20VC: Scale Founder Alex Wang on How To Hire Incredible Talent Before You Are A Hot Company, Why Beating Competition Is Not As Clear Cut As Investors Believe & Why AI Is Under-Hyped Today In Terms of Total Impact
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Release Date: 09/06/2019
20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Patrick Forquer is the Chief Revenue Officer at , the fastest growing enterprise business to ever hit $100M in ARR and now on track to hit over $250M in ARR by the end of the year. They recently raised a $550 million Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation, led by Accel, note 20VC did participate and is an investor in the company. AGENDA: 0:00 – How Jude Law Generated $50 Million in Qualified Pipeline 4:00 – Why Implementation is Your Secret Weapon to Win in AI 5:50 – Why AI Enterprise Sales Require "Legal Engineers" 7:45 – The 6-Figure Rule: When Should Humans Control Sales 12:55...
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20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Cliff Weitzman is the Founder & CEO of Speechify AI. He solved his dyslexia and ADHD in college by building a Voice AI agent that's now used by over 60 million people and has over 1 million five-star ratings. Over 200 software and AI engineers work on Speechify which won the Apple Design award last year. AGENDA: 00:00 — Until You Hit $100K Do Not Spend on any Channel Other than Meta 04:53 — How I hacked the college system by applying to 26 universities 06:33 — The "Great Guy" yearbook prank that accidentally outed me 08:35 — What I learned from hunting down the top 100...
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20VC: Mag7 Earnings: Google & Amazon Win - Meta and Microsoft Falter | Anthropic's $50BN Raise & What it Means for a Potential IPO | Atlassian, Twilio and Five9 Beat: The SaaS Apocalypse Over? | Sierra’s $15B Valuation: Peak or Potential
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:00 – Mag Seven Earnings: The "Super Bowl" of Tech Results 04:45 – Google’s Cloud Explosion & The AI Search "Disruption" That Never Came 15:53 – Microsoft’s $190B Bet: Is AI the Only Thing Keeping Growth Flat? 21:59 – Meta’s $150B Future Bet vs. Wall Street’s Need for Spreadsheets 28:50 – Palantir’s Home Run: Why Big Companies Spend Big Money on AI 38:43 – Apple’s Quiet Consistency & The Stealth Inflation of Memory Chips 41:11 – The SaaS Apocalypse Over? Atlassian and Twilio Lead the Re-acceleration 50:50 – Anthropic’s $50B Raise & The Math...
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20VC: Shopify's Tobi Lütke on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & What Will Labour Markets Be in the Future | Why We Need More Scrutiny on Charitable Giving, Governments are Bad at What They Do and Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Tobi Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, the global e-commerce titan with a $160 billion market cap. Under his leadership, the company generates over $7 billion in annual revenue and has seen its valuation grow nearly 100x since its 2015 IPO. Today, Shopify has over 8,000 employees and AI now generates over 50% of the Shopify’s code. AGENDA: 00:10:36 - The $160 billion CEO who did not want to be CEO. 00:11:51 - Why don't companies become public? Because it is much worse to be an untrusted public company. 00:16:53 - Why we are about to enter a golden age of entrepreneurship....
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20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Becca Lindquist is Head of Sales at Clay, one of the fastest-growing AI companies to reach $100M+ ARR. She previously helped scale dbt Labs into a category-defining data platform, building and leading high-performing sales teams. Before that, she was an early sales leader at Heap, where she played a key role in scaling the GTM motion. AGENDA: 00:00 Why most sales reps plateau—and when you should leave your company 02:45 Should you jump from SaaS to a hot AI startup right now? 05:30 How long is too long at one company—and what great tenure actually looks like 08:00 How to read a LinkedIn...
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20VC: Anthropic Raises $45BN but Falls Short on Compute | OpenAI Crushes with GPT5.5 and Codex: Back in the Game? | China Blocks Manus $2BN Deal to Meta | Thoma Bravo Hand Back Medallia Keys to Creditors | Why Google is a Bigger Buy Than Ever Before
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:00 $45B Floods into Anthropic from Google & Amazon 05:10 OpenAI Misses Growth Targets — Is This a Real Problem? 08:40 The Rise of AI Agents: Why Humans No Longer Pick Models 12:05 “Compute ≠ Revenue”: The First Crack in the AI Business Model 20:30 China Blocks $2B Manus Deal — AI Cold War Escalates 34:10 Why Google May Be the Biggest Winner in AI Infrastructure 41:50 The Death of SaaS? Agents Replace Apps Like Jira & Canva 46:20 Thoma Bravo Hands Medallia to Creditors — $5B Wiped Out 52:10 The Collapse of Private Equity Exit Routes in VC
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20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Adam Foroughi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Applovin, one of the most underdiscussed but incredible businesses. Applovin has a market cap of $160BN, the company does $5.48BN in revenue and has an astonishing $10M EBITDA per head. The margins; 80%+. There is almost no other business in the world like it. AGENDA: 00:00 – Why Winning (Not Fear) Drives the Best Founders 04:30 – When Money Stops Mattering: The Real Founder Motivation 07:15 – $83M CEO Payday: The Truth Behind the Headlines 10:45 – The Hidden Cost of Being a CEO: What No One Tells You 13:00 – Down 92%: How Do You...
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20Product: Replit CEO on Why Coding Models Are Plateauing | Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified: Will Incumbents Be Replaced? | Why IDEs Are Dead and Do PMs Survive the Next 3-5 Years with Amjad Masad
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Amjad Masad is the Co-Founder and CEO of Replit, one of the leading “vibe-coding” platforms. Under his leadership, Replit has raised a total of $922 million in funding, recently raising at a whopping $9 billion valuation. Replit has over 50 million registered users and is used by employees at 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Replit’s revenue jumped from $10 million to $100 million in nine months, and the company is on track to reach $1BN in ARR by the end of 2026. AGENDA: 00:00 — Why Coding Models are Hitting a Performance Plateau 07:21 — Is Most of the Value of Replit Not...
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20VC: Cursor Acquired for $60BN by xAI | Anthropic Hits $1TRN in Secondary Markets | Did Anthropic Just Kill Figma, Adobe and Canva | Rippling Hits $1BN in ARR | Salesforce Goes Headless: Smart or Stupid | Cerebras IPO 2.0
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 04:00 — 🤯 Cursor Acquired for $60B?! Breaking down the mind-blowing deal with xAI/SpaceX. 07:00 — 🤝 A Marriage Made in Heaven: Why Cursor and Elon Musk actually make perfect sense. 11:00 — 🏆 Who Won the Deal? The $60B question and why SpaceX public shareholders might be the secret losers. 15:00 — 💰 Venture Payday: What this means for the investors and the "lock-up" reality for the founders. 19:30 — 🚀 SpaceX as an AI Lab: Is Elon using $2 trillion in market cap to buy his way into the AI race?. 20:30 — ⚠️ The AI Advantage: Why high-price stocks are...
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20VC: Everyone is Wrong; We Will Have More Developers in Five Years | Why Frontier Labs Will Be Way More Valuable Than They Are Today | Are SaaS Companies Cooked: Which Thrive & Which Die with Aaron Levie, Founder at Box
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Aaron Levie is one of the most forward-thinking public company CEOs when it comes to enterprise adoption of AI. Aaron is the CEO of Box, the enterprise storage company that does over $1BN in revenue but only has a market cap of $3.2BN. Something we discuss today… AGENDA: 00:00 — Why the Experts are DEAD WRONG About the US-China AI Race 10:55 — Everyone is Wrong About Labour Markets: You Will Not Lose Your Job 13:10 — What Role Does Not Exist Today But Will Be So Common in 5 Years 16:45 — Is Your SaaS Tool Actually a Valueless Database in an Agentic World? 20:50 — The...
info_outlineAlex Wang is the Founder & CEO @ Scale, the data platform for AI providing high-quality training and validation data for AI applications. To date, they have raised over $123m in financing from some of the best investors in the business including Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Thrive, Spark and Coatue and then also some of the world's best operators and founders of Dropbox, Instagram, Quora, Github and Twitch to name a few. Prior to founding Scale, Alexandr was a Tech Lead at Quora, directly responsible for all speed projects and before that a software engineer at Addepar responsible for building and maintaining financial models.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Alex made his way from growing up in Los Alamos to being one of the hottest founders in the valley with Scale's new round giving them a unicorn valuation? How did growing up outside the ether of the valley shape Alex's operating mindset today?
2.) Why does Alex believe that AI is under-hyped relative to the state of technology today? Would Alex agree that most projects claiming to be AI are merely rebrandings from actuarial science, data science etc etc? What questions does Alex ask to determine true AI or BS?
3.) How does Alex think about how AI can deal better with ambiguity of data? What other core areas would Alex like to see meaningful step-function improvements in? How does Alex think about the value of data-set size? How does he think about the utility value of data reducing with every incremental data point? How does Alex think about the rise of synthetic data? How does this change the landscape?
4.) What are Alex's biggest lessons on what it takes to hire incredible people before you are a hot company? How does Alex determine whether someone has the right risk profile and desire to work in a startup? What questions reveal that? Where does Alex believe that many go wrong in the early days of hiring? What would he do differently now?
5.) For the $100m Series C, how did the round come together? What did the process look like? How did this round compare to the other rounds? How does Alex think about and approach the element of investor selection? How can founders build relationships with investors in these hyper-compressed fundraising timelines? What have been Alex's biggest lessons when it comes to CEO growth and then also board management?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Alex’s Fave Book: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
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