The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:39:10 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:39:10] S3: Jack, I think we're just a bit slower than Rory. Okay? Professor O'Driscoll has... He's very sharp. He's very sharp. [00:39:16] S0: Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop the bullshit. We should just... For the viewers, we... Our listeners, we should just say, look. What happened here is the CEO, the chief executive officer of a standalone independent public company, MongoDB, a very successful $20,000,000,000 market cap public company, who just took the job less than nine months ago, got an offer from Muse, hit the bid, moved over to Facebook slash Meta to run their enterprise division, and Mongo stopped, dropped 20% in one day, and then Dev stepped back in, who'd been the... Not the founder, but the CEO from a long last time and and is now back running it. But the point... To Jack's point was the money can exert such a powerful influence. It was powerful enough to persuade this guy to quit the top job, go work at Facebook, because I assumed the offer was just earth shatteringly compelling. Right. And that's your point, Jack, is that when you have the hot stock, when you have the momentum, you can make people offers that just allow you to take whatever talent you want. And this is an example of that. [00:40:12] S3: Do you think it is money? I don't know. When you're earning 52... Maybe I I don't earn $52,000,000 a year. But I imagine if you're earning $52,000,000 a year, earning $120,000,000 a year, that's nice. But I think for him, when he looks at this, he's like, holy shit. I have the chance to impact far greater. Nah.
00:40:12 · Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:40:12] S3: Do you think it is money? I don't know. When you're earning 52... Maybe I I don't earn $52,000,000 a year. But I imagine if you're earning $52,000,000 a year, earning $120,000,000 a year, that's nice. But I think for him, when he looks at this, he's like, holy shit. I have the chance to impact far greater. Nah. [00:40:28] S2: I think it was a $52,000,000 package, and he was offered a $500,000,000 package by Zuck to run enterprise. He... 10 x is easy. What does it take? 520,000,000 then done. Right? No one wants to step down from CEO to be a chief executive enterprise products and tokens officer. [00:40:45] S3: You think he's paid $500,000,000 a year? [00:40:47] S0: Yeah. It's 10 x. [00:40:47] S3: It's it's 10 x. I'm I'm hitting the bed. Hit the [00:40:50] S0: bed. I'm just kind of agreeing with Jason because you were gonna go down some kind of mongos, not exciting, and meta enterprise would be exciting. I think that's true. But conversely, no one who's been a CEO goes back to not being a CEO. It's just it's just so damn hard. Right? So the answer is it must have been just a compelling offer. [00:41:09] S3: I mean, dude, we saw we saw Nick Clegg, who was deputy prime minister, go and work as Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean, [00:41:15] S0: I mean, yes. [00:41:16] S3: So like, you know, that's... [00:41:18] S0: I'm a... Yes. I'm trying... Yes. Yeah. Be careful what you say. I'm just trying to not be mean about Nick Clegg or England or David Cameron our Mark Zuckerberg, and it's just too hard, so I'm just gonna let it slide.
00:41:18 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:41:18] S0: I'm a... Yes. I'm trying... Yes. Yeah. Be careful what you say. I'm just trying to not be mean about Nick Clegg or England or David Cameron our Mark Zuckerberg, and it's just too hard, so I'm just gonna let it slide. [00:41:28] S3: And what what what should we take from this, though? That actually even the role of CEO is one where departure is normal now in face of money? [00:41:36] S0: You should take what Jack said. It gets back to the conversation you were making. He... Because he segued it off your comment on opportunity cost. The market is sending a signal that the only place to be is in these extraordinary hot AI companies, and it's sending that signal via price, and people are responding to price.
00:41:51 · Jack Altman
[00:41:51] S1: Yeah. I mean, to to me, I think it is it is the money, and it's also the... It's the attention, and it's where the zeitgeist, and it's like the white hot center. And I think that is so alluring to people. There's an entirely separate thing here, you know, with kind of the way that this all went down that I'm not close enough to at all to know the details of. And I think that's kind of its own unique beast. But in general, I just think that it is so alluring. And the money is part of it, but it's not just the money. It's also the thing in all of the headlines. It's the products that we're all using. It's the thing that all of our families are talking about. And I think that it's just so concentrating. There's all of these short term things that are negative about it. One of the things that I will say, just kind of this is zoomed out broad positive, is that the much higher transition rate of talent that I think we've ever probably seen. One of the benefits of it is that talent feels very unstuck right now. You have all of these times in history where great talent gets very, very stuck in places that you might not want it to be. And we are probably in one of the higher liquidity moments in the market where great people are in fact going to the most important opportunities, which I think is probably on some societal level, very positive, even if in these like short term situations, you your head and you're like, what's going on here?
00:43:05 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin
[00:43:05] S0: You're right. I tend to focus on the money, but you're right. It's not just that. It is the side guess. I'll give you and Harry that point. Yeah. It's what's good about here even versus the East. You know, I can't remember, was it someone on garden leave either in the East Coast or The UK? The great thing about California, you got none of that. It's just like I go across the street, and next day I start in a new company. What are you doing, Harry? [00:43:25] S3: It's time for the investment committee. [00:43:27] S2: You already you already did one. You did a great one for instinct at the top of the hour. [00:43:31] S0: Oh, no. No. No. [00:43:32] S3: That wasn't an investment committee. No. No. The the investment committee this week is JEV. JEV is in the market to raise at a $10,000,000,000 price. Chase, welcome to the room. Can you please present whether we should be doing this deal or not at $10,000,000,000 a week after the seed at about $200,000,000
00:43:50 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:43:50] S2: Well, of course we should do it. What's the price, 10,000,000,000? At first thought we should do 5% of the fund, but after the last 20 VC, I've decided to recommend up to 30% of the fund. You know, JEV's already 17% of the traffic on OpenRouter. It's 20% of the traffic through VercelsRouter. Many people will of course copy it, just like many will copy Instinct and others. But we are reaching the point where as exciting as the NeoLabs are, as exciting as Anthropics pending IPO and OpenAR, these AI costs are unsustainable. It doesn't matter if Sonnet 5.5 and the latest Opus is cheaper. It is unsustainable to spend these costs ten, twelve hours a day and the competitive bar just goes up. JEV is a seventieth of the price and a 100 times faster. And listen, as my good friend Jack Altman says, the pace of change is so fast or exploding so fast. Maybe JEV isn't the winner next year, but this is exactly the kind of bet we have to do. We have a 100% downside protection. Someone's gonna scoop up this team out of X OpenAI no matter what. 17% market share on Open Router? I mean, much as I advocated instinct last week, this week, this is my deal. I'm all in on Jeff. 30% of the fund. I know it's risky, but I want to get the ownership. And I do believe there's a 50x upside to 500,000,000,000. So I I defer into Rory. I say we do... Well, 20 to 30% of the fund. [00:45:02] S0: Jack, I should warn you for some reason how he likes this kind of... The sound bite. And it plays well on pods. So who [00:45:08] S3: are you? Jack, you know me so well. At the end of the day, I'm a