The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:26 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:26] S1: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. It's my favorite show of the week. Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, the news that matters. And let's be clear, there is one story that matters more than any other this week. Anthropic, they finally dropped their s one. This show, we break down what you need to know, the questions that really come from it, and what we can expect when it comes to day one. And will that be the mega pop of all pops? Then we have more news in the form of Meta going to equity markets needing $95,000,000,000 to fund more insane compute buying. We have Microsoft offering to buy out about 60,000 staff members. And then we have some serious private rounds. We have everything from Instinct's rumored $30,000,000,000 round to flapping airplanes raising a billion dollars. This and so much more in the show today with Jason and Rory. But before we dive into the show today, every great software company eventually runs into money. Uber had to move it. Shopify had to hold it. Airbnb had to settle it. Money movement stopped being a fintech problem. It became a software problem. And increasingly, god, it's an AI problem too. Zero Hash is the infrastructure that makes global instant money movement seamless. One API integration for stablecoins, digital assets, and modern payment rails so builders can stay builders. Zero Hash powers some of the world's largest enterprises and financial institutions, including Kalshi, Stripe, Morgan Stanley, Gusto, and Interactive Brokers. If you're thinking about stablecoins, digital assets, and the future of money, it's time to talk to the team at Zero Hash. Visit 0hash.com/20vc to learn more. While Zero Hash powers your crypto infrastructure, Deel helps you build a global team. 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? Deel 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 Deel. It's one system, one source of truth with zero vendor gaps or manual workarounds. So build your global team with Deel. Visit deel.com/20vc and start expanding your business today. While Deel builds the team, Framer builds the site.
00:02:57 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
If you want AI that builds your real website, not just a throwaway first draft, that's Framer. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. Agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale. You bring taste, judgment, and control. The work lands on the canvas and stays editable. Build custom code components, manage CMS content, optimize SEO, and audit for issues all in one place. Enterprise grade hosting, security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs trusted by leading brands like Perplexity and Miro. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. Boys, we are back. It is my favorite time of the week, and we have some big news to start with. Anthropic files, it's s one. It's the moment that we've been waiting for. 16,300,000,000 of first half revenue. I just wanna hand over to you, Rory, because whatever metric I give, you're gonna say it was the wrong one to cite. No. [00:04:19] S2: I'm not. [00:04:19] S1: So was what was it? Which ones were you drawn to? And what is the takeaways for us from this?
00:04:19 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:04:19] S1: So was what was it? Which ones were you drawn to? And what is the takeaways for us from this? [00:04:25] S2: It was a great as one. Frankly, all the haters and the warriors, at least for now, have to go pound sand. I mean, the burden of proof is most definitely on the side of the naysayers. In other words, the s one was great in almost every dimension. It'll be widely well received. I mean, it was a... Yeah. It addressed... I mean, there's some pending open question still. They didn't give the q three revenue number. The overall revenue numbers are known, but they were amazing. It was great, better than expected on margins, op income, even op income after stock based comp. It was great on customer concentration. It was great on compute efficiency. It was stunningly great on cash and cash balance sheet. You know, I mean, it's just on every dimension, it looked really good. I mean, you have to struggle to find questions. And there are questions, and we can come to those in a second. But it was a really top tier performance.
00:05:13 · Jason Lemkin
[00:05:13] S0: As crazy as this may sound, I think folks are almost underestimating Anthropic because five years to IPO versus twenty four for SpaceX. It's not just something we've never seen before. We'll see hints of it with OpenAI's IPO, right? It might be worse. It might be better. Probably slightly worse, right, based on what we know. Right? Less capital efficient, slightly slower. But JFC, to get here in five years from a a spite startup, it's just beyond unprecedented. Time value to liquidity still matters. I mean, it's markups are fun, man. But getting out of the greatest IPO in our lifetimes and less than six years to distributions, I mean, I know Rory will will roast me for it, but you got to think, why would I do anything else? Why would I wait? Like these seed deals are like eighteen years to full distributions, right? I could get to six years in full liquidity Anthropic. And why would I waste my time with anything that's ten to twelve years to IPO, but it's just one deal in the fund, another two years to distribute, exists versus five years?
00:06:14 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:06:14] S2: No, I won't ask you, Jason. I mean, I think that I saw a tweet that basically said the same thing as every founder and every investor is looking, why am I bothering with anything else? These are such stunning numbers in terms of size, scale, and speed that you're right. It's going to dominate the results for, you know, for a long time to come, and everything else just seems a lot more work for a lot less return compared to it. And all credit to the founding team, all credit to the investors who got in early. It's just a great way to make money. Things going up into the right faster than anything else in human history for five years to add up to a trillion dollars. That's as good as getting venture. [00:06:48] S0: It Yeah, was funny watching Byron Deeter from Bessemer on the TV shows saying, This is the greatest investment in the history of Bessemer. I think Bessemer was founded in the nineteenth century or something like that. Don't know what the funny was. Their greatest investment and their largest checks, Right? So to see that all happen now after a hundred years, that's the end of... That's that's the whole story. Right? I mean, greatest greatest investment, biggest check, fastest time to to liquidity. Why are we doing anything else? [00:07:14] S1: Rory, you said about questions there. There are always cynics in the audience. There are always people throwing peanuts. If you were to to present the alternate view of, oh, here was a striking number or two, is there any that?
00:07:26 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:07:26] S2: The interesting one, 80% of the revenue comes from models that are less than six months old. And then separately, you'll note they didn't give you a gross margin, an actual gross margin calculation. They just didn't lay it out that way because you can do that in accounting. You can just put all the compute costs into one place. And then it kind of gave a footnote breakout that kind of 70%, 80% of the compute costs are for training, not for inference. In other words, once you've built, the models are wildly expensive to build. Once you build them, they're fairly wildly profitable to serve, and you want to get to serve them for six months, and then you got to invent another one. It's so not like software where you build something and maybe you can sell it for ten, fifteen years. In this case, you invent something, you get most of the revenue from it in six, twelve months, and then you have to continue to invent masses of money to build the next one. And then your question is, so what do you make of that? Because the funny thing is that that's the facts. And you could look at it one way and say, Oh my God, that's totally scary if you miss even once you're screwed. And on the other hand, you can say to yourself, That might actually be great for Anthropic, because they're best in the position to build new stuff, and they want to build new stuff. And they said that very clearly, We want to build new stuff. And if all the time... Very few people are going to be able to compete with this. Very few people... Like, if the next turn of the crank on the model... I mean, if they spend $8,000,000,000 on compute year to date, June 26, and they're going to spend $16,000,000,000 next year. There's very few people who can write a 10,000,000,012 billion dollars compute check. They can continue to invent these new models, get masses of revenue from them, and then, yeah, maybe at the back end, other folks have it. So even though that statistic was kind of weird and scary, oh my God, the shelf life of your amazing product is six months. It's actually, I would argue, an advantage if you're the kind of leader and you're willing to just be aggressive on it, right? But it does point to that. So therefore, what looked like a negative isn't, it just points to the incredibly dynamic and scary nature of the game.