The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:31:01 · Erik Bernhardsson, Harry Stebbings
[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. [00:31:07] S1: You would have done it though at 8,500,000,000. [00:31:09] S0: I would have done it at 8,500,000,000. I I think there's a pretty big outcome here. Could be an exit. Could be, you know, like a public company. Who knows? But but I do think there's a lot of upside here. [00:31:19] S1: Dude, I'd love to see him ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange. [00:31:22] S0: Do you [00:31:23] S1: know what I mean? [00:31:23] S0: Yeah. Fantastic guy. Love that guy. Is he great? I mean, you know, his charisma, his like... You have to create, like, a personality, like, around your brand. You have to create this, like, visual identity. It's obviously not the visual identity I would have picked. [00:31:36] S1: I hear you, but I think then you should be more loud, if I'm just honest, Erik. Modal? No. Well, yeah, but you. [00:31:41] S0: Yeah. I mean, that's possible. [00:31:42] S1: Right? Like, I I don't think there's, a personality lad cult from Modal from your perspective. I think that's a fair point of criticism. I think I could be [00:31:49] S0: out there even more. I tried to tweet. I tried blogging. I've been, like, kinda bad at that recently. [00:31:53] S1: No one gives a shit about blogging.
00:31:53 · Harry Stebbings, Erik Bernhardsson
[00:31:53] S1: No one gives a shit about blogging. [00:31:55] S0: Yeah. Maybe. Right? Maybe I just need to, like, go more unhinged on Twitter. It's like fund related marketing, basically. Like, in the early days of of Modal, like, that was a big part of our growth. Right? Like me just like tweeting all the time about what we're building. And I think that's really important. I mean, every company has to find its own sort of, you know, go to market strategy. But in the early days, like we spent a lot of time just talking to people on Twitter, just like hitting people up, try the product, what do you think? Of them ended up angel investing. You know, they're now supporters of Modal. And, you know, you have to lean into what you're good at. And in the early days, I did a lot of shit posting. [00:32:23] S1: Do you know for every follower that followed me before 50,000, I would send them a personal, like, thank you message. [00:32:29] S0: That's amazing. You typed it out yourself? [00:32:31] S1: Every night from one till 02:30AM, would [00:32:33] S0: send them [00:32:34] S1: a personal, and I'd say like, I see that you're from Sweden, I love the Grand Hotel, let me know when you're in London. And I would send like 50 to 100 a night. [00:32:41] S0: That's dedication, that's amazing. [00:32:43] S1: No, but it was the customer acquisition flywheel. Yeah. They would go into the office the next day and be like, wow, you know this guy? He'd sent me a message, and like, you should listen to a show.