20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Release Date: 04/27/2020
20VC's Big Fat Quiz of the Year: Founder, Fund and Breakout Company of 2025 | Predictions for 2026: The Company to Buy, The Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win 2026 and The Tailwinds NVIDIA Will Face
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 03:48 Founder of the Year 2025 06:58 Product of the Year 10:05 Fund of the Year 20:52 Breakout Companies of 2025: Who Made the Biggest Impact? 26:57 Biggest Surprises of 2025 32:57 Predictions for 2026: Top Performing Tech Stocks of the Year 35:25 B2B Stocks to Watch 38:31 Why Salesforce Could Be the Buy of 2026 47:11 Google, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft: Buy One, Short One 55:38 IPO Speculations: Who Will Go Public in 2026 01:00:57 The Impact of AI on Employment
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20Product: On Running's CPO on How to Create Emotion Through Product | Why 99% of Products Fail and How to Create Cults Around Products | The Biggest Product Mistakes On Have Made & Lessons Learned with Gérald Marolf
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Gérald Marolf is the Chief Product Officer at On Running. Gérald oversees the full range of On’s shoes, apparel and accessories to make sure each delivers performance, comfort and style. Before On, Gérald spent over a decade building consumer brands with collaborators such as Microsoft and Ferrari. AGENDA: 00:00 – Why Most “Great Products” Fail to Create Emotion 03:00 – How Perfume Taught Me Everything About Desire & Product 06:10 – The Brutal Reality of Building Physical vs Digital Products 16:00 – Why “Simple Design” Is Overrated and Dangerous 23:00 – Why Vuori is...
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20VC: Will SpaceX IPO at $1.5TRN | Will Cursor Kill Figma | Lightspeed Raises $9BN | OpenAI: $1BN from Disney, New CRO & #1 App in App Store | Oracle and Broadcom Hit: Now the Time to Buy?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 03:32 Lightspeed's $9 Billion Fundraise 05:20 The Impact of Mega Funds on Seed VCs 10:09 The Supercycle of Growth and Late-Stage Investments 13:06 Disney Invests $1BN into OpenAI and What It Means 23:19 Oracle Hit Hard: Is Now the Time to Buy 28:34 Broadcom's Market Cap Drop and Anthropic’s AI Chip Orders 35:04 Cursor Competes with Figma: The Convergence of Design and Coding Tools 46:20 The Biggest Danger for Incumbents: Being Maimed by AI 55:28 Boom Supersonic Raising $300M to… Power Data Centres… WTF 01:00:24 Will SpaceX IPO at $1.5TRN and The Elon Option Value
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20VC: a16z’s David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s Growth investing team. His team has backed many of the defining companies of this era, including Databricks, Figma, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, and OpenAI, and is now investing behind a new generation of AI startups like Cursor, Harvey, and Abridge. AGENDA: 03:05 – Why Everyone is Wrong: Mega Funds Does Not Reduce Returns 10:40 – Is Public Market Capital Actually Cheaper Than Private Capital? 18:55 – The Biggest Advantage of Staying Private for Longer 23:30 – The #1 Investing Rule for a16z: Always Invest...
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20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Raaz Herberg is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company in history. As one of the first 10 employees, Raaz has helped scale the business from nothing to a multi-billion-dollar ARR business. Before Wiz, Raaz was a Senior PM working on Azure at Microsoft. AGENDA: 03:51 What No One Knows About The Early Wiz Days 09:08 Most Effective Marketing Wiz Ever Did? Lessons from it? 24:11 How Wiz Mastered Enterprise Sales and Product Development 39:12 The Value of Proof of Concept an Why Everyone Gets Them Wrong 44:23 Why The Best Leaders...
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20VC OGs: SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price | Airwallex Raises $330M and The Battle with Keith Rabois | Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers | IPO Market Predictions for 2026: Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks and SpaceX
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 03:46 SpaceX's $800 Billion Valuation: A Deep Dive 09:18 IPO Market Predictions for 2026 18:18 Netflix's Bold Move: Acquiring Warner Brothers 27:43 Tiger's New Fund Strategy 33:02 Databricks' Head of AI $500 Million Seed Round 36:38 Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Valuation 48:22 Will LLMs Kill the App Layer 01:02:02 Google's AI Capabilities 01:06:58 Chinese Open Source Models in US Startups 01:08:57 Airwallex Raises $330M at an $8BN Valuation 01:23:50 Prediction Markets and Insider Trading
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20VC: Kalshi’s $1BN Raise, the Polymarket Feud, and the Battle to Replace Traditional Media
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Tarek Mansour is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Kalshi, the leader in the world of prediction markets. Just last week, they announced their $1BN raise at an $11BN valuation. In total, they have raised $1.59BN from some of the best, including Sequoia, a16z, General Catalyst, IVP, Meritech, and more. They also last week announced exclusive partnerships with CNN and CNBC, marking their move into mainstream media and news. AGENDA: 03:28 Why Did Kalshi Need to Raise $1BN 10:35 Why is Kalshi vs Polymarket Such a Fierce Rivalry? 20:44 The Future of Prediction Markets 25:09 Why Does Kalshi Partner...
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20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Bending Spoons is the acquisition machine of the tech world. They have acquired the likes of Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Streamyard and more. However, they never open their gates to the secrets behind Evernote’s product machine. Today that changes with Federico Simionato joining 20Product. Fede has been a Product Lead at Bending Spoons for 8 years where he has led product teams at Evernote, WeTransfer and more. AGENDA: 03:02 From Dentist Games to $11BN Bending Spoons 04:54 Advice for Aspiring Product Managers 05:38 Building a Coveted Brand at Bending Spoons 07:43 Evaluating and...
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20VC: Thrive & OpenAI Partnership | Eventbrite Acquired for $500M | Databricks Raising $5BN at $134BN Valuation: Cheap or Not? | Why SaaS is Like Japan and The TAM Trap in Software
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 04:20 Thrive and OpenAI Partnership 07:14 Databricks Raising $5BN at $134BN Valuation: Cheap or Not? 17:39 Eventbrite Acquired by Bending Spoons for $500M 21:39 Pagerduty’s $1BN Market Cap, Just 2x Revenue 26:59 The TAM Trap: Why SaaS Is Like Japan 37:42 Lessons from Companies Hitting $100M ARR 44:57 The Future of Labour Markets is F****** 52:10 The Importance of Compounding in Investments 56:45 The Relevance Game in Venture Capital 01:05:01 Supabase at $5BN or Lovable at $6BN: Which One?
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20VC: Scale, Surge, Turing, Mercor: Who Wins & Who Loses in Data Labelling | Is Revenue in Data Labelling Real or GMV? | Why 99% of Knowledge Work Will Go and What Happens Then? | Why SaaS is Dead in a World of AI with Jonathan Siddharth @ Turing
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jonathan Siddharth is Founder and CEO of Turing, one of the fastest-growing AI companies advancing frontier models. Jonathan has led the company to an astonishing $300M ARR with just $225M raised and a profitable company. A Stanford-trained AI scientist, Jonathan previously helped pioneer natural language search at Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft. AGENDA: 03:35 Data, Compute, Algorithms: What is Most Abundant? What is Lacking Most? 09:18 What Does No One Know About AI’s Data Requirements That Everyone Should? 17:05 The Biggest Challenges Enterprises Have with AI Adoption 20:38 Why...
info_outlineHowie Liu is the Founder & CEO @ Airtable, the all in one collaboration platform that has taken so much of our ecosystem by storm. To date, Howie has raised over $170M from some of the best in the business including Benchmark, Thrive, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital, Founder Collective, CRV and Freestyle to name a few. Prior to founding Airtable, Howie was the Co-Founder @ Etacts, an automated intelligent CRM that was acquired by Salesforce just 9 months after creation. Howie then led the social CRM product at Salesforce. Fun fact, Howie started his career as an intern at Freestyle Ventures.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Howie made his way from founding Etacts to changing the way we think about databases and spreadsheets today with Airtable? How did Salesforce acquiring Etacts impact Howie's operating mentality with Airtable?
2.) With the rise of remote work, what have been Howie's core observations from the last month of the world going WFH? What does it take to succeed? What mistakes have Airtable made in their process of work from home? Why did it not work? What lessons did Howie take from that?
3.) How does Howie think about Airtable's transition from an application to a platform? What does he perceive as the core challenges in making the transition? What lessons has he learned from studying others who have done it? Why did Howie choose Peter Fenton @ Benchmark to work with?
4.) How has Howie seen himself evolve and scale as a leader over the last few years? What have been the most challenging elements? How does Howie think about which individuals he would like as mentors? How does he determine which advice to ingest vs to reject?
5.) How does Howie analyse the remote work/collaboration tools environment today? Does Howie believe we will enter a period of consolidation with the proliferation of new tools created? Does Howie believe we will see an unbundling in collaboration tools?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Howie’s Fave Book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, Spying on Whales
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