The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Venky Ganesan
[00:00:00] S0: At this point in Menlo's history, right, we are going broke. We are going for the grand slam home run. We want to see everything. We want to win everything. Full stop. It is a very disorienting, confusing time. Each seed investment is an option bet. You're buying an option to see if it's an outlier. You never want to let your ego come in the way. My only ego is to make money for my investors. If there's an opportunity to make money on investment, we should do it. The rest of this is all noise. The game has changed. You have to focus on IRR. There's no way for venture to be successful in today's era without the max seven participating in everything you're doing. There's no limit to what a person can do as long as you don't care who gets the credit.
00:00:41 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:41] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I shows like this. Firstly, because I actually know what I'm talking about when we reenter the world of venture and move away from deep tech. But second, because it's a real discussion. You know, quite frankly, do you play the game on the field even when it's crazy? The music is playing louder than ever. Do you grab a chair or do you keep dancing? In this discussion with Venky, we discuss the craziness that's happening in venture, pricing, when to pay up, when not to, how to think about market sizing, how to think about when to sell, how to think about being collaborative in rounds. This and so much more in a true nerd venture fest that is this episode. But before we dive into the show today, Blitzy, the autonomous software platform that's built for enterprise scale, is proud to sponsor today's show. Enterprise code bases have grown beyond human comprehension. Tens of millions of lines, decades of tech debt, complexity existing tools cannot fathom. Blitzy starts by understanding. Thousands of agents reverse engineer your code base into a proprietary knowledge graph that maps architecture, dependencies, and business logic. That graph surfaces every CVE and zero day hiding in your code before anyone hands you a ticket. Grounded in that context, Blitzy then executes entire epics autonomously, modernize off legacy systems, ship new features five x faster, or batch remediate CVEs at scale surfaced by the platform. Blitzy not only generates code, it validates an end to end test every single line, and that's why Fortune 500 enterprises are shipping enterprise grade code five times faster. Go to blitzy.com/20vc to learn more. While Blitzy helps you build faster, Flex helps you run your finances smarter. Business owners run their whole financial life on Flex. One platform from business revenue to their personal spend. Float every purchase for sixty days. Tap capital that grows with your revenue and pay vendors in a 170 countries across 32 currencies, plus the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place. So you spend less time reconciling and more time growing. That's why thousands of owners use Flex, named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2026. Visit flex.one, that's flex,.one, and use the code 20 v c. While Flex runs your finances, Vanta keeps your compliance covered.
00:03:09 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
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00:04:29 · Venky Ganesan, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:29] S0: Oh, I love this. Thank you so much, and I cannot wait to see if I pass your test. [00:04:34] S1: Dude, you'll pass my test. Now I want to use this as a real learning discussion for me because I wanna build a firm like Manlow, and I wanna learn from the wisdom that you've had now seeing multiple different cycles. You just told me a story that I loved, and it was from two decades ago, holding a sudden stock. Can you tell me that story and your takeaway?
00:04:34 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:04:34] S1: Dude, you'll pass my test. Now I want to use this as a real learning discussion for me because I wanna build a firm like Manlow, and I wanna learn from the wisdom that you've had now seeing multiple different cycles. You just told me a story that I loved, and it was from two decades ago, holding a sudden stock. Can you tell me that story and your takeaway? [00:04:54] S0: Yeah, so a little bit of a past. Previously, I was at a firm called Globespan Capital Partners, we happened to be investors in a company called AVNX, which is nobody knows about this company, AVNX. I remember the stock symbol even now. I was an associate, did not have carry the fund. AVNX was a big winner, goes public. They gave the associates a chance to own shares of the IPO. So I bought some shares of the IPO. I remember putting the princely sum of $5,000 And at one point, AVONEX got up to 200,000. It was such a big push on my portfolio. And my wife was much smarter than me. She was my fiance then. We were getting married. She said, hey, why don't you sell some so that we can have something for a down payment for the house? And I was like, no, no, no. AVONEX is gonna go up. Optical components is a critical part of the Internet bubble. It's gonna go... We're gonna make a million dollars on it. And you know how the story ends, right? It drops 90%, and I think I sell it for around 8 to $9,000. So I call it the most important lesson I learned from a 90% loss, which is at some point, you should take some chips off the table.
00:05:53 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:05:53] S1: I'm not sure what to take from that because I know I remember having Jake Saper on from Emergence. And when he broke down Emergence's returns, basically, you just saw this one meteoric outlier that returned 90 to 90. Viva? Viva, yes, but it was actually Salesforce. Wow. And if they had have held it longer and longer, obviously, it would have been even more meteoric. And so I guess my question is, what should we take from that? Because we also see the dangers of selling too early. [00:06:21] S0: Agreed. I I think a lot of this advice depends on the context of who you are as a person and what your balance sheet is. At this point in Menlo's history, right, we are going broke. We are going for the grand slam home run because we have had home runs before. We have a history of putting it on the table. As a 24 year old with very little in your bank account, when you have that kind of, for me, AvanaX game changing money, it just makes economic sense to take some off the table. And so I do think, like, the advice is there's no one size fits all for these things.