The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:12:56 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:12:56] S1: Would you sell for $30,000,000,000 [00:12:58] S0: No, I wouldn't. I mean, ultimately, we've gotten a lot of acquisition interest, and we could walk away with like I could walk away with billions of dollars in cash. The thing is, that's just not what motivates me. I'm very motivated by how do we solve this incredibly important problem in the world of how humans fit into the economy. I feel like we have the opportunity to build a legendary company in creating this new category of work, And our probability of executing on that vision wouldn't be as high if we weren't an independent company. [00:13:34] S1: How humans fit into the economy. When we look at the news, we see Insure lays off 16,000, Medal lays off 8,000 at 4AM, LinkedIn a thousand, Coinbase, blah blah blah, ClickUp now 22% going. It's hard for people to see how humans are gonna fit into that new economy. Totally. Do you share that concern?
00:13:34 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:13:34] S1: How humans fit into the economy. When we look at the news, we see Insure lays off 16,000, Medal lays off 8,000 at 4AM, LinkedIn a thousand, Coinbase, blah blah blah, ClickUp now 22% going. It's hard for people to see how humans are gonna fit into that new economy. Totally. Do you share that concern? [00:13:53] S0: I think to some extent. I believe there's certainly going to be many more jobs in ten years than there are today. But there's also going to be a lot of job displacement along the way. Amidst all of these layoffs, I think the most important question is understanding what jobs is AI able to do and what jobs is AI not able to do. And so we're building a ton of initiatives such as the AI productivity index or APEX that are becoming the industry standard and answering that question of measuring across all the different popular job categories that people talk about ranging from consultants to investment bankers, to lawyers, to software engineers. What are the actual tasks within those that AI can automate, and what are the tasks that it can't? [00:14:36] S1: With the greatest of respect, does that not change so quickly? When you saw Andre Kapathi talk about how he uses coding agents, it was like, Oh, I use it for 20% of the work. And then it's like, Oh, it does 80% and I do the final 20% within a six month period. Definitely.
00:14:36 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:14:36] S1: With the greatest of respect, does that not change so quickly? When you saw Andre Kapathi talk about how he uses coding agents, it was like, Oh, I use it for 20% of the work. And then it's like, Oh, it does 80% and I do the final 20% within a six month period. Definitely. [00:14:51] S0: Well, even another example on that is on Apex, the frontier model right now is at about 40%. And twelve months ago, the frontier model was one, which was scoring 1%. And so that's been the progress of the last twelve months. And obviously we expect it to continue and be fairly significant. But I think that the key thing is that everyone underestimates the elasticity for demand and increased productivity in the economy. Ultimately, over the last two fifty years, we've increased productivity by 25x, equivalent to automating about 96% of someone's job. And during every technology revolution, ranging from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the computer revolution, people feared that there would be this enormous job displacement because of the lump of labor fallacy, where people assumed that there was a fixed amount of things that had to be done, and when we made people more productive, that would all of a sudden mean that there were fewer jobs. Yet two fifty years later, there's more jobs than ever before, and it's because we have no shortage of problems to solve as a society, right? We still need to solve climate change and cure cancer and do all of these other new things, and so...
00:16:04 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:16:04] S1: I buy that completely, what I don't buy is the speed of transition. And what I mean by that is when you look at industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, it took multi decade cycles to implement and train new technologies to do what humans did. Yeah. Now with Nano Banana Pro, I can get rid of all designers in my media company pretty much overnight. [00:16:23] S0: Well, the thing I agree with you is about displacement. I agree there's gonna be a very significant amount of displacement, but I also think that the economy is becoming much at creating new job categories and allocating new labor. Like a great example is what we do in that now we're paying out over $3,000,000 a day in the fastest job category ever created in history. And I expect that's going to continue growing exponentially from here. And I think that there's going to be so many new job categories created across everything within AI, such as training agents for deployed engineering, building data centers, all the way to all of the problems that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to address as a society. Like how do we build solutions to climate change? How do we have more people working on rockets to explore space? Totally get you. You said 3,000,000 per day pay down? What is that in twelve months' time? In twelve months' time, that's probably about triple that. [00:17:22] S1: 9,000,000? Do you think you're being ambitious enough? Maybe it's quadruple that.
00:17:22 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:17:22] S1: 9,000,000? Do you think you're being ambitious enough? Maybe it's quadruple that. [00:17:27] S0: We internal projections that are always much more aggressive than our external projections, but we almost doubled our projections last year. [00:17:36] S1: What new role will we have in five years that does not exist today? [00:17:41] S0: One of the largest things that people underestimate, both in the context of AI Labs as well as within the enterprise, is how significant of a job category it is gonna be to train agents. Like what we're seeing is that all knowledge work is converging on training agents because it is structurally more efficient to do something once. Instead of having a customer support representative that is redundantly responding to hundreds of tickets, they're going to train an agent how to do that once. Instead of having a lawyer that is redundantly doing dozens of similar red lines on commercial contracts, they're going to train an agent how to automate that. And even probably when you're playing around with Claude, you see that there's so many repetitive workflows of how you prepare for a meeting or draft emails or whatever it is, where it's just much more efficient for you to train the agent how to do that activity so that you can amortize that over the entire useful life cycle rather than doing it redundantly yourself. And so I think that there's going to be this enormous paradigm shift as agents enter the workforce and everyone begins to manage them.
00:17:41 · Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings
[00:17:41] S0: One of the largest things that people underestimate, both in the context of AI Labs as well as within the enterprise, is how significant of a job category it is gonna be to train agents. Like what we're seeing is that all knowledge work is converging on training agents because it is structurally more efficient to do something once. Instead of having a customer support representative that is redundantly responding to hundreds of tickets, they're going to train an agent how to do that once. Instead of having a lawyer that is redundantly doing dozens of similar red lines on commercial contracts, they're going to train an agent how to automate that. And even probably when you're playing around with Claude, you see that there's so many repetitive workflows of how you prepare for a meeting or draft emails or whatever it is, where it's just much more efficient for you to train the agent how to do that activity so that you can amortize that over the entire useful life cycle rather than doing it redundantly yourself. And so I think that there's going to be this enormous paradigm shift as agents enter the workforce and everyone begins to manage them. [00:18:44] S1: Can I ask you, when we think about that enterprise adoption, I think one of the biggest problems that we have is data structures and data cleanliness? I interviewed a guest the other day and they said we'll have like data cleaner as one of the most important jobs in the next five years. Is data structure and data cleanliness the biggest barrier to enterprise adoption?