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.

20Sales: Everything You Know About Sales Playbooks is Wrong | How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires | How to Crush Pipeline and Deal Reviews as a Team | How to Structure Sales Teams and Sales Comp Plans with Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password 03/07/2025

20VC: Lovable on Hitting $17.5M in ARR in 3 Months | Adding $2.1M ARR Every Week | Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention: Better than ChatGPT | The Story of Europe's Fastest Scaling Company with Anton Osika 03/05/2025

20VC: Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: Where Will Value Be Created in a World of AI | Have Foundation Models Commoditized | When Do Model Providers Become Application Providers | What Anthropic Learned from Deepseek 03/03/2025

20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci 02/28/2025

20VC: The Insane Story of Glovo: Selling 30% of the Company for €100K | The McDonalds Deal That Saved Them | Running out of Money Three Times | Burning $1M Per Day | Being Acquired for $2.2BN with Oscar Pierre, Founder @ Glovo 02/26/2025

20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML 02/24/2025

20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath 02/20/2025

20VC: NVIDIA vs Groq: The Future of Training vs Inference | Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments: Who Wins | Data, Compute, Models: The Core Bottlenecks in AI & Where Value Will Distribute with Jonathan Ross, Founder @ Groq 02/17/2025

20VC: From Penniless Printing Shop Offices to Public Company and One of the Largest Entertainment Companies: The Story of LADbible | The Future of Content & Social Media | US vs Europe: Is Europe F****** with Solly Solomou Founder and CEO of LADbible Group, Solly Solomou has built one of the largest and most engaged digital media entertainment companies in the world. Under his leadership, LADbible has grown to reach two-thirds of 18-34-year-olds in the UK, with a global audience of over 494 million followers, including 141 million in the US. The company’s content now has a total reach of over 1 billion people worldwide. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: From Printer Shop Office to Ringing the IPO Bell: How did Solly start LADbible with no money and no experience? How did a moment with Kevin Hart and Ice Cube show Solly that he had something special with LADbible? In the expansion of the business, what new products did not work? What did Solly learn from the failures of products? Why did Solly always want to build the business without an external funding? What are the top 3 pieces of advice Solly gives to young entrepreneurs starting a business today? The Future of Content and Social Media: How does Solly see wearables changing the future of media and social? Does Solly agree that the friendship graph has been eradicated by interest graphs? Does Solly think TikTok should be banned? Why does Solly think TikTok Shop is the most interesting product in social today? Europe vs US: Is Europe F******: What are the single biggest differences between doing business in the US vs Europe? Why did Solly decide to go public in London on The London Stock Exchange? How tough is it being a public company in London? How important are local liquidity markets if Europe is to regain competitiveness? If Solly were advising Keir Starmer on how to stimulate growth in the UK, what would he say and advise? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/35278740

20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo 02/13/2025

20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo Fabien Pinckaers is the Founder & CEO of Odoo, one of the most incredible businesses that you might not have heard of. Built from the countryside of Belgium, they do an astonishing $650M in ARR, they have over 5,000 employees and have over 50,000 companies as customers. Even better, Fabian openly does not ever want to sell the company, IPO, believes that titles in companies are total BS and most management is done completely wrong. In Today’s Episode with Fabien We Discuss: 1. Everything You Know About Management is Wrong: Why is it BS to give people titles in a company? How does Odoo hire people after only one interview? Why does Odoo prefer to hire really young people under 30? Why does Fabien think it is the worst to build a team in Silicon Valley? 2. The Billionaire Who Does Not Care About Money: Why does Fabien literally not care about money and does not even own a house? Why does Fabien refuse to ever sell or IPO Odoo? How does Fabien plan to offer liquidity to investors if he never wants to sell or IPO? 3. Why Did Every VC Turn Down the $5BN Odoo: What are Fabien’s biggest lessons from being rejected by every VC for Odoo? What did they not see that they should have seen? Why did Fabien always want the price of the company on every funding round to be as low as possible? How does Fabien advise founders on pitching VCs today, knowing all he knows? 4. Scaling to $650M in ARR: The Biggest Lessons: Why does Fabien believe the biggest mistake companies make is they lose focus? What did Fabien not do with Odoo that they should have done? What did Fabien do and invest in, that with the benefit of hindsight they should not have done? When did the business start to break with scale? What would Fabien have done differently knowing all he does know? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/35209235

20VC: Why Model Providers Will Kill Many Startups Moving into the Application Layer | Why Deepseek is not a Threat to OpenAI & Why OpenAI Beats Anthropic | Apps vs Models vs Infrastructure: Where is Value in AI with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake CEO 02/10/2025

20Product: Product Secrets Behind Uber and Opendoor | How AI Changes the Role of the PM & The Product Development Process | How to Hire the Best Product Teams & What No One Does That Everyone Should Do with Brian Tolkin 02/07/2025

20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap 02/05/2025

20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more. In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss: 1. The Rules of Investing: What have been Nabeel’s biggest lessons on price sensitivity? When did he not pay up and with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had of paid up? How important is ownership to Nabeel and Spark? How does Nabeel think about reserve investing and doubling down? Why does Nabeel not engage in secondary markets? How does Nabeel think about when is the right time to sell? Why does Nabeel think the majority of market sizing is total BS? 2. The Venture Landscape: Run by Principles and Broken: Why does Nabeel believe this generation of AI investing will require a different mindset to the one that made VCs successful over the last decade? Why does Nabeel believe that venture is currently run by principals and associates? Why is that such a problem? Why does Nabeel believe that the majority of venture firms today are dead but do not know it yet? What does Nabeel believe happens to the mega multi-stage firms who have raised billions and billions? 3. How to Win the VC Game in a World of AI: Infrastructure, models, apps: where does Nabeel believe the most value will accrue in the next decade of AI investing? What does Nabeel mean when he says there are three categories of AI apps today? Where does Nabeel believe the most valuable will be built? Does Nabeel believe Deepseek hurt or helped the future for Anthropic? How could Anthropic be a $100BN company from this point? What does no one see about the next 10 years of AI that everyone should see? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/35118865

20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting Wayne Ting is CEO of Lime. The global leader in micromobility, the first to achieve a fully profitable year (2022). Last year, Lime did over $600M in gross bookings, $90M in EBITDA. Their 4-year top-line CAGR is 30%. Before joining Lime, Wayne spent four years at Uber in various roles, including Chief of Staff to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and General Manager of Uber's Northern California business. Wayne previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor on the White House’s National Economic Council under President Obama. In Today’s Episode with Wayne Ting We Discuss: Is Lime Really a Good Business: How did Wayne turn Lime from losing $3 on every $1 to $90M in EBITDA? What worked? What did not work? What did Lime do that he wishes they had not done? What did they not do that he wishes they had done? The Moments that Changed Everything: COVID: Lime lost 95% of their revenues overnight. What did Wayne and Lime do to save the business in such a short space of time? Uber Deal: How did the Uber deal led by Uber CEO, Dara, save Lime as a business? Battery Innovation: How did an innovation on the transportability of batteries and replacing them change the entire Lime business? The Dangers of VC Funding and Capital Efficiency: Why does Wayne believe that VC hype cycles are so damaging for companies and sectors? How did the heat around micromobility damage Lime? What did Wayne and Lime do to increase their capital efficiency so much? What worked? What did not? AMA with the CEO of Lime: What company did Lime not acquire that Wayne wishes they had? How did having a stroke change the way that Wayne leads? Which competitor does Wayne most respect and admire? What were his biggest lessons from working with Dara @ Uber? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/35010825

20VC: Deepseek Special: Is Deepseek a Weapon of the CCP | How Should OpenAI and the US Government Respond | Why $500BN for Stargate is Not Enough | The Future of Inference, NVIDIA and Foundation Models with Jonathan Ross @ Groq 01/30/2025

20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness 01/24/2025

20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia 01/22/2025

20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji Hussein Kanji is the Founder and Managing Partner of Hoxton Ventures, one of Europe’s leading early-stage firms with mega wins in the form of Darktrace and Deliveroo. Hussein cut his teeth in venture at Accel Partners in his early years. In Today’s Episode with Hussein Kanji We Discuss: 1. How to Raise a Fund: What are Hussein’s biggest lessons from his first fund taking 39 months to raise? Why does Hussein believe you should fundraise for a set amount of time and not to achieve a certain amount of capital? Does Hussein believe governments should be investing in venture funds? What are the biggest mistakes Hussein sees emerging managers make when raising? 2. How to 10x a Fund: What is Hussein’s formula for knowing when to sell an investment? How did Hussein miss out on making $400M in Darktrace? What did he learn from it? How much money did Hoxton make from Deliveroo? How did doing 37x on Deliveroo impact how Hussein invests today? 3. How to Build a Team in Venture: Why does Hussein believe the incentive mechanism for young VCs is broken? Why do they just want to get cash out the door and not worry about quality? Why is it hard to hire female partners today? What needs to happen for this to change? What are the single biggest ways that venture partnerships break down? What went wrong between Hussein and his partner, Rob? 4. Is Europe Totally F*******: Why does Hussein believe small seed rounds are a massive problem in the UK? Why does Hussein believe the dire state of the London Stock Exchange is not a problem? Why does Hussein advise companies that the best way to scale is in the US? What advice would Hussein give to Keir Starmer on how to stimulate growth in the UK? Why does AI mean that the UK can now compete with the US? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/34910860

20VC: Monday.com: Scaling from $6M to $120M in ARR in 3 Years | How Monday Have Built the Best Performance Marketing Engine in SaaS | Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product; The Biggest Lessons and Mistakes with Eran Zinman 01/17/2025

20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia 01/15/2025

20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years 01/13/2025

20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno 01/10/2025

20VC: Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets: From $60BN to $400M and Back to $40BN | The Biggest Opportunities, Mistakes and Challenges Ahead for One of the Public Market's Only 100x Investments Carvana is one of the most wild stories in the public markets. The company IPO’d with a market cap of $2BN before skyrocketing to $60BN, only for the company to lose 99% of it’s value hitting a bottom of $400M market cap. Today the company is stronger than ever and with a market cap of $41BN. Joining us in the hotseat is Dan Gill, Carvana’s CPO, the man who oversees all technology functions, as well as strategic partnerships for the business. In Today’s Episode with Dan Gill We Discuss: From $60BN to $400M Market Cap: What did Carvana do that Dan wishes they had not done? What did Carvana not do that Dan wishes they had done? How do you maintain morale in a team when the company has lost 99% of it’s value? From $400M Back to $40BN Market Cap: What have been the core needle movers in Carvana’s market cap surging? How does the Carvana business model benefit from economies of scale? How does vertical integration of the different products Carvana sells change the margin structure of the business? The Future of Carvana: Why does Dan believe there is a massive market for Cavana in selling new cars? Why does Dan want to move into the peer to peer market, a market where so many before have failed? Why does Dan think Carvana should sell Chinese cars on the platform if American citizens want to buy them? What revenue line does Carvana not have today that Dan believes will be the biggest in 10 years time? Product Advice, North Star Metrics, Idea Selection: What is the product advice that Dan gives more than any other? How does Dan advise startup founders on how to know they have the right north star metric? What is his framework? How does Dan advise founders on how to select the right idea to work on? What is Dan’s prioritisation framework for if an idea will have a larger enough impact and is therefore worthy of being worked on? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/34767060

20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate 01/06/2025

20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank 12/20/2024

20VC: UiPath's Daniel Dines on Why Agents Do Not Mean RPA is F***** | Why We Have Reached the Upper End of Scaling Laws | The Future of Work in an Agent World and What Everyone Misunderstands About Enterprise AI Daniel Dines is the Founder & CEO @ , one of the most incredible journeys in startups. For 10 years, UiPath was a bootstrapped company that scaled to just $500K in revenue. Then it all changed, product market fit became obvious and the rest is history. The company went on to raise funding from , Accel, Kleiner Perkins and more. Today, the company is worth over $10BN, listed on the NASDAQ and does $1BN+ in revenue. In Today’s Episode with Daniel Dines We Discuss: 1. The Future of LLMs: Why does Daniel believe that we are at the upper end of scaling laws and more compute will not lead to increased performance? Does Daniel believe we will see a world of many specialised models or fewer generalist models? OpenAI, Anthropic, Xai. Which would Daniel most want to invest in? Why them? 2. Is RPA F******* in a World of Agents: What is the core difference between RPA and agents? How do the tasks they complete differ? Why must we have a neutral meta layer coordinating RPA processes and agents? Why will siloed applications like Salesforce be unable to expand beyond their initial function? Why does Daniel believe that agents will not complete tasks but make recommendations? 3. The Future of Work: WTF Happens with Agents: How long will it be before agents are fully utilised in the enterprise? What is the role of the human in a world of agents? What are the single biggest concerns of enterprises considering implementing agents in their companies? Why has GenAI not been successful in enterprise so far? Will this change? 4. Daniel Dines: The Billionaire Behind the Brand: How does Daniel deal with the loneliness of being CEO? What problem did Daniel struggle with for much of his twenties and thirties? How did he overcome it? Why does Daniel fear that he is becoming more and more disconnected? Why does Daniel believe 1-1s are BS? What is Daniel’s single biggest advice to a new parent today? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/34499660

20VC: Reid Hoffman on The Trump Administration | Elon Musk and DOGE | The US Defence Budget, NATO and The War in Ukraine | China, Tariffs and TikTok | The Future of Chips, Nuclear Energy, Quantum Computing and Climate Reid Hoffman is one of the most impactful people in technology and startups. As a Founder he founded Paypal and Linkedin before moving to the investing side where he has led deals in Facebook, Airbnb and more. In Today’s Episode with Reid Hoffman We Discuss: 1. China and Tariffs: Should the US ban Tiktok and other Chinese companies, given China banning US companies presence in their country? How does Reid evaluate the rise of the Chinese car industry? What are his concerns? How does Reid hope Trump uses tariffs to advantage the US position? What is Reid concerned about what Trump could do with tariffs? What would be bad? 2. Elon Musk and DOGE: What impact will Elon Musk have on the future of AI in America? Why does Reid believe that it is impossible for DOGE to achieve it’s targets? What should Elon must be given credit for? What does he not deserve credit for? What are Elon’s greatest strengths? What are his greatest weaknesses? 3. The US Defence Budget and Ukraine: Why does Reid believe that the US should reduce their defence budget? Does Reid believe the US should continue to finance the war in Ukraine? Should the US continue to subsidise NATO’s lack of defence spending? 4. NVIDIA and The Future of Chips: Will NVIDIA be able to sustain their monopoly? What is the biggest threat to their position? Should both the US and Europe have their own chip sovereignty? How does Reid evaluate potential conflict between China and Taiwan impacting chip supply? 5. Nuclear, Quantum and Climate: Why does Reid believe nuclear fusion can solve climate change? Does Reid believe that with the rise of global conflict and AI, the importance of climate change is reduced in the attention of the world? Why does Reid believe that AI does more to help than harm climate change? Why is Reid so excited for a future with quantum computing? What are the biggest dangers of quantum that we need to be mindful of? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/34460950

20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire Guillaume Moubeche is the Founder of Lempire, a company he has bootstrapped in the most competitive market in technology and scaled to a staggering $30M in ARR. Guillaume has never raised primary funding for the business but sold $10M of secondary at a $150M valuation. Guillaume is also an angel investor and and best selling author. In Today’s Episode with Guillaume Moubeche: 1. How to Build a Sales Machine: What is the biggest mistake founders make when crafting their ideal customer profile? What are Guillaume’s biggest lessons in scaling from $0-$1M in ARR? Why are most founders afraid to sell? What can they do to overcome this? What is the ultimate equation to success in sales? 2. How to Build a Content Machine: How does Guillaume come up with ideas for new content? How does he structure his content creation time? How does Guillaume advise founders on which platform and content type they should focus on? What are the biggest mistakes they make? How does Guillaume think about content repackaging and reposting? What have been some of the biggest lessons in how to get the max out of existing content? 3. How to Build a Hiring Machine: Why does Guillaume think you should pay people well above market rate? What does it allow you to do as their employer? Why does Guillaume think in 90% of times, more people equals more problems? What have been Guillaume’s biggest hiring mistakes? What did he learn? 4. Making $10M, Ironman and Family: How does Guillaume reflect on his own relationship to money? How has it changed post making $10M? Why does Guillaume believe that endurance sports makes for better entrepreneurs? When asked if all the sacrifices were worth it, how does Guillaume respond? What does his life not have yet that he would most like? /episode/index/show/thetwentyminutevc/id/34423020

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

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