The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:18:20 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:18:20] S0: Do we see ripple effects in... Across the infrastructure layer, in publics, in privates? [00:18:27] S1: There was a one day minor hit on kinda the semi stocks on that first day. Separately, pleasingly, CrowdStrike and all the cyber stocks jumped 10%. So it's actually interesting. I looked at Monday, and we're recording this on Tuesday. It'll appear on Thursday, which is a whole lifetime away in the world we live now. But the instant response was slight markdown on semis and the AI CapEx, but not a lot. So no discern... I mean, it's maybe... Which implied some level of slowdown. Significant markup on the cyber stocks because it looks like that's where the actual reality of the problem exists. And overall, I always look at World Cloud, which is the software index, versus SOX, which is a semiconductor index. And it was a great day for World Cloud relative to SOX. Software up, semi slightly down, but not big. I mean, loved... Saw a tweet. Market moves point 1% on news of 10% probability of extinction. In other words, capitalism took on board the risk and said, it'll be fine.
00:19:28 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:19:28] S2: I mean, this this may be like a much faster version of the twenties. There's no regulation. Everyone just wants to get rich as f in the twenties. Right? And what our version of 1929 will be for AI? You know, we don't know yet, but everyone just wants to get rich. $2,000,000,000 is just a start around adventure today. I was literally thinking that today when I saw Shield raise at 20 or 30,000,000,000 and they had a little chart. I'm like, wow, 2,000,000,000 is a start around now in today's world. It's just so much money and AI is so much money that it's just too easy to take advantage of the dark version if that's how you make money. It's too easy for you to be... Because every LLM has a dark version, it's too easy to cut that corner if that's how you can get raise at 1,000,000,000 after demo day. It's too easy. [00:20:08] S1: I don't think that's actually what I have. I actually think a different version of the same thing is this. Everyone's saying, oh my god, this is evil and bad and could be dangerous. And as it were, they're purging their conscience by worrying. But, Jason, you're exactly right. No one's saying I'm gonna push away from the table. And I don't think the people running some of these companies, especially on Tropic and Obey, oddly enough... I mean, you gotta defend them a They're not profit maximizers. If they were profit maximizers, they would own more than 2% in the case of Dario and 0% in the case of Sam.
00:20:08 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:20:08] S1: I don't think that's actually what I have. I actually think a different version of the same thing is this. Everyone's saying, oh my god, this is evil and bad and could be dangerous. And as it were, they're purging their conscience by worrying. But, Jason, you're exactly right. No one's saying I'm gonna push away from the table. And I don't think the people running some of these companies, especially on Tropic and Obey, oddly enough... I mean, you gotta defend them a They're not profit maximizers. If they were profit maximizers, they would own more than 2% in the case of Dario and 0% in the case of Sam. [00:20:36] S2: It's the it's the other folks that we should be worried about, not the three of them. We actually have half decent stewards at the top. Sam, Dario and Elon are about as good as... They may be better in theory, but in practice we can't get three better stewards. They have the right reasons to do what they're doing. The real problem is that ten or fifteen percent of founders are sociopaths. They genuinely are. In fact, especially the successful ones it lets you drive will something out of nothing into existence the ability to manipulate people the ability to have that look and do it that's where the bad people using AI come from the sociopaths you really don't think ten percent of the founders you've ever invested in are sociopaths? Of course they are.
00:20:36 · Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:20:36] S2: It's the it's the other folks that we should be worried about, not the three of them. We actually have half decent stewards at the top. Sam, Dario and Elon are about as good as... They may be better in theory, but in practice we can't get three better stewards. They have the right reasons to do what they're doing. The real problem is that ten or fifteen percent of founders are sociopaths. They genuinely are. In fact, especially the successful ones it lets you drive will something out of nothing into existence the ability to manipulate people the ability to have that look and do it that's where the bad people using AI come from the sociopaths you really don't think ten percent of the founders you've ever invested in are sociopaths? Of course they are. [00:21:11] S0: We're gonna move on, but fantastic. Next, we have the AI assistant race that we touched on last week, but I was really annoyed because we actually missed Matter releasing news, which is Matter's product that is an AI assistant in many ways. [00:21:27] S1: What what did you say, Harry? We didn't miss it. [00:21:29] S0: Well, like, it came out after we recorded the show. [00:21:31] S1: Correct. I mean, I'm actually gonna give us an a. I'm gonna give us an a. We recorded on Tuesday because I... Because you used that clip of me. On Tuesday, I was like, somewhere, there were 20 meta engineers locked in a room being told to ship something. We said that on Tuesday. On Wednesday, news shipped and on Thursday the pod shipped. So I think we nailed it, man.
00:21:31 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:21:31] S1: Correct. I mean, I'm actually gonna give us an a. I'm gonna give us an a. We recorded on Tuesday because I... Because you used that clip of me. On Tuesday, I was like, somewhere, there were 20 meta engineers locked in a room being told to ship something. We said that on Tuesday. On Wednesday, news shipped and on Thursday the pod shipped. So I think we nailed it, man. [00:21:49] S2: You just didn't know it was 500, not 20. That's the only slight thing that was missed. It's 500. You didn't realize that the minute OpenClaw took off, Zuck took a huge chunk of his AI team and said we're building OpenClaw for consumers. And from that night on they people work days and nights. I mean I was logging bugs over the Muse weekend on Twitter for fun. The engineering team was responding in real time Saturday night, Saturday morning, Sunday morning. I mean they're working nine ninety six on this thing. This is not 20 people. This is a top priority since OpenClaw launched, Right? That's... It's interesting it came out seemingly oddly after some of the other agents, but this has been a a P one since OpenClaw. Right? Because, you know, people were like lining the streets with their Mac minis trying to get figured out how to run an agent. Now I can do it on Facebook. [00:22:32] S0: Well, let... Let's actually just start with this, Roy. And I think you'll be as interested in I am by Jason's analysis. [00:22:37] S1: Yes. [00:22:38] S0: I'm not able to use it being in The UK, [00:22:40] S1: so would love your thoughts. [00:22:41] S0: Jason [00:22:41] S2: I'll get you a VPN.
00:22:41 · Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:22:41] S2: I'll get you a VPN. [00:22:43] S0: Yeah. Thanks, dude. What did you think? How good is it? How good a response is it to instincts? What do we think?