The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:04:15 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[01:04:15] S1: I remember when researchers weren't paid very much. This was like ten, fifteen years ago, were like the underpaid but brilliant people in society. Yeah. Now I feel like that's relatively changed. [01:04:24] S0: Yeah. Is it harder than ever to run the company? I don't think so. Like, to give a frame of reference, we were 40 people and 50,000,000 in revenue run rate last year, at the start of last year. Since then, we've seven or 8x headcount and we've increased the broader scale of the business by 25x, 30x. It's definitely been very stressful to keep up with the growth along the way. But I think that now we have the supporting functions, like we have HR, or not really HR, but we have finance and we have legal and we're building out HR. And that brings some sense of stability where I don't have to deal with all of these little escalations. And I'm able to just spend my time focusing on building great products, research, and time with customers. And that, I think, has made it easier, significantly easier to run the business. I get in a lot [01:05:21] S1: of shit for everything I say these days, which is wonderful. My team just go, Oh, no, Harry. The trouble is I don't deliberately rage bait, but people just hate me. Which is the worst thing. Yeah. But HR, I tweeted after a show with Adam at AppLovin, no great CEO that I've met. And it's true. Loves HR. They slow you down. They implement policy and procedure, and it's just pain.
01:05:21 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[01:05:21] S1: of shit for everything I say these days, which is wonderful. My team just go, Oh, no, Harry. The trouble is I don't deliberately rage bait, but people just hate me. Which is the worst thing. Yeah. But HR, I tweeted after a show with Adam at AppLovin, no great CEO that I've met. And it's true. Loves HR. They slow you down. They implement policy and procedure, and it's just pain. [01:05:43] S0: Do you agree with me? The caveat I'll give is that I think it's really important. We definitely had challenges in scaling culture when we went from 40 people to 400 people. [01:05:56] S1: How does that show up?
01:05:56 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[01:05:56] S1: How does that show up? [01:05:58] S0: Well, it's so many things, ranging from making sure that we keep a really high talent bar, to making sure that people are bought into the mission of the company, to even the tactical things of making sure that managers are communicating to their team about their performance review and how they're doing so that they're never surprised by a performance review. And when we have a young team with a lot of first time managers, that just creates culture challenges of people that aren't used to giving feedback and maintaining all of the values and commitment to the mission of the team. And so I think that to some extent, I agree. And I think that some of the big tech companies probably go too far on empowering HR, but I also think that it's important, and one of the large lessons we've had over the last eighteen months or so is that it's critical to really get these foundations in place as you scale headcount, otherwise it creates problems. Culture challenges. [01:06:52] S1: Before the show, we said that after the show with the dosh, a couple of people thought that like nine ninety six was the way that like McCor is run, and it's like clock in, clock out. Why is that not true, and how do you think about that?
01:06:52 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[01:06:52] S1: Before the show, we said that after the show with the dosh, a couple of people thought that like nine ninety six was the way that like McCor is run, and it's like clock in, clock out. Why is that not true, and how do you think about that? [01:07:04] S0: So the reason it's not true is that we've never mandated hours at the company. And obviously I work extremely hard. Adarsh works extremely hard. We work from when we wake up until we sleep pretty much all the time, aside from maybe working out, but I'm still thinking about work during that time. Most of our leadership team of course does as well, but at the same time, majority of my leadership team has kids, and we want them to be able to go home and see their families and all of that. And so I think that it's some combination of knowing that building a legendary company requires immense dedication to the mission of the business, while also recognizing we need to ensure that it's a sustainable environment for the best people in the world to do their life's work. [01:07:50] S1: Are you ready for a quick fire round? Of course.
01:07:50 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[01:07:50] S1: Are you ready for a quick fire round? Of course. [01:07:52] S0: Would you like to go public? Definitely. When? In the next few years, I think that all legendary companies eventually go public. And so it's an important part of the journey and maturing and having a much larger company than we have today, but it's not something we're rushing to do this year or next year, in part because we dropped out of college less than three years ago at this point, and it's still a very young business where we want to make sure that we properly actualize everything that we're working on, on the enterprise side especially, before going public. [01:08:27] S1: Don't laugh. Do you ever lie in bed at night and just go like, Wow, pretty wild. [01:08:32] S0: I'm always pinching myself, and I feel extremely grateful for the team and Adarsh and Surya and how all of them made it possible because I could have imagined a 100 things that would have gone differently, and we'd be in a totally different circumstance. [01:08:48] S1: What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? [01:08:51] S0: What have I changed my mind on? I used to have some questions around whether the Foundation Model Labs would be the largest businesses in the world because of the exact things you asked about in the context of how much those models are gonna be able to maintain pricing power amidst a competitive environment. But I think that as we've seen the sheer revenue ramp of these businesses, I've gained immense conviction that they will be the most valuable companies in the world.
01:08:51 · Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings
[01:08:51] S0: What have I changed my mind on? I used to have some questions around whether the Foundation Model Labs would be the largest businesses in the world because of the exact things you asked about in the context of how much those models are gonna be able to maintain pricing power amidst a competitive environment. But I think that as we've seen the sheer revenue ramp of these businesses, I've gained immense conviction that they will be the most valuable companies in the world. [01:09:23] S1: You can invest in OpenAI or Anthropic. Which one? Oh, I [01:09:27] S0: can't respond to that. I would [01:09:28] S1: choose that. Who do you not have as an investor in the company yet that you would most like to have? [01:09:34] S0: I really admire Jeff Bezos. I think he's so disciplined about the culture of Amazon. That's one of the things that's always stuck with me. Everyone there just understands the values and is steering in the same direction as such a strategic business leader. I've never met him, [01:09:52] S1: but I've always wanted to. Which competitor do you most respect and why?