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

Latest Episodes:

20VC: Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders | The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time | Why SPACs Will Come Back | Why Short Sellers Should Be Banned | Is Trump Better for Business than Biden with Jason Wilk @ Dave Apr 21, 2025

Show notes

Jason Wilk is the Founder and CEO of Dave, the greatest turnaround in the public markets of the last 12 months. Dave went public with a market cap of $4BN, just months later the company had a market cap of $50M. Today, they are back with a market cap of $1.1BN. In 2024, CNBC named Dave the best-performing financial stock in the country, achieving 900% growth.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:09 Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders

07:45 The Best Performing Fund Would Only Invest in YC Founders on Their Second Time

11:25 "We Went Public Too Late, It Was a Big Mistake"

17:53 Why Did Jason Choose to SPAC?

24:21 Why Does Jason Believe SPACs are Unfairly Demonised and Will Comeback?

29:47 How Does AI Change the Margin Structure of the Next Generation of Companies

33:14 Is Trump Better for Business than a Biden Administration?

38:35 Are We Heading into a Recession? Predictions for Next 12 Months?

46:26 Why Have No Neobanks Reached the Heights of Revolut in the US?

48:08 Why is the Opportunity in Low Income Banking Not High Income in the US?

50:07 Why Short Sellers Should Be Stopped and How Immoral They Are

20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com Apr 18, 2025

Show notes

Rich Socher is the Founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of the AI startup MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. He is widely recognised as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:10 Winners & Losers: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude

08:59 How Partnerships Could Decide the Winners in AI

12:42 China vs US: Who Wins the War for AI

25:50 How Society and Economics Needs to Change in a World of AI

34:04 What Jobs Will Be Replaced, What Will Not

36:04 How Europe Needs to Change It's Approach to AI

41:06 How AI Will Change Health and Longevity

43:10 AI in Consumer and Enterprise Markets

49:30 Quantum Computing and AI Misconceptions

56:57 Longevity, Personal Reflections, and Future Outlook

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20VC: Why Seed is for Suckers | a16z's $20BN Fund & Founders Fund's $4.6BN: What Makes Them So Good | Why Josh Kushner Is the Master of Venture Capital Strategy | Why Extended Private Markets Screw US Citizens with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll Apr 17, 2025

Show notes

Jason Lemkin is one of the leading SaaS investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat, Saleloft and more.

Rory O'Driscoll is a General Partner @ Scale where he has led investments in category leaders such as Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), and WalkMe (WKME), among others.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:23 What is Wrong with Billionaires on Twitter: Are They Depressed?

08:49 Why Does product Market Fit Mean Less Than Ever

11:50 Why is Venture Capital More Risky Than Ever and No One is Discussing It

16:17 Will Private Equity Save a Generation of SaaS Companies and VCs

23:53 a16z's $20BN Fund: Seriously?

31:29 Why Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital are Masters of the World

38:21 Why is Seed Investing for Suckers

45:49 Why Are $50 Million Seed Funds Useless

46:21 Founders Fund Raises $4.6BN: Analysis

52:00 How WIll LPs Change Their Approach to Venture in the Next Five Years

59:53 When Will IPOs Comeback?

01:09:15 Why Does it Not Make Sense for the Best Companies to IPO

01:09:51 Lost Ethics and Morals in Founder Secondaries and Term Sheets

01:22:58 Quickfire: OpenAI, Cursor, Deel vs Rippling

20VC: Benchmark's Victor Lazarte on Why Portfolio Construction is BS| Why SaaS Spreadsheet Investing is Dead | Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US | Three Traits All the Best Founders Have & The Lie All Big Tech Companies Have Been Telling Apr 14, 2025

Show notes

Victor Lazarte is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the mot renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Victor has led deals into the likes of HeyGen and Mercor. As an angel, he was the first investor and board member of Brex, and as a Founder he scaled Wildlife Studios, bootstrapping into the largest gaming company in LatAm, with about 4 billion downloads.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:10 Lessons Scaling Wildlife Studios to 4BN Downloads

04:49 Why Predicting the Future is Wrong When Starting a Company

07:11 Three Different Categories of Company in an AI World: Who Wins & Loses?

09:25 Why You Should Always Ask What a Founder Does in Their Free Time?

17:30 Two Traits That All the Best Founders Have?

23:17 Why If You Start a Company in SF You are 1,000x More Likely to be Successful?

35:30 Why Spreadsheet SaaS Investing is Dead

36:10 Why Replacing Humans is the Most Exciting Opportunity in AI

37:02 Why Knowledge Work Will Be Destroyed and What Happens Then?

37:30 Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US

38:59 China vs. US: The AI Race

42:33 Why All Students Today Should Study Computer Science

44:38 Why Portfolio Construction is BS

47:04 What Makes Peter Fenton One of the Best Ever

51:31 Why Duolingo Will Be One of the Most Valuable Companies in the World

01:00:17 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions

20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak Apr 11, 2025

Show notes

Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:21 Biggest Product Lessons from Scale AI

7:18 Why Product Managers Are Wrong: They are not the CEO of the Product

12:28 Why Market Selection is More Important than Anything Else

16:40 If Distribution is King then Product is President

22:06 Effective Product Strategy and Execution

26:24 How to Write the Best PRDs

31:01 Balancing New Features and Technical Debt

33:17 Analysing Retrospectives and Postmortems

33:55 Introduction to Pre-mortems

38:25 Biggest Product Mistakes and Lessons Learned

41:40 Evaluating AI Models and Lessons Learned

45:03 The Future of AI in Product Management

55:21 What Should Product People Learn to Win in a World of AI

59:37 The AI Talent War in San Francisco

01:01:26 Quickfire Round

20VC: How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem | Why We Need to Flood the UK with Venture Capital | What the UK Can Learn From Sequoia, Stripe and Norway | Why Now is the Time to be Bullish on China & Lessons from Jensen Huang with Tom Hulme & Stan Boland Apr 10, 2025

Show notes

Tom Hulme is a General Partner @ GV and leads GV's European investing. He has led rounds in Monzo, Nothing, GoCardless, Lemonade, Snyk and is widely considered one of the best investors in Europe.

Stan Boland is one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the UK. In 1999, he co-founded Element 14 which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 for $640 million. Following this, Boland co-founded Icera Inc. in 2002, a fabless semiconductor company which he sold to Nvidia for $367 million.

In Today's Discussion We Cover:

04:26 Is The UK's Biggest Problem a Talent Problem

09:50 Why We Need to Flood the UK With Venture Capital

10:38 What Europe Can Learn from Stripe and the Collisons

15:21 How the UK Can Use Visas to Retain the Best Talent

16:46 Why the Government Needs to Put 10x More Cash Into Fund of Funds

24:32 Is the London Stock Exchange F****** and Does it Matter?

34:38 What The UK Can Learn From Sequoia and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund

40:42 What is a "National Goal for Wealth Creation" & How Do We Implement It?

48:10 What are the Most Broken Elements of the UK Tax Regime

52:11 Is It Stupid to Remove the Non-Dom Tax Status

53:15 Why is Now the Time to Be Bullish on China

01:00:19 Biggest Lessons from Working with Jensen Huang

01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions

20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America Apr 07, 2025

Show notes

Ernest Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Carvana. Under Ernie's leadership, Carvana went from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a $50+ billion public company, became the fastest-growing online used car retailer in U.S. history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right, in 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just $400M. Today they are back with a market cap of $35BN, that is a 100x in the public markets and selling 400,000 cars sold annually, with a logistics network that rivals Amazon.

In Today's Episode with Ernie Garcia We Discuss:

04:12 Are all great founders just "stubborn egomaniacs"?

06:55 How Carvana Almost Died on Several Occasions

08:46 Is Carvana's Inability to get VC Funding a Sign the VC Model is Broken?

11:58 Operators vs. Strategists: What Hires Can Make or Break a Company?

21:46 Billionaire's Biggest Lessons on Parenting

26:52 Is Life About Happiness or Achieving

32:21 The Reality of Being a Public Company CEO

39:07 Why Companies Should Go Public

43:55 Why You Should Price Your IPO to Perfection with No Pop

50:50 "What I Wish I Had Known About Debt in Building Carvana"

52:32 Quick Fire Round: Favourite CEO, Marriage Advice, Carvana in 10 Years

20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital Apr 04, 2025

Show notes

Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more.

In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss:

1. The Rules of Investing:

What have been Nabeel's biggest lessons on price sensitivity? When did he not pay up and with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had of paid up?
How important is ownership to Nabeel and Spark? How does Nabeel think about reserve investing and doubling down?
Why does Nabeel not engage in secondary markets? How does Nabeel think about when is the right time to sell?
Why does Nabeel think the majority of market sizing is total BS?

2. The Venture Landscape: Run by Principles and Broken:

Why does Nabeel believe this generation of AI investing will require a different mindset to the one that made VCs successful over the last decade?
Why does Nabeel believe that venture is currently run by principals and associates? Why is that such a problem?
Why does Nabeel believe that the majority of venture firms today are dead but do not know it yet?
What does Nabeel believe happens to the mega multi-stage firms who have raised billions and billions?

3. How to Win the VC Game in a World of AI:

Infrastructure, models, apps: where does Nabeel believe the most value will accrue in the next decade of AI investing?
What does Nabeel mean when he says there are three categories of AI apps today? Where does Nabeel believe the most valuable will be built?
Does Nabeel believe Deepseek hurt or helped the future for Anthropic? How could Anthropic be a $100BN company from this point?
What does no one see about the next 10 years of AI that everyone should see?

20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox Apr 04, 2025

Show notes

Ishan Mukherjee is the Co-Founder/CEO of Rox, a Sequoia-backed AI-powered sales productivity platform. Before Rox, he was the Chief Growth Officer at New Relic where he scaled the self-serve business from $0-$100M in ARR. Prior to New Relic, Ishan founded Pixie Labs (acq by New Relic). Before that he led product at Siri Knowledge Graph at Apple, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), Premise Data, and Amazon Robotics. Ishan was also an early engineer in Kiva (acquired by Amazon) where he joined after graduating from MIT.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:50 Biggest Lessons Scaling New Relic's PLG to $100M in ARR

05:59 How to Do PLG and Enterprise at the Same Time

07:00 How to do Content in a PLG World

08:50 Performance Marketing or Organic Content: What Works for PLG

10:27 Why You Should Stop Marketing at Events

11:47 Why SEM is a Cartel

14:15 Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS

17:17 How AI Changes the World of Enterprise Sales: Commit-Based vs. Usage-Based

20:49 How to do Sales Compensation Plans

24:44 How to Ramp New Sales Reps

25:03 The Impact of AI on Sales Research

29:18 How to do Deep Customer Research in an AI World

35:56 Changing Spending Patterns in SaaS

41:41 Retention and Churn in Enterprise AI

43:31 The Future of Sales Teams with AI

44:45 Hiring and Scaling Sales Teams

54:28 Quickfire

20VC: The Daily Deal: Coreweave IPO | Scale Hits $25BN on $2BN EOY Revenue | Sequoia's 25x Return on Wiz | Tech Stocks Tank with Tariffs | Cursor: Defensible or Dangerous Example of Lost Moats in Tech Apr 03, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to The Daily Deal — the new show with Harry Stebbings and Jason Lemkin, where we break down the biggest stories in tech, venture, and B2B. From market meltdowns to billion-dollar raises, wild valuations, and the drama behind the deals. We're covering it all! Plus, we'll be joined by some incredible guests to go deeper on the moves shaping the future of our industry.

Today we discuss:

Tech stocks were hammered in late trading today in response to the Trump administration's plans to levy tariffs of between 10% and 49% on imported goods, with Apple shares falling more than 6%.
Rippling Deal: Illegal or Hustle?
Emergence Raises $1B for B2B Investments
Cursor, Replit, Windsurf: Who Wins?
Lots of gen AI startups are crossing into the $100M ARR club. The latest entrant is talent marketplace Mercor, last valued at $2B. Is triple triple double double dead?
ScaleAI at $25B: Pricey or Potential?

Discussion with Bhavin Shah @ Moveworks:

ServiceNow Acquires Moveworks for $2.5B: AI Craze Continues
Sequoia Makes 25x on Wiz: Is M&A Open Again?
USD Stablecoin issuer Circle has filed to go public. The company, which has raised $1.2 billion in VC money, reported $1.7 billion in 2024 revenue, with $155.7 million in net income.
Oracle Cloud Revenue Up 23%: Old Guard Wins in AI?
Salesforce Customers Love AgentForce, But Will They Pay?
Dustin Moskovitz Retires from Asana: Is SaaS Too Tough?

Discussion with Andrew Feldman @ Cerebras:

Coreweave's Redemption Provision: A Time Bomb for Coatue?
Can OpenAI's $12B Deal Save Coreweave from $5B Loss?
OpenAI Won't Profit Until $127B in Annual Revenue
A lot of young founders raising big in chips; bullish or bullshit?

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