20VC: Bill Gurley and Howard Marks: What Happened In 2020? What Can We Expect Looking Forward to 2021?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Release Date: 01/04/2021
20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jesse Zhang is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Decagon, the conversational AI platform for customer experience. As one of the fastest growing companies in the valley, they have raised over $230M at a last round price of $1.5BN. Prior to Decagon, Jesse founded Lowkey (acquired by Niantic), studied CS at Harvard, and worked at places like Google, HRT, Citadel, and Intel. AGENDA: 00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Messages 03:43 Olympiad Mathematician to Startup Founder 05:34 Selling to Niantic and What I Did Differently the Second Time 07:16 Why 90% of Founders Build Companies the Wrong Way 12:19 Scaling...
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20VC: Opendoor's CEO on The Greatest Turnaround in Tech | OpenAI and Oracle: How Can Either Afford to Do This | How Anthropic Could Lose 50% of Their Revenue Overnight | Replit Raises at $3BN | Figure, Gemini & VIA IPOs Broken Down
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:00 Opendoor's Potential and Market Valuation 03:32 Why Did Kaz Leave $300M on the Table to Join Opendoor 04:44 Why Does Kaz Believe OPEN Can Be a Good Business When the Market Doesn’t 06:34 How does Kaz Feel About OPEN Becoming a Meme Stock? 17:25 Kaz’s $0 Salary but $1BN Stock Based Compensation 23:41 Oracle and OpenAI Partnership: WTF is Going On? 42:21 Microsoft's Investment in OpenAI: A Financial Perspective & Who Has the Power 44:46 Why Sam Altman is the Greatest Politician of our Time 48:33 How Anthropic’s Revenue Could Go to Zero Overnight? 50:12 Replit Raises $250M...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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 . 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...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
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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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
info_outlineHoward Marks is co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, a leading investment firm with more than $120 billion in assets. Prior to founding Oaktree, Howard spent 10 years at The TCW Group, where he was responsible for investments in distressed debt, high yield bonds, and convertible securities. Howard has also written two books, most recently Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side, and it was Warren Buffet who said, “When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they’re the first thing I open and read. I always learn something.”
Bill Gurley is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, StitchFix, eBay and many many more. As for Bill, widely recognised as one of the greats of our time having worked with the likes of GrubHub, NextDoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix and Zillow. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Before entering venture, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) In March Ray Dalio stated we would be entering a "global recession", how do Howard and Bill feel about this statement? How does today's environment remind Howard and Bill of 2010/11? What is similar? What is different? How does Bill think about investing through cycles?
2.) How does Bill think about investing through cycles? What have Bill's lessons been from seeing many venture vintages on LP performance across cycles? How does Howard think about investing through cycles from a distressed debt perspective? What have his lessons been from Oaktree's performance over the years?
3.) Do Howard and Bill agree we will not see interest rates go anywhere for the next 3-5 years? What is the impact of this sustained low-interest rate environment? What could be done that would see interest rates increase in the future? How does Bill believe this will impact the supply of LP dollars in venture?
4.) How do Bill and Howard evaluate the state of the public markets today? Why does Howard believe that FOMO has really taken effect? How does Bill think about network effects and the laws of compounding with regards to public companies?
5.) Do Howard and Bill agree we are seeing a retreat from globalisation? What are the core impacts of this retreat? Why is Bill so concerned about "regulatory capture"? Why does Bill fear that today, "Washington is for sale"? What would he like to see change?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode
Howard’s Favourite Book: Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America
Bill’s Favourite Book: How Innovation Works
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