The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:08:25 · Rory O'Driscoll
[00:08:25] S0: I almost think the people who are gonna be big buyers of the stock are not an overlapping circle with the people who are dealing with all the kind of fallout from the noise and the negativity. And let me say it even more directly. Right? 70% of Americans might think data centers suck, but they're not running Fidelity growth. A small number of highly compensated managers are the buyers of their stock. Right? And retail people excited for the thing. Where I do think you're right, Jason, is it's not so much that directly the dislike of AI kind of impacts the stock directly, but the indirect comment is I do think there was a nontrivial political backlash brewing. I think it was super interesting to see the guy in Florida fired basically a suit of stop opening anotropic for middling models. There's gonna be a whole lot of, you told me in a legal document that this thing was not safe. Therefore, I'm entitled to believe you. And if it's not safe, you should stop. So I do think indirectly, you're right is that because they have to spew out all these negatives just to cover their ass, though I'm not sure who's gonna sue you if the end of the world actually happens, you're probably pretty good on litigation side. But because they have to skew out all this negativity, people are gonna be reading that and saying, this is the first S1 I've ever seen that poses existential risk and where the product lies to me. Maybe I should, as the attorney general for the great state of fill in the blank, sue these guys and say, And I think we're starting to see that. So it will be way more of a public participatory moment. Everyone's gonna have a goddamn opinion on this, perhaps in a way that everyone doesn't have an opinion on. You know, when a semiconductor stock goes public, 95% of the people can barely describe what it does. Everyone's gonna have an opinion here.
00:09:59 · Harry Stebbings
[00:09:59] S3: Speaking of topics that everyone has an opinion of, I think everyone seems to have an opinion on instinct right now and instinct versus muse and the future of agents and personal AI assistants. Instinct closes a billion dollar series c at 10,000,000,000. Noah Shin, 23 year old founder, amazing generational talent, raises 1,000,000,000 at 10,000,000,000, takes on Muse and Alex Wang and Zuck. What do we think? Jack, I think you've got a chat from Benchmark.
00:10:27 · Jack Altman
[00:10:27] S1: Yeah. We did. My my partners, Peter and Ev, led it, and we were all extremely excited about it. And, I mean, first of all, goes without saying on the point of Muse and Meta and them waking up, they've done a phenomenal job, and it's a great product. They've sort of reinvigorated the organization. I've got a lot of friends there. Like, that that is an awesome company, and they've done they've done a great job. But I think in a lot of ways, to me at least, when I see that, it kind of reminds me of what happened with coding and with Cursor and Cognition in the face of the labs. And our view is kind of this is such an important new paradigm where you've got these consumer agents that are... I think Ben Thompson described it as like the aggregator of aggregators. But basically it's these agents that can interact with the entire third party internet. That's a pretty important new paradigm shift. And the implications are big. It means that you can have it do things for you. It's not just talking to it anymore. I think a lot of the younger generation was already using AI in this kind of way. And I think this kind of brought it to the masses where it's like, this is something that primarily does things for you. And so I think that it's a big new paradigm. What we've seen in general, whether it was with coding or a bunch of the application areas, was just when something's that important, a lot of things can win. And so my view is basically something like there can be an amazing independent player like Instinct. You're also gonna see the labs have some sorts of offerings around this. But if this is the main way that broad consumer bases use the product, think it's gonna be really important. So we'll see how it plays out. But our view is that this is a really big new paradigm kind of on the level of chat and coding and these other things. And I think I think a lot of players will win.
00:12:05 · Jason Lemkin
[00:12:05] S2: This is my, meat and potatoes view of the big winners today. Is the ones that are winning today, and this is... And I'm a Muse fan. I haven't used Instinct. I'm hoping to get an invite, but I use... I have 22 agents. I'm all in on the agents. Right? But the ones that win, and this is an open question, are the ones we use all effing day long. So if you look at coding, even me, I'm running my coding agents ten hours a day now. Right. I run and legal, I got wrong in a sense because folks are running Harvey and Legora, like Harry's partner. You're like this. She gets home. She's on the sofa running it all effing day long. And there's lots of wins as VCs were going to make for sporadic use. And this is just a question. I don't know. It's not even a criticism. Will we run Instinct Muse eight hours a day? If we do, I guarantee it wins. Right? But I think this is the second generation. Generation one was open clawed. No one knew how to run it. Right? Other than destroying, you know, all your security and credit card. This is generation two. And then gen three, I think we'll figure out, but I don't know that we're gonna do the use... This may change in two weeks, but I don't know if we have an eight hours a day app yet here. I don't