The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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?
00:22:49 · Jason Lemkin
[00:22:49] S2: Well, first of all, as software, it's very, very, very good. It instantly works. This is the definition of great software. Like, you just can't believe how well it works because all the hard work was done that you can't see. Most of the things you wanted to do create a reservation, send an email to... I asked Muse to send us a bunch of stories for this show. It sent it to me and Harry and I forwarded it to Rory. I did it at the right time. It sent it to us, right? I had it rebuild the entire sastro.com website for me. Log into WordPress, redo it. It did a pretty good job of it. A lot of the things you wanted to do it just works. I'll add one more thought and then the the meta question. The really interesting thing is you know we we didn't talk about but it is something I know a little about. It's not cheap. Okay? You're giving everybody up to a certain point a free VM which I think two CPUs, two GPUs, eight gigabytes around 100 gigs of storage or something. I do know that like the Replitz, Lovable, Vercels and others, it costs about 3 to $4 per person to deliver that. And Muse is at the edge of it. It gives you more than they do. Okay? And those guys are working on it every week because it's such a huge part of their COGS, right? Because every time you spool up a website, not a free one but a paid one, they've got a $3 to $4 nut. You know, Wix before Base44 has a 2¢ nut to serve that website. Now it's $3.04 dollars So they're very incented every day to work that down, right? Meta is lucky. Not only does it already have the infrastructure, right? So we could argue whether it's free, but it has tons of infrastructure. This is running on its own LLM, Muse LLM. So it has a massive infrastructure and LL benefit that no one else has. That's why it's fast. That's why it works well. That's why you get more VPUs, more GPUs, more everything. So I think from an infrastructure perspective, it's almost no one can compete. You get all the VM, all the infrastructure, all the storage, and they have their own LLM use. And my learning is for these lay usages, like what we're talking about, not frontier drug discovery. News LM is really good for this. But the question is, does it matter?
00:24:43 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:24:43] S0: What do you mean does it matter? Sorry. [00:24:45] S2: Yeah. What's the killer app? Another reservation at a Cheesecake Factory or TGI Fridays? We need to see the VisiCalc of Muse. We need to see what is the killer app. Every horizontal platform needs a, you know, traditionally needs some sort of killer app, right? I'm just skeptical. I'm just wondering. Right? I don't think... And this whole thing, I don't think there was a killer app for OpenClaw. I don't I don't know if there is a killer app for Muse because... Or Instinct because there wasn't one for OpenClaw. [00:25:12] S0: Is it is it not being your discovery mechanism to shopping like a a WeChat, a super app? You know, Zucker's spoken about taking portions of transactions as being the business model as well. The model's good, but what [00:25:26] S2: are what are his examples? Scheduling his daughter's carpool. Is that really what a trillionaire needs to do with a general... He can't even come up with a good use case of views for himself. He's making up consumer y things. I had to schedule ballet lessons for my daughter. I mean, great, but you need to run this thing eight hours a day. I think like Claude Code or Codex to really matter. And so if we're in it eight hours a day like a super app, it's cool. If it's a random task, I'm just waiting to see what the killer app is. Muse is really fun. Like it's so beautiful. The beauty is it gives you all the ideas. It has an idea tab, and it tells you all the things to do. I've done most of them, and they're great. I just don't know if it's killer.
00:25:26 · Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:25:26] S2: are what are his examples? Scheduling his daughter's carpool. Is that really what a trillionaire needs to do with a general... He can't even come up with a good use case of views for himself. He's making up consumer y things. I had to schedule ballet lessons for my daughter. I mean, great, but you need to run this thing eight hours a day. I think like Claude Code or Codex to really matter. And so if we're in it eight hours a day like a super app, it's cool. If it's a random task, I'm just waiting to see what the killer app is. Muse is really fun. Like it's so beautiful. The beauty is it gives you all the ideas. It has an idea tab, and it tells you all the things to do. I've done most of them, and they're great. I just don't know if it's killer. [00:26:04] S0: I don't know if it needs to be. And I know that sounds stupid, but no, but I use Instinct in a similar power user way. I think latency is a real problem with instinct, by the way, which might not be with matter. Wait minutes for responses. Minutes. It's like the first days of chat GPT. It's a real problem. But I don't know if it needs to be. It does all of my bookings, travel, restaurants. It does all of my shopping. It's very good. It does all of my calendar invites. I know there's no killer app, but it's just incrementally better than everything else. I don't know, but there's lots of little bits not good enough.
00:26:36 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:26:36] S1: I have a feeling it might be. I I think... Well, I'm skeptical of the category on a stand alone basis. But, you know, I always have my three venture questions. Is this a category? Who's the winner? And are we getting paid for the risk? And is this a category question? Is is there a role for AI in a kind of personal assistant messenger type thing? And I will say having used both Instinct and Muse, I can see it. I don't know if I love the word killer app because a single thing that does everything, you know, that that that just ignites a platform like VisiCal... Let's leave let's leave the killer app concept out there. Right? At the margin, you kinda go, yeah, I'd use this. You have the example from long ago of WeChat, you know, Chinese messaging systems having very much a super app. Facebook tried to do that with the messenger. It didn't take off Because the truth is the UI, pre AI, the UI of trying to book things on a chatbot is a pain in the butt. It's actually a lot easier just to go to the United website and see all the flights at the same time and book it. It is possible that with intelligence at the back end as a thing from, you know, non intelligence, you you actually have an interaction on a mobile device where enough of the intelligence is in the cloud that it can do a lot more for you. It knows a lot more about for you, and it just becomes an easy place to get shit done. And therefore, to your point, Howard, at the margin, you can imagine people using this. If you're a Facebook user, you get muse, you're a happy little camper, you chug along. Do I think there's more of this going to happen? Yes. To me, the interesting question is, the second one is, do you think it's a standalone company that wins here, or do you think it's going to be Facebook with Muse and OpenAI with whatever product they come up with? Do you think that the instincts of this world can build a standalone business here, giving that... To put it out there, having raised at something like 50 pre less than five months ago, then 400 pre, then a couple of billion pre, then now rumor has it raising at nought to 10,000,000,000?