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
Release Date: 08/01/2026
20VC: The $100 Billion AI Assistant Race: Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | We Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble & AI Assistants Will Replace Every App on Your Phone with JD, Founder of Town
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jean-Denis “JD” Grèze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $1BN valuation. Before founding Town, JD spent seven years as CTO of Plaid. Before Plaid, he was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. He is also a prolific angel investor backing companies including Modal, BaseTen, Merge and NexHealth. AGENDA: 00:00 Why AI Assistants Are Silicon Valley’s Hottest Market 07:00 How Does Town Compete With Grokbot, Instinct and Big Tech? 11:00 Will We Have One AI Agent or Different Agents for Every Part of Our Lives? 17:00 How Many...
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20VC: How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It | How ElevenLabs Leapfrogged Us: What I Learned | The AI Talent War: How Your Hiring Process Needs to Change with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Cliff Weitzman is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify, the world’s leading AI voice and text-to-speech platform, used by more than 60 million people globally. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, Cliff first built Speechify at Brown University to help him consume written material through audio. AGENDA: 00:00 Cliff Weitzman Reveals His Biggest-Ever Strategic Mistake 03:08 Why Speechify Is Paying Millions to Build Their Own Data Centres 09:59 What No One Knows About Buying Chips That Everyone Should Know? 20:19 The AI Data Gold Rush Has a Brutal Business-Model Problem 23:42 How...
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20VC: NVIDIA Crushes Quarter and Buys Hugging Face | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5BN Valuation and The Race for AI Assistants | Cognition Raises at $46BN, Linear $2.5BN and Clay $7BN
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:00 Nvidia crushes $96.2B quarter and nears $12.9B Hugging Face deal 13:52 OpenAI cuts off Cursor as the Altman–Musk feud escalates 17:40 OpenAI’s 1,000-agent cyberattack triggers an industry wake-up call 22:58 Instinct hits $2.5B valuation as AI assistants gain spending power 36:39 Cognition targets $1.6B ARR as the coding-agent market explodes 40:31 AI forces every startup to become a compound company—or get left behind 52:42 Salesforce embraces Claude and outcome-based pricing in major AI reset 1:00:52 Stripe–PayPal deal collapses as both sides clash over price...
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20VC: The AI Bubble Is Wrong | AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern | Why People Over-Estimate Open Models But Enterprises Still Fear Frontier Models with Aaron Katz, ClickHouse
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale revenue from approximately $5M to $500M and led the company through its IPO. Before Elastic, he spent 12 years at Salesforce, working alongside Marc Benioff and helping transform it from a 200-person startup into a global software giant....
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20VC: Is Anthropic’s Coding Business Worth $2 Trillion? | Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? | Why 80–90% of Neo-Labs Die in the Next 18 Months? with Eno Reyes, Co-Founder @ Factory
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Eno Reyes is the co-founder and CTO of Factory, the agent-native software development platform building autonomous “Droids” for enterprise engineering teams. Factory has raised $220 million, most recently a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, from investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, 20VC, NEA, Blackstone, Insight Partners and Nvidia. Before founding Factory, Eno worked as a machine-learning engineer at Hugging Face, training, optimizing and deploying large language models for enterprise customers. AGENDA: 00:00 Are We Underestimating AI by an Order of...
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20VC: NVIDIA Bonanza: Buys Poolside & Invests in Mercor and Perplexity | Anthropic's $30TRN Revenue Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service, Defence and Robotics are Overinflated
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 00:00 NVIDIA Launches a Three-Deal Blitz Across the AI Stack 04:31 NVIDIA’s $12BN Poolside Deal Exposes Frontier AI’s Capital Wall 15:39 NVIDIA Moves to Back Mercor at $20BN and Perplexity at $30BN 26:55 OpenAI Confirms 2027 IPO as Anthropic Seizes the Lead 40:42 Hugging Face Draws $13BN Takeover Interest as Open Models Boom 44:56 Citadel Cashes Out 80% of Its Leopold Aschenbrenner AI Trade 51:51 AI Boom Is “Less Than One-Third Over”—But Token Addiction Has a Price 01:04:07 Stripe Reaccelerates to 41% as AI Reshapes Software’s Leaderboard 01:07:45 Instinct Security...
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20VC: Inside Sequoia’s Investment Committee: Lessons from Don Valentine, Doug Leone and Alfred Lin | How the SpaceX and Citadel Deals Went Down | What Sequoia Specifically Looks for in Founders with Julien Bek
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world. At Sequoia, he has partnered with companies including Rillet, Tacto, and Auctor. Before joining Sequoia, Julien spent five years at Accel, where he worked with companies including Miro, Melio, and BeReal. He is also an angel investor in Revolut and Attio. AGENDA: 06:35 – What did Julien only discover about Sequoia after joining the firm? 08:05 – What does everyone get wrong about Sequoia? 13:00 – Is Series A the hardest stage at which to invest today? 14:00 – Is Sequoia less...
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20VC: The AI Bubble Will Burst: Half the Neoclouds Will Die | China: Should We Ban Chip Exports & Be Fearful of Chinese Open-Source | Mag7: Who Dies and Who Thrives: Why Meta is Meh and Microsoft is Mega
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jerry Murdock is the Co-Founder of Insight Partners, which manages over $90 billion in assets. Jerry personally backed companies including Twitter, Nest and Docker, while Insight’s portfolio includes giants such as Shopify, Wiz and monday.com. Across three decades, Insight has helped produce 55+ IPOs and become one of the most powerful technology investment firms in the world. AGENDA: 00:00 — Is the AI Bubble About to Burst? 11:00 — Will Half of All Neoclouds Disappear Within 36 Months? 13:00 — Can Open Source Models Actually Beat OpenAI and Anthropic? 22:00...
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20VC: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60BN | Stripe’s $8BN OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic’s First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600BN in Revenue? | Lovable and Higgsfield Raise Mega Rounds
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
AGENDA: 04:20 Elon’s Deal of the Decade: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60BN 06:10 Why Cursor Was Surprisingly Cheap at $60BN 07:00 Why Zuckerberg Failed to Buy the AI Prize Elon Secured 12:00 Elon vs Zuck: Who Would You Rather Work For? 14:00 Will Microsoft or Amazon Now Race to Buy Cognition? 17:05 Stripe’s $7BN OpenRouter Deal Creates Huge VC Winners 25:00 OpenRouter’s Fatal Risk: Enterprises Don’t Want 10 Models 28:15 Anthropic Turns Its First Profit on $11.5BN of Quarterly Revenue 32:15 Can Anthropic Really Reach $600BN in Revenue? 37:00 Why Every Elite Engineer Could Soon Get $100K in...
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20VC: Uber President on The Untold Uber Stories: Travis, China and Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food with Andrew MacDonald
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Andrew Macdonald (Mac) is the longest-serving employee at Uber. Today, he is the President and COO. No one on the planet has spent more time mastering ride-sharing than Mac. Uber now does 300M rides per week, has 200M users, and is one of the most recognised brands on the planet. Mac never does interviews and so this was a rare look behind the scenes at the Uber machine. AGENDA: 05:39 – How was Mac the only survivor from the Travis era? 10:39 – How does Uber decide what to include in Uber One membership? 11:45 – How does Uber decide which new products to pursue? 16:08 – What does...
info_outlineJoon 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 Best AI Companies Have Clear and Fast Reward Functions
24:00 How We Sign Fortune 500 Companies for $10M Contracts in Weeks
32:00 Does Similie Kill Kalshi and Polymarket? Prediction vs Changing the Future
42:00 Inside Similie’s $300M Raise; What Every Founder Needs to Know