The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:26:10 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:26:10] S1: I think it's very, very hard to replicate what we built. What was the hardest thing? [00:26:13] S0: All the code and everything around the file system, the container runtime, the scheduler, like building the system that can place millions of sandboxes every minute, scale up and down many thousands of GPUs, you know, power hundreds of thousands of tasks running concurrently. These are these are very hard engineering problems. I I mean, I'm I'm an infra geek. Like, I love that shit. It's so much fun to work on it, but, like, these are hard problems. [00:26:37] S1: Is Nebius a better business than CoreWeave? [00:26:39] S0: I actually don't know. Like, I I don't know. I I think they're both, like... They're they're executed extremely well, both of them. I have a tremendous respect for what we've done. I think at the at the end of the day, like, the thing that I have the most respect for is actually more on the financial engineering side. They're very good at that of [00:26:52] S1: stuff. Why do you say that? [00:26:53] S0: Because I think a lot of the constraint for building a Neo Cloud very quickly is on the financial side. You need to be very good at... You go lock in like a long term customer contract, then you go raise a bunch of money against it, then you go buy the chips, then you deliver the chips, and then you pay off the debt, like over the next few years. Doing that sort of dance with the financials, like it's kind of an interesting game. And CoreWeave has done it exceptionally well. It's a capital game. It's a financial game.
00:26:53 · Erik Bernhardsson, Harry Stebbings
[00:26:53] S0: Because I think a lot of the constraint for building a Neo Cloud very quickly is on the financial side. You need to be very good at... You go lock in like a long term customer contract, then you go raise a bunch of money against it, then you go buy the chips, then you deliver the chips, and then you pay off the debt, like over the next few years. Doing that sort of dance with the financials, like it's kind of an interesting game. And CoreWeave has done it exceptionally well. It's a capital game. It's a financial game. [00:27:18] S1: When you move a layer beneath them, we spoke about Jeff, who obviously worked with Modal, we've seen incredible movement from the open source community, which has been exciting. Yeah. But then you also see Haiku and Anthropic's newest models being incredibly performant and incredibly cheap. What's the benefit of open models if frontier models are almost as cheap and as efficient?
00:27:18 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:27:18] S1: When you move a layer beneath them, we spoke about Jeff, who obviously worked with Modal, we've seen incredible movement from the open source community, which has been exciting. Yeah. But then you also see Haiku and Anthropic's newest models being incredibly performant and incredibly cheap. What's the benefit of open models if frontier models are almost as cheap and as efficient? [00:27:41] S0: I think open source is always gonna be... There's always gonna be great models coming out. Let's also remember, like, open source models, they're all moving into licensing models. So, they're getting better at capturing the value of those models. And I think that means they're gonna have more funding to train better models. And I really hope there's gonna be European and US models because I don't think it's a good situation that we have so many Chinese models. I mean, they're they're obviously... I have tremendous respect for all the Chinese labs. They're extremely good at what they're doing. But I think it's good for the world if there's, you know, more power spread out. But anyway, going back to your question, I do think that open source there's always going to be people who want to fine tune, want to have more control over their models and sort of tweak to parameters, like go low latency, high throughput, like whatever it is. And open source is gonna play a big role in that. It's like Windows versus Linux. With the... I am sorry, with [00:28:25] S1: the greatest of respect, do you think Europe will produce a competitive open source model?
00:28:25 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:28:25] S1: the greatest of respect, do you think Europe will produce a competitive open source model? [00:28:30] S0: Yeah. I mean, I love Europe. I grew up in Europe. Grew up in Sweden, but I do think that Europe does struggle with accumulating large amounts of capital. I think both of those things are things that Europe struggles with. And and that is something that China has done really well. They've accumulated massive amounts of human capital. And and US obviously has very good, you know, very good at, like, raising enormous amounts of money and, like, training very large models. I don't know if Europe has the... Either of those. [00:28:56] S1: Does it matter if NVIDIA owns the open source model layer in The US with first poolside and now reflection? [00:29:04] S0: I think NVIDIA is very smart to focus on the ecosystem, building up an ecosystem. And I think that includes like propping up a lot of open source models. And I think they probably saw an opportunity to pick up open source models. These companies are very resource intensive, right, very CapEx intensive. And I think it's smart of NVIDIA to like buy some of those and sponsor them effectively in order to create American built models. By the way, I wanna take back one thing I said. Europe does have an insane amount of human capital. I do think what Europe is very bad at is aggregating them and putting all of them at the same company. That is something I think US is very good at.
00:29:04 · Erik Bernhardsson, Harry Stebbings
[00:29:04] S0: I think NVIDIA is very smart to focus on the ecosystem, building up an ecosystem. And I think that includes like propping up a lot of open source models. And I think they probably saw an opportunity to pick up open source models. These companies are very resource intensive, right, very CapEx intensive. And I think it's smart of NVIDIA to like buy some of those and sponsor them effectively in order to create American built models. By the way, I wanna take back one thing I said. Europe does have an insane amount of human capital. I do think what Europe is very bad at is aggregating them and putting all of them at the same company. That is something I think US is very good at. [00:29:41] S1: And I think inspiring a mindset of ambition and huge, huge scale. I think to the point that you said earlier, which is like, Oh, I didn't have the belief in myself. I respectfully think if you're in The US, you might've been surrounded by influences that told you to start a company earlier. [00:29:55] S0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's almost like too much on the other side to that point, but Oh, when [00:29:58] S1: you were four, you were encouraged to start, leave school, drop out, kindergarten wasn't worth it. Exactly. I totally agree with you. I do wanna talk about, we said about Models and Jav in particular. Are we seeing the unbundling of Models on a per function basis, where Jav is obviously very good for its certain tasks?
00:29:58 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:29:58] S1: you were four, you were encouraged to start, leave school, drop out, kindergarten wasn't worth it. Exactly. I totally agree with you. I do wanna talk about, we said about Models and Jav in particular. Are we seeing the unbundling of Models on a per function basis, where Jav is obviously very good for its certain tasks? [00:30:15] S0: I think so, and I think that's a function of what I talked about earlier, where the market for inference is so large, and that when a market is a billion dollars, you're not gonna have too many sub markets, but when a market is starting to get 10,000,000,000, 100,000,000,000, whatever, you're gonna have a lot of different sub markets. And Jeff does classification and things like that, regression type things very, very well. And there's a large enough market for that. [00:30:35] S1: Okay, welcome. It's your first day as a partner at Twenty VC Fund, and we're in the investment committee. And very kindly, have the opportunity to invest in JEV. We're all in on JEV's new role. [00:30:46] S0: All in. [00:30:46] S1: What's the bull case for JEV being worth 100,000,000,000? [00:30:49] S0: I told you before, but like, I think the brand and the community and the movement around, you know, just this sort of everything they're doing is so incredible. And that to me is like a massive, massive asset in this new age. [00:30:59] S1: That's a $100,000,000,000 company. [00:31:01] S0: I think there is an opportunity to create a $100,000,000,000 company with a lot of specialized models and inference.