The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Alex Mashrabov
[00:00:00] S0: My parents told me that I must get to The United States because this is the place where technology matters. By the age of 19, I was able to get to top three in the world in competitive programming. Actually, it took us eighteen months from 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. For Coursera, it took twenty four months. On average at Hixfield, a person on the team spends over $10,000 a month on various models. So internal usage of models a month is over 4,000,000. I just caught a guy who spent over 30 k in a week on Astra model. Many people spend over 10,000 in a week. Higgs Field, this is the story that no one has told in startups yet. The company has just hit a billion dollars in revenue. It is the fastest growing company in consumer land to hit this milestone.
00:00:49 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:49] S1: It even surpassed Cursa. And guess what? The travesty. No one has covered this story. This company is built with 300 people out of Kazakhstan. It is a complete anomaly, and you don't know about it. Alex, the founder, is an incredible genius. One of, like, the most talented computer programmers competing in competitions from a, like, super, super early age, and then building a company that he sold to Snap for over a $160,000,000. Now Hicksfield, rumored to be raising at an $8,000,000,000 price, has just crossed 1,000,000,000 in revenue. This is the story that you don't know that you need to know. But before we dive into the show today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid Shait, cofounder and CEO of dMATRICE, JPMorgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. He credits JPMorgan's high touch approach with supporting dMatrix as it grew and expanded internationally. Whether you're in the early days or expanding into new markets, JPMorgan helps startups navigate complexity with real confidence, offering personalized guidance and deep sector expertise. Find out how JPMorgan helps founders at jpmorgan.com/growwithoutlimits. JPMorgan is the bank of the innovation economy. While JPMorgan supports growth, Corgi protects it. My word. What an arresting first line. Get your ass covered with Corgi insurance, and I'll tell you why. If you're running a business right now, you already know this pain all too well. Getting insurance, it's really slow, it's confusing, and my word, it's full of paperwork. Well, that's exactly why Corgi is here to change the game. Corgi is the first and only insurance carrier designed specifically for tech companies, allowing you to get covered in minutes instead of days. Corgi provides essential coverages for all growth stages, such as DNO, E and O liability, cyber, commercial, general liability, and more. Get your ass covered. I love the way we say ass with Corgi Insurance alongside thousands of other startups at corgi.com/20vc today. That's corgi.com/20vc. You won't regret it. While Corgi covers risk, Flex gives you room to move. Business owners run their whole financial life on Flex. One platform from business revenue to their personal spend. Float every purchase for sixty days.
00:03:21 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
Tap capital that grows with your revenue and pay vendors in a 170 countries across 32 currencies, plus the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place So you spend less time reconciling and more time growing. That's why thousands of owners use Flex, named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2026. Visit flex.one, that's flex.one, and use the code 20 v c. You have now arrived at your destination. Alex, I am so excited for this dude. We were talking downstairs, and I said, I don't think the Higgs Field journey has been told before, and it's it's an amazing journey. So thank you so much for joining me today. [00:04:04] S0: That's very special opportunity for us. Thank you for having me. Obviously, your story is inspiring as well, like how social media has become, like, an elevator for you, opportunity to create fun, and so on. [00:04:15] S1: It's very kind of you to say. I do just want to go back though because you're not the Stanford Silicon Valley born and bred engineer. You were a competitive programmer in Kazakhstan. Can you just take me back? How did you first find and fall in love with computers and become a programmer so early?
00:04:15 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:04:15] S1: It's very kind of you to say. I do just want to go back though because you're not the Stanford Silicon Valley born and bred engineer. You were a competitive programmer in Kazakhstan. Can you just take me back? How did you first find and fall in love with computers and become a programmer so early? [00:04:34] S0: So first, you need to understand where I come from. So my father is from Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is a country in Central Asia where, like, if a family of five people makes thousand dollars a month, it's considered to be wealthy. It's not very high standards of living, unfortunately. But both my parents are professors of mechanical engineering. And since I remember myself, since I was eight, my parents told me that I must get to The United States because this is the place where technology matters. So mother had to work three jobs because basically my education was to compete in programming competitions all the time and to go to various educational camps where I could learn from the best, like certain data structures, algorithms, and so on. Can I [00:05:20] S1: ask you a question? Did you feel pressure as a child competing, being pushed into these environments when you are
00:05:20 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:05:20] S1: ask you a question? Did you feel pressure as a child competing, being pushed into these environments when you are [00:05:28] S0: so young? Absolutely. And and and I'm very grateful to my parents that they showed me the path really from that early on. Definitely, when you come from this part of the world, think about post Soviet countries, India, China. Getting to the top of the rankings in any competition, in any international competition, is the only way to really break out. So by the age of 19, I was able to get to top three in the world in competitive programming. But then instead of pursuing academical career, decided to do startups. [00:06:01] S1: I'm sure your parents were thrilled. Can you take me to that decision? This is penultimate moment. You've worked nineteen years for, your parents have told you this is the mother load, this is the thing. And you're like, I'm gonna go and do this really risky thing called a startup at this point. What happens then?
00:06:01 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:06:01] S1: I'm sure your parents were thrilled. Can you take me to that decision? This is penultimate moment. You've worked nineteen years for, your parents have told you this is the mother load, this is the thing. And you're like, I'm gonna go and do this really risky thing called a startup at this point. What happens then? [00:06:18] S0: So let me take you back to 2014. I was very fortunate to work on pre transformer architecture neural nets. And I was primarily just doing optimization, make it run faster, parallel across multiple machines, and so on. And we actually built state of the art system for language translation from English to Russian and Russian to English. Apparently, talent wars were a real thing even back then. A lot of my teammates were hired by DeepMinds and Meta, but my passion was actually different. I was very, very surprised to learn when I come to SF for the first time how quickly Uber actually spread out. And I was thinking, if this app can take over the world so quickly and transform the whole industry, maybe what's gonna happen is that mobile phones are gonna become the most used devices in the world. Maybe there is gonna be a version of the future where everyone is gonna be spending most of their time in their life watching AI generated videos on the phones. Because who else is gonna produce videos for the phones? Maybe it's gonna happen with AI. [00:07:19] S1: Okay. And so that was the company that we built before that you sold to Snap?