The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman. If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.

20VC: Everyone is Wrong; We Will Have More Developers in Five Years | Why Frontier Labs Will Be Way More Valuable Than They Are Today | Are SaaS Companies Cooked: Which Thrive & Which Die with Aaron Levie, Founder at Box 04/20/2026

20VC: Jake Paul on Why Traditional VC is Toast and Attention is More Valuable Than Cash | Politics: Will Jake Paul Actually Run for President? | Inside the Payday of Fighting Anthony Joshua and Mike Tyson | with Geoffrey Wu, Co-Founder at Anti-Fund 04/18/2026

20VC: Anthropic Unveils Mythos | SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TRN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race | Jason's Critique of Dario Amodei & How OpenAI Could Win the Enterprise Game 04/16/2026

20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried 04/14/2026

20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina Carles Reina is VP of Sales at ElevenLabs, where he was the first investor and fourth employee. Carles has scaled the revenue org from Day 1 to over $350M in just 3 years. Carles is also an active investor with investments in ElevenLabs, Revolut, Happy Robot and more. AGENDA: 00:00 - Is the Traditional CRO Dead in the Age of AI? 01:01 - Building the AI Sales Machine: Agents that Actually Generate Revenue 08:35 - Will AI Shrink the Sales Teams of the Future? 09:51 - The ElevenLabs Masterclass: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota 11:00 - How to Structure Explosive Sales Accelerators 12:15 - Why You Should Stop Paying Commission on Pilots 14:00 - Customer Success: Is it 'Total Bullshit' or a Growth Engine? 16:15 - The 'Global-First' Fallacy: Why You Need to Open Every Market Now 17:23 - Why Startups Are Wrong to Ignore 20-Year Sales Veterans 19:15 - The Pipeline Construction Secret: Liquidity vs. Whales 24:30 - Forecasting the Unpredictable: How to Hit a $1B Revenue Target 31:55 - The Substitution Threat: Is AI Voice Just a Commodity? 34:10 - Verticalization Mistakes: Lessons from Scaling India 38:40 - The 'IBM Effect': Does Brand Actually Shorten Sales Cycles? 40:15 - Extreme Expectations: Why ElevenLabs is a Hard Company to Work For 42:15 - Internal Leaderboards: How to Use Public Competition to Drive Results 44:20 - Hunting the Obsessed: Identifying the 'Inner Psychopath' in Hires 46:40 - The SaaS Apocalypse: Will Companies Build Their Own CRM? 48:30 - Formula 1 Branding: The Mindset Behind the Audi-Revolut Deal 50:15 - Dinner vs. Conferences: Which Marketing Channels Actually Scale? 52:45 - Designing Un-Salesy Content: How to Run a Legendary Summit 54:20 - CVC Strategy: Turning Corporate Investors into Distribution Channels 01:01:45 - The Globalization Nightmare: Why You Can't Sell in English Everywhere 01:06:45 - Operator-Investors: Can You Be a High-Performer and a VC Simultaneously? 01:11:30 - Unit Economics in AI: Why Good Early Numbers Might Mean Failure 01:18:25 - The Next Wave: Why Foundational Model Consolidation is Inevitable /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/40808400

20VC: DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution | Why LLMs Will Not Commoditise & We Have Not Hit Scaling Laws | Bottlenecks in AI & The Energy Crisis Caused By AI | Whether AI Will Do More to Harm or Help Inequality Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder & CEO of Google DeepMind - working on AGI, responsible for AI breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the game of Go; and AlphaFold, which cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction and was recognised with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Demis is revolutionising drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs. Ultimately, trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality. AGENDA: 00:04:00 — What Actually Counts as AGI; and Where Are We Today? 00:05:00 — What Are the Biggest Bottlenecks Holding AI Back Today? 00:06:00 — Have We Hit the Limits of Scaling Laws? 00:07:00 — Where Is AI Ahead of Expectations; and What’s Still Missing? 00:07:30 — Why Can’t AI Systems Learn Continuously Like Humans? 00:08:30 — How Did DeepMind Go from Behind to Leading the Pack? 00:11:00 — Are We Heading Toward Model Commoditization; or Winner-Takes-All? 00:12:00 — What Does the Future of Open Source Really Look Like? 00:13:00 — What Does a Post LLM World Look Like? 00:14:45 — Can AI Really Fix Drug Discovery—and Cut the 10-Year Timeline? 00:17:00 — What Does “Good” AI Regulation Actually Look Like? 00:18:00 — Who Should Be the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in an AI World? 00:19:30 — If Demis Had One Shot to Fix AI Safety, What Would He Do? 00:21:00 — Is This Time Different for Jobs; or Will History Repeat Itself? 00:22:00 — Is AGI Bigger Than the Industrial Revolution; and Faster? 00:23:00 — Are We Underestimating AI Despite All the Hype? 00:23:30 — Does AI Lead to Massive Inequality; or Universal Prosperity? 00:24:30 — How Do We Solve the Energy Crisis Created by AI? 00:26:00 — Why Stay in the UK Instead of Moving to Silicon Valley? 00:28:00 — Will Europe Ever Build a Trillion-Dollar Tech Giant? 00:29:30 — Meeting Elon Musk for the First Time? 00:31:00 — What Big Questions About AI Is No One Talking About? 00:31:30 — What Does Demis Want His Legacy to Be? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/40750590

20VC: Hims & Hers: $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue: The Comeback | Why Being Public is 10x Better | The Death of the "Strategy" Hire | Why Performance Marketing is Worse than Brand Marketing with Andrew Dudum 04/04/2026

20VC: Anthropic's $6BN Revenue Month | OpenAI Kills Sora & Hits $100M ARR on Ads | Oura Going Public & Whoop Raises at $10BN | Manus Founders Trapped in China & The Billionaire Tax: Anyone Left in California? 04/02/2026

20VC: Marc Andreessen on The Future of Venture Capital: Will a16z Go Public | Why Labour Displacement with AI is Wrong | Why Introspection is Dangerous | Why "Diamonds in the Rough" is BS in VC | Why a16z Invested $300M into Adam Neumann 03/30/2026

20VC: The Venture Model is Broken | You Need to be Greedy and Selfish to Win Early Stage Investing | Why Margins Do Not Matter for Early-Stage Startups | The Growth Rate that is Required in a World of AI with Gili Raanan, Founder @ Cyberstarts 03/28/2026

20VC: Why You Need a $1BN Fund To Do Series A Today | OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who Wins Enterprise | SpaceX at $2TRN and Data Centers in Space | The $20BN Groq Deal Broken Down | Jeff Bezos' $100BN New Fund 03/26/2026

20VC: Inside Anduril's $20BN Army Contract & Why Anduril Must Go Public | Why 99% of Drone Companies Will Die | Why There is Never an Ethical Question of How Anduril Products are Used with Matthew Steckman, President @ Anduril 03/23/2026

20Sales: Inside Figma's $1BN ARR Revenue Machine | Why We Do Not Have Customer Success or SDRs | Why I Do Not Believe in Sales Quotas with Shaunt Voskanian, CRO @ Figma 03/21/2026

20VC: The Return of Travis Kalanick: Uber Would Be $1TRN Today With Him | NVIDIA Predicts $1TRN in Revenue: Everything You Need to Know From GTC | Anduril Lands $20BN Army Contract | Adobe CEO Shock Exit: The Dominos Falling 03/19/2026

20VC: The 8 Moats of Enduring Software Companies: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI | Why Dropouts are "AI Maxing" the World & Remote Early-Stage Companies are Dying with Gokul Rajaram Gokul Rajaram is one of the greatest operators turned investors of the last 2 decades. He is trusted as the go to advisor for the greatest founders in the world. Today he serves as a Board Director at three public companies: Coinbase, Pinterest and The Trade Desk. Prior to Marathon (his firm), Gokul served on the executive team at DoorDash and Block. Before Block, he served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook. Earlier in his career, Gokul served as a Product Management Director for Google AdSense. Gokul is also a prolific angel investor, having invested in 700+ companies, including Airtable, Figma, Groq, Runway, Supabase, and Vercel. AGENDA: 03:53 — Investing Lessons from Google, Doordash and Facebook 05:32 — Why Mark Zuckerberg is the Greatest Distribution Genius Alive 07:23 — Why Every Company Today Needs to be Multi-Product 09:16 — Negative Gross Margins: Are the Best Companies Actually Built on "Shit" Economics? 10:50 — The SaaS Apocalypse: Is the Entire Sector Going to Zero? 12:15 — The 8 Moats of Enduring Software Companies: How to Analyse Companies 14:50 — Why Brand is No Longer a Strong Moat (And What Replaced It) 16:13 — Salesforce vs. Atlassian: Which Systems of Record are Dying? 18:13 — Outcome-Based Pricing: Is This the Total Death of Seat Pricing? 20:16 — The Bolt-On AI Trap: Why Rebuilding Your Entire UX is Non-Negotiable 23:44 — Are the Outcome Sizes of Vertical SaaS Large Enough for VC Today? 28:16 — The Zombie Cohort: What Happens to Private Companies with High Valuations? 32:44 — Is "King Making" Complete Bullshit? 34:21 — Durability Over Margins: What Really Matters in a 100x Growth World 35:36 — The Non-Consumption Miracle: Why Granola and Gamma are Crushing It 38:50 — The PayPal Rule: Can You Raise Prices 5 Times in 3 Years? 42:47 — My Biggest Miss: How I Misread the Shopify Billion-Dollar Mark 45:18 — The Courage to Bet: Why Instacart is the Best VC Deal Ever 46:33 — Seed vs. Growth Pricing: When Does Price Actually Destroy Returns? 50:53 — Does "Proprietary Founder Access" Even Exist? 54:33 — Double Down or Diversify? The Truth About Fund Reserves 59:44 — The Vanta Anti-Portfolio: A Mistake I'll Never Forget 01:01:21 — When to Sell: The "Sell a Third, Hold a Third, Trade a Third" Rule 01:04:12 — Why Remote Early-Stage Companies are Dying 01:07:33 — Why Mid-Level Partners are Fleeing Mega Funds 01:09:47 — The Best CEO Superpowers: Larry, Mark, Jack, and Tony 01:12:33 — The Next 10 Years: Why Dropouts are "AI Maxing" the World /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/40487710