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

Latest Episodes:

20VC: Mercor: From $1M to $500M in 17 Months: The Fastest Growing Company in the World | How to Think About Margins and Revenue Sustainability in AI | Why Evaluation Benchmarks in AI are BS Today with Brendan Foody Sep 15, 2025

Show notes

Brendan Foody is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Mercor, the fastest growing company in history. The company solves talent allocation in the AI economy and they have scaled from $1M to $500M in revenue in just 17 months. With a rumoured new funding round pricing the company at a whopping $10BN, the company has the likes of Benchmark, Felicis, Emergence, and of course, 20VC, all on their cap table.

AGENDA:

04:34 Why My Mother Thought I Was Selling Drugs as a Kid

07:48 In The Time My Peers Graduated, I Created a $10BN Business; Is College Worth it?

10:27 Scale, Surge, Mercor, Turing: How Do Data Providers Differentiate

20:57 Scaling from $1M to $500M: We Quadrupled Since Scale was Acquired

33:43 Is There Too Much Cash in Private Markets?

34:55 Why Evaluation Benchmarks in AI are Total BS

35:44 Revenue Sustainability in AI Companies

36:48 Should Investors Give a S*** About Margins When Analysing AI Companies

40:46 The Future of AI Model Providers: Who Wins

45:58 You Cannot Create a $10BN Company without 9-9-6 Work Culture

48:56 We Literally Have Too Much Money, We Cannot Spend It…

52:36 Quick Fire Round: OpenAI vs Anthropic, Lessons from Peter Fenton and Jack Dorsey

20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

Amit Bendov is Co-Founder & CEO of Gong, the leading AI-sales platform. The company has raised over $600 million from some of the best in the world including Sequoia, Thrive, Salesforce and more. Gong has surpassed $300M in ARR, serves thousands of customers (including multiple Fortune 10s), and is valued at over $7BN.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Why CRM Was Always a Lie and Gong's Secret Insight

04:30 – Will AI Kill Salesforce? Mark Benioff's Nightmare

08:15 – Why 99% of VCs Said No to Gong's Seed Round

12:00 – The Shocking Trial Close That Changed Everything

18:00 – Can AI Make Every Seller Perform Like LeBron?

20:30 – Will Sales Software Shift from Software Budget to Human Labor Budget?

25:00 – Why AI SDRs Are "Stupid" and Bound to Fail

35:00 – Gong's Darkest Hour: Shrinking, Churn, and Losing Muscle

41:30 – The Re-Acceleration Playbook: How Gong Got Back to Hypergrowth

54:00 – Would Amit Ever Sell Gong—or Take It Public?

20VC: Musk's $TRN Pay Package Broken Down | Ramp Hits $1BN ARR and Brex Hits $700M: Who Wins | OpenAI's $10BN Secondary Sale | Atlassian Buys The Browser Company for $610M | ASML Lead Roun into Mistral at $14BN Valuation Sep 11, 2025

Show notes

AGENDA:

[00:05] Musk's $1 Trillion Pay Package: The Breakdown?

[00:15] Scale, Windsurf: Are Founders Just Mercenaries Chasing Cash Today?

[00:21] Ramp at $1B ARR, Brex at $700M — Is AI Causing All Boats To Rise?

[00:26] Sierra at $100M ARR Worth $10B — Bubble or Brilliant Bet?

[00:30] Kleiner Perkins Invests $100M into Anthropic at $183BN… WTF?

[00:36] $10B in OpenAI Secondaries — What Happens When 1,000 New Millionaires Hit SF?

[00:40] Anthropic Pays $1.5B to Authors — Fair Deal or Pure Piracy?

[00:44] Why Did ASML Just Invest into Mistral at $14BN?

[00:52] Atlassian Buys the Browser Company for $610M — Genius Move or Panic Buy?

[01:18] IRL CEO Arrested for Fraud: Is More To Come?

20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski Sep 08, 2025

Show notes

Mati Staniszewski is the Co-Founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, the world's leading AI voice platform. Since launching in 2022, ElevenLabs has raised over $350M, most recently at a $3.3BN valuation, making it one of Europe's fastest AI unicorns. The company counts Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Sequoia Capital among its backers. Today, Mati announces that the company has hit a staggering $200M ARR. ElevenLabs took 20 months to hit $100M ARR. 10 months to hit $200M ARR. Can they do $300M in 5 months…

AGENDA:

[00:00] $100M in 20 Months?! ElevenLabs Untold Growth Story

[12:20] Are AI Models Already Plateauing—or Just Getting Started?

[14:00] Why OpenAI Can't Beat ElevenLabs

[17:30] The Talent Wars: How Do You Retain World-Class AI Researchers?

[23:10] PR vs Product: Why Most Startups Botch Their Launch

[36:00] Are U.S. VCs Playing a Different Game Than Europe?

[44:00] The Real Cost of AI: Why ElevenLabs Built Its Own Data Centers

[59:00] Voice Agents = Multi-Billion Dollar Business of the Future?

[01:05:00] Buy OpenAI or Anthropic? Which Foundation Model Wins?

[01:09:30] Europe: Strengths, Weaknesses and What Needs to be Done

20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader Sep 05, 2025

Show notes

Alex Schultz is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics at Meta, where he has spent nearly two decades shaping the company's growth and marketing strategy. He has been instrumental in scaling Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to billions of users worldwide. Alex is is also the author of Click Here: The New Rules of Marketing, the definitive guide to modern growth — available now on Amazon.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Is All Marketing Actually Performance Marketing?

04:00 – When Did Facebook Have the Wrong North Star? What Did They Learn?

16:00 – Will AI Create Companies Run by Just ONE Person?

27:00 – Is AI About to Hit the Biggest Plateau Since Self-Driving Cars?

30:00 – Is China Secretly Winning the Global AI Arms Race?

38:00 – Does AI Kill Content or Supercharge It?

44:00 – Why Brand Marketing Is Harder (and More Important) Than You Think

47:00 – Will Glasses Replace Phones Forever?

51:00 – What Would Alex Do If He Were Sundar at Google Today?

59:00 – What is the Greatest Strength and the Greatest Weakness of Zuck?

20VC: Anthropic Raises $13BN | Why Canva Will Not Direct List | OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1BN All Stock | Lovable Raising at $4BN + Vercel at $9BN: Justified or Not | Quarterly Results from SNOW, Mongo, ZOOM and more Sep 04, 2025

Show notes

Agenda:

04:00 – Anthropic Raises $13BN: The Analysis?

19:00 – Is Zuck's $14BN Scale bet the biggest blunder in AI?

27:00 – Lovable Raising at $4BN and Vercel at $9BN: Justified or Madness?

36:00 – Quarterly Results for Snowflake, Mongo, Okta, Zoom Skyrocket: Is B2B SaaS back from the dead?

48:00 – Is Jensen Huang right there will be $4TRN in AI gains?

57:00 – Will AI wipe out SaaS margins with 10% GPU taxes? Or is Notion the exception?

Items Mentioned in Today's Episode:

Try NEXOS.AI for yourself with a 14-day free trial: https://nexos.ai/20vc

20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst Sep 01, 2025

Show notes

Nick Frosst is a Canadian AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as co-founder of Cohere, the enterprise-focused LLM. Cohere has raised over $900 million, most recently a $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. Under his leadership, Cohere hit $100M in ARR. Prior to founding Cohere, Nick was a researcher at Google Brain and a protégé of Geoffrey Hinton.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Biggest lessons from Geoff Hinton at Google Brain?

02:10 – Did Google completely sleep at the wheel and miss ChatGPT?

05:45 – Is data or compute the real bottleneck in AI's future?

07:20 – Does GPT5 Prove That Scaling Laws are BS?

13:30 – Are AI benchmarks just total BS?

17:00 – Would Cohere spend $5M on a single AI researcher?

19:40 – What is nonsense in AI that everyone is talking about?

25:30 – What is no one talking about in AI that everyone should be talking about?

33:00 – How do Cohere compete with OpenAI and Anthropic's billions?

44:30 – Why does being American actually hurt tech companies today?

45:10 – Should countries fund their own models? Is model sovereignty the future?

52:00 – Why has Sam Altman actually done a disservice to AI?

20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi Aug 29, 2025

Show notes

Jason James is the Co-Founder of Tezi and one of the leading product minds in the valley. Prior to Tezi, Jason was the VP Product at Instacart and before that was Head of Product and Design at Thumbtack.

AGENDA:

00:00 Product lessons scaling Instacart to $40B – what really moves the needle

02:15 Why "quick optimizations" won't build billion-dollar products

04:30 MVPs are dead? How AI is reshaping product development

07:00 Do startups even need PMs anymore in the age of AI?

11:30 The biggest product mistake Jason made building Tezi

16:30 Why most hiring managers fail at recruiting

20:00 The resume trap: how to spot if someone was just "on the elevator up"

26:00 The three roles founders always end up firing

28:00 Are most CPOs actually terrible?

36:30 The myth of startup "culture" – why growth is the only thing that matters

43:00 Did DoorDash actually beat Instacart? The inside take

48:00 Fundraising secrets founders never realize until it's too late

20VC: Anthropic's $10BN Round | Klarna's IPO Broken Down | Inside a16z's 72 Deal Seed Investment Machine | Martin Casado: Is Consensus Investing the Only Game | Why Satya is Chatting S*** on SaaS Apps Disappearing featuring Marc Benioff Aug 28, 2025

Show notes

AGENDA:

00:00 – Marc Benioff vs Snowflake, Databricks & Palantir: Who Wins the Data Cloud War?

05:10 – Does Benioff Feel The Need to Buy AI Talent Like Zuck Is?

09:00 – What Salesforce has Learned From Palantir on Forward Deployed Engineers?

18:00 – Will SaaS apps disappear in an AI world? Why Satya is Chatting S***

23:40 – Are SDRs really screwed by AI… or just evolving?

26:10 – Benioff on Who Wins: OpenAI or Anthropic?

30:00 – Nat Friedman reports to Alex Wang: Genius move or career downgrade?

34:00 – Anthropic's $10B round: Have we hit peak AI hype?

47:00 – Klarna's wild ride: From $45B to $6B to IPO at $15B

55:00 – Inside a16z's seed machine: 72 bets vs Sequoia's 27

57:45 – Martìn Casado: Is consensus investing dangerous—or the only game?

01:05:00 – The big lesson: consensus, contrarian, and why investing is harder than ever

20VC: Do Margins Matter in AI? | Is Defensibility Gone For Good? | Is Vertical SaaS Dead in a World of AI | What SaaS Rules Are BS and No Longer Apply in a World of AI | The Future of Venture: Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS with Byron Deeter Aug 25, 2025

Show notes

Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and one of the most renowned SaaS investors. Byron has led 19 unicorn investments, including IPO successes like ServiceTitan, Procore, Twilio, Box, Gainsight, Intercom, DocuSign, SendGrid. His portfolio includes eight companies that have gone public. Insane.

Agenda:

00:00 – Why are the stakes in AI higher than ever before?

05:20 – Is defensibility in AI gone for good?

07:40 – Do margins even matter when backing the next Anthropic or Perplexity?

09:50 – How does Byron think about future dilution when investing in AI today?

12:10 – With 40% of venture money going to 10 deals, is there any point investing elsewhere?

13:40 – Is vertical SaaS dead? Is there any point when the large players can own it?

18:00 – Will AI shift from the tech budget to the human labor budget and unlock trillions?

21:10 – Are we entering the era of billion-dollar businesses built by 10 people?

25:20 – Is treble-treble-double-double now too slow for AI companies?

33:10 – In today's AI gold rush, is it better to scream the loudest or just build the best product?

41:10 – What specific growth rates are best in class, good and not good enough today?

55:00 – Is venture now just a game of scale — Chanel vs. Walmart?

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