The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jack Altman, Jason Lemkin
[00:00:00] S0: I taught you tiptoe in, and I got to hand it to you. No. When we're embracing this thing, we're fucking embracing it. It's 10,000,000,000 pre pre revenue, big ass check, no mincey little little steps here. It's all in on day one. So congratulations. It's like coming off the dry and evasive the booze. [00:00:17] S1: We're definitely not investing at the right speed. We are either investing way too fast or way too slow. [00:00:22] S0: Returns are going to be highly skewed. Variance is going to go up with AI and many of you will fail. [00:00:27] S1: There are like 10 companies that can do $10,000,000,000 acquisitions and want to. [00:00:32] S0: Money is a signal. Price is a signal. And price is sending a signal. Everybody go right here. It's a [00:00:38] S1: talent war in the most insane way right now. [00:00:40] S2: I think open source has reached its maximum as a market share. I think it's gonna keep go... Going down. No one wants to run on open source models there. At least Chinese, China based. Nobody. [00:00:49] S1: It's kind of all just gonna come down to, like, who's got the compute. [00:00:52] S2: Even 1,000,000,000 starts to sound small for seed funds if you believe 30 million's a seed. [00:00:56] S0: If we're willing to fucking trust them not to blow up the world, and they've already said they might and it's only a 10% chance, I think we can trust them too with the votes.
00:01:04 · Harry Stebbings
[00:01:04] S3: This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. It's my favorite show of the week. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, and a special guest in Jack Altman from Benchmark joins us in the hot seat. So what do we have on the cards today? Well, Anthropics draft s one lease, we break that down. AMD, baby. They are in the market to buy. Fei Fei Li's World Lab sells to AMD for 8,200,000,000 in stock, and then ka ching, mister Mark Zuckerberg decides to whack out the checkbook to hire MongoDB's CEO and pinch him for Muse Enterprise. This and so much more in a blistering episode out today. But before we dive into the show today, when you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign these days without proof of your security. Here's what happens if you're not prepared. A prospect asks for proof of compliance. The deal stalls when you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the road map to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into this horrible fire drill. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC two, ISO 27,001, HIPAA, and GDPR, but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. So your deals keep moving and your engineers really keep building. Now access the Vanta agent everywhere you work even if your team lives in Claude or Cursor. And that's why Vanta's trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey, and Ryta. So prove you're ready for business and get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/20vc. That's vanta.com/20vc. While Vanta keeps compliance covered, Deal helps you hire globally. We get it. Global IT can be a headache. New hire in Tokyo, but the laptop, well, it's stuck in London. Someone left the company last week. Wait. Is that access already revoked? Deal IT handles hardware, software, and access to across a 130 countries from one system. You have the right to be impressed. Brands like eleven Labs are already managing their global IT at scale with Deal. It's one system, one source of truth with zero vendor gaps or manual workarounds. So build your global team with Deal. Visit deel.com/20vc and start expanding your business today. While Deal builds the team, Framer builds the site.
00:03:30 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Altman
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00:05:08 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:05:08] S0: Genuine comment. Not a single piece of information in that leak. Not a single piece of useful act other than one minor comment, which I'll come back to, like, the 2,025 numbers long since spent. I mean, lots of shitty bad takes. The whole... Oh my god. They're losing 40,000,000... Billion when 34,000,000,000 of its non accounting law... An accounting loss. Rest The of it was exactly what you thought, 4,500,000,000 in revenues, eight in compute expense, five in other expense, blah. The only interesting factoid in that was that two customers did 25% of the of the revenue, which means someone spent $500,000,000 on Entropic last year, which is pretty impressive. But the only thing that counts is not even Q one and Q two of this year, because I think everyone knows Q one and Q two is Anthropic killed it. The Q three numbers, which haven't been finalized yet, are the model though, are the the only thing you need you need to care about, because, obviously, the story now is Jack and now opening eye, killing it, really exploding in growth. And you know, there's very nascent data from what I think what a ticker trends or something that and Swapi kind of flattened out. The Q3 revenue number is 90% of the data required to make a decision on pricing on Anthropic. And everything prior to that, in particular 2025, is so leaked at this point that there was no data in the Reuters saying it was fun, but no data. Go people.
00:06:25 · Jack Altman
[00:06:25] S1: This is gonna be one of one of the nice things about these companies going public is that I actually think the public market investors will be a little bit more long term oriented than the private investors. I think, like, we are all hand wringing month to month about what these companies are doing. And in a weird way, I think the public market investors will think a little bit more long term, little bit more structurally. You think about both Anthropic and OpenAI, and it's like each month, it's like the narrative is just all over the place. And it's so easy to flip like that. I think, least in my conversations with public market investors, they're going to be thinking a little bit more, at least quarters, maybe even years. And so I agree with all of that, but I think people are going to mostly be oriented towards like, what is the market structure of these things? And hopefully it'll, it will be a little bit calmer.
00:07:08 · Jason Lemkin
[00:07:08] S2: My only thought and listen, this could be completely wrong. When I read all the press, Yeah. Like to Rory's point, we learned nothing. And to Jack's point, just getting the public investors excited to hold an epic asset long. But man, it really reads negative, you know, not just the risk factor that there's existential risk to humanity. I mean, that one is a little jarring to see, but it may be like the Facebook IPO in that at least on the retail side, the negatives come to the top, you know, and we're all investors, right? So we're all playing for the upside, aren't we? You know, why is instinct worth 10,000,000,000? Well, it's the upside. The jaw dropping losses that frankly, I don't think the four of us care about. Right. And maybe a lot of long public markets don't care about. I just think the retail market, everyone that is anti AI may see these negatives as a reason to sour. And I don't know if that can really drive the stock down, but I worry that the IPO will be six. It's a minor worry, but I worry the IPO will be successful. They'll hit their number, whatever they ask for. It'll be over more than oversubscribed than Aura, you know, 10x. But then a month or two in with no real change, we may see a drift below the IPO price just because of the negativity, the massive spend, the CDSs or at Oracle, some default on data centers, and all of a sudden the negatives overwhelm the life changing positives. That was my only thought is we're gonna see a lot of stuff like this, right, after the IPO, much more than we have before.