The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:05:45 · Harry Stebbings, Sameer Dholakia
[01:05:45] S1: Byron is the picker. Who is the winner? And what I mean by that is when you're like, oh, Sequoia around this, Founders around this, Benchmarker, who is the one person who closes Founders better than anyone else? [01:05:58] S0: Oh, that's a good one too. Can I revise my answer then knowing both of those two? I would go with David Cowan as the picker because he finds stuff that everybody thinks is crazy, like Rocket Lab that then becomes, you know, an enormous business, and nobody knows what he's doing. But when it comes to closing, Byron Dieter every time for sure. A 100%. That guy is he is a force of nature. He's charming. He's funny. He's smart as all get out. His experience is ridiculous. He knows how to have a good time. He'll host people, whether it's at a 49ers football game or up, skiing at his house in Montana. I mean, the guy is is is... He's an amazing amazing closer. [01:06:35] S1: What company is Bassam and not in that universally the firm ruse and wishes it was in? [01:06:40] S0: So many. I would say Stripe. We were the developer API venture capital firm. We were, you know, led the seed in in... I think in b in Twilio, led the series b in in SendGrid. We had Auth0 that David Cowan led. I mean, we were the developer API company, and we weren't in Stripe. That hurts. That's probably the... I'll I'll I'll use that one. [01:07:02] S1: You can add one person to the venture partnership that is not there currently. It's a dream ad. It's not like a realist, but who would that be?
01:07:02 · Harry Stebbings, Sameer Dholakia
[01:07:02] S1: You can add one person to the venture partnership that is not there currently. It's a dream ad. It's not like a realist, but who would that be? [01:07:11] S0: If I could convince Ravi Matre to come join us, I would love Ravi over here from Lightspeed. Ravi is incredible deep thinker, goes deep on the technology and and the markets. You know, you look at some of the investments that that he has led and made, not the least of which was a billion dollar check into Anthropic. In the $60,000,000,000 round, that guy's... He's just... He's really good, and he's willing... He's not just really good, but he's willing to take these giant risks that seem almost borderline insane. And, I I I have deep mad respect for both. [01:07:42] S1: Billion dollar jack. That is some serious bulls. You're just like I'm messing around. The the finance director, like, typing those zeros must just be like, wow. This is... Wow. [01:07:56] S0: That's that's that's a lot lot of numbers. [01:07:58] S1: What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months?
01:07:58 · Harry Stebbings, Sameer Dholakia
[01:07:58] S1: What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? [01:08:01] S0: In the last twelve, I would say just my deep appreciation for how big the open token economy is gonna be. I just didn't see it twelve months ago. I didn't appreciate it. It's a big part of the reason we're we're investing as much as we are behind fall and fireworks both fall on the gen media side and the infrastructure side there, and they're going up and down the stack. They're amazing, amazing business, amazing team. And fireworks, obviously, we talked a lot about those two. I just didn't appreciate how big that market was gonna be twelve months ago. [01:08:29] S1: Final one for you. What are you most genuinely excited about moving forwards? [01:08:34] S0: I'll say two. One is I'm wildly fired up about all things robotics and embodied AI. Like, we invested nearly 200,000,000 into Waymo, and I just think that, you know, autonomy and what that changes and how that changes the way we work and live, I think, is awesome. Is that [01:08:50] S1: is that humanoids, or is that not humanoids? [01:08:52] S0: It can be. Can be. And certainly an area that we've been looking at, and I think we're probably in the equivalent in embodied robotics in that sense. I think we're probably at circa 2021 relative to the generative AI era. So I think it's... We're still... We've got a a couple few years to go, but it's it's on one of these curves, man. It's gonna go... It's it's happening fast. So I think we will get there faster than it... Than most people think.
01:08:52 · Sameer Dholakia, Harry Stebbings
[01:08:52] S0: It can be. Can be. And certainly an area that we've been looking at, and I think we're probably in the equivalent in embodied robotics in that sense. I think we're probably at circa 2021 relative to the generative AI era. So I think it's... We're still... We've got a a couple few years to go, but it's it's on one of these curves, man. It's gonna go... It's it's happening fast. So I think we will get there faster than it... Than most people think. [01:09:16] S1: Are you in any of the robotic data companies? We saw Macca just get done by Sequoia yesterday. You've got Micro AGI in Europe. Are you in them, and how do you see the data market for robotics? [01:09:27] S0: We are not yet that I know of or that I can think of offhand, but I know that we have spent a lot of time around robotics. And so I'm sure there's my early stage partners listening going, Samir, come on, man. We met with, like, 20 of these. We're gonna make this pick. I I don't actually know offhand. I think there's a lot of excitement in the firm around that area. I'm personally looking at the autonomy. You know, we did Waymo, but now you're like, okay. What about autonomy in construction? What about autonomy in mining? What about autonomy in agriculture? You know, there's tons of areas. [01:09:56] S1: Oh, this is a good quick find. You do Waymo at 01:15, and Uber has a a market cap of $1.20, $1.25. [01:10:03] S0: Yeah. Why am [01:10:03] S1: I a moron?
01:10:03 · Harry Stebbings, Sameer Dholakia
[01:10:03] S1: I a moron? [01:10:06] S0: Because you're looking at the ride hailing market as the only market. That's not the only market, Harry. I have a 16 year old son that I just bought a car for. If I could have bought that car with an option to have a Waymo driver on it and pay them a subscription every single month on that car or any car that we bought as a family, it'd be a default purchase. Of course, I would do it. Just like Tesla and Elon's got it for his FSD on his cars, I think Waymo has the opportunity to do that for every other OEM on the planet. Are they doing that today? It's not it's not their near term focus. They're focused on ride hailing. They're crushing it. They're rolling out both nationally and globally to every city, and they're gonna build an enormous business on that side. They're gonna unlock use cases and ride hailing that didn't exist before for folks like your mom or for my teenage daughter going to... Coming back from, you know, whatever. There's so many more things. That will be a very big business. But when you take that same technology and capability and apply it to personal car ownership and then apply it to trucking and then apply it to logistics, Waymo's gonna be an extraordinary, I think, a trillion dollar business. Easy. [01:11:09] S1: Good. One is that. What was the second one?
01:11:09 · Harry Stebbings, Sameer Dholakia
[01:11:09] S1: Good. One is that. What was the second one? [01:11:12] S0: It kind of follows your your lead, which is therapeutics using AI to, as they say, drug the undruggable, like, to figure out cures is by far the greatest, I think, potential and impact that we'll see out of this technology. And I believe... I mean, you're just seeing the pace of things. We're gonna automate... You know, their... The wet labs are gonna become automatable, and you put an AI brain that can see and reason over mass sums of datasets and in ways that a single human simply can't. And and I think we're gonna have a pace of discovery in biology and therapeutics and drug development over the next decade that we have... That would... I really do believe what Dario says on that in in machines of love and grace. I think we're gonna see in the next decade what would have taken us half a century. I really believe that. [01:12:00] S1: I think you've been so patient with me today. I mean, you have been... I I mean, you're like, I came for a nice chat, dude. And then you're just like [01:12:08] S0: I mean, I love this. Harry, you're... You always do this. You... You're so freaking entertaining, and you're smart, and you ask great questions. So it's