The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:08:14 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:08:14] S1: You might still walk out with a term sheet from sale. So what you're saying is there's a small number of extraordinary potential startups that the very best VCs are focused on almost to the detriment of anything else. That's your point, Harry. Correct? [00:08:29] S2: No. I'm saying the whole venture landscape has realized that a certain few categories are the most interesting and exciting, and everything else is uninteresting in a way that has not been before. [00:08:42] S0: Rory, back me up here. If you're raising a $5,000,000,000 plus fund, you you have to have billion dollar positions in everything. You even need a $5,000,000,000 position here or there, right? So what a $2,000,000,000 Listen Labs just doesn't is not good enough because the odds unless you have 51% ownership, which most founders are not cool with, it's pretty hard to build a billion dollar position. I mean, if I were working at one of those mega funds and we were playing our game, that would be my final question to the team. How are we going to get at least a billion dollar position out of this? And I'll take 1% of Anthropic. I think that still gets me to a billion dollar position, with dilution, right? The Eric Schmidt story. But you gotta have billion dollar positions in everything in in Big Boy Venture today, think. And and I don't mean boy with a gender attribution, big, big folk. You gotta have billion... It's billion dollar positions or nothing. There's no point in investing otherwise with large funds.
00:09:29 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:09:29] S1: Well, I still go back to the statistics we cited last week, which is, you know, 10 to 20 decacons per decade in The entire US tech industry, and we clearly believe that there's gonna be 90 of them this year. And one of those two facts is gonna be at variance with the other, and I'm willing to bet on the fifty years of data, albeit lifted up for growth. You know, it's not gonna be just predicting on the past because you allow some kind of growth over the years for bigger exits. But I don't think I don't think you can confine yourself to saying, I'll only do deals where I can get a billion dollars to work or a billion... Or it's a... What's the demand on common $25,000,000,000 outcome? I mean, you want some of those, but it's the whole industry is not going to be able to say we're all going to do those and have more than five funds. Cause it's just not enough. [00:10:11] S0: Maybe five is enough. [00:10:13] S2: Jason, I think Rory is not going along with our thread here.
00:10:13 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:10:13] S2: Jason, I think Rory is not going along with our thread here. [00:10:16] S0: Listen, haven't sat in an Andreessen or index partner meeting, but I'm pretty sure the math is something like how can we make at least a billion dollars off this deal? It's not even enough. That's, I Everyone has the four different scenarios when they write up the investment memo. A billion dollar position, not an exit, billion dollar position, is just the B outcome. This is 10% probability analysis, 25,000,000,000 or higher. 25, you know, this percent, we only make 1,000,000,000 on the deal, right? We're raising these funds every eighteen months, these 5 to $10,000,000,000 funds. We have to have so many billion dollar positions, positions, gains to even be playing at this game. It's just math. It's just the maths. [00:10:54] S1: To take the other side of the argument, actually, talk about seed, which is your role, Jason, you probably... I'm assuming you would agree that from a multiple perspective, it's going to be far easier for the best seed investor to generate a five X net fund than it's going to be for someone who's writing billion dollar checks into things.
00:10:54 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings
[00:10:54] S1: To take the other side of the argument, actually, talk about seed, which is your role, Jason, you probably... I'm assuming you would agree that from a multiple perspective, it's going to be far easier for the best seed investor to generate a five X net fund than it's going to be for someone who's writing billion dollar checks into things. [00:11:11] S0: No, it's harder. It's much harder because unless you really do the Roger Ehrenberg find something in Antarctica, right? The entry prices are so high and the ownership typically is lower unless the seed fund is very large that actually, and all these Valors are cutting my pro radas, Rory. How am I going make it up on the back end with my SPVs and my triple? I can't make any, Five x is so much easier. I'll do it at 1,000,000,000 in town, and we'll raise it 5,000,000,000 next week, and I'll take the rest of the year off. The entry price, 50,000,000, a 100,000,000 seeds, you you can't make money. [00:11:45] S2: Just to add to that, not only can you not make money, you can't make money even worse because they're a multistage product for those big players in terms of they're the ones who lead them, and they crush your allocation. So not only does the price go way higher, but your allocation goes way lower. And so you have 3 to 500 k at best, and I've I've got this. And I've got this in a company that is going now to 18,000,000,000. It still doesn't move the fucking needle, Rory. [00:12:11] S1: Because what? You only got 300 k in the middle. [00:12:13] S2: 300 k in, and it's at a 100,000,000 price. It's...
00:12:13 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:12:13] S2: 300 k in, and it's at a 100,000,000 price. It's... [00:12:18] S1: No. That doesn't move the needle. No. You... That that I would agree. [00:12:21] S2: And so not only do you have a way higher price, but you have a way lower check going in. [00:12:25] S1: Look. Over time, in a rational capital world, the return multiple from early stage investing should be higher than growth, just logically over an extended period of time, because otherwise, why would you do it? [00:12:36] S2: I agree. But would you not say for the first time ever that we're actually gonna see that inverted? [00:12:41] S1: I totally agree. I think the last five years are gonna be clearly inverted. It's clearly gonna be... Mean, look, someone said it. Was It a very good line. He said the aggregate market cap of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI went from around $400,000,000,000 three years ago to something like 5,000,000,004 or $5,000,000,000 today. That means... It's a trillion. And I've changed billion and so trillion, $4,400,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000,000. Right? So you've got 4,000,000,000,000 plus of value created in in the late stage business. Nothing else matters. And if, you know, if your theory is there's gonna be 10 more than next year, then you're right. That's all you do. And if your theory is that was amazing, but it's probably not gonna be a run rate business, then you make different bets.
00:12:41 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:12:41] S1: I totally agree. I think the last five years are gonna be clearly inverted. It's clearly gonna be... Mean, look, someone said it. Was It a very good line. He said the aggregate market cap of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI went from around $400,000,000,000 three years ago to something like 5,000,000,004 or $5,000,000,000 today. That means... It's a trillion. And I've changed billion and so trillion, $4,400,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000,000. Right? So you've got 4,000,000,000,000 plus of value created in in the late stage business. Nothing else matters. And if, you know, if your theory is there's gonna be 10 more than next year, then you're right. That's all you do. And if your theory is that was amazing, but it's probably not gonna be a run rate business, then you make different bets. [00:13:20] S2: We will go back to schedule, which is are we starting to see a crack in the AI trade? Core Weave have had a tough week. I admit I'm a holder. It it has not been great. Rory, can you please provide some context as to what is going on? What do we need to know as background?