20VC: Why Seed is for Suckers | a16z's $20BN Fund & Founders Fund's $4.6BN: What Makes Them So Good | Why Josh Kushner Is the Master of Venture Capital Strategy | Why Extended Private Markets Screw US Citizens with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Release Date: 04/17/2025
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...
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20VC: Anthropic's $10BN Round | Klarna's IPO Broken Down | Inside a16z's 72 Deal Seed Investment Machine | Martin Casado: Is Consensus Investing the Only Game | Why Satya is Chatting S*** on SaaS Apps Disappearing featuring Marc Benioff
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:00 – Marc Benioff vs Snowflake, Databricks & Palantir: Who Wins the Data Cloud War? 05:10 – Does Benioff Feel The Need to Buy AI Talent Like Zuck Is? 09:00 – What Salesforce has Learned From Palantir on Forward Deployed Engineers? 18:00 – Will SaaS apps disappear in an AI world? Why Satya is Chatting S*** 23:40 – Are SDRs really screwed by AI… or just evolving? 26:10 – Benioff on Who Wins: OpenAI or Anthropic? 30:00 – Nat Friedman reports to Alex Wang: Genius move or career downgrade? 34:00 – Anthropic’s $10B round: Have we hit peak AI hype? 47:00 –...
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20VC: Do Margins Matter in AI? | Is Defensibility Gone For Good? | Is Vertical SaaS Dead in a World of AI | What SaaS Rules Are BS and No Longer Apply in a World of AI | The Future of Venture: Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS with Byron Deeter
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and one of the most renowned SaaS investors. Byron has led 19 unicorn investments, including IPO successes like ServiceTitan, Procore, Twilio, Box, Gainsight, Intercom, DocuSign, SendGrid. His portfolio includes eight companies that have gone public. Insane. Agenda: 00:00 – Why are the stakes in AI higher than ever before? 05:20 – Is defensibility in AI gone for good? 07:40 – Do margins even matter when backing the next Anthropic or Perplexity? 09:50 – How does Byron think about future dilution when investing in AI today?...
info_outlineJason Lemkin is one of the leading SaaS investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat, Saleloft and more.
Rory O’Driscoll is a General Partner @ Scale where he has led investments in category leaders such as Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), and WalkMe (WKME), among others.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:23 What is Wrong with Billionaires on Twitter: Are They Depressed?
08:49 Why Does product Market Fit Mean Less Than Ever
11:50 Why is Venture Capital More Risky Than Ever and No One is Discussing It
16:17 Will Private Equity Save a Generation of SaaS Companies and VCs
23:53 a16z’s $20BN Fund: Seriously?
31:29 Why Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital are Masters of the World
38:21 Why is Seed Investing for Suckers
45:49 Why Are $50 Million Seed Funds Useless
46:21 Founders Fund Raises $4.6BN: Analysis
52:00 How WIll LPs Change Their Approach to Venture in the Next Five Years
59:53 When Will IPOs Comeback?
01:09:15 Why Does it Not Make Sense for the Best Companies to IPO
01:09:51 Lost Ethics and Morals in Founder Secondaries and Term Sheets
01:22:58 Quickfire: OpenAI, Cursor, Deel vs Rippling