The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Brendan Foody
[00:00:00] S0: Building defensibility in the software layer on top of the models is going to be incredibly difficult. I think over the last two years, everyone has increasingly realized that the model is the product. We have the demand to double overnight. We just don't have the capacity. Like right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount. I think we're seeing in real time that services are getting automated. I could definitely see one of them being a $10,000,000,000,000 company, maybe even significantly higher. How much does it cost to hire a high quality AI researcher? Oftentimes, it would be in the tens of millions of stock per year.
00:00:41 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:41] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now joining me in the hot seat today, we have Brandon Foody, cofounder and co CEO of McCore, one of the fastest growing AI companies valued at over $10,000,000,000 today, doing over $1,000,000,000 in revenue. Now Brandon's done quite a few shows before, and so my question was, how do I get answers that he's never given before? How do I push and ask questions that no one's ever pushed him to ask before? This is the most revealing interview that Brandon has ever done, discussing core elements like, is revenue really revenue in this business? What does that look like moving forward? Would he rather invest in OpenAI or Anthropic? We do not shy away from the spicy question in this show, and Brandon was incredible and more than delivered. But before we dive into the show today, did you know the industry average for booking a business trip is forty five minutes? That's a massive waste of your team's time. Well, with Navan, your employees can book a trip in just seven on average. Navan is the AI powered travel and expense platform designed for companies that value efficiency. It drives real business impact through high employee adoption and automated policy control. Now the built in AI approves in policy bookings and blocks the rest automatically. This allows finance teams to stop chasing receipts and skip the month end chaos, and you get this real time visibility that can save your company up to 15% on your travel budget. And that's why leaders like Visa, Stripe, Figma, and even Anthropic rely on Navan these days. Go to navan.com/20vc today to see for yourself, and you'll get a chance to win two business class flights anywhere in Continental US. No purchase necessary. Rules apply. Head over to navan.com/20vc now. Once Navan simplifies the travel, Airwallet simplifies the spend behind it. Founders, let's get real about the growth tax. You've raised VC funding and you're scaling globally, and it's no longer about shipping product. It's about orchestrating operations across continents. But suddenly, your payments and finance stack is choking your growth. You're logging into lots of different banking portals, waiting days for transfers, and reporting across entities. It's operational drag and it's at your scale. It's costing millions. That's why I'm so excited to partner with Airwallis.
00:02:55 · Harry Stebbings
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00:04:52 · Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:52] S0: Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Harry. [00:04:55] S1: So I was thinking about how we're gonna structure this, and I was like, you know what? There's there's quite a lot of myths or rumors around McCaw. And given it's our second time, I thought I could kinda break the ice and just go straight for them. So myth number one that we're gonna tackle, but there was a hack or a leak or whatever. I don't know how you can... Terminology you call it, but a hack, And revenue's been flat. What's really happening with McCore? True or false? [00:05:20] S0: So there was an incident. All of the other parts are false, in that we obviously handled it very quickly. We were in touch with customers. We moved incredibly fast at engaging Mandiant and a bunch of other security consulting firms, and the company's been crushing it ever since. We've expanded our relationships with all of the Frontier Labs and added 300,000,000 in net new ARR in the last sixty days. [00:05:43] S1: 300,000,000 in sixty days? Fuck me. [00:05:46] S0: That's been pretty crazy, yeah. [00:05:47] S1: Keeping Where us were you when you found out about the hack and what did you do? Well, it was
00:05:47 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:05:47] S1: Keeping Where us were you when you found out about the hack and what did you do? Well, it was [00:05:52] S0: a Saturday, so I was in the office and I was talking with our engineering team. And I think the initial thing is of course, how are we communicating this to customers and trying to be very proactive about understanding exactly what happened, what was accessed, etcetera. And then how do we communicate this to the experts and just containing it, moving quickly on the comms. And then from there, of course, making sure that we put in place all the right things so that it never happens again. [00:06:21] S1: There's a brilliant poet, Roger O. Kipling, who said, you have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. That is a time when everyone is losing theirs. Definitely. And by no means, wanna be patronizing when both young, you're younger than me. What do you do to stay calm when that is an oh shit moment?
00:06:21 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:06:21] S1: There's a brilliant poet, Roger O. Kipling, who said, you have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. That is a time when everyone is losing theirs. Definitely. And by no means, wanna be patronizing when both young, you're younger than me. What do you do to stay calm when that is an oh shit moment? [00:06:37] S0: Well, it's interesting because I feel like throughout the lifetime of the business, I have been through a lot of very stressful moments. That was definitely stressful, but it definitely wasn't close to the most stressful one. Seriously. Yeah. I mean, there's been times when I'm freaking out about making sure we get something right with a customer or whatever it is, but part of it is that there was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business. And so having a thorough understanding of what actually happened and having really strong relationships with customers gave us a lot of confidence that we would get through it, be on the other side even stronger. And we used to have six values as a company, but we added a seventh value as security to make sure it's very ingrained in the culture. But I think that, yeah, just that confidence that we know what's going on and that there's sort of this echo chamber on X that we need to hedge against a little bit. Do you pay attention [00:07:37] S1: to it, and do founders need to pay attention to it? Definitely.