The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:30 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:30] S2: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it's the show that we all freaking wait for. Let's be honest. Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, the biggest news in tech. What is going down this week? Anthropic baby, they pushed the IPO. A la Pooh Bell. We have to wait longer. Maybe it's November. Then we have Meta. Alex Wang is delivering the goods. Muse holds number one spot on the App Store. They are crushing and handing it to Instinct. Maybe the AI assistant race really is on. Then we have chat GBT inventor shipping JEV, one of the most popular tools today becoming Vercel's fastest ever launch. Then we have Lampkin's deep dive with the IC that is Jason Lampkin. Do we put money into Ligure at 11,000,000,000? Do we do Crusoe at a $30,000,000,000 price? And then do we do Factory at a $5,000,000,000 price? Finally, Air Wallachs versus Keith Raboy. This show goes on and why Sidney Sweeney should come out as the ambassador for Air Wallachs. But before we dive into the show today, you have the idea, but with most AI tools, you hit a wall. The setup, the config, the gap between what you pictured and what you actually ship. Well, Base 44 is where that wall disappears. You describe it? Yeah. Base 44 builds it. Apps, websites, AI agents, real working products, built in minutes using nothing but plain language. And it's all batteries included. The back end, the database, the authentication, the hosting, the heavy lifting is handled, so you just really stay in the flow. This doesn't just take the busy work off your plate, but it gives you an advantage and pushes you past what you thought you could build alone. So in this market, fast is the baseline. To win, you just have to be first. Base 44 is that edge, the move that skips the troubleshooting and gets you straight to the breakthrough. Build your next thing at base44.com. That's base44.com. While Base forty four turns ideas into apps, Plort turns conversations into insights. Founders and operators spend way too much time every week jumping between meetings, investor calls, brainstorms, customer conversations, and then trying to piece everything back together afterwards. And that's why I've been using Plaud.
00:02:38 · Harry Stebbings
Plaud instantly captures conversations, voice notes, meetings, random ideas with one press, and then turns them into clean summaries, action items, mind maps, and searchable notes that you can actually come back to later. Honestly, it feels less like a recorder and more like an AI powered, like, brain memory system. And the crazy part is the hardware itself. The Plaud Note Pro is literally as small and thin as a credit card, so it's just always with you when something important comes up. There are already more than 2,000,000 founders, operators, investors, consultants, and professionals using Plaud to stay organized. So think more clearly and stop losing great ideas and important details. Go to plaud.ai/20vc and use the code two zero v c for 10% off. That's plaud.ai slash two zero v c, and use the code two zero v c for 10% off. While Plaud captures the conversation, Finn helps continue it. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job. Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience from service to sales to success and beyond. Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers. It's powered by custom models, trained on years of real customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. Agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self manageable so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves. No third parties required. Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash, and crypto.com already use and love Fin to deliver better customer experiences. So for a limited time, you can get $500 a month in Fin credits for your first three months. Learn more at fin.aiforward20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. Boys, another week, and I wanted to start with the news that Anthropic pushes its $2,000,000,000,000 IPO from October to November. Some people are suggesting that it's the first signs of a cracking in the market. It's following the pacing the frontier that we discussed last week. To what extent do you agree with that?
00:04:53 · Harry Stebbings
Or to what extent do you think it really is just them wanting to have a great q three prospect prospectus and needing more time for those numbers to show through?
00:05:03 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:05:03] S1: I think that's the answer. I think the whole crack in the market thing, let's leave that to one side for now. We'll talk about it later. Ditto the pacing stuff, which clearly has also been shown to be not really believed even by the people who said it. It really boils down to what you said. They had an amazing q two. They finally became bigger than OpenAI. And remember, we talked about this. OpenAI then responded furiously in July, started tweeting all that my Q3 numbers are amazing story and really pushing back. And some of the data supports that. So my guess is the banker said, hey, if you want a really clean story, it would be great to incorporate a quarter that reflects this noise instead of going out in October where you won't be able to share your October numbers. It's kind of that weird thing, go out in November where it's clean, you print your October numbers, you drop them in and you go. So from a programming kind of timing perspective, it just all makes sense. It's a cleaner deal. Whether it turns out to be a wise decision or not, we can come back to in a second, but just from a... It's always weird to go out after you have your numbers, but before you can share the numbers. So after the end of your quarter, but before you've kind of finalized and audited them, especially for what looks like quite a pivotal quarter. So it totally made sense. If I'm a banker, I'm thinking, we do this in October, it's going to be a lot of explaining. If we do this in November, the numbers will talk.
00:06:24 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:06:24] S0: Having said that, that sounds alright to me. Right? But it's said to me, maybe there's just a hint of worry that getting 30x or 20x oversubscribed or whoever they want it, you know, at the most massive IPO of our lifetimes. Maybe there's just a hint of stress on the pre on the pre conversations. Right? [00:06:39] S1: I agree. And that's why I made a comment earlier about is it a good decision or not? Like, if the world goes to hell in a handbasket in November, you'll look back and go, damn. We should have gone when we had the chance. Because you are a CFO who said, we're just doing it. I don't care about your messy story. We're gonna tell a good story. If the price ends up between 1.5 instead of two because it's a messy story, I don't care. I'm willing to live with that. And that's the approach you take if you felt it was hell or high water. I gotta get this money. Clearly, the fact that they didn't take that approach means they decided it's not hell or high water. They're confident. Yeah. They're willing to take another month of timing risk, probably for some significant valuation pop, which is what you do when you think you have lots of time and you're in a good commanding position. I mean, if I was on that board, it's 90% certain that this is a good decision, and a clean story in Q four is better than a messy story in October. And there's always that 10% chance the world goes crazy, and you look back and you go, damn. Should've taken the 100,000,000,000.
00:06:39 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:06:39] S1: I agree. And that's why I made a comment earlier about is it a good decision or not? Like, if the world goes to hell in a handbasket in November, you'll look back and go, damn. We should have gone when we had the chance. Because you are a CFO who said, we're just doing it. I don't care about your messy story. We're gonna tell a good story. If the price ends up between 1.5 instead of two because it's a messy story, I don't care. I'm willing to live with that. And that's the approach you take if you felt it was hell or high water. I gotta get this money. Clearly, the fact that they didn't take that approach means they decided it's not hell or high water. They're confident. Yeah. They're willing to take another month of timing risk, probably for some significant valuation pop, which is what you do when you think you have lots of time and you're in a good commanding position. I mean, if I was on that board, it's 90% certain that this is a good decision, and a clean story in Q four is better than a messy story in October. And there's always that 10% chance the world goes crazy, and you look back and you go, damn. Should've taken the 100,000,000,000. [00:07:38] S2: I was walking with a friend of mine the other day, and he said, Harry... And a very successful multibillionaire investor. He said, Harry, how the do these frontier model providers go public when no one is willing to provide liability insurance? You have swarms of rogue agents doing whatever you want. How how on earth do they go public? Who's liable?