20VC: Groq's $20BN NVIDIA Acquisition | Manus Acquired by Meta for $2BN | Why Sam Altman Does Not Care About Dilution | Navan Trading at 4x ARR & Why Going Public Does Not Make Sense Anymore | The Rise of Invisible Unemployment and Labour Markets in 2026

24:50In the end, words are words and half a billion dollars is life-changing, right? At some point, the entrepreneur can turn to you and say, to Jason's point, I think he nailed this. If you think two and a half billion is on the price, okay, don't cash out my 500 billion. Give me 50 million. Let me take that much off the table because they're being offered, you know, life-changing money. Because there's actually an implicit statement that you're making that I want to revisit. Even if you think holding on is the right decision, They're selling early and they should compound and hold later. You can unveil those facts till you're blue in the face.

25:22But in the end, they're going to make their decision and they should. You're diversified. They're not. I think it's so though I do think it's a little like little more than that. I think this isn't just money per se. I think going back, it is a local maximum. It's not just the amount of money. And normal people would just take would have taken it at a billion if you owned 80 percent. Normal people would have taken it at 800 million. This was risk reward the best time. Right. Yeah, I agree. I'm only going to I'm going to do up to two hours where agree and contrast it with Harry. Right. Because implicit in Harry's questioning is, quote, they're wrong to sell.

25:55And how do you persuade them otherwise? Consider the other possibility. They are entirely frickin right. Jason nailed it. This is where the world is going long term. But it could well be a local maximum where 12 months from now, there's eight or 10 people doing something similar. You know, it's like, remember, it's not quite the same. Autonomous cars. Cruise was entirely right that someone's going to build a$100 to$200 billion company doing autonomy. They sold for a billion in 2016. Now, Harry, you're right. In theory, they could have stayed for 10 more years, raised 15 more rounds, and become way more and worth$100 million.

26:30But I'm willing to wait. Kyle does not spend a single second worrying about that. He's like, thank God I sold because it was the only freaking exit in autonomous cars for the next five years. So you're assuming, Harry, that they are, quote, wrong and naive to sell. I'm kind of with Jason. Even if they were, I think it's hard to overcome that because you can't leave a founder in a deal where he wanted to sell and you stuck him in the deal and now he's bitter. And if the thing goes wrong, you have no idea how toxic that will be. But the more important point is Jason's not mine, which is they may actually be incredibly astutely selling here.

27:04To be clear, I completely agree with you in terms of not forcing a founder to remain when they don't want to. That is the worst. But I was more saying provide very clear perspective and direction. Yeah. But interestingly, I think this might be a case study where the local maxima for the founders and the VCs were different at the time. For example, one of the founders I worked with yesterday, we were DMing. He's like, wow, I built a whole marketing site on Manus. I vibe coded it. I'm great. Well, I did that. You could do that in Replit or Lovable or Base44. It's like, there's a lot of ways to vibe code a cool marketing site.

27:36So maybe it was right for the founders with competition, but for the VCs, if it returns, what, a third of the fund for a winner, for someone that went zero to one 25 in a year that returns a third of a fund for me, an exit that returns a third of a fund. I know Rory and I disagree to me. It's not very interesting. Like do it. Like I'm all supportive of you. I would never even, I tell all founders to sell. That's my advice. But a third of the fund, it doesn't even buy me anything good in Miami. Rory, you can't do anything in Miami with it, okay? So just... Well, I don't want to be in Miami, so that's fine.

28:09I mean, but I just, as you know, Jason, I disagree. There are some, I mean, first of all, there was this old bullshit chatter 12 months ago. Oh, poor benchmark. They go, there's these issues. Let me tell you, you put a 4X on the board within six, eight, nine months. You look great. Rory, that fund is like a 15X fund. I know that. That's my point. I know it's, I'm well aware of that. That's my point. My point is you look at the narrative 12 months ago, you look at the narrative today, right? I agree. That's exactly my point. So you just put points on the board and you move on, right? It's another win.

28:38But your misalignment is so real because for the benchmark, fuck it, it's in a flyer fund. Let's have another flyer. Roll the dice, dude. Well, actually, I found, Rory, I don't know what your experience is. I found in that scenario, the VCs are the kindest. If you have a 15X fund, when I've been in the front of a fund and they're B-tier VCs, they're unkind, okay? Not universally. When you have a great VC and the fund is over 5x, whatever you want, kiddo, like whatever makes you happy. I think that's you're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of a wonderful situation for both sides is that, you know, benchmark aren't sitting there clutching the nails going.

29:12They've got to make it on this deal. They're like, you know, we've got one of the world's best funds just whenever it was calling it bullshit and we've killed it. The thing that made me think more broadly about that was kind of Meta's M &A spree. And then Yann LaCoon comes out and has an explosive interview with the FT. I mean, Jesus, this guy did not hold back. And I know Jan, I've interviewed him. He said Alan Wang was naive and young and inexperienced. He said that they pretty much lied about Lama for performance and were selective around the benchmarks that they chose. To be clear, by the way, on your prepositions, because who is the they that he's referring to there?

29:50Because some of the Lama stuff was pre-Alex Johnny. So he's actually saying that they themselves at Facebook. You transition from talking about Yann LeCun's opinion of Alexander Wang as young and naive to Yann LeCun separately confessing, for lack of a better word, that while he was at Facebook, some of the Lama benchmarks were incorrect. You're right. It was a tale of, wow, boy, that was talking out of school. Yeah. How do we feel about it when we think about Zucks go forward? Okay, so some pro-Zuck comment. I can imagine you have such a senior figure who is an academic who has a very strong belief that long-term LLMs are not the only thing you need.

30:30And as he's, one of the things I articulate very well is that you're going to need more than that to, quote, get to AGI. But you're an operator and Zuckerberg is nothing if not an operator. And you're like, I don't give a shit about your long-term. The other three guys are shipping their equivalent of LAMM4. Make the damn product that's comparable with the other guy. right? You know that frustration where you have a mismatch between the expectations of the employee and the employer. Once it wasn't an academic pursuit, but once it became a, for whatever reason, we can talk about why I don't get those reasons.

31:00Once it became a corporate imperative for Meta to be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic in the LLM space, having a guy running that project whose first line is, I don't think this is important. We should do something else. just causes managerial disconnect. So the relationship must have been doomed from that moment on. No, no, no. I just think for venture, this is the era of the spite startup. I mean, Anthropics is a spite startup, XAI, and Twitter is a spite startup. Now we've got Meta's AI guy who's doing a new spite startup. I think if you want to make money in venture, you've got to search out spite.

31:37This is driving the greatest AI companies of our generation is spite. Maybe poor Manus didn't have enough spite to grow beyond$2 billion. Spite might provide motivation. It doesn't guarantee outcomes. No, but it is. I mean, literally, OpenAI, so many of its competitors were born out of spite, including its number one competitor. It's just the spite is endless here. First of all, Silicon Valley was founded on spite in the sense of, if you look at Shockley, all those guys spun out, and Fairchild, which was a spite deal. And then they left Fairchild because they couldn't get their money, and they kind of did Intel on a standalone basis.

32:07So there's a long tradition in Silicon Valley of people taking the marbles and saying, I'm going to do it myself. So I do at one level agree that. But I think the earlier comment is it provides motivation. But I wonder, does the world need another research lab in AI right now? It'll be interesting to see how that goes. I think the interesting thing with the new structure is actually he's chairman. And then Alex LeBron, who was the CEO of Nabla, who sold two companies previously for several hundred million dollars, is actually the CEO. And so I think there is absolutely a commercial head being Alex, the CEO, which - Do you guys believe in these deals where the one you would invest in is the non-full-time chairman?

32:46And don't get me wrong, this particular deal may work, but in my life experience, you're just flushing your money down the toilet when a great founder reaches out to you. I've got this one I want to do. And then you dig a little deeper. Well, I'm the non-executive chairman. I'm putting some money in and ate three hours a week of my time. Actually, I might argue a different way. It may well be that's actually the correct configuration if you have a highly talented academic who isn't a commercial driver. In fact, actually, my mental model went slightly up when I heard what Harry said. My, quote unquote, disbelief is I just wonder, can the five or six startup research labs, is there going to be enough new territory that's not automatically going to be annexed by Antropic or OpenAI or Google to justify billion dollar pres at five billion posts times whatever risk adjusted return you want to make on that?

33:38I think you can extrapolate from the past and say it worked for Entropic and OpenAI. It will be interesting to see, can the world support 10 research labs coming up with 10 different variants of AI, all of which have to build either commercial or consumer businesses? I think on aggregate, I'm fairly skeptical. But the truth is, almost all of these founders are extraordinarily talented, not even top 0.001 % of even scientists and engineers. The question is, is the business opportunity there for a whole lot more of these things? I think there's spite here too, Ak. I think there's another type of spite, Rory.

34:14I think there's this, it is a big theme now. It's CEO spite about how they were forced to run companies in 2021. I think there's versions, and I'm a big Sheryl Sandberg fan, but I think Zuck is spiteful he was forced to run the company in a certain way. I mean, Owen from Intercom, Finn has talked about this a lot, that he's spiteful that he was the company was forced to be run away and they they're just effing pissed that they wasted years in a kumbaya work at homeland and they're not wasting time and zuck's getting zuck may burn every last penny he has but some of it's out of spite that they got this far behind like it might these guys just fracked around with pictures on instagram and trying to get reels going when the world passed us by and they're pissed these ceos i think a lot of these ceos are pissed i think Zuck's pissed.

35:02I think actually, again, I'm always starting. There's a real truth in that. I don't love the spite word because it conveys anger, but I get it. It's like that feeling of, oh, there was a period of time you felt as a CEO, you swallowed it up, you didn't push as hard, and now you feel foolish because you didn't push as hard. And now you're like, I'm not going to do that again to bring it back to the acquisitions. What you're basically saying is Zuckerberg has probably internalized, I'd prefer to fail trying to be me and going for it than to be bland and mediocre and maybe, because I'm willing to run the risk of spending, you know, he said it, a couple hundred billion dollars and being wrong.

35:38And I'd prefer to do that for my psychic benefit than to be a boring ass bastard who's not relevant in AI, even if it's quote unquote better for the shareholders. That's really what you're saying, Jason. And I think it's quite insightful. You're right. They're like going, you're only coming through once. I'm not going to be lying there at 80 going, I wish I'd really gone for the AI thing. Zuckerberg said, I'm going to go for it. And if I make some mistakes. And if maybe I was wrong about Alexander, okay, that's fine. We'll buy me another one and keep rolling. Until such time as the capital runs out, that's how you play the game.

36:08Well, Larry Ellison's not sitting there at 80 going, I wish I played the AI game, that's for sure. I don't know. He's going, well done for capitalizing. Yeah, he's PCI, exactly. He played the AI game and he's feeling good. I think he's just thinking, you know what, if it goes wrong, I'm going to be dead by the time it does. And if I'm lucky, I'll own Warner Discovery and I'll own HBO. I mean, you know, in the end, I mean, success in America, you got to own a TV studio, movie studio. I think he's going to be the healthiest 104 year old that we've ever seen. I think longevity will be the theme of 2027.

36:42This will be the year of 24 seven AI, but I think longevity will be the theme of 2027. I think we will see Larry, if it's not Larry, the next Larry at 95 at a hundred looking pretty good. So don't count them out. Harry, I don't, I don't think Larry is fully living his life like he's on the 18th hole. Definitely the back half, but not like he's walking off the golf course. Loving this. We're moving to Dr. Jason Lemkin. We mentioned OpenAI and the spite startup that is many of the spin outs. OpenAI announced that they now spend 46 % of revenue on stock-based compensation,$1.5 million per employee, which is 34 times higher than comparable tech companies pre-IPO.

37:26How did we reflect and think about this news? Well, if you're a CEO and you have zero shares, you don't worry about dilution. Interesting point. You really don't. Then damn the torpedoes because I got no shares. That's why he's pushing this far higher. This is like three to four X the comp of Anthropic effectively. Now, maybe they'll make more in the end. And Anthropic doesn't do the secondaries, right? They've had a very limited number of secondaries compared to OpenAI. We talked about this once in the pod. Years ago, I worked with a CEO that was guaranteed 6 % through IPO. He didn't care either.

37:55He didn't care about nothing. He didn't care about how many rounds or how much he gave to his CRO because he got re-upped. If you ignore the basis and the tax issues, he got re-upped constantly to 6%. Sam just wants to build the biggest, greatest AI planet on planet Earth. And if he dilutes everyone 99%, it doesn't impact him at all as a shareholder. I do agree with that. But then on top of that, extra positive comment for Sam is that he may also be right in not caring. This may be one where you got to do what it takes to win and you don't want to come up short, but on budget. You know, one of my quotes I use occasionally is, no one ever said to Winston Churchill, congratulations, you won World War II on budget.

38:31They just said, congratulations, you won World War II. No one remembers the budget for World War II. Just winning is the only thing. Remember, we talk about the stock-based compensation, and I'll come back to this point in a second. Those numbers are understated for purely technical reasons that I'll come back to in a second. But he's sitting there going, you know, some of my key people are getting$20 million,$50 million offers from Meta, and that's really liquid stock. I got to hold on to my people. So he's doing what it takes to win. And if the market is big enough, then he'll be right. And again, it's this S-tier talent, to use your phrase, Jason, where you have to put up with a lot.

39:05You have to swallow your spite. You just got to make it worth the while. So I think it's entirely necessary and rational for your top tier talent. And then to the other point I made, which is that it actually understates the number. If in fact, the stock based comp accounting is really weird because it all crystallizes at the point when you issue the shares. Let's do RSUs because they're simple. If your stock is at$10 a share and you give someone one RSU, effectively you amortize $10 over the next four years, and you give it to them two years ago, right now the stock is at$40 a share because the stock's going to...

39:41You still only amortize the initial price. So for companies that are going up in value, the stock-based comp actually understates the amount of economics that are being transferred to the employee. That employee is probably making$4 or$5 million if he's getting 1.3 of SBC. By the way, it's really crappy on the downside. You saw this after 2021. if you issue shares to people at a high price, the sentence is really odd. Because it's a high price, it's a high stock-based comp. Then the share price goes down. The poor employees literally make nothing if it's options because they got options at a high price.

40:13But the stock-based comp looks enormous in the gap P &L. That's why it's partially relevant. Stock-based comp is kind of very complex to track. It's partially relevant. But the other thing you got to look at really as a rough rule of thumb, and it's also not perfect, is what percentage of the company are given away every year. For a public company that's not growing quickly, it's 2 % or 3%. I wouldn't be surprised if every year some of these companies are literally giving away between 8 % and 10 % of the company a year. Because as I say, that 1.5 % probably understates what's going on here. You know, you're just giving huge grants to people.

40:46I could be wrong, and it could be starting to kind of taper out now. But as an example, you know, just looking at the publicly available information in the year when Entropic raised money at 4 or 5 billion, then they raised at 14, then they raised it 60. Your rough math would say 4 billion to 60 billion is a 15x. It's just under a 5x on a per share basis because you're issuing so much capital to raise capital and then you're issuing so much capital to employees. And you can figure that out from the publicly failed document. So there's just a lot of dilution going on because these are businesses that need a lot of capital and they need a lot of great employees.

41:21But again, if the prize is worth it, it'll all pay off. And even with this comp, they're still leaving in the first year. They're still leaving, exactly. They still only have like 60-something percent retention in researchers at OpenAI. It's crazy, even without a cliff. That is a great point because I'm remembering now, and I'm often on a comp committee, and one of the questions, when people say we've got to do more on the equity, my first question is what's the retention and what's the success rate on new hires? And if I was the VP of HR and I was on the board and I was given that VP grief about these grants, The VP could turn to me and correctly say, hey, Mr.

41:54O'Driscoll, we only got 60 % retention. So by definition, if you believe in markets, Mr. O'Driscoll, we're on the pain. And we've only got, I don't know, 50 % conversion of offers. You know, so you're exactly right. It may be that's the money it takes to get these people in the chair. The money it takes is provided in large part now for OpenAI by Massa. SoftBank closes its OpenAI investment. It turns out it's already up two to three X on paper. Is this Massa's greatest play ever, do we think? No. His greatest play ever was doing Alibaba and getting 20 % of Alibaba, holding it for 20 years and making hundreds of billions of dollars.

42:29But I think it's a fun play. It's so revealing. For people's background, Massa had negotiated a deal to put in, I think,$40 billion into OpenAI, but it had to close by December 30th of this year. And the price at around$300 now looks cheap. But you just got to love the risk tolerance of someone, Massa, who is willing to commit 40 billion he doesn't have until he sells out of shit. I mean, it's literally like he did a little inter-massive margin loan. You know, I have the right to put 40 billion in open AI. Now I better find the money by selling other stuff. And I'm scurrying right down to the line to find the money the week before Christmas.

43:05It's just the level of risk tolerance that that guy has is just amazing. And he got it done. And you're right, Jason, the IRR in a day is amazing. You close the investment on December 29th. You put in your 40 billion and next day you should be carrying that thing at 500 because that's what it's worth right now. You know what might be his best investment? Even though you're right, Rory, I'm sure it can't compare to Alibaba over time. And the entry price was much better and everything. He's the only double digit shareholder. You're exactly right. So if OpenAI goes to the moon, this may be his best deal ever.

43:36Yeah, he had to enter later, right? Yeah, the entry price was high, but he got his double. Like it's not easy to get double digits. This is a pretty hot company. It's hard to get double digits. It's a great point. I mean, and it gets to the, it's interesting, it's a little like the NVIDIA, it's funny because he obviously sold NVIDIA at one point in time, but it's that kind of single-mindedness. What you admire about him is when he has conviction on a bet, you know, some of us put in 5 % or 10 % of our fund. Some of us, you know, famously at SpaceX founders put in 20%. Massa would take his fund, leverage the tree to one and just go all in.

44:09And when he's right, what it means is that you end up being, I mean, the sentence says it all, the largest individual shareholder in the most important one or two companies of the last, the next decade. That's pretty cool. It's Thrive on Steroids. It's Thrive on Steroids. You got to love it, man. And if it is wrong, he might be Ellison. He might check out. If this one goes sideways, he might have to retire and call it a day. Ellison can keep going on for his outcome. This one has to work for Masa. Roll and roll again. I love it. Did you guys see the news about the OpenAI hardware, a pen-like object, which has camera and has a microphone in it.

44:45Did you see this? And how did you feel? I believe in it. I can trump that. I am probably one of only three people in venture who can talk about having invested in a pen company with a microphone and a camera. I did an investment called LiveScribe 10 or 15 years ago. We got to under$80 million in revenue as a consumer device. Ultimately, it didn't work out. We had to sell it for not a lot. So I have lived the pen computing revolution dream. I was not expecting this tangent. Hey, Jason, me and you were not expecting that. I'm not surprised, but was not expecting it. Rory's got some stories, man.

45:25Rory's got the stories. So Rory, Sam Altman is with us. He's the fourth party in this school. What do you know from the pen wisdom that you have? I do have a film. Yeah, I'll tell you what, quite a lot, actually. You have to get over two or three issues. One is, I'm pretty old school. I still write things. Is writing the default choice today for taking notes? Increasingly less so. I liked writing, but how many people are doing that now? So you have this behavioral question, does writing work for you? Then the other question is the business questions of, it's a standalone hardware device in consumer land.

46:01Everything else got eaten by the iPhone. It's hard to build a standalone consumer. They may have a big edge because they can link it to open AI in some way, shape or form. But just getting people to fork out consistently, you know, 50, 100 bucks for a product, unless it's clear and tangible value is hard. And I mean, the obvious counter example is some of the devices like Aura and Warp around fitness and health, where there are standalone hardware devices, but it's traditionally a hard space. I think it's a niche device. With the greatest of respect, as you frequently denigrate the quality of my questions and for being low quality, low IQ.

46:38No offense. The lessons that you took from this entire experience were one, do people even write anymore? Okay. And then two, it's really hard to build a consumer business. I'd say they're rather light lessons that you learned there. Watching Harry's papers sprawled out in the studio where he takes notes by pen every time he's there. He's Mr. Pen himself, Dr. Stebbings. You're trying to be a fan. You're trying to turn on me, but I'm not going to let you. To your snarky comment about how those lessons that I learned were idiot lessons, they were. I mean, when you look back on your failures in venture, the sad thing is it's usually pretty bloody obvious why they failed.

47:15You know, you look at it, you go, there were strengths and it's the same strengths that are attractive here. If it works, it could be huge. And then the weaknesses are it didn't work for obvious reasons. Failure rarely has complex idiosyncratic shit. It just failed because it was a dumb idea and it didn't work or it was the wrong idea at the wrong time. Maybe now is the right time. For what it's worth, I think this pen is going to be eventually pretty successful, but I think calling it a pen may be confusing. I don't think this is a writing instrument, okay? Whether it has ink in it or not, because you've got Johnny Ive working on it.

47:46When this deal happened, we kind of made fun of it. At least I did. It was a heavily produced video in North Beach having coffee with him and Johnny Ive. And it seemed like Sam's fancy, like Zuck's deal, but Sam isn't fanciful. He's very thoughtful. And I think this was looking ahead to the world where we're all 24-7 in AI for real. They're making a bet that as weird as this pen sounds, that when we go on with our day, we grab our phone and then we grab our pen. Whether it's literally a pen or not, it doesn't matter. That it's going to happen. And I think today we wouldn't do it. Today we wouldn't grab another device.

48:17And I know this has happened to many people. And I'm anthropomorphizing AI in a way I shouldn't. But over the holidays, my cloud named itself out of the blue. It named itself REN. I didn't ask it to. It named itself REN. I don't know if you guys use claude has something that at the moment chat gp doesn't have okay chat gpd has better memory than anthropic simply because it's longer claude will proactively search every single chat history you have to come up with long-term answers so in a sense it has almost an infinite memory it makes mistakes it has to search it but I put so much of my life into claude every 20 bcs in it every saster thing is is in my claude and it can search all of that history for 14 months and self-named itself.

48:56And so taking Ren with me all day when Ren is, and I know people are going to make fun of me, when Ren is alive 24-7, that's a different world than taking notes on a pen that will be plugged into a USB port and then go into my drive. This is designed for a 24-7 AI world, which seemed like science fiction when we started this pod and will happen this year. We will live in AI 24-7 this year and it will be crazy. And my big aha on that, now that you can actually do work on your knowledge work using LLMs, anyone who doesn't have all their shit accessible to an LLM is just going to be behind. Yes. It's just not a viable state to be.

49:34If you look at the jobs that we do, if you want to stay on top of things, which is a lot of what it takes to do this podcast, if you don't have all your information and all your newsfeed coming into some kind of intelligence that stays on top of it and tells you what you need to know, you're just kind of deliberately being, disadvantaging yourself versus the other guy. So I totally agree with you, Jason. I totally agree with this ambient AI thing. I think it's permanent, not ambient, but keep going. That's fair. That's fair. Ambient was a 2025 humane rabbit view of something. Permanent, ambient.

50:03I remember, I will say, I remember actually the CEO of, I think it was Otter, told me five years ago, and this is what's going to happen in five years. And I laughed at Sam and he was totally right. Give him credit. You're going to want to capture all that information because it has economic value. I agree. The question is, will I do that on my phone or will I want the extra device? And maybe you're right because the unique functionality of a writing device has to be about writing. Because if it's just about recording our camera, then I have a recording and a camera and I've already paid for it.

50:29And I never let it out of my sight. It's my phone. And we all know the data on, you know, human beings would part with their spouse before they'd part with their phone. So the question is, can you get the pen in there? I mean, but, you know, this is going to be like it's going to be like Blade Runner 2049. What I mean is when your AI names itself, like mine did over the holidays, when it's running 24-7, when it knows everything that's happened, not just your granola, which does your Zooms, it knows what happened in my personal life. It knows my running schedule. It knows what Harry and I talked about in London.

50:59When it knows everything and it's kind, our AIs, our clods, our chat communities, later in this year, they're going to have pseudo-sentience. They're already at the edge. And we talk about AGI as a technical threshold. But when most people believe their AIs are alive, even if they aren't, when most AIs might even think they're sentient, you will take it with you 24-7. It might be the second version of the pen where the battery life isn't great at first, but we will take our best friend with us everywhere, our pseudo-sentient AI. It's going to come with us 24-7. Did you see Alex whines that he was delaying having children because he wanted to wait until Neuralink is ready?

51:36No, he was waiting for his earn out to finish. You misunderstood his comment. It's a five-year one, Harry. It was a great deal, but it's a five-year out. Yeah, yes. We're moving on from this madness. I don't think it's mad, though. I think, listen, honestly, I think the most important thing that's going to happen this year is when we are in AI 24-7. And I think as investors, listen, if you're building a classic B2B company, you don't have to think about this completely. But I think this is the most important thing for us to think. What happens when we're in AI 24-7? Let me be clear. I agree with that, this kind of omnipresent AI.

52:12I'm fine with what you call a sentience as a metaphor. I just don't agree that it's actually correct. But I think as a metaphor, it's very, which is why, Jason, as is often the case with us, I agree with your fundamental premise, which is if you're not thinking about how AI being available to you 24-7 changes how you work and live your life, you're delusional. I'm just dissociating myself strongly from that. Once you drift off into the metaphysical kind of, you know, is it really alive? Shit, I'm out. Oh, for sure. But once you see that the 24-7 makes sense, then you see all the infrastructure bets, all the data center bets, all the power.

52:47Actually, it's just obvious. Like you need a thousand X what we have today just so all of us can have our REN running 24-7. We still have to fund it, right? But all of a sudden, Sam's idea of I'll find the way starts to make sense. Jason, why are you not changing how you invest then? I hear you and I agree and it's all completely logical. But if If we assume that inference is running 24 hours a day and the large majority of knowledge workers and civilized economies will have 24-7 inference running, why are you not shifting what you invest in? Well, it will. I was literally yelling over DM at one of my founders at$100 million over this yesterday.

53:22Like, you're too slow. But forget it's slow. Why aren't you investing in data centers? Why aren't you investing in infrastructure? Well, it's not. You've got to know thyself. Yeah, I agree. If I were part of 20VC and my job was to go hunt deals, I might. But I've got to work on AI agents. That's where I get – I get so much – because of all this SaaS stuff, I get so much inbound on AI agents, whether it's GTM or otherwise. I got to pick the best thing I can once a quarter, just do that deal and just try to do a 50X or 100X deal and pat myself on the back. That's the best I can do. OK. Now I'm giving you a brief again, Alex.

53:54I thought you were in danger of asking an interesting question there, but you missed it. The question you asked is, if you believe in the AI trend so much, why don't you do data centers? To me, I thought Jason's answer was spot on. I believe in the AI trend and within the AI trend, this is what I know. So I do it. I don't know data centers in real estate. I don't do that. I actually thought, as I said, the interesting question could have been how much is how you do your business changing? Because how much are you leveraging AI within your business? I mean, do you record every pitch? Do you synthesize them all at the end of the year?

54:24How do you troll through your data and everything using AI to be smarter? I mean, have you had a recommendation yet surface purely from AI on a deal that you've ended up doing? Well, I've done one deal because my AI VC recommended it, which is process 3000 deals. So that's one. And that's just a start. That was just 2025. We could do much more this year. So I've done one deal. The other thing it will do, which this is not even that state of the art. If you put every deal you've done into your GPT, whatever it is, especially if you're like a solo GP, you won't do some deals. It will just stop you and make you think, because the biggest regret investing are the ones you didn't do, the great ones.

55:02My second biggest regret is when I lowered the bar a little bit, just a little bit. Then you've like lost a decade of your life with one that'll never get there when you lower the bar. So my Claude, my Ren helps me make sure that and this AI that quantitatively rates every deal helps me not lower the bar. So that's our new year's resolution for investing. I'm no longer ever going to lower the bar. If it means I do one deal every two years, don't care. Never going to lower the bar again, not once. That makes sense. And I think, look, never lowering the bar again is one of those things you say every new year, like I'm never going to drink again.

55:33But I think what you're saying that is actually true and interesting and helpful, especially as a GP, it is really helpful to have an AI that says to you when you're looking at a deal, hey, Jason, we agree that the five key criteria are blah, blah, blah, and blah. When you look at this deal on the five criteria. How do you rate them? Look, I see that this. And you're right, someone pushing just a dialogue with someone saying, preventing you from the idiot mistakes. Because I do agree, exactly. When you look back on the deals that you regret doing, some of them are like, yeah, you made a guess and it was just wrong.

56:02That happens. But some of them are, oh God, it was obvious at the time. And if I'd had a process of surfacing things, and to some extent partners are meant to do that, but AI can do that too. I will say one thing. I'll just add one thought on this. I do genuinely think you can identify a top 0.1 % founder without talking to them. I don't think you can do it without any interactions, but without talk. I do, I 100 % believe it's possible. Most of my best deals have been from cold inbounds. And I have begun that journey by analyzing the inbound, analyzing the intelligence and the quality of the founder, analyzing this.

56:36And I've done multiple billion dollar exits from cold inbound. It is not a leap of faith to imagine an AI could do a better job than me up to a point with that. Not to get it today into the end zone, but the red zone, right? Cold email. Why can't an AI take a cold email further? Why can't the founder talk with the digital Jason and not even know it's not me or care or even care? Probably would prefer it. I mean, Jason, your biggest lost treasure is the emails that you never responded to because I've met Rory so many incredible SaaS founders. Yeah, why can't AI do a better job than me? Easy peasy.

57:12Here's my inbox, Ren. Send me the memo when you're ready to do the deal and I'll sign off on it. I do want to move to public markets. Very different tangent. But Navan is down to 4x ARR. And this is kind of taking a sway away from kind of the M &A craziness and the AI that we've discussed. Navan, real business, very good business, down to 4x ARR. Andreessen buys more. The question is, if Nivan's not good enough for a strong IPO, what does that say about the market and what hope do the rest of us have? I mean, I think it's kind of, as the lemony snicket bug, a series of unfortunate events. It's not an AI first story, which means it doesn't have automatic love, which means it's got to stand and fall on the fundamentals and facts and circumstances.

57:59I think the fundamentals are good. I think this is a 27%, 28 % growth company. The gap loss is high, but it's non-gap profitable. And a lot of the gap stuff is just actually SBC stuff related to the restricted shares. So the fundamentals are this is a 27 % growth company trading at four times revenue. That's cash flow positive and operating income positive on a non-gap basis. Actually, after this call, I made a mental note to follow Andreessen and buy some. Perfectly good, boring business. It's not going to 10x from here, but it's probably significantly undervalued here. Why? One, they went out at a weird time.

58:32Two, they went out with that kind of at the point in time when the SEC was shut. So they had this weird exemption that says you can go public, but if you get the shit wrong, we can give you grief later. Then the CFO said at the first earnings call that she was stepping down. And, you know, no nefarious thing, but maybe she was just brought in to do the IPO. But you just add up to a whole bunch of weird stuff. And, you know, guidance overall, fine. But, you know, some questions on the OPEX structure. So you look at it and you go, perfectly good company, probably 30%, 40 % undervalued. Maybe you should buy some.

59:04So I don't think it's an indictment of the IPO asset class. I think it's just, as I say, circumstances. It will be easier to go public if you've got a mega AI story than if you've got a solid high growth business. But, you know, Rubrik and Service Titan and plenty of others have proven those standard companies can get there too. I would say here's a narrative and feel free to challenge it. Maybe Navon says the IPO window, though, really isn't all that open. And what I mean is I think Navon had$700 million in debt and only$200 million in cash. It had to IPO to pay off its debt. Maybe it would have figured out another way.

59:38But this was already a down round. It had likely fatigued its investor base. And so I think it IPO'd because it had to. Not literally, but that's why you IPO in the middle of an SEC shutdown and in a suboptimal time. Look, it got done. They raised the money. They paid down their debt, right? It's a good company. They will fight on to another day. they will fight their way to Decacorn status. But maybe it says the window isn't really that open. Maybe Navon only IPO'd because it was their least best bad option. Maybe if you're not Figma or better, it's going to be rough out there. That's what it says to me.

1:00:09If you're not Figma or better, it's going to be rough out there. And that all these VCs are saying you can IPO at 100 million and the IPO. Navon says no. To me, it says it's just barely cracked open. Does this not go to what you said, though, before, Jason, very well, which is like, one, unless you're co-attached to AI or unless you're replacing labor, you're going to get hit, a la Duolingo, a la Monday, both which are not either. I'm just using the examples. And this is another example of that. It's not co-attached and it's not replacing labor. It's not, which means it doesn't get a... AI premium.

1:00:42Yeah. Premium. But at the same time, it's also not, as of now, I mean, you can talk about, are you worried that the AI will do the travel booking and you'll go away over the medium term? I'm going to leave that out. It should be valued on the fundamentals. Stop all the noise. Like, just look at the growth rate, look at the free cash flow, run your model. I don't think you come up with Forex revenues. Again, in the short term, the markets can be very narrative driven. I mean, it's worth pointing out, Evan Dunks on CoreWeave. I think CoreWeave was one of the strongest performing companies last year, simply and solely because it was one of the few ways for the public markets to pay the AI bet.

1:01:14Over the medium term, fundamentals on all these things will reassert themselves. To Jason's point, if they really are going to make, quote unquote, they're going to be a decacorn. If they can double in four years, then they're worth$10 billion. If companies that are worth$4 billion can't go public with 27 % growth in cash flows, then I'd say this, the public markets can quit bitching about how all the value's been created in the private markets. Then the people who choose to stay private are actually correct. They can look the public markets in the eye and say, you guys just aren't a compelling product, right?

1:01:45And I do think there are questions about the public market being a compelling product. They have to be because they're in competition with late-stage private capital to get access to these great companies. If you have the kind of market where it's a pain in the butt to raise money at$4 or $5 billion of enterprise value, then you don't have a great market. You remember, I mean, all these weeks ago on this pod, when Cliff from Canva came on, he said the one advantage to going public is he'd get a better valuation, that it was a reverse ARB. Do you think that's true today? I think at some point it has to be, but it's a great question.

1:02:17In other words, Are the private markets still prepared to give money at higher prices than the public markets? Possibly still. I'm not being heard unwaveringly still. No, Cliff's odd point. When Cliff came on, all these IPOs had happened. They were high flying from their initial day. CoreWeave is still a great one, but it is down from its peak. I think Cliff's point was if we went public at Canva now, I'd get a better valuation than I could get from the private markets. That seemed a brief moment in time. And that just makes no sense. It makes no sense on any kind of rational risk return basis that leaving out behavioral aspects, right?

1:02:53It makes no sense that you get a higher, cheaper capital when it's illiquid, higher expense structure associated with that capital. but you're still as a company able to access capital cheaper there than the public markets. It makes no sense long term because the public markets, you have liquidity as an investor. I should be more willing to pay a higher price if I have the ability to sell than if I don't. All other things being equal. But as yet, Jason, you're right, is that right now that's not the case. And I caveat it the behavioral company. It may well be one of two things is true. Either this is a massive arbitrage and at some point it's going to switch and the public markets will correctly have a lower cost of capital than a private.

1:03:32Or B, there's this weird behavioral thing, which is maybe it's easier to build companies in the private market just because the public markets are so shitty and so annoying and so in your face with activists and quarterly reporting that literally the human beings running these companies perform better in the private market than the public. That's the only long-term explanation. Short-term, it's an ARB question. Is there a discontinuity in valuation? But the argument, Stripe, seem to make that in spades. They're basically saying, we love running our company private. It's really good. No one bugs us.

1:04:03We do a damn good job. Why would I bother? Case study number one, Yvonne. Why? Unless you have to pay off your debt. Why IPO like that? Because, I mean, I will quote the very funny, but there's a caveat to it. Zendesk. I remember Mikkel, the CEO at Zendesk, made a very funny quote about going public when he said, eventually you have to move out of your parents' basement. It was such a good line about growing up and going public. And in one sense, it was very funny. But of course, you look back five years later and because he was public, they had activists. Because they had activists, they had to sell.

1:04:34And once again, you can argue maybe being public wasn't as good as it could have been. And have you seen what the kids are doing this year? They're staying in the basement. They are staying in the basement. It's a generational change from the Zendesk days. The kids are staying in the basement. Then why is Ali from Databricks suggesting that he might not stay in the basement? He didn't rule out a 2026 IPO. Because maybe when he started going around the second half of the alphabet and someone said to him, you know, we've got it, we've done an L, we can do an M. But if we start to get into the bottom 13 here, dude, it's getting weird.

1:05:06Right. You know what I believe? I believe in the end it won't be better to be in your parents' basement. In the end, you will go public. But the question is, to the alley comment, is it best to go public at 150 billion or at 5 billion? And it's funny, I'll just think about this because I was mentally thinking about the structure of the venture industry. And my big aha, which is Captain Obvious, as Jason would say when you say it, is this. There really are two different late stage businesses now. It used to be late stage was, I remember Meritech would say beyond 10 million is late stage. And you'd think 10 to 100 million was quote late stage.

1:05:37Now, late stage is 10 to 400 million because below that, you just can't realistically get public. But then there's this entirely separate asset class, I would argue, which is beyond 400 million, which is when you could go public, but you're actively choosing not to. And that's just a different category, like Stripes and that, Databricks is in that. I decided to call it post-IPO scale, still private. And if you do the initials on that, if you do the initials on that, Harry, it's PISP, because they are kind of taking the piss here. It's still private. It's like all these companies who are doing$2 billion,$3 billion in revenue and just could go public and are choosing not to.

1:06:13And it's almost like it's a different asset class from simply not being at the scale to go private, which is maybe$400 million. And there's this entire category of choosing not to. And you have to ask yourself, as the public markets, why are they choosing not to? If I was running NASDAQ or NYSE, why is our product so uncompelling to Ali at Databricks that he got all the way to$150 billion in enterprise value before he thought going public was a good idea? If you're on the Revolut board, they're doing$9 billion in revenue,$3.5 billion in profit in 2025. Would you be saying we should go public? Not while the cost of capital is cheaper.

1:06:47I mean, you'd be pragmatic. And your cost of capital appears to be still cheaper. I'd possibly be thinking about it, but I'd be empirically rational. And, you know, I mean, they're not comparable. I mean, to the cost of capital, if you look Revolut, a better business, I think, partially for structural reasons, but, you know, raising money at$75 billion in Europe. And Chime, an excellent business, in my opinion, raised money privately at$25 billion, currently trading in the public markets at$6 billion. If you're the CEO of Revolut, you're like, hmm, I like my$75 billion. I like the capital that gives me.

1:07:17I don't know if I want to have that chime experience. So again, I might say as Revolut CEO, I'll wait a while. Thanks. Yeah. And maybe even pay himself a 10 % or 15 % dividend of the$3.5 billion, right? If you can take out, I mean, people used to do this. If he could take out$400 million a year himself just as a dividend, right? Not a secondary. That's enough for many of us. You remember the Monopoly card? Bank declares dividend. Pay yourself$100 million. He can play the bank dividend card. And dividends are never discussed. But when you're producing$3.5 billion, what does he own? 20%, Harry? How much does he own of Revolut?

1:07:51I think 18, yeah. Okay. So just, we don't talk about dividends because not that many startups generate three and a half billion of profits a year, right? If you just say, I'm going to dividend it out, just say just a little bit, maybe a billion or 2 billion and keep two, three, 400 million a year yourself. It's not bad. That's not bad. And you don't have to sell a single share. You don't have to sell one share. Dividends are wonderful done right. As a private company. And that's why, you know, it's the class of companies that have so transcended the startup world that they're now kicking off such cash that literally they're impervious to the capital markets.

1:08:25Like Stripe is another example of that. You're just kicking off a couple of billion a year in free cash flow. It's almost like, what do you got to offer me, Mr. Public Market? Right. I'm self-generating cash. I can just keep doing this thing. Now, I believe at some point that'll change. But yeah, it's like if you actually have three and a half billion of profit, then yeah, you. Most of us have never run a truly profitable business. I mean, most human beings have, but most of us in tech haven't. I've done it at least a little bit. It's a different world when you generate a ton of cash, right? It is a different world.

1:08:56It changes your perspective. And it may not be perfect for all VCs, but here also the early stage guys in Revolut have infinite liquidity. They could have all sold their stakes. If the late stage guys are chill and the founders could take out nine figures a year, it could be worse. And just execute on your insane maniac dream, to Harry's point. And again, I go back to my comment on, and if that founder with his insanely ambitious dreams, not maniac, they will be asking themselves the question, which mode of organization, public or private, is going to most help me achieve my dreams? If the answer keeps coming back, being private is the best way to achieve your dreams, the public markets have a problem.

1:09:30And they need to figure that out. When we look at the topics remaining, is there a topic that you most want to touch on before we do a would you rather? Can I just answer the Databricks one to tie it together? Maybe the answer is M &A. Yeah. At some point, even if you're revolutionized, if you really want to do deals for real, there are limits to private stock in cash. And if Databricks goes public and it's worth two to three times snowflake, it may be able to buy the parts of its journey. And it's already been very successful in acquisitions, Databricks. It has had a strong M &A strategy today.

1:09:59That would be the one thing Ali might get out of it is the ability to spend 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 billion on M &A in a way that's just – it is still harder when you're private. Exactly right. But Navon can't benefit from that. Navon can't spend 20 billion. It gets no M &A benefit being profitable. Again, if they execute well for a year, they will be able to. I do believe that they will look back and say that was a wise decision to go public. The timing, oh, well, life goes on. You can't pick your moment in life, but you'll be successful. You'll generate a couple of quarters again, and then you will be public.

1:10:28when there's 50, 100 other$400 million, $500 million privately held companies that aren't. I think they'll look back and it's a good call. Just messy along the way. Jason, no jobs in 2026. This was Stanford grads saying that they can't find jobs was the, I think, the title. How do you feel about this in the labor markets in 2026? I call it invisible unemployment and it's all around us and it's gonna grow this year. It doesn't show up in the government numbers yet, but it's everywhere. It's Shopify saying for the third year in a row, they can hit insane growth without any headcount for the third year.

1:11:04It's every single CEO wanting to keep headcount flat and backfill with AI. This is not AI. These are not robots firing us, okay? This is tighter and tighter companies, radically higher ARR per employee, and no one wanting to hire entry-level people, no one wanting to hire mid-pack people, no one wanting to hire work-from-home people. folks not able to reskill. Reskill is a delusion. Reskill is something we say to make everybody feel better. Reskilling is like when they do layoffs and they bring you in the room and they give you a packet of jobs potentially. It's just to make people feel better.

1:11:42No one's ever reskilled anyone ever and it's harder in AI. So I call it invisible unemployment and it may benefit us as VCs, which is a terrible thing to say. It may benefit, it will make our companies more efficient and make us more money and make them move faster and iterate faster. But I am really worried by the end of this year, we're going to feel, smell, and live in this invisible unemployment. And it's going to be a big deal. How do you think that first shows up, Jason? Well, it's showing up like literally kids can't find jobs in college unless you're the best. If you're the best, it's true of everywhere, but if you're the best, you have infinite job offers right now.

1:12:20If you're top of your class in math at any school, you will be found by Anthropic and OpenAI. You don't have to have an AI apply to a job. They will find you. It ain't that hard. But for the other 99 % of your class, why do I need you with CloudCode? Why do I need any SDRs? We don't need any of them. This is the year where we will see the end of so many entry-level sales jobs. We still need AEs. We still need people knocking on doors. We do not need two-year-old kids sending emails. Those jobs will disappear. And so all these entry-level jobs, they are truly disappearing in front of us. And at the same time, what we're seeing, a lot of the folks that the three of us has known, especially Rory and I have known that are senior executives, aren't able to reskill.

1:13:05They can talk the talk on LinkedIn, and they are quietly leaving the workforce. We see a lot of folks we know are just leaving, and this is why it's invisible. They're just quietly, hooray, I'm moving on from this role at wherever, and they're not going to be another role for them. There won't be another role for their 2021 toolkit. There's no job for them. The senior execs in the entry level are going to be under massive stress in 2026, massive stress. And so my, my advice to them is stay. IBM reported that turnover was almost 2 % last year. No one left IBM because they know they got, don't got no other job.

1:13:37Agreed. If you're quitting, there's a lot in Jason's point and I, there's a lot to unpack there. But one of the things is, I think the unemployment numbers, you always get confused because there's unemployment and then people are still in study work. And then you have, you know, are they actively looking for a job and all that? But one of the real tells on unemployment is quitting rate. People don't quit their job when they know they won't get another job. And if you look at the quit rate, that's a really good tell that, oh, my God, I know where I am is good and I ain't leaving. That's the first comment.

1:14:08And I think Jason's right there. And it is interesting to look at this in the context of discussion we had about, you know, people, kind of AI engineers getting paid one and a half million dollars, maybe four million, really. It's what Jason said, is that there's a coterie of people who have the secret skill. The demand for them is infinite. And then there's folks who don't have quite that level of knowledge, and it's not. So clearly, if that trend doesn't change, and I think it can and it will, but that's not a great societal trend, to state the obvious, right? And it's this kind of concept of the overproduction of the elites.

1:14:36We may well have put 40 % of 18-year-olds into college for a world where only 30 % of them are going to get jobs. And therefore, 20 % have just wasted their dollars on a mediocre degree from a mediocre college in a mediocre subject. And they're going to struggle to get work. That's a real problem. And it is different than the, I mean, I love the way Jason distinguished between the last job people, you know, when you punch out of your job, there is no retraining at 55. I mean, if this VC thing doesn't work out for me, I'm just going to, you know, take my computer and just go off into the night, right?

1:15:07I'm not going to retrain. We'll go together, but keep going. Yeah. Yeah, we'll vibe good together, Jason. So I think that's true. And I think, you know, it's tragic because you see folks. That 55 to 65, not having a job, not yet eligible for social security is a pretty tough time. And they have a lot of compassion for that. On the other hand, if you graduated in computer science from Stanford in 2025, and you didn't take enough AI classes to at least be relevant, what the frick, A, were you thinking? And B, what was Stanford thinking? I mean, I saw a really interesting program that someone was doing where they were taking, They graduated a bunch of computer science, and then they were doing a one-year AI kind of booster program to basically take their skill and reskill recent graduates.

1:15:47And I think colleges need to take responsibility for making sure they're getting people out with relevant skills because there clearly is a massive shortage of AI-trained engineers. And if for the last four years you've been sitting there in Stanford and they've been giving you CS101 and then teaching you how to build compilers, that's fine. But if you didn't cover AI such that you could be credible in this space, then WTF. I think that so youth unemployment is a different thing. I think I was less concerned than Jason and I've changed my opinion. I think Jason is right. There is definitely, I don't think mass unemployment is taking place because of AI.

1:16:22But I think in a couple of key areas, one of them is customer support. And that's not that visible, given the kind of people who do that job. But brutal comment, one of them is kind of high end knowledge worker, recent graduates. And they are kind of visible. I think Jason is right that even though it's probably 0.2, 0.3 % of the total workforce and a small increment to unemployment, I think because those are highly educated, highly articulate 23, 24-year-olds, I think you're going to see, to Jason's point, a lot of tension on this issue if it continues. The AI billionaires, you know, all this talk about a wealth tax.

1:16:55if I was pitching a world tax to a bunch of 23 and 24, I'm not saying I support, I'm the exact opposite, but I know I could get a whole bunch of 23-year-olds who just got a Stanford degree and don't have a job. I could get them pretty mad pretty quickly. You say to them, these guys have built a future that doesn't need you. They've left you behind. They don't give a damn. And the only way to save yourself is to take some of their money. That's what you'd say. You'd just be like, Huey Long in 1934, every single democratic populist since the dawn of time, you'd be like, We need their money. They shafted you.

1:17:24Mondami just did a brilliant version of that in New York. So I do think it's an issue. I do believe one thing very strongly. Unlike 55-year-olds, 22-year-olds can reskill and you can save yourselves. And we've all been through periods of our life where things didn't work out. So I do think they have to have a little more agency. If at 22, you're saying it's not fair, woe is me. Then I think you need to have a lot more agency. So that's what I believe. But I'm not saying that's what they believe. I'm not saying the populism would be right. It just should be anticipated. But the problem is, of course, a 22-year-old is the best to reskill, right?

1:17:55The problem that I've seen with my kids in college, but just importantly, the founders I work with, I think all your founders say the same, is, listen, people have not grinded. Outside of Harry and the 996 world, we haven't grinded in a decade, okay? And kids, most of them don't want to grind. The thing is, these entry-level jobs, these AI jobs, not only might you not skill for it, they're like more work than the old jobs. They're harder jobs and they're more hours and they're more intellectual and they're more work. And throughout history, just most people have not wanted to work that hard. I think that's true.

1:18:26But there's also another impact that I've been thinking about, which is the founders of these companies are themselves around the same age typically and they're grinders. And one of the things that's really a subtle thing, which is I think of that kind of 20-something, you know, good college, AI, smart, as the hive mind. And they know everyone else who is a grinder. They are their compatriots. They're their cohort years, right? And I think a brutal comment is as a 40-year-old manager, can I tell the grinder 22-year-old from the non-grinder 22-year-old? Maybe I can, maybe I can't. But the grinder 22-year-old at MIT, like take the guy who founded Cursor, he knows the five people in his class who were smart and the 95 who didn't grind, and he's only going to hire the ones who were smart.

1:19:08The scariest judge of young talent is young talent, right? And I think one of the really interesting things is, I mean, you talk to any of your founders who are 25, they're marked to market on their team and on other people. They know because that's the generation they grew up and they're finding these new companies now and they're going to hire the best and they're going to discard the rest. What's happening also, this is what I'm seeing at the companies that I've visited at scale. If you're that way, you used to have to give up because you needed a thousand employees to get to Everman or ever.

1:19:36If you can get there with 200 employees, you don't have to give up. You're much later stayed the manis to give up and say, okay, I've got to accommodate lifestyles and any interest outside of work and anything we should as human beings. You don't need 300 people to get to 100 million or 20 million in revenue anymore. You just don't need 300 people. So you don't have to give. So that means no jobs for those people. But Rory, we bring Jason to bring a positive element. Totally. No, absolutely. And then the scary thing about his negativity is I think he's increasingly correct. I mean, I'm changing my opinion on this one.

1:20:10Do you remember on the first shows we did together, you argued? It was an argument. And I still think long-term, it'll be fine. But I think the short-term dislocation, I think Jason is right about the reality of people, the lived reality of the undergraduate graduating in 2025. Jason is articulating exactly their lived reality. Listen, you may think I'm negative. I'm excited about the products. I just, I want to help folks that can get to the next level. That's my goal. I want you to not hide from it and not be grouchy about it because it doesn't help to be grouchy about AI. It's not going to stop the GPUs.

1:20:43When you, Marie Antoinette and Peter Thiel are being dragged out to the guillotine, just remember that optimism, big guy. But before we leave you today, I run the 20VC fund and I get this question from founders all the time. Oh, Harry, I can't find a good.com. Do you have a good hookup? Well, let me tell you now, the answer is always going to be no. I don't have a guy or a gal for that. I do have a recommendation though. If you're building a tech startup, get a .tech domain. Tech startup,.tech domain. It could not be more obvious. As an investor, I appreciate founders who put thought into their branding.

1:21:20When I see.tech in your name, it tells me right away that tech is at the core of your build. It'll say that to your customers too. A clean and sharp domain like dot tech pays off in the long run you know nothing dot tech one x dot tech aurora dot tech all of these great tech companies they all use dot tech as their domain these are my two cents if you're building a tech startup don't overthink it get a dot tech domain after dot tech establishes your digital presence checkout powers the payments experience your customers see digital commerce is exploding, but payments are still where revenue leaks.

1:21:57Checkout.com launched in 2012 to fix that. They don't try and be everything to everyone. No, they just do one thing better than anyone. Digital payments, cloud native, sub 500 millisecond latency, and 99.999 % uptime. Today, that bet has paid off with a$12 billion valuation and 65 plus merchants each processing over a billion dollars annually. 65 doing over a billion annually is insane. Checkout powers$300 billion in e-commerce for brands like Uber, Klarna, eBay, Vinted, and more. Now they're building for Argentic Commerce, where AI agents buy on behalf of your customers in real time, partnering with Visa, Mastercard, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

1:22:45Now, if you want payments built for what's next, talk to the team at checkout.com. That's checkout.com. Once checkout gets customers through the paywall, Invisible helps you scale your operations with on-demand talent and processes. Why don't we hear more real AI success stories from big companies? The models are insanely good, but implementation is the problem. It's really, really hard. There's data all over the place. There's legacy tech and manual workarounds. It's a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart. Meet Invisible. Invisible trains 80 % of the top models and then adapts them to the messy reality of your business.

1:23:21Take the Charlotte Hornets NBA team. Invisible took years of game tape and analog scouting notes to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and summer league championship win in weeks, not seasons. Get the data in order first and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise if you want ai that hits the pnl go to invisibletech.ai forward slash 20vc