The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:00:00] S0: But you gotta have billion dollar positions in everything in in Big Boy Venture today, think. Its billion dollar positions are nothing. There's no point in investing otherwise with large funds. The entry price... 50,000,000, a 100,000,000 seeds, you can't make money. [00:00:13] S1: If the end user demand is there, then everything is gonna work out. [00:00:17] S0: CoreWeave is B tier compared to NVIDIA and friends. Oracle is B tier. [00:00:21] S1: Compared to NVIDIA, we're all fucking B tier assets. How about that? [00:00:24] S0: I actually think code review is the single most important category today in software. [00:00:28] S1: Coding is the mother lode of LLM value. [00:00:31] S0: We are just taking revenue multiples too far today. Bending spoons is like the Berkshire version of software. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. It's my favorite show of
00:00:40 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:40] S2: the week. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, the biggest news in tech. So what are we talking about today? Well, are the AI cracks starting to show? Coolweave is hit pretty hard. Next up, we have Anthropic. The talk of IPO town is it could be priced at 1,500,000,000,000, not the 2,000,000,000,000 originally suggested. Then we move down to the world of private markets where we have Modal, which closes a $15,750,000,000 valuation fundraise. Anjuril tenders at 90,000,000,000, and then welcome to the agent land. We have Town that raised a $108,000,000 at a $1,000,000,000 valuation. This and so much more in the episode today. But before we dive into the show today, Base 44 is one of those products used, and I just thought straight away, man, I wish I'd had this when I started 20 VC with $50 and no contacts in Venture. I wanted to see what it could do, so I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsored contacts, follow ups, all in one amazing location. I described it in plain English. A few minutes later, I had the product open in front of me. Database, login, back end, and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy. And that's what I loved. I didn't write a long spec. I didn't stitch five different tools together. I built the thing, and I started using it. For any founder listening, that's the point. The faster you turn an idea into something real, the faster you launch. Apps, dashboards, internal systems, AI agents, whatever you need to build, Base forty four gets you there. Go to base44.com/20vc. That's base44.com/20vc. While Base 44 helps you build, AlphaSense helps you find answers really, really fast. We used AlphaSense on an investment that helped us close an $8,000,000 deal. $8,000,000, baby. That's a lot of money. That's why I'm genuinely excited to have them as a partner on 20 VC. C. AlphaSense combines AI with one of the world's deepest libraries of market intelligence, including expert interviews, broker research, earnings calls, company filings, and real time news. Every answer is grounded in this incredibly trusted evidence and fully traceable to the original source, which is so important. So you can make really high conviction decisions with confidence. But the best part, they're building super analyst and always on AI analyst.
00:03:00 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
So instead of starting your day with another search, you'll start with work you already done, your coverage monitored, the important developments surfaced, and your investment brief already waiting for you. See for yourself. Head to alphasense.com/20vc. That's alpha-sense.com/20vc. While AlphaSense finds insights, Intercom helps you serve customers. 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. 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 Finn credits for your first three months. Learn more at finn.ai/20vc. [00:04:22] S1: You have now arrived at your destination.
00:04:22 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:04:22] S1: You have now arrived at your destination. [00:04:25] S2: Boys, I just tweeted something that has got a rather large response from a founder community. I think Venture is broken today in the way that I'm meeting more and more companies that fit this profile. I just met a company today, and I have a company that's 20,000,000 in ARR, growing incredibly fast, six, 700% profitable, brilliant business with a great team, crickets. VCs do not want it. Is venture broken today? [00:04:53] S0: Look, I'm sure Rory has a of thoughts. I'll just add one one ahead of it, is we were talking about this company, which will be nameless. Right? I invested in a in a vaguely similar company, like, doing similar things for similar sized companies. They raised about a $3,000,000 seed round, and they're planning that's it, even with this type of growth, even with it all being agentic, even with it all being all the things we're supposed to be excited about, right? AI and voice and resolution agents, it does actually something that's pretty somewhat unique, but they're literally planning to never raise again because you get the fifteen percent eighteen a month venture update, but no one wants to meet. It's like, well, I'll put in a little more money, but it may have mean some ways in the old days where early investors may need to carry you if you're anything that's not hyper growth and the right boxes to check. Right? The three bike check. Your investors may have to carry you. It's like the old days.
00:04:53 · Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:53] S0: Look, I'm sure Rory has a of thoughts. I'll just add one one ahead of it, is we were talking about this company, which will be nameless. Right? I invested in a in a vaguely similar company, like, doing similar things for similar sized companies. They raised about a $3,000,000 seed round, and they're planning that's it, even with this type of growth, even with it all being agentic, even with it all being all the things we're supposed to be excited about, right? AI and voice and resolution agents, it does actually something that's pretty somewhat unique, but they're literally planning to never raise again because you get the fifteen percent eighteen a month venture update, but no one wants to meet. It's like, well, I'll put in a little more money, but it may have mean some ways in the old days where early investors may need to carry you if you're anything that's not hyper growth and the right boxes to check. Right? The three bike check. Your investors may have to carry you. It's like the old days. [00:05:41] S2: Jason, you're right. You said earlier that kind of specificity box has really narrowed in terms of what is interesting to investors. Yeah. And I'm seeing that more and more with this concentration of capital going to fewer and fewer names and everything else being wholly unfundable, which more so than I've seen ever in venture before, which is surprising for a sheep like market like Venture.
00:05:41 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:05:41] S2: Jason, you're right. You said earlier that kind of specificity box has really narrowed in terms of what is interesting to investors. Yeah. And I'm seeing that more and more with this concentration of capital going to fewer and fewer names and everything else being wholly unfundable, which more so than I've seen ever in venture before, which is surprising for a sheep like market like Venture. [00:06:02] S1: But what you're saying is if you think about... If you think of the role of venture financing innovation, what you're saying, there are lots of companies that look on the surface to have very good numbers that can't raise money. That's what you mean. Correct? [00:06:14] S2: Correct. [00:06:15] S1: And I think that's probably true. I mean, let give you the contrast, At the same time, I don't think it's just going to 10 or 20 companies in total. Because at the same time, are a whole bunch of projects that probably in another era would not get funded at all, that are getting venture money, data centers in space, quantum computing, you know, so we're very risk on for stuff that has ultra high upside. And I think the stuff that's struggling to get funded is, as you say, it's software for specific markets where there's some inarticulate fear that AI will make it all go away. Is that kind of a fair next level summary? [00:06:48] S2: Yeah, think so. I think you're absolutely right. I think it's this like power law on steroids requirement where it's like, unless you can paint me the trillion dollar market cap, I'm not interested.