20VC: Lessons from Investing $2BN and Returning $8BN in Cash | Why Most Venture Partnerships are Broken | We Sold Salesforce Early and Lost Out on Billions | Are The Best Deals Always Expensive and Competitive with Jake Saper @ Emergence Capital
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Release Date: 03/10/2025
20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
David Frankel is one of the great seed investors of our time. As the Co-Founder of Founder Collective he has backed the likes of Uber, Coupang, Suno, PillPack, Airtable, Whoop, Shield AI and many more. In a world of expanding fund sizes, David and Founder Collective are one of the only successful franchises to truly stick to small, boutique funds. AGENDA: 00:00 The Bubbles Are Getting Bigger—and There Will Be a Lot of Roadkill 05:21 The Worst-Performing Funds Will Be the $50M–$100M Seed Funds 25:06 “We’re Greedy for Returns, Not Management Fees” 30:10 “Pro Rata Is the...
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20VC: Airtable Sold for $1.285BN | Leo Achenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up | Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B | Anthropic Model Breaches Three Companies' Security | Big Tech Earnings: Why Palantir Beat The Rest
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Special Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO @ Palo Alto Networks. AGENDA: 04:50 Airtable Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B 17:00 Leo Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness Blows Up as Citadel Buys His $16BN Book 22:30 Anthropic’s AI Models Breach Three Companies as Cyber Threat Accelerates 33:35 Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B as Chinese Models Crush AI Prices 38:05 Valar Atomics Triples to $6B as Sequoia Bets on Nuclear Power for AI 42:50 OpenAI and Anthropic Could Trigger a Massive Public-Market Dislocation 52:55 Big Tech and Palantir Earnings Ignite the Next Phase of the AI Gold Rush...
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20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users. AGENDA: 00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit… 05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now? 07:30 – Do Chinese open source models...
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20VC: The Best AI Companies Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies | Will Simile Kill Kalshi, Polymarkets and NASDAQ | How to Sign Fortune 500 Companies As Customers in Weeks with Joon Sung Park, Simile
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before making a decision in the real world. Simile has now raised $300 million in total, including a $200 million Series B announced last week at a $2 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures. AGENDA: 00:00 We Will Pay $100M for a Single Query on Some Models 10:00 Why Stock Markets May Not Exist in 5 Years Time 15:00 The Best Companies All Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies 19:00 The...
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20VC: Jensen's Open-Weights Letter | Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks | Francisco Partners Raises $21BN | Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 05:00 Jensen’s Open-Weights Letter Puts Anthropic on an Island 10:00 OpenAI’s Model Targets Hugging Face in a Cyber-Security Scare 18:00 America’s Open-Model Push Accelerates as China Looms Large 30:00 Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia 34:00 Google Cloud Grows 82%—So Why Did the Market Panic? 41:00 Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms and Physical AI 51:00 Francisco Partners Raises $21B: Can Private Equity Still Save SaaS? 1:00:00 Mark Pincus Says Quit When It’s Too Hard—Jason Lemkin Erupts 1:07:00 Stripe vs Revolut: Which $100B+ Fintech Would You Own?
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20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, who just raised $3 billion in fresh capital, its largest pool ever. Matt's portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora, OpenRouter, Chai Discovery, Axiom, OpenEvidence and more. AGENDA: 00:00 Why Menlo Broke All Its Investing Rules to Back Anthropic 09:00 Why Ownership Matters Less in an Outlier-Driven Venture Market 13:00 Do We Have an SPV Problem in Venture Today? 20:00 Do Margins Still Matter in AI? 23:00 Why Open Source Won’t Derail Anthropic’s Growth 26:00 Does Every Model Provider Need to Build Its Own Chips? 29:00 Why Anthropic Is...
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20VC: Mercor CPO on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs | Why Large Enterprise is Scared to Partner with Frontier Labs | Why Small Specialised Models is the Future with Osvald Nitski
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Osvald Nitski is the Chief Product Officer at Mercor, the AI-training and expert-data marketplace powering frontier-model development. Mercor last raised a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation, and is reportedly in discussions for a new round at a $20 billion valuation. Mercor crossed $2BN in ARR in June; doubling from $1 billion in only four months. AGENDA: 00:04:00 Will open-source models kill the data-provider business? 00:07:00 Are enterprises still terrified of working with frontier model companies? 00:09:00 Does every company end up with its own specialised AI...
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20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell & Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:04 China’s Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned 00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion? 00:21 OpenRouter’s Moment: Is This the Perfect Time to Sell? 00:31 Fireworks’ $1.5B Raise Signals the Real AI Money Is in Infrastructure 00:39 Why Every Great AI App May Need to Build Its Own Model 00:50 Stripe’s Bold Play to Buy PayPal 01:01 The AI Funding Frenzy: Why Late-Stage Venture Is Winning 01:12 Nuclear Startups Go Wild While Databricks and Stripe Stay Private 01:15 The AI Supply Chain...
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20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It’s Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch. AGENDA: 00:07 — Why Did Fireworks Bet on Inference When Everyone Else Was Chasing Training? 00:13 — Can Open-Source Models Turn AI Infrastructure into a Commodity? 00:19 — Should Enterprises Trust Chinese Open...
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20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare. AGENDA: 00:00 How Did a Spare-Time COVID Test Become a $5BN Business? 07:00 How Do You Go From Testing Cows to STDs, Sepsis and...
info_outlineJake Saper is a General Partner @ Emergence Capital, one of the leading venture firms of the last 20 years. Their many wins include being early investors in Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva and more. In total, the firm has invested $2BN and returned an astonishing $8BN in cash with much more to come.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:45 The Zoom Investment Story
10:21 Founder, Market, Traction: Rank Them
26:37 Why Market Pull is the Most Important Thing and How to Know
27:23 Are the Best Deals Always Expensive?
28:25 What is the One Framework Emergence Use for Every Investment
29:08 Lessons from the 16x DPI Zoom Fund
30:44 Why Does Every Partner Do Reference Calls on Every Deal?
35:16 We Have Lied to SaaS Founders: The Revenue Rules Changed
37:53 Where Will Value Accrue in a World of AI?
41:37 Three Reasons Why AI Will Not Replace Vertical SaaS
46:38 Who Wins in AI: Startups or Incumbents?
50:09 Why Should Every Company Aim to Be a “Board Discussion”
55:12 Why is Jake Worried About AI’s FTX Moment?
56:00 What Losing Billions on Salesforce Taught Us About Selling
01:00:07 Why Most VC Partnerships are Broken
01:03:07 Grok vs Anthropic vs OpenAI: Buy and Sell?
01:14:25 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com