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