20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Release Date: 06/12/2024
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
David Luan is the CEO and Co-Founder at , a company building AI agents for knowledge workers. To date, David has raised over $400M for the company from , Andrej Karpathy, Scott Belsky, Nvidia, ServiceNow and WorkDay. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at OpenAI, overseeing research on language, supercomputing, RL, safety, and policy and where his teams shipped GPT, CLIP, and DALL-E. He led Google's giant model efforts as a co-lead of Google Brain. In Today's Episode with David Luan We Discuss: 1. The Biggest Lessons from OpenAI and Google Brain: What did OpenAI realise that no one...
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Val Scholz is the former Head of Growth @ Revolut, where he led the company to their first 10M users. Post Revolut, Val played a crucial role in scaling several high-growth companies including VEED, Simple & Busuu (exited for $400M). Today, Val is the Head of Growth at Kittl, an intuitive design platform empowering graphic designers. In Today’s Episode with Val Scholz We Discuss: Lessons from Scaling Revolut to 10M Users What were Val’s biggest takeaways during his time at Revolut? What does Val consider the secret sauce behind Revolut’s success? What did Val think Revolut...
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Michael Eisenberg is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ , one of Israel's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Wix, Lemonade, Empathy, Honeybook and more. Before leading Aleph, Michael was a General Partner @ Benchmark. In Today's Show with Michael Eisenberg We Discuss: 1. The State of AI Investing: Why does Michael believe that "foundation models are the fastest depreciating asset in history"? Are we in an AI bubble today? As an investor, what is the right way to approach this market? Who will be the biggest losers in this AI investing phase? Where will...
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Danny Rimer is a Partner @ and one of the most prominent VCs of the last two decades. Danny has led Index to be one of the top global firms on both sides of the Atlantic. Among Danny's incredible portfolio, he has led or been involved with Figma, Discord, Dream Games, , Glossier and Patreon. In Today's Discussion with Danny Rimer We Cover: 1. The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook: How did Danny miss investing in Brian Chesky and Airbnb when Brian says "Index is the best investor that Airbnb never had"? What was Danny's biggest takeaway from turning down...
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Janie Lee is the Head of Product and the owner of the Self-Serve business at Loom. Janie previously worked at Rippling, leading the Identity Management and Hardware teams. Prior to that, she worked at Opendoor launching markets and developing pricing algorithms. During this time, Opendoor scaled from 2 to 20+ markets, $5B+ revenue, and 1500+ employees. In Today's Episode with Janie Lee We Discuss: 1. Inside the Product Building Machine of Rippling and Opendoor: What are Janie's single biggest product lessons from Rippling? How do they build so much product so fast? Can you have...
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Alex Wang is the Founder and CEO @ Scale.ai, the company that allows you to make the best models with the best data. To date, Alex has raised $1.6BN for the company with a last reported valuation of $14BN earlier this year. Scale tripled their ARR in 2023 and is expected to hit $1.4BN in ARR by the end of 2024. Their investors include Accel, Index, Thrive, Founders Fund, Meta and Nvidia to name a few. In Today's Show with Alex Wang We Discuss: 1. Foundation Models: Diminishing Returns: What are the three core pillars that can meaningfully improve foundation models performance? Why is...
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Reid Hoffman has been one of the most impactful people in technology over the last two decades. He is the Co-Founder of Linkedin (acq by Microsoft for $26BN) and Co-Founder of Inflection.ai. As an investor, Reid has backed the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, Zynga and more. Reid is also a Board Member @ Microsoft and was on the board of OpenAI. In Today's Show with Reid Hoffman We Discuss: 1. Foundation Models: Commoditisation, Business Models, Incumbents: Does Reid believe we are seeing the commoditization of foundation models? Is it too late for new foundation models to be born today?...
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Ashley Kelly is the VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling, the all-in-one platform for HR, IT, and finance. Before Rippling, Ashley played a crucial role in scaling Brex’s outbound sales from $2M to over $300M in ARR, and has hired over 800 SDRs during her time in some of the best tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Lever and Zenefits. In Today’s Episode with Ashley Kelly We Discuss: From NASCAR to Silicon Valley SDR How did Ashley make her way into the world of sales? Why does Ashley think the best AEs and leaders start off as SDRs? What is Ashley’s advice...
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Aravind Srinivas is the Co-Founder & CEO of Perplexity, the conversational "answer engine" that provides precise, user-focused answers to queries. Aravind co-founded the company in 2022 after working as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. To date, Perplexity has raised over $100 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Susan Wojciki. In Today’s Episode with Aravind Srinivas We Discuss: Biggest Lessons from DeepMind & OpenAI What was the best career advice Sam Altman @ OpenAI gave Aravind? What were Aravind’s biggest...
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is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com. In Our First Ever Episode of This Week in SaaS 1. PluralSight Goes to Zero: WTF happened to PluralSight? How did it go from $3.5BN to $0? Will this have a wider impact on the willingness of PE to buy tech companies? Who are the next contenders to go from hero to zero? Zendesk? Anaplan?...
info_outlineAlex Wang is the Founder and CEO @ Scale.ai, the company that allows you to make the best models with the best data. To date, Alex has raised $1.6BN for the company with a last reported valuation of $14BN earlier this year. Scale tripled their ARR in 2023 and is expected to hit $1.4BN in ARR by the end of 2024. Their investors include Accel, Index, Thrive, Founders Fund, Meta and Nvidia to name a few.
In Today's Show with Alex Wang We Discuss:
1. Foundation Models: Diminishing Returns:
- What are the three core pillars that can meaningfully improve foundation models performance?
- Why is data the single largest bottleneck to the performance of models today?
- What data do we need to capture that we do not currently, that will have the biggest impact on model performance moving forward?
- Will we see the largest companies in the world revert back to on-prem with the increasing security challenges of migrating all customer data to foundation models?
2. AI: A Military Asset in Global Conflict: China + Russia
- Why does Alex believe that AI has the potential to be an even more powerful military asset than nuclear weapons?
- If this is the case, should we have open systems? Do we not have to have closed systems?
- Why does Alex believe that the CCP's approach to industrial policy is better than anyone else's?
- How does Alex evaluate the rise of Chinese EV car manufacturers in the last few years?
- Does Alex really believe that China is two years behind the US in the AI race?
3. "I Get Fairer Treatment in Congress than in the Press":
- Why does Alex believe that the best PR is no PR?
- Why does Alex believe that he got fairer treatment in congress than he does in the media?
- Why does Alex believe that all founders should look to own their own distribution channels today?
4. Alex Wang: AMA:
- What are some of Alex's biggest lessons from Patrick Collison on the impact that a hot company brand has on the ability for that company to hire the best?
- Does Alex think Trump is going to win? What would be the impact if he were to?
- Why does Alex believe that enterprise software will be changed forever in the next few years?
- What question is Alex never asked that he thinks he should be asked?