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Podcast Summary: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Episode 20VC: Is Chamath Right: Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters | Does OpenAI Even Matter | Mary Meeker's AI Report: The Analysis | IPO Breakdown: Chime, Circle & Thoma Bravo's New Fund
Episode Overview In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings engages in a lively discussion with guests including Sam Lessin, Jason Calacanis, and others about the current state of venture capital, the importance of performance metrics like DPI (Distributions to Paid-In), OpenAI's relevance, and a breakdown of recent IPO activity.
Key Topics Discussed
- DPI vs. TVPI:
- Chamath Palihapitiya's assertion that DPI (Distributions to Paid-In) is the only metric that truly matters in venture capital is debated.
- The hosts largely agree with Chamath, suggesting that while TVPI (Total Value to Paid-In) can serve as a marketing tool, what ultimately matters is the real cash returned to investors.
- OpenAI's Relevance:
- The hosts question whether OpenAI will be historically significant.
- Despite its rapid user acquisition, they ponder if its current trajectory will translate into lasting importance in the tech landscape.
- Market Dynamics:
- The discussion touches on the differences between asset-gathering strategies versus those that genuinely seek to create wealth through investments.
- There's a consensus that mid-tier VC funds are struggling to compete against larger firms which have substantial capital to invest.
- Chime IPO and Other Market Trends:
- Analysis of recent IPOs, particularly Chime and Circle, highlights a mixed perception of their market significance.
- Discussion includes the implications of mega-funds raising significant capital and the potential for market correction as a result of inflated valuations.
- Mary Meeker’s AI Report:
- The hosts highlight key takeaways from the report, emphasizing the unprecedented infrastructure spending in AI and the questions surrounding revenue generation amidst heavy CapEx investments.
- Existential Dread in B2B Startups:
- A call for B2B startups to exhibit more urgency and existential dread to stay competitive in a landscape rapidly evolving with AI technologies.
- The concern is that without a proactive approach, many startups may become irrelevant.
- Future Predictions:
- Discussion on the potential future for OpenAI and its competition, as well as predictions for Elon Musk's role with Tesla by 2027.
Key Takeaways
- DPI as a Vital Metric: Cash returns matter more than paper valuations; DPI should be the focus for both VCs and their investors.
- OpenAI's Future: While OpenAI is currently successful, its lasting impact is uncertain and requires ongoing evaluation.
- IPO Landscape: The IPO market is showing signs of recovery but is mixed with concerns about valuations and market relevance.
- AI Infrastructure Spending: There’s a significant amount of investment in AI infrastructure, but the gap in revenue generation raises questions about sustainability.
- B2B Startup Mindset: B2B startups must adopt a more aggressive and urgent mindset to survive in an increasingly competitive market.
Conclusion This episode dives deep into critical discussions around venture capital metrics, the significance of major tech players like OpenAI, and the current market for IPOs. The insights shared provide valuable perspectives for investors and founders navigating the rapidly changing landscape of technology and startups.
For more detailed exploration of the episode, listeners can reach out to the podcast hosts or visit the podcast's official website.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00But what we look back in 20 years and say, open AI was fundamentally important to me. Maybe. Every company's market share is up for grabs when there's a platform shift. The hyperscalers have taken very good cash efficient businesses and they would break Mr. Buffett's heart because they've turned him into CapEx Hawks. Public company investors are just mean VCs on steroids. This is 20VC with me Harry Stebrings. Now it is my favorite show of the week at Jason Lanken, Warrior Driscoll and we have a And guess joining us for the first half of this show, Sam Lesson, the discussion. I mean, oh my gosh, he got a little bit spicy on what companies actually matter.
0:38Does open AI even matter? Is one of the questions we discussed today. And then we break down IPOs. We break down Chine. We break down Circle. We break down Mary Meek as AI reports. It is a fantastic discussion. I so enjoyed doing this. I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think of this style of show. Let me know by emailing Harry at 20bc .com. But before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow, second Kajabi's users keep 100 % of their earnings with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30 ,000 per year.
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4:21You have now arrived at your destination. Guys, I am so excited for We had so many interesting things that we want to dive into this week. I just want to start with diving in actually on the deep end on a series of Chimath tweets. And Chimath basically said, hey, TVPI's bullshit vanity match that you can't eat, IRL, you can only eat net DPI. When you read this and when you read his quite opinionated stance, how did we feel? I mean, I hate agreeing with Chimath on principle, but I agree with him. Well, you know it's interesting if you read the Wall Street Journal article on Tom O 'Brawo They just raised a 34 billion dollar fund, right Harry your buddy But it's so what the Wall Street Journal said that's a record fund for P 34 billion.
5:04It's a record But Q1 was a low point no one at no one raised a five billion dollar P fund because of lack of liquidity So it's kind of ties to Chimath's point which is if you have the liquidity in today's world You're gonna get the capital right Tom O 'Brawo had 30 billion dollars in distributions last year 30 billion dollars I think that exceeds most guests, right? 30 billion in distributions, not paper markups, but distributions. Look, from my perspective, this is simple, right? Which is there's two very different games that are called venture capital, or even private capital in general. One game is actually making people money, finding companies early, making the right bets, paying the right prices, and selling.
5:41And that is a DPI game, and all that matters is DPI. And that's the game I like to play. That's the game I think I value and I respect. There's also an asset gathering game. and the asset gathering game does exist. And here's the thing, I think this is a seed investor with full transparency. As a business, the asset gathering game is actually a better business. If you're just in it to make money, you're an asset gatherer. Like that's what the market wants, and we can talk about why and the whole nine yards, the public market wants that, they care about fees, et cetera. The problem is I just am an intellectual snob, and I have no respect for asset gatherers.
6:12Like I think it's a stupid game. I think they're just two very different things that are called the same thing, and you just should be really sober about what game you're in and what you're trying to do. I think it's really fun that we had this conversation and we ended up thinking that Chimates on the side of good. Nice job, Sam. I'm the first to say, like, I think that's wild that I agree with him up. My default instinct is to completely disagree with him or whatever he says, but like in this case, I happened to agree with him. I'm comfortable disagreeing with him. I honestly thought it was kind of a trite comment.
6:42It's one of the, it's a very typical Chimates comment on first glance that sounds smart but on deeper analysis it's kind of vaguely right but not useful. Obviously for you know he cited this 2013 and 1550 trends obviously at that point DPI is the only thing that counts if you're 10 years in and you're still selling promises then you're in trouble so it's that's a trivially obvious comment but to say TvPI doesn't count the truth is venture is investing in illiquid assets for five to seven years with the the expectation of remaining a greater return. That means that for five to seven years, you don't have DPI.
7:18You've constantly, you just have enough. You've constantly on DPI yourself. You've taken money and you've given it on the title in the ground. In that period of time, you have two choices as an investor engaging these guys. You can say, TVPI means nothing. I'll stick my head up my ass that I'll look in seven years. I see how they're doing. Or you can use TVPI for what it is. A proxy, a loose proxy for performance. I'll be more direct. And again, we don't know each other. Here's the upshot. You have to understand that LPs are just insancted driven. And from an LP, what you should do is a rational human being.
7:50If you were, it was me investing in the fun. He said, yeah, the money's in the ground for five years. And after that, we'll see what we're at. And that's all that matters, what you deliver. I know full well. I know this is an investor that the marks that you made up or the marks as soft bank listed something somewhere completely irrelevant. In fact, the negative signal in a lot of cases. The marks are irrelevant and stupid. But now here's the reality. Institutional all peas are people too. There's some junior guy who wrote the check and he wants to get promoted and he exists in an organization that's trying to deliver something.
8:19He doesn't want to wait seven years to get promoted, right? For making a good call or a bad call. And so it really is just a marketing thing where you're saying, hey, I'm gonna give the person who wrote me the check, some marketing thing they can then use for their own internal purposes. Because everything in life is about get later, get paid. If you had two funds three years in and one of them had no mockups and one of them was a 2x TVPI. Would you regard those two funds as exactly identical? No, what I would regard them as though, and this is how I actually do regard them when I look at my own portfolio or things like that, is very simple, which is how many credible things do you have that are going to be fund returners?
8:53Just giving the list of poor things. I don't care where they're marked. Like, you either have a set of legitimate shots on goal for important companies and important outcomes or you don't. If a company had marked it 2x where it went in, soft -banks some crazy person marked it up in some. Say it was a call out, but my point about the traumatic comment is to say it means nothing to say it means nothing as a gross exaggeration. They're almost certainly is some signal in that data. Let's kind of take it. Let's go right down into TVPI means nothing. I'm willing to bet if you got some kind of machine learning algorithm and looked at all the funds three or four years in had a TVPI of two X and all the funds that four years in had a TVPI of point eight X and then correlated that to the ultimate outcomes.
9:33I bet you there would be data in that signal that says it has some value. It's not the only source of data. You write there are better source of data if you're in a position to evaluate better data. But as an LP and the absence of anything better, there is signal in the data, which means the comment is wrong. It would be fun to look at. I actually bet that firms that hold positions at zero or cost or even are willing to mark down positions that are more honest about it and reality might actually happen. I don't know, we can look at it, but the reality is I think there's an, I mean, as an LP in many funds, you have funds, you get their statements, and you laugh.
10:10Because they hold everything at ridiculous value, the high watermark they can possibly come up with with these numbers that make no sense. And you look at it, you're like, this is like kind of funny, but you're like, this is not real, right? And I just think that like it's, because everyone has methodologies all over the board, it's all marketing. I kind of unfortunately, I hate being with Chimoff. I hate it. Like I've known Chimoff a long time, not well, but casually. And I gotta say, it drives me nuts that I have to be, but with him, all I care about early is give me five names that matter, and all I care about after you've had enough time is did you make me money or not?
10:41But I get your point. Like it's zero as an extreme statement, but you know, we live in an age of memes. We said we're living in this kind of too dichotomy world or this kind of binary world adventure. In the middle, you know, SVB did this great analysis and they were saying that middle of VC funds is getting really hollowed out. In other words, you'll kind of mid -tier firms in terms of size are really forming apart. What happens to them? Is it a game with a very small and very large, do we think, when we look at this report? I mean, yes, like there's no middle. You can't be a billion dollar venture fund.
11:12Is a billion middle? Well, what we talk about, $200 million early stage funds. That's what we do every few years. I'm very confident we know how to deploy that. Like, I believe there's a market where you can, from a DPI perspective, make money on that. It's not a great fee business, but it's a great DPI business. I don't know how you make multiples on a billion dollars consistently in VC. I think once you're doing 10, you're playing a completely different game of asset gathering and asset deployment, where you no longer have the same goals. So I personally think that the billion dollar zone is like the death zone.
11:41Gotcha. Good to know, that's a 900 million dollar fund. Yeah. That's a top five. I did actually look at the SVB debt. First of all, I was thinking, are they showing me under the bus, too? I checked the data, and they were actually saying the two to 500 was the middle zone. So now that I felt even more depressed, Now I'm a small bohemant, which is even more degrading. I'm kind of a low rent conglomerate. I think in the end you have to be size for the stage you're playing at to achieve the portfolio construction you want to achieve. And I'm pretty confident that our typical check size is 20 to 30 million and you're 30 to 40 million dollar rounds.
12:19We want to get 30 checks, the math works. 30 kind of deals total. So I think you have to be size for the game you're at. It still doesn't mean you can't get it wrong. And I do think, to your point, one of the things that Jason and I have been kind of batting this around over the last eight weeks is I do believe the impact of the conglomerates has made everything harder, including it's harder for us to make money. I totally buy that. The existence of people with $10 billion to spend makes it very hard for people with $900 or $500 or $600 million to spend to do that rationally in a way that probably, and I'd love to hear from Jason on this, in a way that if you're putting out 100 or 200 million, you'll probably a little more in your tweet.
12:59Maybe the more interesting question is for founders. I think the S &B report, which I wrote up, I don't think it was really saying 800 to a billion was the hollowed out middle, but I guess it is part of the analysis, right? That they're not raising funds. If that is true, then every founder wants to raise 20 or 30 million in their A now. No one wants to raise an eight million dollar series A is now three safe notes. So does that mean in a couple years, your candidates gets outside of some scales are going to be limited to megafunds. Like are there the only people that can't be able to write series HX?
13:29Because 20 to 30 million isn't even a large series A today. It's a normal one. So if there is no one in the middle, then we're all stuck with megafunds to fund the seed companies, right? I mean, I guess it's an obvious point, but founders just, they better get to know folks with $5 or $10 billion funds before demo day. Or they're all going bankrupt and these are all bad companies. Like I think that's the other way to look at this is like, you know, I know a lot of people are pulling out a series A's entirely, because these are completely in this price and these make no sense. I think that the other possibility is that we're in an era where there are good companies to be built and there are places to make money.
14:01And if you are going into corners of the economy or funding things that other people won't and see your end of one or an end of a few looking at spaces that are kind of really novel, there are places to make lots of money. But I think we also have to look at the other way, which is like there's just a massive amount of capital being massively misallocated right now. It's always funny when people simultaneously have the world view that, you know, the big funds are going to win everything, but all the money's being wasted. I mean, at some point, well, I think the thing that was human mind is like, I don't even know the big funds need to make that much money because their asset gatherers, they need to make enough money to generate gathering more assets and they need to justify their own existence and it's a good business.
14:38That's different from saying you're trying to make a lot of money in venture capital. Boardly agreed, but I actually think Jason, I want to go back to what you said, because I thought it would spot on. It's like, if there's only $200 million funds and billion dollar funds, then you're exactly right. Logically, those 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollar checks are going to come from only 10 names who are writing 40 of them a year, not eight like us. That's possible, but it's just a weird fun construction because those people are then going to be writing 40, 50, 60 checks of this size. You're going to have a very spread out partner base.
15:10I don't know if they'll be able to meet the founder needs where it is. Is that not what your insights have today though? I mean, we've mentioned before kind of the outcomes that they have with your hinge health is returning 400 million on a six billion fund and then having like hundreds of positions. And actually that being the construction they have. Yes, it is the construction they have. But at some point, it gets easier when you're running big sums to put big money in a smaller number of companies than try and diversify away. If we're trying with 900 million to have 30 A's or B's, Someone who's running nine billion, if they were trying to do the same thing, would have 300 A's and B's in three years, it would be silly.
15:47So at some point, it becomes a part of their business, but not all their business. And then I think Jason's right. I mean, it's so funny. We're gonna talk in a few minutes about and Sam mentioned earlier, this idea of a lot of A's are struggling to be raised. The only way that worldview makes sense, is actually what Sam said is that, if you have a world where people can let call them mid -sized funds, quote unquote, can survive cause of the big guys and the big guys are quote stealing all the good deals. And at the same time, we're also saying many companies are struggling to make a series A get a series A raised Those things are common almost opposite to each other one says capital is scarce and one says capital is planting in the big I would say actually the way you resolve that illogical steaming statement is quite simple Which is every generation is only a few companies that matter yes Most of the money at series A is completely wasted and they might want it in larger quantum That just is like kind of it's kind of a war of attrition, right?
16:40Which is more money being lit on fire. Now the mega funds will just win it can win because they can say, okay, look, I'm gonna plow a good trillion dollars at almost any price in and because of AI whatever argument they want to make, there's no upper bound, right? And so they say we make lots of money just on lots of money being deployed and that can logically make sense. Seed funds are fine because you still have to be in winners, but it's just a multiple scheme, right? which is if you're in it at zero, right, then like, you know, you can make a bunch of checks and like make the math work from a DPI perspective.
17:11You also have a nice benefit, which I very much appreciate, which is I really strongly believe private to private as an important future. And I love being early and small and first because I actually can sell into the private markets in a way that you can't, if you're written a $30, $40 million check into the series, you're too big. Right. So I think those two things survive. What do you think about? So for selling if selling early right selling in secondary is unicorn secondary is how do you think about the goals? Is it one extra fund two extra fund half as is it just risk allocation? I think if you have a smaller fund.
17:41It's really it's interesting Because you get like I just the other day I had a one X exit opportunity to return the fund once and One of my anchors was all I also brought them in as part of the deal and we talked about it, right? They followed me so it was less for them But for them, it would have been very high IRR and Mia1X, right? That sounds good on the internet. But then it's gone. Yeah, so look, I mean, I just mean, there's no more returns. In the end of the day, there's a few things that matter. The number one rule as a fund allocator, you cannot sell the things that matter. Rule two is, because we were one of the first investors in Olberts, or astro -rockets, or plenty of things that God had people excited about, but feces broke.
18:22And so I think you have to be really honest with yourself, right and honest and you're gonna make mistakes, you know, I think one of the things I always say is as early as you invest, you get hundreds of shots to buy. You get really good at buying. You have so fewer shots at learning to sell that it actually takes much longer to learn to sell well. But it's still as important as learning to buy well. And I think you just have to be really honestly yourself, which is like, is this an infinity shot or is it not? And the second the thesis is broken and it's not, if there's a buyer at a price that makes sense because someone else has different fund dynamics.
18:51Maybe they already own a lot and for them it's like about rounding down their average in cost. Maybe it's they're not capital allocator and they don't care as much about the negative return. They have different goals. There are opportunities that work for everyone. Roy, can I ask you if it's not one of the companies that matter? Is it lighting money on fire in the kind of binary way that... No, I'm glad you came back to that because I would say again respectfully I disagree and it's a matter of degree. But no, I don't think that's a correct statement. It is true in every decade, you look back and you go, the vast bulk of the value is driven by one or two companies.
19:26It's a power law. We all understand the math to a running error. There was a decade where it was Google and then everything else, right? And that's true and it's intellectually absolutely true. So you could say to yourself, if I didn't do Google, I must have let the money on fire. But then when you make that sentence a few times, then you go on your look and show up account and go, oh, I have money in there. So I mustn't have let it on fire. There are more wins than the biggest win. It is a power law. I would prefer to have done an Google that any whatever I made money on in 2002 2010, but I'm damn glad I did that one too and the over extrapolation of the only three deals make money So therefore everything in this series a is burning money It's true when that you prefer to be in Google But it's not the only way to make money.
20:09I mean just in the last couple of weeks We've had as you mentioned a couple of decent IPOs hinge health and we're gonna have chime mountain last week We've another one this week. Take Hinch head someone made 400 million dollars for their investors 20 % of 400 million dollars 80 million dollars. I say this every time when someone at the office says oh, it's just a three X Every single one of you will cash the fucking check every single one of you If I left them on the counter there, you'd all take them home with you, right? 80 million dollars is still real money in America And Roy that's almost my point but just to put you in time like times are great example of this Right.
20:45If you were an early stage investor, you're very sad you didn't sell last round in China. Right. And I would argue at 25 billion or whatever the last round was done, when you look at that rationality, you'd say, look, let's go to a company. Is it an infinity company? Or is this a really great place where I did my job, which was just funded early to find it early to fund it when money was scarce? And now we have capital out. Okay. Those are making a different assessment. I think the answer is you clearly would have wanted to sell last round. And I think it's incumbent on investors. I only know it's in the S1, but I didn't see any of the early shareholders make the cut on the principal stockholders.
21:17When I look at principal stockholders, there's delusion, but I don't see any of the seed guys on table. So that says to me they probably sold the 20, some amount at 25 billion, what I literally only see DST, cross link and memo. That is their job. That is their job. But I think you will not if it's a 250 trillion billy dollar. Just to separate things floating around and I wanted to segregate them. First is I'm going to fight in the fence of mid -tier. The mid -tier investors who didn't do the seed, but didn't do the $25 billion around, are they happy they did that round? The round that men loaded, I think was out of the BRC, it was a couple hundred million, can't remember what the pre was, they're damn happy they did that round.
21:57And that's a classic example of a mid -sized venture firm making a savvy bet doing good stock picking long after the seed, but still making good coin. To me, that's the first point, which is the validation that you can at that fun size, probably it was a $400 - $500 million fund then, make really good coin and move the need to let the fund level. Second comment to your point, Sam, I'm answering you right. You look back and go, hmm, I might have been marginally smarter if I had bought a 2 ,300 and then sold a 25 billion rather than holding and selling a 12. But the big advantage they have is they'll still book, probably 10 or 20 X.
22:31Now 40 X is better than 20 X, right? So they've made good coin in a situation where as we discussed before the kind of 25 billion dollar bonds Gonna lose money. So that's proof that you can make perfectly shrewd A to C bets Subbibillion pray and make very good money in a non -quart and court generational company China is an extremely good company I'm obviously trying to be provocative on purpose, but I think we're directing it Here's my boys points to bring a full circle that DPI them which is when you think about how I relatively value DPI versus TVPI and the other metric. If I'm in a really stage fund or really anyone and you said, hey, I sold my time stock at 25 billion for American dollars, like for cash.
23:12And I gave it to you years ago, right? Like from an IRR perspective and a cash perspective, that is a great move. And so that's anything to think of the mind when we go back to all of this is like, we're talking in pretty deep cuts on the game of VC right now, right? As opposed to the game of company building. But like I do think like when you come back to this like this is why I believe the Chimalth line unfortunately and it's gonna get clipped and I'm gonna be upset about it But like whatever is like great is like it's like in the end of the day like good investors good Capitalists make people money if that's the game they're playing and they're not as it gathers in the end That's true in the end check in the bank counts sometimes even as you correctly say it's often even true I like what you said about Facebook is that But sometimes it's even true that a smaller check earlier has more value than a bigger check layer and just a whole bunch of life reasons.
23:57I mean, that's why we have interest rates. There's the time value of money. I remember a friend of mine, we saw this company, I was giving him grief, and then five or six years later, another company in the same space went public at two or three times the market cap, and I foolishly gave him shit about it. And he called bullshit on me. He said, look, I'd been at the thing 10 years. I made a lot of money. I got married. I have a life. I have a lovely house in Spain. and I started another company. Yeah, I'd have more money if I'd held, but that was my life choice. The thing was exactly right. I just saw Menlo Ventures.
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24:28So obviously, I don't know what their basis is, Rory. Obviously they'll make a ton of money on time. Right, a classic great bet. They said they did the Series B, right? They win. So they did the Series B at 200, 300. Maybe we can figure it out on the fly. They're gonna, this will be a nine. They'll be some delusion. They'll 10 or 15 extra money, right? That'll be a fund returner or more than a fund returner. Probably a little longer, but yeah. And I do like that team and then back when when in 2021 they wanted to invest like in all of my companies There was very hard a very high alignment right for better or worse, right?
24:56What's interesting to me today from the start of the conversation is all they talk about is entropic today And this is a smart team. It's every they have an ontropic fund every because I follow all the guys and I'm leaking Nothing but their Siri and they didn't do the seat and they're gonna make a lot of money off this right because entropic is one to three Billion and revenue in five months, right? but it's a sign of the times, isn't it? Probably. I don't see them trumpeting their coming DPI from Chime, which is epic, but anthropic is on their social media 11 team times a day, as perhaps it should be, but I don't think they're taking any DPI.
25:28I am always. Entrepreneurs, they're not marking the LPs. Here's the way I look at it honestly. I think adventure capital, it is unbelievably difficult to know what anything is worth. And if you're men low or you're anyone in the middle, My God, you have to price things properly. If you're plowing enormous amounts of money and something late on the infinity dream, prices really matter, which is how you get these ridiculous prices. And like the reason is it's very simple. It's like, what is opening eye worth? Who the hell knows? It's like one of those things where people can dream, right, you can have a trillion dollar dream.
26:01And that means that like there's very little pricing discipline, it's basically a game of pissing, of who can pay more, who's willing to go further. And at seed, nothing's worth anything, right? And so you just have to have pricing discipline and remember that. The problem with mellow is that I don't know how you know, like, the, you know, I said this as somebody started my career at Baning Company. I think with these private companies catching the right price and the right dynamic and being right at Series A, B is like the hardest game. I think some parts of that are true. I think you are right that the seed investor, I mean, I will say, you know, we can do A's and B's and I will say we're at the first point where you can start to do some analysis versus just people in market, which is why you have to live on and broad directionality, right?
26:42You've got at least some pitiful facts to look at and try and know that. I just sort of fact free zone. Yeah, absolutely. And we live in a fact thing zone. So I do agree. I don't agree that pricing for us is, quote, harder than pricing for the late stage. I think late stage on average, I think it's much harder to price at that late stage because on average, you'll be wrong. And we're seeing a whole bunch of down -rounds where the last around loses money and every other round prior to that makes money. So I actually think price discipline is even more important to closer you get to an exit. They don't lose money.
27:14They just get their price. Well, we've trashed I want to that. In China's case, they're going to lose money because they don't have that. That's a fair eye role. But I think the more important thing is the interesting is we always say, I think on traffic, I think men are doing on traffic was a genius move. Right. So come to that and say, I think it's like a genius move too. I think that there's always some deals, and it's very surprising that even at that two, three, five billion valuation level, there's still another 10X from there. Now there's not many of them. There's literally one maybe every second year.
27:42But if you do that one, you can price like it's an ARB, but deploy money like it's an F, and make a return, 10X plus return as if it's an ARB. It's an awesome deal. There's, as I say, one of them every couple of years, and tropicals won, open AI, it was one, probably Angela was one. But the average late stage deal isn't that right and there's just less degrees of freedom on the average late stage deal to compound So I think you have to be a little when I look at the people who do it well like the merit text like the IVP There's a fair amount of shrewd price discipline in what they bring to the table or what the product they're selling is You know, just a different product the product they're selling is access to this pool of companies that are late For people with too much money or that need private access with a cherry on top of infinity, right?
28:27And they're actually not in the business. I think that probably not as true for the names I cited, but I think you're right. Some, there are people who are, there are funds who are playing that game where, you know, it gets back to the whole. When all the cute sexy stuff is private, there are eventually going to be entities who sold gold in life as to put public investors in contact with those sexy private companies. The one thing I will say on chime in the 25 billion is every single round in the billions for Ravaluit. Everyone was saying, well, how much more can it be? How much more can it be?
28:54I think everyone is realizing now that Ravaluit will quite likely be at least $100 billion campaign, likely $150 billion. If you sold it 25, you would be grossly underestimating or missing $125 billion of gains in a European neo bank. It also just depends what business you think you're in. Aren't you in the business of making as much money if you're investors as possible? No, well, I think there's another real debate, I think, which is a tough one, which is I would argue that there's a strong case to be made that as a venture capitalist, you should not have an opinion about the public markets.
29:28That you're not paid to have an opinion about public markets. People don't have their own opinions about public markets. And your paid, your job is to manage the private markets or private pricing. And it wants things public. It's like, look, the game should be over. Now, there's all sorts of people that juice that or decide they do have opinions about the public markets. But it's something I'm going back and forth on to be totally honest with you about whether VCs just thematically shooting that or whether you say, look, we can turn over shares. as you guys figure out what to do. But I would probably sell revolute and chime right now, right now.
29:58Both of them have about 15 % market share, true tam. If you're trying to decide when to sell, right, or whether you have infinity runway, market share is a limiter, right? There are folks who can get to 100 % market share, but for a lot of apps, 15 % I find is a little bit aheadwind. Like you start to see, and in a lot of times in B2B when the market's smaller, it's even before 100 million revenue. You start to get to double digit market share, and just when it gets good, because everyone's heard about you and all the leads come in. It's like, ah, all the easy to 15 % market share is a lot. Well, it's not a monopoly.
30:31It's not a monopoly. That is the classic thing. Everyone comes, you know, as an earlier judge, and I feel kind of like, well, the cat is blank, but it's going to go down like, nope, cat only goes up, right? Like people just consistently get this wrong, right? And so I think they almost always up at scale, right? It's like, this is how the world works. I'm like, you know, the kind of argument that you're going to get good at something and all of a sudden, it's going to get cheaper is just wrong. So is chime an important company? I just don't see it. You know, it's good company like they provided some banking process to unbanked people or underbanked people I get it It's not bad.
31:00They did a good job. They built a good app. But like is it important? If if the $14 million market cap was in my bank account, I would think it was a very important company indeed It's like fine. It's fine. It's not a bad thing, right? It's just if that is the case if chime is not a real an important company at all then I I've never done anything to port in my life. I've been a decent founder. I've seeded multiple. My team has gone on to help run multiple decorcorns. I've had $5 billion cash exits, but I really don't matter. I think I've helped thousands of founders build companies from scratch, but I probably don't matter if Chime doesn't matter.
31:33I think the default is that most of us don't matter and most of the companies in the world don't matter. But the things that matter really matter, right? And like, I think the job is to find the things that really matter. Do you think Salesforce or Oracle Matter? Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of England, in the 1900s, very language -relaxed man used to say, nothing matters a lot and very little matters at all. And that's really what you're saying, Sal, and it's true, but the cost of correct response says, what am I meant to do with that? I think an Andrew can matter. I think you can tell us, it can.
32:03I do think killing people matters, it's very helpful. I think that opening up I could matter. Magnusau, Facebook, Google, these are companies that matter. I think Bitcoin matters. I personally think Solana matters. I think Venmo might matter. Like we can go down the line of things that are actually paradigm shifting and like have an impact. And then everything else is not, you can't build good businesses. You can. So you don't think you're not sure open AI will matter. You just think it's possible. I'm not sure it will matter. I think it might matter. I mean, that's a pretty arrogant thing to say, isn't it?
32:30Why? The game is young. They clearly pushed the ball forward, but like will it, well, we look back in 20 years and say open AI was a fundamentally important company. Maybe. I think the truth is most companies fail. some companies compound to a billion in value, a few each year compound to five billion, one every year to 10, and one or two every decade to 100 billion. So taking away that quote matter, and I think market cap is a rough proxy for mattering. I say that pretty confidently, because I believe the capital system works, and the things that matter the most are valued the most. What I'm disconnecting with a little bit is, and so I love what Jason said, I just want to come back, I love what he said, I'm at peace with the fact that if the definition of mattering is a hundred billion dollars, I may well complete another ten years and venture, do it for 40 years, and quote, never matter.
33:20And I'm actually okay with that. You know, I'll take it up my therapist. I'll be fine. But I know I'll have invested in perfectly good companies that have built real value, that create perfectly good businesses, that, you know, in some cases, it worth five, ten billion dollars. And that's okay. The problem with the only new things that matter is that in the end, the tens of some kind of nihilism, which is that nothing else does matter. I do think that people should wake up every day and have the opinion that they want to do things that are going to matter. I'd say the most insulting thing you could ever call me is a market participant.
33:52I find that incredibly insulting. I was like, yeah, it's pretty efficient market. Capital's pretty efficient. You pay $100 billion, $120 million. Who cares? It's fine. You have a company that's like a billion dollar company that does some stuff and sort of like fine. I'm glad that happened. That's capital isn't working. but like then you're really just a cog in the system, right? And I think that's not a recipe for outsized returns, but it is a recipe for doing fine. It's just not my goal. I am a cog in the system. I might want to be more than that, but I think you're a hollowed out fun that doesn't matter.
34:24Harry, you should have asked Aaron Levy when you interviewed him yesterday if he mattered. Yeah. I don't think he matters. I don't think Boxman, I don't think he matters. What's, I mean, he, he, he, he, he, oh, Box, I love. It's not, it's nowhere near. I don't think Aaron Levy would say Box is more important than OpenAI. I'm confident he would. For what it's worth, I love Aaron. He's like a good company. But this company doesn't matter. It's only four, five, six billion. It's irrelevant. I completely agree. It's coming doesn't matter. And in fact, one of the things I told him when I went public is I should be to shut it down tomorrow is five point billion dollar company.
34:51Absolutely not. But it does actually is for some random person to come run it from some hedge fund. Aaron is very excited about AI, if you didn't know. Right. And I think part of that is an opportunity for him and for Box to matter. Because Box is again, he's done an incredible job. I'm like very pro Aaron Levy. And what I said to him when the company went public, I said, I'm like, look, one of the things I most respect about you is you just worked this to make it happen, right? Like this was not from a first principle as like an important company, right? This is not like a sexy company, but you just ground it out.
35:21And like I really respect that. I'm like I think that's an incredible thing to have done. But I think part of the excitement about a lot of founders around life. I mean, Aaron and I started together. So he was 20. If this company doesn't matter, when he started, he was a wonder kid. Now he's the greatest CEO I know. He's wasted his whole fucking life is basically what you're saying because it doesn't waste it is life But I've been told this Rory was there he could have sold this company to Citrix They made a hundred million dollars with retention payments in like 2008 So he wasted the lap according to you.
35:48He wasted the last 16 years of his life fucking thru flushed it down the toilet by doing To be the money at the IPO I've lost it down the toilet, but look I do think there's this thing going on right now It's a lot of life in Citrix wasted his life the poor For what it's worth I think a I don't know I think you probably know the math, but my sense is that he actually probably would have made more in that deal than ultimately going public now I don't know where he is now, but like from that Cash in 2008 plus his shares in Stripe and Gusto and others. Yeah, he should have just he should have just found it in all birds instead of doing box If you are a fun manager, he definitely should have sold them.
36:21He's not he's a person and he wants to run it That's fine. The second thing is I do think there's a lot of exuberance about AI right now from a lot of people who are kind of in these position is like this is a company that's kind of a meh, but maybe there's an angle to not be meh, right? And that's exciting to people like I think that's awesome for org to try that But I think it is the race to matter that is becomes interesting That's what I think the AI stuff is so interesting in so many cases is some of it's real some of it's not But like there is this new opening where people are like oh my god.
36:47Does this now matter? That's kind of the big game to play anyway guys with that I'm actually hoping on my partner meeting So I'm gonna drop but that was fun. I hope I have my therapy session set up for tomorrow I don't matter. I'm hollowed out, but I'll get through it somehow. As my wife says, sometimes go get some my birds, Rory, you'll feel better. Go to the mall, put Stanford and get a few pair of all birds and you'll feel like a winner. Cron to your fucking money. Okay. The thing that I do want to go to though now is actually I thought a phenomenal report which Jason, you did brilliant work on, which was Mary Meakers AI report.
37:20So I want to go to it. You posted an incredible thread with 10 fantastic takeaways. I want to hand over to you on which takeaways you found most striking and why and just start there. Some of it was obvious. The one I first started off, which is obvious, but I'll tell you why I put it in there anyway, was that Chachi BT is the fastest, even though Sam Lesson said he's not sure it's important, it's the fastest gain of users in the history of the world, 0 to 800 million in 17 months. It took Netflix 15 times longer, it took TikTok five times longer, the rate of adoption. I talk to so many folks, especially in B2B here, they're like, you know, I don't know.
37:56I don't know that AI can really replace a good, hardworking marketing manager or a good PR person. Or they say, there's too many, you know what they say, Rory? There's too many hallucinations. To me, those are reminder, the rate of change. I don't think as humans, we can process the rate of change of AI. It's so fast that we don't understand almost how quickly it's changing. Whatever you think AI could do three months ago, it's like super dated. the second Mary Meeker one was showing that the infrastructure spend is unprecedented in the history of internet, right? That the big six spend two hundred and twelve billion on CapEx and yeah, the top line's great, but the spend here is insane.
38:32I'm just still a little confused where it's going because it's early at the application level. Where is at the at the application level? Is this all going to coding and support? Is it all going to to custom data analysis? Is it all going to subsidizing our chat GBT 20 bucks a month. I just don't know where all this infrastructure. I think it's laying the foundation that is transformational, but I just, it feels so far ahead of the application level. I think you're right. And my takeaway from her thing was, the hyperscalers have taken very good cash efficient businesses and they would break Mr.
39:04Buffett's heart because they've turned him into CapEx hogs, right? Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, all have had CapEx as a percentage of free cash flow go up significantly. Now, as you pointed out, the good news is, in the last four or five years, free cash low themselves have grown. So your cash low hit hasn't been enormous. It's only been about a 10 % decline in free cash low, right? It hasn't been horrific. In a less generous economic environment, the shareholders of Microscalf might well be screaming and saying, you're wow, 60 billion a nut in the show for it, guys, come on here. It's been perfect timing, it's a little actually in that respect, like 98 .99.
39:39the overall economy has been favorable. The performance of the hyperscalus existing businesses, not their AI businesses, have been pretty damn amazing. And as a result of that, the market's been able to say, guys, knock yourself out, spend 260 billion dollars, you know, I'm sure something will come of it soon. The 600 billion dollar question is where are the apps? And since then, you know, it kind of implied that they didn't say, oh my god, there's going to be a correction. And obviously since then, there hasn't been. Everyone is just plowing on. They're investing the capital and the revenue is coming, but relative to the spend, if someone said to you, you can finance a $600 billion cap ex business.
40:20And you have four or five years in, you'd have 10, 15 million billion in revenue and $585 billion in losses. You'd probably say, ah, no, I don't need that right now. But that's where we're at. We say that on the revenue side. But then I think end of year, that is the opening eyes going to be at 25 to 30 billion. We saw anthropic cross three billion in revenue up from a billion just five months ago, three X from a billion in five months. It always takes time when we're laying infrastructure at revenue company. The variable that we're missing in this discussion in my view is time. I totally believed that all the apps will come to fill the space available for it when all this capex.
40:58I believe the LLM guys will make amazing shit. It'll be impressive and business will find a way to use it. But to Jason's point, I think if businesses adopt in two years and then the revenue comes quickly, it'll all be fine. If businesses take four or five years to get there, you could be looking at a more extended period of, you know, you're having the costs, but not yet the revenue. So I think that's the as yet unknown. How quickly will apps revenue fill the gap? When you look at the present and free cash, you said they're 10 % and actually a master's being okay with that. There's a ceiling to what they are okay with.
41:32If it is five years out, and that is now 30, 40, is there a ceiling to what investors are okay with Satya, Larry, Sergei, you name it, spending? Yes, there is, is the answer. And it seems inconceivable today, because everyone's like, wow, wow, go for it. But you know, public company investors are just mean VCs on steroids. We turn on a dime from, I can't believe you're not spending more to what the What's right do you mean you spend in so much money? And we've lived here in 99 where you'd call the team in and say, double the burn. And without blushing, you'd call them in six months later and say, why are you spending so much money?
42:06Let's cut. If the economy slows down, if your core growth rate starts to decline or slow down significantly, I think you'd see mild to reasonable level pressure on all the hyperscalers. I mean, an interesting example would be in a different market. Meta changed its name and wanted to go all in on VR. There are two years in, there's no return. There was a little bit of pressure, and I think Zuckerberg heard the pressure on Pivot at NICE2. I mean, still spending a lot on virtual reality, but not as much, and there was kind of a little bit of a belt tightening there. So when the pressure comes on, I think, yeah, I think CEO has responded.
42:40I said this when we said last time that if you really, one of the things I admire about Somal and some things that don't understand what admire is how he's telling you the future, even though you just got to listen. Yeah. And you know, when he started talking about Stargate, that he alone needed 500 billion just to get going and up to $5 trillion, right? And we got him, what Stargate? What do you mean 500 billion? But he's socializing the whole market that it's gonna be an order of magnitude bigger, right? He's socializing the market here. This isn't Amazon, not only is the size bigger than the classic Amazon investment losses, but you need everyone to go all in on this.
43:13You need all the big participants to say, we're going all in on this big bet. It's not just one company making a big bet. this is all the highly big companies making a massive bet. I think the interesting question is, you know, there was a time when Amazon stock was pearly low and a whole bunch of banking analysts were smearing and saying they'll go bust and obviously in retrospect they didn't and all those banks did and Jeff Bezos got to say Neenon Neenor, but intuitively you just know when you're spending half a trillion dollars in advance of revenue at some point in the next two or three years, there'll be at least one scary moment.
43:46And that could be actually an interesting opportunity you invest, but it's hard to believe it's up to the right from here. What is this scary moment? Can you just help me visualize that? When we see the commoditization of models, they're all becoming very efficient and all becoming really bloody good. What is this scary moment? Maybe if opening eye just misses a growth plan, right? If it's just 30 or 40 percent, if they have two rough quarters for whatever reason, right? Some sort of saturation we're not anticipating, that would set off a mini panic, I think. Agreed. And you know, I was just looking at their numbers.
44:15It's interesting exactly 20 years apart. Their numbers versus Google's numbers from 20 years ago. So literally 2002 is the same as OpenAI's 2022. 2003, I think I'm doing it from memory is about 1 .3 billion for OpenAI, 1 .4 billion for Google four years ago, 20 years ago, this year, 2004, sorry, 3 billion and 3 billion. So roughly the same. And now what's interesting is the projections for OpenAI now start to, as you don't realize, projections start to pull away ahead of Google. In other words, OpenAI was the Google of its day until now, and it's projecting to become twice the Google of its day for the next four years.
44:55Now, maybe it will, because I think it is a more impressive piece of technology when you use it, but maybe it won't. Let me make the statement clear. If all OpenAI is as just as good as Google, then it's going to miss its number next year by about 40%. That would be a scary moment. I'm simply saying that the expectations are so high that anything that's been freaking amazing could feel like a fail even though in any logical terms it isn't. Just as Amazon wasn't a fail in 2001, 2002, it was just in retrospect minor growing pains that a panicky market interpreted, oh my god, going bust. No, they're just building a business where it's going to take three to four billion dollars a last is to get cash to break even.
45:38And then you're going to make billions every year. Jason, just to be clear, we're going to do a visual of Rory looking mean with open AI. Doesn't matter. No, no one else in the frame. No one else in the frame. Can I get you to get your captions, Harry? I just want to say that and you get me in the trouble. But I've given up. You got to do it. You want to do the third point because it's kind of interesting. Yeah. I brought up going. No, keep going. You could have opinions on Elon Musk, But now that he's out of government, man, the guy is direct, right? He was direct today. He said this, this, this spending bill is ridiculous for all parties.
46:08And he's been talking about China with AI, right? And Mary -Megger's number three point was we're missing what's happening in China, which is natural. We're not even connected to them on the internet. We have different internet. Her point was, it was X months ago, we thought deep seek was going to change the world. It didn't. But 93 % performance at the time of open AI's O3 mini for a fraction of the cost. Alibaba, which we can't even use here, right? Outperforms both. Buy, do, earn, which I don't even know. 0 .2 % the cost of GPT 4 .5. People smarter than me are worried about China and AI. That was kind of for a third point.
46:39And we've stopped talking about safety, and I think we've stopped talking about China. I mean, the simpler point is probably some version of, I think, Chatt GPD will be the Apple -level quality product, but there'll be a whole bunch of Android -type quality products that are out there that will just keep pricing honest if they're commercially available universally. And I don't think to Jason to your point, obviously, if the model is built in China, we won't be accessing them here. Even if we were legally out, my guess is corporate America wouldn't want to. The meta point about DeepSeek was that it was possible to get quite close, quite cheaply.
47:14And you know, you're going to see that independent of China just in terms of competition here. But I think the undeniable fact is we ain't a monopoly anymore. It's not two or three companies monopolistically producing LLNs, there are four or five companies the other side of the pond cranking them out. Jason, are there any others that you think were specifically relevant for B2B? Maybe just two more and you can shut me up. The second one which we all know, but I think it's very useful to see it simplified and compressed into a chart which is folks still get this wrong of B2B today. Token costs collapse 99 .7 % in two years.
47:46Now if you're a developer, if you're sitting in Windsorff or lovable all day, you get this and it's not this simple because you're consuming many more tokens, right? But all these ill -fitting blazer and jeans, SAS guys who are saying it's too expensive, or the mediocre and VP of engineering that don't code anymore, who haven't coded in five years, that are constantly telling me why AI is too expensive and don't work, like find a new job, right? If tokens collapse 99%, 27 % in the next two years, you can tell me already, but I don't know where they're going to be in two years, but it's at least going to be exponential decrease in absolute cost per token, right?
48:19it will use more, right? Training costs will go up. But even today in June, if I want to just jump off the roof, when I hear a VP of engineering that doesn't code anymore, saying it's too expensive to do enough AI in the product, like we'd like to do this rory at our B2B workflow company, but we can't. It's too expensive, Mr. Board of Director. Like I just want to tell, I tell the CEO to fire that guy. Yeah, you should pummel him to debt because you're right, because there's some things I'm angsty about in terms of the road ahead in terms of the economics of it, but just from a raw knowledge intelligence, for lack of a better word, is just going to get cheaper and cheaper faster and faster.
48:54Intelligence is available at a price that's declining, you know, by long orders of magnitude every freaking year. That's just huge. As I say, one of my boards, where I'm a wildly smart, called a Correy Eye Model, as a fellow board member, it just repeats over and again. So you can't do it today, build a product. By the time you've built it, the stuff will be cheaper, it'll work, and if it doesn't work, then it'll work six months from now. That's the big trend that you're all leaning into. The price of a unit of intelligence is plummeting every month. Therefore, anything that you control intelligence at will get cheaper every month, just lean into it.
49:28The models will make it happen. I call it the AI slow roll, and I think it's the number one thing killing B2B companies is the AI slow roll. Yes. We're talking about it. We're going to roll something out in Q4. We're going to do a limited release in Q4, Rory, and then next year, if it goes well, we're going to roll it out to a little bit more of our base, that's going to be slaughtered. That's actually a fun discussion because it is so hard to watch companies turn on a dime and push towards the new thing. Right? And we're talking when Sam was on early. I give Aaron a huge credit. He's like, we're going to do this.
50:01It's going to be top down. Quintessential example is Facebook just after the IPO. And he's deciding, mobile is it? Strap ourselves into the office. We're just going to get it done. And it takes top down leadership. And I agree, if you don't do that. If you don't do it well, you're just going to be slow toast over the next two years. And it's just hard to do. It's just hard to shake companies out of their inertia, because you'll always feel that doing a little means at least you're trying, so that gives you points. That's the problem with startups, thinking they get points for doing a little right here.
50:33Yeah. I thought it was fantastic. I had the very in the founder of Windsor on the show, at Reveal Star Monday. And he said, listen, start -up speed incumbents because of existential dread. If you're in the startup and you don't ship great products and it converts the sales, you lose. If you are in an incumbent and you don't ship great product and it converts and you're a great engineer, you're definitely getting reassigned and reallocated. You're not going to lose great engineers. You're just going to put them on different products. See it all on you. That's the problem with B2B today versus where Verun is.
51:00I don't see enough existential dread in most B2B startups. I don't see it. Aaron has it. Yamania had it when she was on stage. She's, Aaron and Yamania saster this year. I mean, Rory, it's Scales Investor Boat. They both said the same thing. We're so excited and we're scared. I don't see enough existential dread in B2B startups. I don't see it. I see a little bit of it, some discussion. I want to walk into a board meeting and see a little bit of shaking because there's so much going on in the world and they just had yet another hackathon this last weekend and they're rolling out AI voice agents on Wednesday.
51:29If that's not you, I honestly think you're gonna fail. You want dread, dread. Veroons right, because Veroon, he's had three different companies in 18 months, right? And every month he's at risk of being displaced. Every month, right? And he's honest about it. He was honest on 20 BC, right? We need more of that and B2B not this slow roll So the other point she made which we knew if you want but I really think for B2B This is super interesting because she a lot of stuff she said like like pricing and but this is one to slow down on and Harry sometimes jokes to these old but this is where Harry is old for real her point was the next 32 % of the world is just coming online right now.
52:03They will all be AI first She says they'll use voice agents Agent -driven interfaces and national language interactions. I think that is 225. What I do know is that this generation will not use the internet remotely like we do. They will not use lead contacts and opportunities. They will not use files. Files are disappearing overnight. Kids do not know what a file is. It does not matter. Everything will be MCP or AID. And this is an existential threat. If I'm Aaron or Yamini, like these are ST or Sassios, I gotta worry about AI today, right? I got to worry about agents. I got to worry about automation.
52:38And then I got to worry about what happens when no one uses these applications remotely. Like they use them today. You really think that the next iteration is going to like even understand what a sales source UI is. It won't even make sense to them. They'll never use it. My son helped us at Sasster Manual this year. We have a Sass platform we use for like tickets and stuff. And he's like, wow, this is the first time I've seen software like this. Wow. And he codes every day. I do think that is true. I think in front of every system of record, there's going to be some system of work that does it and it'll sit on top of the system of records for now.
53:12And if it does a good job, it will gradually displace, make you relevant or replace the system of record if they allow that to happen. The AI that's closest to you is the worker. If I'm the worker, if the thing that I interact with every day that helps me do my job, over time that just become the most important thing in my life and anything back behind that doesn't matter. So if I'm a sales rep and I have a lot of automation, voice automation, AI, SDR, whatever, telling me what to do, doing things for me where I'm acting as a control of the agents, that's just going to become mentally my model of what a CRM is.
53:46And back behind that, yeah, there might be some database called Salesforce, but I just won't care. Yeah. And there might even be multiple ones. You won't care. You won't care if the company using Salesforce, and HubSpot, and Adio, and its own database. No, I think smart companies can we imagine what those workflows look like and built to it? And that's obviously what they're trying to do. But if you fail, if you're not relevant in terms of how your next generation of work is used AI, you will eventually be displaced. I mean, it might take a long time. I think, as I've always said, I think Salesforce instances will be there at scale long after I'm dead.
54:20But the value accretion will all go to the technology that's helping me do my job. Not the technology that's just keeping score and how well my job has been done. The one I'm really struggling with today, and I have asked Aaron and others this, right? It's early, but I think MCP is an existential threat to almost every SaaS app. And now you can MCP into Notion, you can MCP a little bit into HubSpot, but it's very limited, right? You can MCP into Google Calendar. I just don't know why if I can just talk to my AI, my clotter chat GP and do everything I want to do at HubSpot, elegantly, I don't know why I would ever log into HubSpot or ever even learn what HubSpot is.
54:57Not as such as perspective, though, isn't it, really? Which is the, you know, in an energetic first world or an agent first world, you basically have all of these applications that become databases and then agents basically become the data transporters and you never need to engage with the core database. Yeah. I thought it was too nerdy when he started saying it, right? And too technical, too Microsofty. I thought it was too Microsofty. But time goes by and now that I can see MCP applications just starting and the prompt is you need to listen, I'm not an expert, but everything I've tried, you need a key.
55:25So a key is annoying, right? I got to go to some website. I got to get a secret key and I got to add it to my thing But when those keys go away and I can just talk to all my apps through my chat GPT or Claude man I just don't think we're ready for this world and I'll give you an an example like Harry knows There's a company I invested in that I love called Mangleman. It's next generation SaaS for spas doctors offices And the like okay, they're coming up on 25 million love the CEO to death would do anything with them He was all over MCP the day. He could use it Okay, and he's like, here's the problem for me.
55:55Let me be clear. And he's the best in his space. That's why they were able to do it. Not a huge tam lots of issues. Like now, let's say I want to, I want an appointment at WaterCourseWay in Palo Alto, right? Where Rory goes to decompress after a tough pod. Tony. And let's, but right now he might have to figure out which application they use. Do they use mango mint? Do they, which of the variant, what do they use? MCP, it can just abstract away and you'll have no more relationship with this application. And like, he's like, I could become a pipe overnight and he's already completely changed his value proposition because of that because it's like if I don't change what I'm doing today No one will even know which of these applications and Harry's invested in some adjacent cut is not in this space But you might not know you might not know which restaurant application it is which spa application it might not matter It's very difficult for me to imagine you can increase your prices in that world You know you one thing dude if you're doing SaaS for spars.
56:46Yeah, you definitely don't matter recording to some less even restaurants, you are just not even in the conversation, dude. Yeah, Dr. Thomas is spars. But he was, he was in a good way. He was, it was an instant wake up call. He's like, if I don't address, if I don't add even more value, I will be partially obsolete because people won't even know who I am anymore. They'll just use AI to just go out and be in picket for them. And anytime everyone starts talking about a gentick this and that, I start to roll my eyes. It's too nerdy. The rural doesn't think about a gentick this, but the rural does think, can I go to chat GPT and get my haircut?
57:19I mean, Rory's upgraded his haircut for the show. It looks good, right? Thank you. But why can't my chat GBD just figure out where is the best haircut in the mid peninsula and do it for me? Why do I have to do these apps? The closer you are to what the customer or the user wants to do, the more right you have to swallow anything that's behind that. And that's really what you're saying. Do you want to be the person who keeps track of who's coming to the spa? Or do you want to be the software that helps decide who's coming to the spa? I want to be the insider. I don't want to be the tracker. because tracking on its own is inherently just not as valuable as a thing to bring to market.
57:52The long -term trend is clear here. It's very interesting that Dar Mesh is on the bleeding edge of this for HubSpot and I think HubSpot is threatened by MCP. HubSpot is a system of record too. It's a very valuable one and it does not really want everybody abstracting away all their structured data and using it however they want in their own applications and their own CRMs and marketing applications. The incumbents will last a long time, but that doesn't matter, because what matters to us is where the next new dollar goes. We're all about the next 100 million of new ARR coming on, and that could comfortably go to these next generation products, while at the same time SAP can compound for the next decade happily.
58:33But they won't be getting the new money. Our job is to find the companies that get the new dollar, and you don't have to have world. One of the bigger hearts for me has been, quote unquote, last generation companies can compound happily for years on their existing base on expanding within those customers while at the same time effectively you're signing new customers who are saying that that old thing is not where the world is going anymore, but it just has such momentum it just keeps on compounding. But that's okay for that as a public company. For you as venture investor trying to find the new new thing, it's all about the much smaller dollars in budgets that are available for the new stuff because that's the only money we can live off.
59:13We can take the SAP budget for our new product for the next 10 years. We got to take the new companies or the new functionality that sits on top of those apps, be it SAP Salesforce Oracle, etc. And it's hard to imagine in 2025 knowing what we do about AI to say, I've been thinking we really should build a screen just like the other SAP screens. That's not where it's going to go. Every company's market share is up for grabs when there's a platform shift. The very biggest ones don't go to zero, they just slow down, but you're right. The mid -tier ones can really hit a wall. And if you're running one of these companies and you're not afraid and you're not 110 % focused, you're almost certainly going to fail and the only question is over what period of time?
59:55Turns out making money is hard, keeping money is harder. Guys, can I just roll to one thing we said about not being a public market investor. Everyone loves the analysis we do on your chimes of the world that we have done in the past. There have been a lot coming out in terms of M &A's and IPOs. As Chime obviously this week, there's GrowFild for an IPO. It's an Indian IPO. She in moving IPO from London to Hong Kong, maybe finally getting that one out. A Marda Health coming out for a $1 .1 billion price. CircleFild for IPO at 8 billion. sales force requires information at $8 billion. Of those, free for all, which one do you think is most interesting?
1:00:32I'll hit two. I do think circle is interesting. Just because it's a fun business model, it's basically a bit kind of enabled money market fund. They get your money, they're able to invest in treasury, they get a nice yield, they have to share some of that money with customers, with distribution partners, and they build a perfectly nice business there. And valuation that around $18 plus or minus reasonable, It's an interesting business. It's like a $43, $44 billion money market fund where they're getting roughly 4 % or 5%. So just under two billion in revenue, and then they have to share a lot of that with distribution partners, and they have a net interest margin.
1:01:10It's just like a little mini bank type thing, and then they have op -ex, and they make a couple hundred million bucks a year. Perfectly good business. It's the boring version of crypto. Crypto but safe. I think it'll be an interesting IPO. Yeah, I think it's bounded in terms of value because there's no magic explosion. It's very clear how the model works. Anyone financial can figure it out and value it, but I think it's interesting. To me, there was the most interesting, and although I'm still trying to fully understand it, was that Snowflake bought probably an almost pre -revenue startup called Crunchy Data, which is a Postgres implementation.
1:01:40Right after Databricks bought, it's own Postgres database company, Neon, for a billion. Yeah. I assume Neon had some real revenue, right? 250 million for Snowflake suggests to me they're buying some distribution. But the fact that trying to understand to this conversation how AI shifts the battles that Snowflake and Databricks now need to be database companies to some level, in a year or two could be like fundamental change in all these lines blurring. Instead of Snowflake, it figured out how to work with all these different postgres providers and open source and forked versions and all the different databases, now they're database companies.
1:02:15Yes, they need their own custom databases so their agents can efficiently work on all the data that's been laked and stored here, but pretty interesting within 60 days, including one yesterday, they both became database companies. It's a big change. What it really is is feeling the need to support all the different types of data structures. And as you say, more, more things from a world where the typical snowflakes data with, you know, data warehouse type data to now the kind of data used for AI. So feeling the need to support a wider variety of data types and data structures. Yeah, those are the two, I nearly said, it's a funny.
1:02:47I nearly said, those are the two publicly traded companies. And then I remember Databricks isn't publicly traded. It's just as if it was a public company, and it should be, of course, and it will be. But you've got Snowflake as public, you've got Databricks. And then Harry, you're going to ask about it in a second, but companies like Clickhouse, which are exploding company in the kind of database space, calling them a database. That's really sick explosive growth and just raised a big, late stage round. I think around and $6 billion from a host of who's who. The AI plumbing business is a great place to be.
1:03:18And if you even adjacent to it, I would argue five or six years ago, Snowflake wasn't in it, they were adjacent to it. So they're trying to furiously move into it. I think the data bricks advantage was they were in it from the start. It was kind of their thing, moving data, and then ultimately using moving data, which enabled for AI. So venture guys make really good thematic bets about the next 10 years, and are pretty horrible at assessing how the market's going to react to the next quarter's data. Head front guys are the exact opposite. They really, some of them, you know, the overnight trend, don't even want to think about the big picture trend.
1:03:51It's just like, is this EPS number over on the estimate and will the stock go up or down? And that's just a different skill set. I'm no good at that. Proof that we're all no good at. It's a fun thing you can do when you have a public company. You're on the board of a company. You have some interesting results. You're about to announce. Some things are better than expected. Some things are worse. I've seen this over and over again. You can go around the board room and ask people. Here's what we said Here's what we're going to announce tomorrow. Will the stock go up or down at best 50 % accuracy Oh, I've seen over and over again this time.
1:04:20Hmm. We think these things are great And then you go out and everyone glums on to the other thing Sometimes the stock goes down and your thought was going up and you want to cry other times it goes up And you're like, hmm, okay. It's kind of like two worlds talking past each other sometimes Can I ask one more final one for Kashi Quickfire, which is just why see obviously new batches out this week and they're raising and everyone's doing 10 % dilution for the round total. You guys have much more experience than me. I'm very lucky to learn from you. I appreciate our relationships really. How do we play in a world where the total round is 10 %?
1:04:52Our fun size is a bigger. Really you've got seven and a half for a lead and two and a half for angels. Jason, how would you advise me? You do YC very well. Well, first I think at YC, it's not 20. I think the new deal they're trying to do with a lot of startups is at least 50 to 60 post for even pre -revenue. There's a ton of deals in this batch at that level. So that's what they're pushing toward. And no criticism. You got to see YC as a business or the stuff will drive your nuts. Have to admire the game that's being played on the field, right? Which is, when YC went to 15, people thought it was crazy.
1:05:21And then 20. And now they're trying to get everyone to 50 to 60 that are AI. That just have AI, which is 70 % of the batch. That's the goal. plenty of folks raising it 50 to 60 or more with essentially no revenue. So that doesn't change the ownership question, but it does make it all even harder, right? Because then the A has to be at like, you know, 200 for the math to really pencil out. This is what I taught investing is like, for seed investing to really make sense, the next round should be 3x to justify the risk. And for A or B, it's got to be 2x, or you should just wait. You should just wait for the next round, because not that it's that simple, but intellectually it seems about right.
1:05:57You can either play that game and buy as much as you can or you can cry on it on the internet. All I can tell you, my little analysis of YC is I've ended up owning about a little less than half of what I would have. That's one guy's analysis. Because I bought more, I bought more in revenue cat, I bought a lot more revenue cat, I bought more in Algole, I bought more in others that have done reasonably well. You can buy more in the next round, but it only works unless you have a massive fund. There's only so much you can buy in the next round, right? I mean, you run out of money, don't you? So you're going to end up owning maybe half, but Gary would tell you since 30 % of the batches unicorns, it don't matter.
1:06:30Jason, first of all, I couldn't. Interesting. I could not agree more. I think it's why you said right at the start about they're doing their job and they're doing it well. It's one of the best businesses. Their value proposition to founders is will take you to unknown guys are gals from unknown place and will turn you into something that God bless these people in Silicon Valley. Their value are 20 to 40 to 50 million prey. And their success is a function of the more they can do that the more people are going to want to come in the higher quality people They're going to be able to attract. They're doing their job and they're doing it well So you write bitch and in moments of waste of time, right?
1:07:04All you can do is do your job well, right in response and It's obviously not the stage we play at we typically play at around around and a half later But the only weapon you have on your side of the table for there if you're going to pursue those deals is picking You obviously have to be way better at picking or you have to find other sources of deals. By definition, I mean, what's happening is as the pricing goes up, they will be correct on the winner deals. It won't matter because it never matters on the winner deals. But, you know, if your advice is only do good deals, it's not really actionable.
1:07:35I mean, I'm trying to only do good deals, but it's really hard in practice. The truth is, when you're paying significantly more per unit, it's just a lot harder to make money. You're picking has to be much more fine -grained. They've done a great job representing their side, which is the pole grain stated intent, make it easier to found companies. He's making it easier and more profitable and more attractive for entrepreneurs to found companies. More companies will be founded. I guess it's the same math, right? But there's plenty of ways to justify paying 60 million in a seed round, okay? If it's a generational company.
1:08:06What's harder, even though you can do it on a spreadsheet, if you have a fixed fund size, it's harder to and take the low ownership. The low ownership crushes you, right? And so you can say, listen, this is low risk and this is the best team ever. But when you end up with 3 % ownership with a large fund, that's where I think there's the slight fallacy in the YC date and I love Gary and I love the team. But that's a model that for folks that are either are angels or have tiny funds or don't need to have a fund returner or a material impact, right? It's just the math works better if it don't tie that to fund size, I think.
1:08:38I don't know how you do it to make return a lot of funds with 3 % though. At the end of the day, until the only thing that makes this whole process work and normalizes errors and corrects for overvaluations is ultimately returns. Correction on this kind of issue is a lagging indicator. If these are on average overpriced, then five or seven years from now the people invest in them will slowly realize they've made a mistake and pricing will come down. But the weird thing about ventures, it just takes a long time. It'll take 10 years to discover if the $8 billion funds work and deliver an acceptable return.
1:09:14It'll take eight years to figure out, can you pay 60 pre for an AI, Y -combinator startup and make money on average? Along the way, there'll be an anecdote of one company that worked. But the real test is the overall asset class work for those prices and so far in Gary's exactly right. He cites the data. The data from the earlier batches has been obviously amazing. But the cynic in me says, if it worked at 20 and give you a 3X and then you pay 60 you do the math here people you know your returns gonna go down by the stand amount but not for I see and the founders get six million instead of two million there's a lot of conceits for venture and all so many VCs are like hey guys take less money to lower valuation it's less risk there's a can VC can see to that one a third the money is riskier if you don't burn it assuming you don't burn it three times as much money for the same delusion D risks your your life as a founder right the second thing that the grouchy people miss is one of the other things that YC is quietly normal is if you do this round next week at 60 or last week, right, at 60 post, and you have to do the next round at 20.
1:10:14It's okay It's actually there are all this safes are a beautiful vehicle every time safes convert There's 11 ,000 different prices, right? There's my best friend that invested three weeks before the batch Then there's the alumni price then there's the price Harry paid then there's the price Lemkin had to pay on demo day And then there's the poor price Rory had to pay two weeks later, right? So when these notes convert at 11 teen prices and then there's another set of notes at for a team other prices. Nobody cares. Nobody cares that one was at six year one was at 20 as long as Rory gets his ownership in the series B.
1:10:44Listen, guys, is there any other IPOs anything that we've missed that we should discuss? Honestly, I think the most salient factors that they're happening. Normal IPOs are taking place. Yeah, normal service has been resumed. I know we glossed over it in the beginning, but I do think Tom O 'Brawo raising a record fund this week is a good sign too. That's $35 billion to buy B2B companies, almost entirely B2B. It's something a friend of mine used to say years ago and it's always struck him, it's just such a price clears all markets. In other words, you can't get your deal done at 25, which is the price you pay for the last one, but there is a price at which most decent companies can get public at, you know, above a certain critical mass.
1:11:23Price clears all markets. That's what price is meant to do and what you're seeing now is a degree of realism creeping in and as a result of that transaction is taking place, it's totally healthy. All righty, we're gonna do a couchie quickfire. This is like the prediction marketplace, my team of doors. So we're gonna go with the first one. Will open AI Johnny Ive device have a screen? Yes or no? Well, your team didn't ask when, right? Yes, thank you, Jason. You got it. So here's my thesis. Listen, if you read the internet, it says it'll be a pendant on your neck and it'll have no screen and even Samsung alluded to that.
1:11:58It's gonna be a voice interaction device. I think the only thing that makes sense and this is why you buy Johnny Ive is it's everything So it's appended on your neck. It's an app in your phone It is listening on our computers. It is listening on our laptops It is a ring like aura and importantly it's a air pod right because air pod is great Air pod already does all this and if you build all of them and the sunglasses like meta If you build all of them eventually some incumbent and a watch you got to have a watch So you just people do watch if you do all of them and they're all Johnny Ive level you solve this problem because we're not all guys sitting in a coffee shop with three things on the bar and our triple espresso's.
1:12:37You know, my son's, where's AirPods 12 hours a day? Rory probably will do the necklace because he likes that kind of open the button shirt, hang out with the necklace, gold chain kind of look, right? The Hawaiian shop. Harry will have the sunglasses, the Polarite sunglasses with his AI. In the land of no sun. So yeah, the years will have AI. Now there may be a screen in it. So I think the, so the first thing that comes out will be no, but ultimately it will be all of it. it'll be yes, it'll have audio and screen, it'll be everything, it'll be in those sunglasses. Because I don't think anyone's going to figure out a new paradigm.
1:13:06He's just going to figure out how it's all elegant. You're saying yes. The family, the family of devices will have a screen. Roy. Yeah, I'd probably go with Jason's answer in an uninformed way. I think the when question is more interesting and will it work? I mean, the interesting question would have been, will the device sell more than five million units in the first full year of shipping? And I would take the under. It might be 50 bucks though. That's the thing you can we have enough money to subsidize it true dude I would I would take the over on that and okay, so that's a fun bet Do that you want to do that is a bad if I'm done?
1:13:40What what are we gonna bad? We'll figure it out You know what you can buy me the device when I beat you so there we go Jason when they sell five million in the first year I will buy you the five millionton one absolutely done It's wonderful. And it's helping you. Do you find me doing it the best? One of my choosing. Done. We'll match a release in AI model that isn't open source this year. They're not prepared to be able to release a lot right now. They're prepared to be having some kind of gear grinding internally. My guess is that would be a decision based on some perceived security issues around open source.
1:14:14Other than that, I see no reason to change the bed that currently are, which has been the open source bed. So no in the absence of DC intervention is my call. You know, we underestimate the importance of llama in portions of the developer community. It's already not fully open. We don't even know what data set it's trained on. The one thing you know from these guys going even there in Levy's, but Zuck's on another level, hyper competitive. And if releasing a fully closed source model makes them more competitive, I think they will. So I think it's more than 35%. I think it's a yes. I think it's not really.
1:14:46I wouldn't bet against Zuck on that. Final one, Elon Musk is back into Tesla and everything in between. will Elon be out as Tesla CEO before 2027? To be clear, I read that as an odds bet. They're saying it's only a one -third chance that that happens. Correct. I don't think it's likely. I don't think it's the base case, but you never discount the random event. I mean, I don't know, the guy's motivation from Adam, but it's been kind of painful on every dimension. And coming back, it's probably not going to be fun. And so you can never discount a rage quit. I suppose would be that, especially when you have the fun of SpaceX and XII to go to.
1:15:25So you don't do it because you think it's likely you do it because you think the odds on the the Calci bet are low enough or high enough in terms of return that it's not a crazy thing to do. Jason. Listen, he's not the CEO of his other companies for reason. I don't think he wants to be CEO of Tesla. I just don't think he could find anybody. He had a CTO. I forget I pronounce his name JB Strubel. Is that a? Yeah. Yeah, I think he wanted him to be the CEO of Tesla when he was ready. I think the problems were huge. He needed to be the Sam Altman of Tesla. He needed to be the face and the problems were to do everything.
1:15:59Electric, AI, automation, trucks. It just was so intense, he had to be the CEO. But he wasn't the founder. I think if he could find someone better, now that he's out of that administration and now that he's reflecting on life, right, and working harder. I think if by the end of 2027, I think this is the question. By the end of 2027, or random 2026 is the bet, right, before 2027. Can he and the next 18 months find someone better than him for the job? I say actually more than 32%. You see, exactly. I'll go 50%. So that means I gotta say yes on this bet. Is that how it works? That's what it means.
1:16:32You think that, yes. I mean, he didn't even pick someone very good for Twitter. What's her name? She's terrible, right? I know. Linda, I mean, he's a movie. And he could also find a nominal CEO for Tesla. like he could find someone that's better than her, right? But he could still run the company like he does Twitter or X. So I think it's more than 50 % because he can't scale as a human being. CEO of Tesla and Neuralink and SpaceX angle into Mark. You just can't do it. So he's now that he's out of the administration. I think he will try to recruit somebody just like Mark Benioff will. Mark Benioff's tried four or five times to get out too.
1:17:04He's hired three other co CEOs. It just hasn't worked. It just hasn't balanced the right way for Mark. I just want to show it out that there is the complexity of the great comp package that has been held up by all the way to judge who clearly just has a thing about stopping him and that's got to be run to ground. But there's enough complexity there that just as a pure betting person, I'm kind of with Jason, you look at the odds and you go, it might be the right thing to happen, it might be what you want, but hey, it's not a crazy outcome just given the amount of change that's going on right now.
1:17:35and also to be honest, from the Tesla brand perspective, it might allow them to put some distance between their customer base and a fairly controversial person. So I could totally see it happening. I also think when you look at the time difference, 18 months now till 2027, you look at how XAI and Grocer going for him, their recent raise as well. 18 months is so long in AI. Elon is a master of moving to the most impactful thing in the world that he has. because they could be that. And I think you see the performance issues at Twitter and the realization that he is a human still. He's not got. And that realization comes home to Roost and he actually goes, fucking, I need management teams.
1:18:16Yeah, I mean, he recruited Ilya to open AI, right? He's the guy who can recruit. That's not new site of the recruit. He's most talented CEO. I think it's just, well, don't, hey, don't Twitter. That was an impossible job. Gwen shot well appears to be one of the most amazing managers ever down there with SpaceX. That means, you know, sending rockets up and most of the time having them work and building an amazing business. That's just been stunning management. So you have to think he wants to reproduce that if he can. Now that he has a moment to reflect. He's like, can I have a Gwen for different company?
1:18:46It's public. There's drama. There's comp issues. But he's got to be he's got to have thought for a decade. And I think he did try with his CTO, but now that he can try again, I got to find my Gwen. I got I can't survive with with 58 kids in the 11 companies if I don't find one, right? The kids is a pretty pretty big load to be fat. Yeah. Good job. Good job guys. No politics, no personalities. Let's leave families out. You're a fair point. No politics, no family. Totally agree. It's just a cognitive load. That's all. It is a cognitive load. Totally. Even Elononi has 24 hours a day. Turns out. And then you're running around this week.
1:19:20I thought I was fascinating. But guys listen, I always love this. You know, this week was a spicier week. We made it through. We still love each other. this was much cordial. So thank you for doing this. As always, it's the highlight of my week, and I really appreciate you both. All right, to infinity and beyond. Thank you, Harry. Are we back? My word, I just love that discussion. That was so much fun. Again, I want to hear what you think of the show. So let me know what you think. You can find me by emailing me Harry at 20VC. That's to zerovc .com, I want to hear your feedback. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi.
1:19:59First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow! Second, Kajabi's users keep 100 % of their earnings with the average Kajabi creator bringing over $30 ,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator commerce platform with an all -in -one suite of tools, including websites, email marketing, digital products, payment processing and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a private community, write a paid newsletter or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and grow your online business without taking a cut of your revenue.
1:20:3720 VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi .com -2 -0VC. That's kajabi .com, k -a -j -a -b -i .com, forward slash 20VC. And once you've found the next great start -up, you're going to need the tools to help them scale. That's why AWS is the perfect partner for start -ups, and why they're proud to sponsor this week's episode of 20VC. The AWS Start -ups team comprises former founders and CTOs, venture capitalist, angel investors, and mentors, ready to help you prove what's possible. Since 2013, AWS has supported over 280 ,000 startups across the globe and provided $7 billion in credits through the AWS Activate program.
1:21:21Big ideas feel at home on AWS and with access to cutting edge technologies like Generative AI, you can quickly turn those ideas into marketable products. Want your own AI -powered assistant? Try Amazon Q. Want to build your own AI products? products, privately customized leading foundation models on Amazon bedrock want to reduce the cost of AI workloads. AWS Trainiam is the silicon you're looking for. Whatever your ambitions, you've already had the idea. Now prove it's possible on AWS. Visit aws .amazon .com. Fordslash startups to get started. Now let's switch gears from cloud innovation to the future of mobile and how one company is turning your screen into real returns.
1:22:02We spend nearly half our waking hours glued to our phones, upwards of 50 hours every week. Recently, one company transforming this reality stood out so much I personally became a shareholder, Mode Mobile. Mode Mobile created the Earn phone. The smartphone that pays you for daily activities. Instead of big tech profiting billions from our attention, Mode returns over $325 million, directly to users through earnings and savings. modes revenues, surged an incredible 32 ,481 % in 3 years, recognized by Deloitte as 2023's fastest growing software company in North America, and here's why I'm excited, modes equity offerings have raised over $30 million from 20 ,000 plus retail investors.
1:22:48One of 2025's standout public raises, and you can now join me as a shareholder with as little as a thousand dollars at invest .modemobile .com, Fordsash20VC, for a limited time unlock up to 100 % bonus shares, and a free earnd phone, email us for the investor brief at 20VC at modemobile .com, or check out invest .modemobile .com, Fordsash20VC.
From the publisher
Agenda:
00:00 – The Most Unfiltered Episode Ever Begins
03:30 – Does OpenAI Even Matter? Sam Lessin Says Maybe Not.
05:45 – TVPI Is Bullshit?
09:20 – Asset Gatherers vs Real Investors: Who Actually Wins?
12:15 – The Death of the Billion-Dollar VC Fund?
16:00 – Mid-Tier VC Funds Are Getting Annihilated
21:00 – Chime: Great Exit or Missed Opportunity?
27:00 – The War on Relevance: What Companies Truly Matter?
33:00 – If You’re Not a Billion-Dollar Company, Do You Even Count?
37:10 – Mary Meeker’s AI Report: What Everyone Missed
39:50 – $600B in AI CapEx—Where Is the Revenue?!
43:40 – What Could Trigger the First AI Crash?
51:10 – The Existential Dread Missing in Most B2B Startups
58:30 – Will AI Reduce Your Startup to Just a Pipe?
01:01:10 – IPO Market Is Back: What Actually Matters Now?
01:06:50 – YC Startups at $60M Valuations: How Should You Play It?
01:10:00 – Why 3% Ownership Could Still Work—Maybe
01:11:30 – Will Elon Still Be Tesla CEO by 2027? Place Your Bets
01:14:10 – Will Meta Release a Closed AI Model? And Does It Even Matter?
01:17:30 – The Real Challenge of Managing 11 Companies and 58 Kids
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.




