond an all time high. Right? It's it's... And and they all need training data. Right? And you can be skeptical of some of these folks, but the demand for high quality training data, even if it's just paying people to wear sensors and do work, it's just off the charts. I met a founder at YC Demo Day. He wasn't in this class of YC. He was just there that I knew from saster stuff. And he tilted his company into doing just a very niche version of training data. And he did 30,000,000 in sixty days. And he said, the problem is they just don't want to do all the stuff that he's asked to do. He's like, we have 300,000,000 of demand. It just takes so many specialized humans in so many countries to do this niche product. We're turning away two seventy out of 30 because we don't want to do it, right? So if you could nail that two by two of being able to provide the data labeling, the humans and the everything, you have the right one. Maybe I'd rather do this than invest in a bunch of robots that are gonna throw Aunt Bessie out the door or smash their fist through my kitchen when they're trying to grab the pots. I'm certainly skeptical of the residential ones. Maybe this is the safest place to put our money. [00:44:17] S2: Oh my god. I would way rather do this than any robotics company.
00:44:17 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:44:17] S2: Oh my god. I would way rather do this than any robotics company. [00:44:21] S1: But the absurdity of that is you can't... These things aren't going to exist unless the robotics companies are successful. So I disagree. [00:44:27] S2: Well, no. No. No. No. No. No. Because I... I'm saying I don't know which robotics company will be successful. I don't know what form factor. I don't know what vertical, but I believe that robotics will be. So I wanna be in the infrastructure that allows any of [00:44:38] S1: them to be But but pushing back on that, that's like saying I wanna do Scale AI, which is... Or Mercar, which are great companies, instead of Anthropic. If I had a choice, I'd do Anthropic. If you can pick the winner, pick the winner. Right? Because the model companies are, by definition, bigger than the companies that sell to the model companies. [00:44:53] S2: Sorry. I didn't quite understand that analogy. It's it's a bit like saying, I wanna be in scale, not legora, because I don't know who's gonna win the application layer, but I do know that models are gonna need to get better. That's a better comparable, which would be understandable.
00:44:53 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:44:53] S2: Sorry. I didn't quite understand that analogy. It's it's a bit like saying, I wanna be in scale, not legora, because I don't know who's gonna win the application layer, but I do know that models are gonna need to get better. That's a better comparable, which would be understandable. [00:45:10] S1: Personally What what you're what you're saying implicit in that is you believe there's a statement in that that each robotics company has its own foundation model and the companies like we're in the journalist pie and skilled, like if journalist pie and skilled become the dominant foundation models for robotics, then it is equivalent to my foundation model comment. But if every robotics company has to build its own specific model, then yes, then it becomes a very fragmented market at the model layer. And I don't know, it's definitely one of the areas where I have a fair number of robotics investment and the least amount of clarity. [00:45:43] S2: Okay, boys. There's a lot else. Guide me in terms of where you would like to go. We can talk about Anthropic cutting the price of Haiku by 90% as the price war with OpenAI further intensifies. Jason, I'm I'm relatively intrigued to hear your thoughts on that given how intensely you use them.
00:46:01 · Jason Lemkin
[00:46:01] S0: I mean, look. I know we've talked a lot about this kind of stuff on the show. I I I will say it's under discussed. These models, Haiku five five and Sonnet five five, they're they're great. And they're really, from my perspective, the first thing that's actually been deflationary with LMs and AI. Nothing else has been deflationary because no matter how many you talk about token prices falling, we've been consuming so many more tokens. We're not getting the benefit of it, right? None of our portfolio companies are seeing their cogs fall in AI, are they? Not really, right? We've all consumed so many more tokens and used more and more of the state of the art frontier models that we haven't seen inflationary benefits. These to me are the first ones that are deflationary. Haiku basically, you know, since the beginning of it, since before the show, there's always been the N minus one model, which isn't quite the frontier one. And you get the last year's Cadillac and Fins for this year's shining. It was sort of worth it, But now, Haiku 55, which is a joke. I mean, developers would laugh at you if you used Haiku 55. It's almost as good for a lot of use cases as Sonnet. And it's a tenth or the twentieth the price. It's like shock. It's so cheap. It's almost... Haiku 55 is like the first reasoning model and you can dial up how much reasoning you want that you can almost not care about what it costs like JEV. We haven't had this before that worked for me. We haven't had a reasoning level model where you didn't have to stress every token, every dollar, because it is a tenth the price of what Sonnet 4.5 was. It's a tenth the price. So I think it's disruptive. Sonnet 5.5 is interesting as an aside. It's basically, you know, it seems at least in the testing that I've done, it's almost as good as the Opus models before. But what's interesting, it's only about 10% cheaper than the previous on it, but it's twice as fast. And these evals don't talk enough about speed. Like this is why a lot of these things are useless like Grok and others, cause they're too slow or they time out. Speed, like if you can have your chat go twice as fast, it's a big deal, right? And Sonify five is twice as fast, 10% cheaper, not that much and better. Speed is also deflationary because you can do more and more quickly.