The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:00] S0: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stabbings, and it's the best show of the week. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lampkin discussing the biggest news in tech. So this week, number one, pacing the frontier. We discuss what it means for infrastructure, what it means for energy, and what it means for the biggest frontier model providers. Next up, AI assistant war. We've got town, we've got instinct on the startup end, and we've got Zuck and Muse on the incumbent end. What happens here? Who wins? Next up, bending spoons, baby. They are on an acquisition spree, having bought Miro for $1,350,000,000. And then finally, staying with Europeans punching above their weight, Mr. Owl raises €3,000,000,000, Europe's largest ever tech funding round. This and so much more in what is always quite a colorful discussion with Rory and Jason. But before we dive into the show today, when you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign these days without proof of your security. Here's what happens if you're not prepared. A prospect asks for proof of compliance. The deal stalls when you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the road map to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into this horrible fire drill. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC two, ISO 27,001, HIPAA, and GDPR, but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. So your deals keep moving and your engineers really keep building. Now access the Vanta agent everywhere you work even if your team lives in Claude or Cursor. And that's why Vanta's trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey, and Reiter. So prove you're ready for business and get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/20vc. That's vanta.com/20vc. While Vanta keeps compliance covered, Deal helps you hire globally. We get it. Global IT can be a headache. New hire in Tokyo, but the laptop, well, it's stuck in London. Someone left the company last week. Wait. Is that access already revoked? Deal IT handles hardware, software, and access to across a 130 countries from one system. You have the right to be impressed. Brands like eleven Labs are already managing their global IT at scale with Deal.
00:02:26 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
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00:03:41 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:03:41] S1: You have now arrived at your destination. [00:03:45] S0: Boys, we are back. Now I was thinking about where we should start, and in all honesty, I just thought it'd be egregious to not start with the most important thing I thought, which was Dario coming out and saying that we need to pace the frontier, to which Sam Altman then agreed with him, and then Elon too agreed that it is important now to put in place some form of external regulatory body to slow down, regulate the capabilities moving forward of model providers. How do we think about this?
00:04:14 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:04:14] S1: It's been fairly universally panned. I tend to be on the side of the people who are saying that the hostile receptionists deserve. What is the problem you're trying to solve? Dario... If you read the note, Dario's definition of the problem was fairly well defined. It was cyber attacks. It was economics, and then it was we lose control of the AI. So even though that sounds like a lot, it's fairly controlled. The guy who quit and started this crazy thing as a coxswain or whatever his name is, and then the employee within Anthropic kind of chiming in saying, I think there's a ten percent chance of, you know, human extinction in ten years. That's a very different thing. So let's deal with that first of all, because I'm just gonna call such bullshit. And to be fair, and this is why I'm saying it's complex, is every time Derry makes a comment, you know, a lot of the tweets back are, hey. If you're gonna blow up the world, you should stop. And they're right. The truth is he didn't actually say they were, to be fair. He didn't talk about p doom, but I'm gonna do the same thing as everyone else. I'm just gonna throw some rocks first. If the feds really thought that there was someone in Downtown San Francisco building a technology that was gonna blow up the fucking world, had a 10% chance of blowing up the world in the next ten years, They would move in with a SWAT team, kill everyone in the place, close it down. Replace the word AI with, we're building a nuclear reactor. It's totally safe right now, but there's a 10% chance it goes wrong in the next five years and blows up the world. Issue that statement how many seconds after that before the entire weight of the US military is shutting you down? What it says is is this... These kind of 10% p doom people, the truth is either the US government is asleep, which I doubt, or b, it's looking at this going, this is a bunch of excited teenagers. We'll step in later if it gets crazy. My my first point is the... To be fair to Dario, not Dario, but the, oh my god. The world's gonna end. We're gonna destroy the world, but we're gonna keep doing it, people. I cling to the hope that the US government, if it was a real issue, we'd do something. Right? So I I think all that's overwrought bullshit, which is different than saying what Dario said is overwrought bullshit. It's just not realistic.
00:06:13 · Rory O'Driscoll
Dario stuff, on the other hand, it's hard not to disagree that the cyber risk is real. Of the three risks he raised, the cyber risk, real. The economic risk, I would all be unemployed, think it's a little bit bullshit. And then the third one, we lose control of the agents hard to assess. So, okay, that's the problem he's trying to solve. And then the solutions range from the unlikely to the impossible. You know, the unlikely is, yeah, we're gonna install third party monitoring agents voluntarily, but then the ask is that it be made a requirement. That's the first second thing is all the democratic governments have to agree, and that'll be easy because we get on so well with Canada and Europe right now. And then the third thing is we have to agree with the Chinese, and that's gonna go super great. Though it might go greater than the Canadians because we like the Chinese more than the Canadians. We should put in the Russians. We get on great with them. So stepping back from the bullshit side two and side three. Right? Just proposal one, which is we're gonna introduce these kind of third party monitors. And if it's voluntary, knock yourself out. You do whatever you want, Dario. Right? If the government decides that they should do something, which is different than Dario thinking they should do something, then it's not gonna be your friend's regulator. You're not gonna get to choose that. It's gonna be a law and there's gonna be regulators, just like bank regulators. And I'm not sure that's a great idea. I'm not sure it'll work really well for innovation. But if it does happen, mean, lot of the comments were either this is silly, we don't need it, or if we do need it, well, who the fuck are you to tell us what we need? We're a government. I'm kinda sympathetic to Bodak responses. Sorry. That was a vent, but I just think it's so overwrought. Sorry, Jason. I just launched. No.
00:07:49 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:07:49] S2: No. No. My very tactical view, and then I'll give you... My very tactical view was this was just a risk factor in an s one done live. My tactical view is Anthropix going public. He is just, you know, in part because of the employee that worked there four weeks or eight weeks that said there's a 10 risk of destroying humanity, which many agreed with. But he's just getting ahead of a risk factor so that when the $2,000,000,000,000 IPO happens, it's a non issue. I honestly think he's enunciating a risk factor. We're ahead of it. We're gonna debate it as a society. And so when we go on the roadshow to New York and and everywhere else, no one cares. It's not even cynical. I think it's your job as CEO. That that was less less discussed. [00:08:26] S1: I'm sorry. You can't say... I mean, words have meaning. If you... And, again, I'm gonna be fair to doubt. He didn't say 10% chance of blowing up the world. [00:08:33] S2: He responded to it.