The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.