The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:50:10 · Venky Ganesan, Harry Stebbings
[00:50:10] S0: We are not a shareholder of Snap, but look, look, Ev is a product genius. There's no question about that. Genius. Right? His vision for Snapchat and what is executed. I think it would be fair to say you have not been rewarded being a shareholder of Snap, at least for the last seven, eight years. [00:50:24] S1: Not been rewarded. I was trying to be polite here. That's like giving Titanic an eight out of 10 in the holiday review book. Like, [00:50:33] S0: not being rewarded. [00:50:34] S1: I've not been rewarded. Duh, blow hard. Yeah. No. That... That's a good way to put it. Okay. That's really interesting. Are you worried by how much money is being made by people? Like, which... I'm seeing sales reps at OpenAI walk out with $3,040,000,000 bucks. [00:50:50] S0: You know, here's the thing. I always believe this. Money doesn't change people. It reveals them. So so what I mean by that is money and power, people think, changes people. No. It only reveals them. What it means is like if you're an asshole before, when you have money and power, you reveal that. What I have found is that the people who are really motivated, they're gonna be motivated even if they have lots of money. And the people who are not motivated who are acting it, when the money shows up, they will opt out. And so to me, it won't change for the A players because for the A players, money is just a way of keeping score, but what they love is the game.
00:50:50 · Venky Ganesan, Harry Stebbings
[00:50:50] S0: You know, here's the thing. I always believe this. Money doesn't change people. It reveals them. So so what I mean by that is money and power, people think, changes people. No. It only reveals them. What it means is like if you're an asshole before, when you have money and power, you reveal that. What I have found is that the people who are really motivated, they're gonna be motivated even if they have lots of money. And the people who are not motivated who are acting it, when the money shows up, they will opt out. And so to me, it won't change for the A players because for the A players, money is just a way of keeping score, but what they love is the game. [00:51:23] S1: So you're not worried about house prices in The Bay and the inflation that we're gonna see with IPOs from SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, that worries you? Of course it does. I mean, it changes the character of the place. [00:51:37] S0: But the real issue we have, and this is the issue in California, hopefully not in London, is a question of supply. It's not a question of demand. Like at the end of the day, we have tremendously increased the cost of... In the process of building a house. There's no supply coming in. So any uptick in demand results in prices going up. The way to address that is not to worry about the demand, to increase the supply of housing stock. And we just do not have the collective willpower in this. For a progressive state, there's more nimbyism in California than I expected, and the nimbyism prevents you from building more housing stock.
00:51:37 · Venky Ganesan, Harry Stebbings
[00:51:37] S0: But the real issue we have, and this is the issue in California, hopefully not in London, is a question of supply. It's not a question of demand. Like at the end of the day, we have tremendously increased the cost of... In the process of building a house. There's no supply coming in. So any uptick in demand results in prices going up. The way to address that is not to worry about the demand, to increase the supply of housing stock. And we just do not have the collective willpower in this. For a progressive state, there's more nimbyism in California than I expected, and the nimbyism prevents you from building more housing stock. [00:52:11] S1: I saw a tweet where you said something. You responded to Brian Armstrong. I do my work. [00:52:18] S0: Okay. Alright. That's dangerous. [00:52:19] S1: Yeah. It is dangerous, but I'm I'm joining you on this side if this is where you're going. And you said, like, I I appreciate your leadership through the woke times.
00:52:19 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:52:19] S1: Yeah. It is dangerous, but I'm I'm joining you on this side if this is where you're going. And you said, like, I I appreciate your leadership through the woke times. [00:52:28] S0: I mean, I think I think what I particularly appreciated about Brian is that he laid out his principles of what he believed, and he told people, hey, if you really want to engage in political activism, then Coinbase is not the place for you because we do not want to have political dialogue here. And if you... If that's important for you, you should go and find a place in which you can do it. I think that takes courage to say, and I think... But it's being true to what he wanted to do. And to me, I think that's most... That's most important is try to be authentic to who you are, and I think I appreciated him being authentic when... I think it came at a cost. Right? Definitely, he was castigated in the press and maybe on Twitter, and he had people leave. But I think he ultimately said, we want people who are authentic to point based values articulated by me, the founder. [00:53:12] S1: Have you ever been inauthentic to who you are?
00:53:12 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:53:12] S1: Have you ever been inauthentic to who you are? [00:53:14] S0: I think there are times when you say certain things to founders because you want them to like you or you want to win a deal that may not be truly authentic. What I'll tell you is that I have dealt with my own insecurities and feeling like an impostor. And I've gotten more comfortable in my skin now where I just feel like I just don't do it. And if it means I have to say something inauthentic to me to win the deal, I'd rather not win it. But that's easy to say because I'm sort of at the point in my life I like, you know, that win doesn't matter. Of course, I like to win, but it's not going to change my life. So I always say it's very different when you're a 25 year old and you're trying to build a career. You do whatever it takes to win. And so in some way, morality is sort of a privilege to the people who already succeeded. It's easy to be moral now when you already have the things you have. The question is, will I be a moral person if I were to go back twenty years ago and start that? That's the real test. And I don't think I've lived to that test as much as I would like. [00:54:16] S1: Are you a better investor now you're richer?
00:54:16 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:54:16] S1: Are you a better investor now you're richer? [00:54:19] S0: Yes. You're not afraid as much. You're not afraid of failure. You're willing to go all in and go to the hilt. And so I I just think you can go for broke more easily. It's not like... Think about it on a poker table. The guy with the big amount of chips has so much leverage to win. Right? They they can see more cards than theirs. And so ironically, and this is why I think, you know, like the way our capitalism system is set up, the rich are gonna get richer because they just have more opportunities to be the bully in the poker table. [00:54:48] S1: Does that mean emerging managers are just in the old stacked against some game? I don't see... And forgive me for this, Ben. I don't like binaries, but fuck your own media, so you kinda have to do binaries. It depends. Doesn't sell. 30 to $100,000,000 funds are just the worst place [00:55:03] S0: to be. Yes. They are today. That's a tough place to be because you're playing in a poker table where people have such high chip stacks. [00:55:09] S1: I think they were five years ago, dude. [00:55:11] S0: I think what happens is if you are lucky enough, right, and I don't know if this true, but I'm sure if you were to go and look at the cap table, there was some small investor who wrote a check. Oh, Arginine wrote a check into Anthropic. Now, maybe he didn't have a fund then, but like you wrote a check, you were a 30,000,000 to $50,000,000 check, you wrote a check into the Anthropic round, not the $4,000,000,000 round we did, but much earlier. You're doing fine.