The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:13:05 · Jack Altman, Harry Stebbings
[00:13:05] S1: I think you described it exactly right, which is it is super early in its cycle. If you think about, like, when chat first launched, like, much did we use it then versus how much do we all use it now? Know, Legora and Harvey, which are, when they started, if you did the reference calls on their customers, when they were at a million of ARR, the customers were like, the thing barely works. We don't use it that much. And now you talk to them and they're like, I run my whole life out of it. And these businesses are at hundreds of millions of ARR growing really fast and all of that. I think same with coding. Like, at first, it could do a little bit. Now it kind of does everything. In the future, it's gonna be, like, you know, times a 100. So it's an open question on this this stuff. And I think you're exactly right. The question will be, does it make it from where we are right now to you can autonomously trust these things to run your life? And if it can, it's big. And if it can't, it's not. [00:13:48] S3: Does it not massively cannibalize the chat usage? I'm so sorry for any awkwardness, Jack. I I used to be a massive open AI. It's kinda like you win both sides, so forgive me for this. I used to be a massive open AI user on ChatGPT, and now I just live my life through instinct. And you see a lot of people cannibalize that chat usage. You know?
00:13:48 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Altman, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:13:48] S3: Does it not massively cannibalize the chat usage? I'm so sorry for any awkwardness, Jack. I I used to be a massive open AI. It's kinda like you win both sides, so forgive me for this. I used to be a massive open AI user on ChatGPT, and now I just live my life through instinct. And you see a lot of people cannibalize that chat usage. You know? [00:14:04] S1: I think it does to some extent. I mean, I think they're... Like, on some level, we're each only awake for so many hours a day. And, like, we are all on our screens so much at this point that, like, there are not... You can't really get us out of the, like, perks where we're playing soccer too much anymore. Like, it is all coming from other time that we were spending on the Internet. So, yes, it it does to some extent. [00:14:23] S0: Jack, you you put the qualifier in. What did you [00:14:25] S1: say right at the end there? I was gonna say the form factor cannibalizes. That doesn't mean that these products cannibalize the other companies, but it does mean that the form factor takes some amount of the space whether the labs do it themselves or not. [00:14:36] S0: Can I [00:14:36] S3: be a dick? Isn't this what OpenClaw was meant to be? And with the founder Pete Stipeet and like, no. But, like, dude, they've been watching from the sidelines for six months.
00:14:36 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Jack Altman
[00:14:36] S3: be a dick? Isn't this what OpenClaw was meant to be? And with the founder Pete Stipeet and like, no. But, like, dude, they've been watching from the sidelines for six months. [00:14:46] S2: Yeah. But OpenAI didn't give everyone an entire virtual CPU in the cloud. Right? And storage and everything. It... This is just these guys looked at... They were all inspired by OpenCloud. We all were. They just instinct did it. Jack and Nevis story. And the whole Muse team said they're inspired the next hour to build Muse. Muse was built since OpenClaw. It's just OpenClaw didn't make sense for any of us. [00:15:04] S0: But I think, to be clear, Harry, what you're saying is not OpenClaw standalone. What you're basically saying is when OpenClaw got subsumed in OpenAI, shouldn't have done this. [00:15:13] S3: Yeah. A 100%. You were best placed to do this. That was the most strategic thing with the person who did OpenCLO. [00:15:18] S1: I actually don't have the sort of full inside scoop here, but OpenAI's dev day is, you know, today. And so we'll see, you know, what, you know, their sort of reactions to all these things are. But, you know, also back to Jason's point, it's like there's generations of these things, and they keep moving, and everybody learns from each other. And it happens in, two seconds. Know, when Cursor came out, they had, like, a long window before the labs caught up. Now, you know, you look at the InstinctTeam's window. It's short. These these cycles are only getting shorter.
00:15:18 · Jack Altman, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:15:18] S1: I actually don't have the sort of full inside scoop here, but OpenAI's dev day is, you know, today. And so we'll see, you know, what, you know, their sort of reactions to all these things are. But, you know, also back to Jason's point, it's like there's generations of these things, and they keep moving, and everybody learns from each other. And it happens in, two seconds. Know, when Cursor came out, they had, like, a long window before the labs caught up. Now, you know, you look at the InstinctTeam's window. It's short. These these cycles are only getting shorter. [00:15:43] S0: First of all, I just gotta say in passing, Jack, I gotta hand it to you guys. You know, I've I've known Ben Trucks since '95 when they started. Right? And when you guys said after thirty years, you're gonna embrace growth, I thought you tiptoe in, and I gotta 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 this coming off the dry and embracing the booze, you know, big party night first night. [00:16:13] S1: Yeah. And what what's funny about it? So yeah. And, you know, we we invested, you know, first at 2.5 and ten. And what's funny is, in our minds, it was actually kind of an early stage investment. And I know that sounds psychotic. It is it. Yeah, but that's kind of how we saw it.
00:16:26 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:16:26] S0: Genuine comment here. It actually is one of the things that's been funny is in this cycle, we've had investments with early stage request risk require super late stage capital, which is just definitionally a strange time to be playing. But yes, I think you thought you were raising a growth fund. In fact, you're just expanding the early stage fund because it just takes bigger checks now. Good on you guys for doing it, because I thought your logic at the end is basically some version of, if this matters, it'll matter a lot. And if it doesn't matter, it won't matter at all. And there you go. I'm just pushing. I was I was... Yeah. I listened to the NOAA interview, and I'm gonna make the boring point, and then I'm gonna kinda kinda backtrack it from the boring... When you listen to the interview and you talk about monetization and travel and all that, and then you go away and you do the data on, you know, the number of Americans who fly more than one or two times a year, which is pretty small, the fees available from that, the number of Americans who book not just dining, but fine dining. It's, you know, it's like 10% or less of total dining experiences are fine dining. You don't need a reservation from McDonald's or Applebee's. So if you start thinking and he mentioned, if you think of it as travel monetization, you could get pretty angsty about market size here. I mean, you guys were smart enough to do OpenTable twenty years ago, twenty six years ago now. Jesus. You know, it's just it's a billion dollar business today. You will be pretty bummed if you're only doing a billion dollars in restaurant bookings on instinct. So does implicitly some level of, yeah, we'll get all this travel revenue, but there's something more here because you guys run the same numbers and you know what, right? Is there a part of the monetization that's just finger in the air and says, this matters, good shit will happen?
00:17:58 · Jack Altman, Harry Stebbings
[00:17:58] S1: So I mean, back to the point before, which is slightly tongue in cheek, but slightly totally true, which is like, do you think of is this a is this a growth investment because it was billions of dollars of valuation? Or is this an early stage investment because it's like nine days old? And both are kind of true. And if you think of it as a growth investment, you say, okay, how do I underwrite this relative to public companies that have 2,500,000,000 of ARR and they're worth 10,000,000,000. And so you kind of logic that out. If you're thinking of as an early stage investment, you say, gosh, this paradigm, we just have no idea. And so I think in our heads, it was close. Yeah. It was closer to that where you say, we are so early innings here where there was open claw. There's the like, you know, between now and Christmas, there's gonna be, like, three more evolutions of the whole thing. It's like you don't even try to guess all of that. [00:18:44] S3: How do you think about sizing it then when you're writing growth checks at early stage risk material?