The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Sameer Dholakia
[00:00:00] S0: Intelligence is gonna be bigger as a market than oil. I've been in software for thirty one years now. In the handful of other moments where I have felt magic, a trillion dollar super cycle followed every single time, and it doesn't happen very often. I absolutely believe capitalism mode. Not being a giant global platform or an incredible specialist who can add differentiated value, I think it's a hard world to make money.
00:00:24 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:24] S1: $5,750,000,000. That is how much Bessemer Venture Partners just raised across their two new funds, a $4,000,000,000 fund and a $1,750,000,000 seed fund. My word, they really took it literally when I said you need a billion dollars to do seed. Well, I saw this and I thought we've gotta have Samir on the show. Samir is one of the leaders at Bessemer today. He led investments in Ligure and Fireworks, two twenty VC companies as well, which is awesome to work with them on, and he's one of the best growth investors in the market today. It's a spicy show. It's kind of what we'd call in The UK a bread and butter show in the way that this is right down my fairway. So unlike the AI deep tech infra stuff where I'm learning as I go, this is really in my zone of comfort, and we had a great discussion. And I love doing shows like this. Like, these shows are why I still do 20 VC with such passion. Samir was patient. He put up with me, and hell did we have a discussion. But before we dive into the show today, Blitzy, the autonomous software development platform that's built for enterprise scale, is proud to sponsor today's show. Enterprise code bases have grown beyond human comprehension. Tens of millions of lines, decades of tech debt, complexity existing tools cannot fathom. Blitzy starts by understanding. Thousands of agents reverse engineer your code base into a proprietary knowledge graph that maps architecture, dependencies, and business logic. That graph surfaces every CVE and zero day hiding in your code before anyone hands you a ticket. Grounded in that context, Blitzy then executes entire epics autonomously. Modernize off legacy systems, ship new features five x faster, or batch remediate CVEs at scale surfaced by the platform. Blitzy not only generates code, it validates an end to end test every single line. And that's why Fortune 500 enterprises are shipping enterprise grade code five times faster. Go to blitzy.com/20vc to learn more. While Blitzy helps you build faster, Flex helps you run your finances smarter. Business owners run their whole financial life on Flex. One platform from business revenue to their personal spend. Float every purchase for sixty days. Tap capital that grows with your revenue and pay vendors in a 170 countries across 32 currencies, plus the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place.
00:02:50 · Harry Stebbings
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00:04:26 · Sameer Dholakia, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:26] S0: Dude, I was so fired up to see you. As I always say, longtime listener. Now second time caller. I'm I'm fired up to be here, man. Thanks for having me. [00:04:33] S1: So we were just chatting beforehand, and we said, ah, USV and, like, 900,000,000, and, you know, you guys just raised, you know, the size of the US treasury, it would seem. I think it was $1,750,000,000 seed fund. We'll get into that, dude. [00:04:46] S0: Seed and early. I'll talk about that later. [00:04:48] S1: Go ahead. Seed and early, and and I think, like, five more in, you know, growth. And so we... We'll get into that. But you said, oh, well, for those of who've seen it before, this is that time.
00:05:00 · Sameer Dholakia
[00:05:00] S0: Man, when when you're in one of these, I I refer to it as, like, magic. Right? Like, I've been in software for thirty one years now. And the handful of other moments where I have felt magic, a trillion dollar super cycle followed every single time, and it doesn't happen very often. But, like, I mean, talk about lucky. I graduated college in 1995 back in the dark ages, but it was at the birth of the Internet, and I was graduating in the heart of Silicon Valley, and it was magic. You could just see how people could create content and share it with everybody on the planet. And you're like, this is magical. And, oh my gosh, we could actually do commerce on this thing, and I don't have to go somewhere to go get something. Like, that was magical. Right? And then and then later in my career, I can still remember. So VMware created this layer of software that disintermediated the the hardware from the from the OS and said, I can spin up virtual machines. I can put 10 of them on that one box. And by the way, you wanna see magic? I can move that running workload from over there on machine number two to machine number eight and shut the other one down whenever I want, and it won't interrupt the workload. Dude, that is magic. And I looked at that, and I was like, holy cow. I didn't appreciate that the super cycle it would create was called cloud, right, because there is no hyperscaler. There's no public cloud without the ability to do virtualization and motion VMs around up and and spin them up and spin them down, the elasticity of the cloud. And so every time I felt magic, I was like, holy cow. This is cool. I gotta go jump into that. And then this one, I remember I I started... I was actually on my sabbatical. I wasn't... I was in between Twilio. I thought I might be retiring, got bored. But, anyways, I was I was doing some advisory work, and this young guy, Dave Robenboser over at Jasper, said, hey. Can you spend some time with me and what we're building here? It's growing really fast. And I was like, yeah. Let's... I'd love to learn more about it. And he shows me a demo of Jasper that's this AI marketing app sitting on top of GPT three. Right? And this is, like, in the winter of twenty twenty one. And I was like, magic. It's again... This is magic. And sure enough, like, here we are now five years later, and it's been magical.
00:07:04 · Sameer Dholakia, Harry Stebbings
You just see these transformational technologies, and this one is bigger than the last two combined, in my humble opinion. [00:07:10] S1: Why do you say that? [00:07:11] S0: The analogy I often try to draw is intelligence is gonna be bigger as a market than oil because oil powers all the machines. Intelligence powers all the humans. Not some of the humans. All the humans. Consumers, prosumers, SMB, mid market, enterprise, government. I don't care who you are or what you are doing. You need more intelligence. And when you think about a market of that scale and scope, you understand this is magic, and it's gonna be really big. [00:07:38] S1: So if we actually go through the stack then, you did Anthropic. Let's start at the the heartbeat of intelligence that you mentioned there. Can you talk to me about the rationale, the underwriting, what you saw, what you didn't see when you look back now? [00:07:52] S0: Yeah. I mean, the most important bit, I'm really proud that we did it in the series d. [00:07:57] S1: What price was that, dude?