20VC: Meta's Muse Hits No. 1. ChatGPT Finally Has a Rival | Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm | Factory Triples Its Valuation to $5 Billion | Keith Rabois vs Airwallex: Who is Right? | Crusoe's $3.9 Billion Round. Is the Data Centre Trade Overheating?

22:50But your point is the right one. I remember someone said like 20 years ago, probably 25 years ago now, internet first came out, that the internet abhors inefficiency. In other words, middlemen get pounded down, right? And if you think about things like the travel sites, Expedia, Airbnb, all of that is that, is getting demand and supply closer together. And I think what you're saying, Jason, is correct. AI is the same. It's going to pound down people who are in the middle, who just have information and are using that to make offers. If that's all you're doing, then there will be pressure at the margin.

23:24Because if you're reducing search costs, that's valuable to me as a human, but it may be the agent can just do it itself. So I'll go with the maiming comment. If it's even 5 % or 10 % impact, it's meaningful. That's the thing. And it's easy to shut off perplexity for Amazon. They're just a gnat. Amazon will have interesting choices when it's everybody. Like, you can't shut off everybody. It is technically possible. But at some point, it's going to be complicated. Are we sure we want to shut off everybody?

23:49Harry Stebbings:Moving swiftly on, anything else that I haven't touched with Muse? No, because it's not really the story of the week. I mean, it's the story of last week. We're going to do the story of the week. And Jason's going to be ready as a hands-on users to tell us about Jev, right? That's the story of the week. So how are we going? We can talk about Jev if you want. It's next one up. And it's the story. It's the next one up. And fine, it's Rory's story of the week. So for those that don't know, chat, GBT and Banter Ships, Jev. It's a model that decides instead of Chass and it becomes Vercel's fastest ever launch.

24:19Harry Stebbings:Jason, I'm sure you've played with it. What did you think? Jason's review, new segment. Well, first of all, listen, I'm not, I maybe, I might not be smart enough to get into semantics. I don't even think it's a model. I think it's a classifier backed by an LLM. I've used it. It's awesome. But I don't know that it'll be as disruptive as everyone on X talking about it that probably never used it said it is, but it is awesome. Okay. So what do you use it for? What I use it for is deciding who in the SaaS community should meet each other. It's quite good at that. Should Rory is the CRO at GCI. Harry is the CRO at Perplexity.

24:55Should they meet? It's actually not that simple a question. They're at pretty different stages. They live in different places. Should they meet? I spent all of Saturday, nothing worked on Jeb because I had to redo the way I did prompts. Okay. So I thought it was a failure, right? Then what I learned is if you invest the time, it can answer that question in milliseconds for a hundredth the price of Anthropocache, actually even less. It can just answer a question and it can answer a subset of questions. But I think as we've learned from data labeling and others, there's a lot of classification that needs to be done, a lot of data labeling that needs to be done, but it doesn't output text and it can't do anything particularly complicated or with reasoning.

25:32So it's like a big deal. And for this particular use case, I'm talking about who should meet who. It is disruptive, but it's maybe like 20 % of all the LLM calls associated with this application, right? So I love it. I think everyone will do some version of this. I think, you know, maybe even EXA and Parallels should do some version. Maybe OpenAI and chat. Everyone should do a version of this. But it's not going to take over 100 % of your stack, and it's not going to replace chat GPT because it just doesn't do those things. But it does remind us that, man, we effing waste a lot of tokens on simple stuff that Astra shouldn't be doing.

26:07I pretty much 100 % agree with you. I mean, the zoom out comment is this. It's a new model. It's different than an LLM. An LLM returns text and is very computationally intensive and in computing terms fairly slow and expensive. This just returns true or false or a ranking or a score, right? So there's three answer types. And it's super fast and super cheap. They don't even charge for output tokens because they're so meaninglessly few. So it's just a faster, more precise. That's why it's called. They refer to it on the website as a system one, which is the Daniel Kahneman thinking fast, thinking slow.

26:42And this is the thinking fast part, quick, fast answers. But Jason's math is exactly right. But we're talking about this on Monday. The part of meeting is that there's roughly$100 billion today being spent on LLM calls between Anthropic OpenAI and the open source models. Maybe that goes, if we just agree that OpenAI is going to be doing 350, Amazon 250. So it's probably going to go to half a trillion dollars five years from now. 20 % and Jason, we had exactly the same number. Only 20 % of them are relevant to this, where it's today you're using a complex, expensive model for something that really needs a much simpler solution.

27:18But 20 % of$100 billion is$20 billion. Well, I don't think the dollar is going to flow that way. I think the tokens will. Let me finish, damn you. The next thing, because you sound like the cynics in my group on Monday. I've already had this discussion once. That's why I can carry it off. So that's$20 billion. But you're exactly right, as one of my partners said. But dude, you just said the prices are going to down by 5x. So that$20 billion is going to become$4 billion. You're exactly right. It's just like open source. It's going to take a slug of the total addressable LLM marketplace, attack it with a better, cheaper product at one-fifth the price.

27:51Net result, that$20 billion becomes$4 billion. But if you're a JEV or if you're a type save, you're saying, hey, that$4 billion becomes mine. And that's the bet. Now, at the same time, going back to your maiming concept, which I love, Jaya from Foundation did a nice post. This is just a slug of the total$100 billion spend that was kind of automatically destined to go to open AI and Anthropic and is now kind of sluicing off into a cheaper, low-cost provider. So that's what's happening here. You're right. It's not the end of Foundation model. The clever shit is still going to be done using foundation models.

28:24It's just a little memeing of 10%, 20 % of the revenue that's now going to be done by someone else at one-fifth the cost. Now, we can talk about competition in a second because I think that's a real issue. But that's what's going on here. I just think it's a hundredth the cost, but I agree with all of it. You're right. A hundredth, which in which case, yeah.

28:40Harry Stebbings:So we're going to see like the unbundling of ChatGPT and we're going to have users go, oh, well, this one would be good for - No, the problem is not ChargePT, the app, but the OpenAI API and the Entropic API. You're right. This is a developer product. You as an end user, I as an end user don't use it. You can go on and try and use it, but it's full this morning. I tried. But it's really, I mean, if you listen to the launch announcement, it's very focused on developers. And the idea is, and this is an interesting thing, almost comes back to Muse, that I think you might see, I could be wrong on this, that the needs of humans, especially consumers for AI are going to continue to diverge from the needs from software developers for AI.

29:19And this is a core software developer thing. You'll never need it, Harry. But someone who's building a software app might realize that a significant portion of the core intelligence they want is system one intelligence. Just tell me if this is an A or a B, animal, mineral, or vegetable. Is AX better than Y? Give me a quick answer. I don't want to blather and have you tell me that's a great question, Rory, like a sycophantic LLM. Just give me the damn answer. So it's not for you, the user, but it's on bundling at the developer level where it's more likely to happen.

29:50Harry Stebbings:You're right. I require far more intellectual answers. No, you just require a bundled product. Actually, Harry, I think what you really like is the sycophantic part of the LLM when they tell you you're so smart, Harry. But to answer your question, what I did learn from using Jev all weekend long, failed on Saturday, figured out the prompts and the use case, got it to work on Sunday. So cheap, you don't even measure it 10 times faster is the use case. but only for these limited use cases. What I did learn may almost sound tangential is man, using a harness to pick a model and getting it right is effing exhausting.

30:22Is it gonna get even harder and harder and harder? When should I use JEV? When should I not use it? What about, you have to run so many evals, so many tests because there's so many things that I did with JEV. You know what doesn't work in JEV? Between Harry, between Rory and Jason, who's the better person to join 20VC as a partner? It can't answer, you'll find, it's gonna get that wrong, okay? So between that and should Rory and Jason meet for coffee, it's going to get that one right. It's not going to guess. It's actually going to know, hey, we're both in the Bay Area. We've known each other.

30:49We should meet for coffee. You have to QA and test every single use case to get those benefits. It's exhausting. And then I got switched over on Replit to Autorouter, where it switches between Astra, Fable, the open source ones and everything. Now I don't even know which one it's using. And then I saw some performance degradation. So then I had to switch it all back to Astra. Do you trust your harness? Can you QA 10 ,000 uses of JEV? This isn't like a bad thing, but this is like the renaissance of like DevOps or something. Like everyone's going to need this massive team to optimize. And the needs are going up with Jev and friends.

31:21Like your team's going to have to get more. It's not just benchmarks and evals. Like we're going to be running these 24-7 across countless permutations. And it's good, but for me, it's too much. Like I can't do it anymore. I can't pick these models anymore. I'm tapping out. These harnesses are only so like Databricks. It's easy to save money with the harness. hey, we route 80 % to open weights models, and now we're doing 10%. It sounds great to the CFO, but I found it doesn't work for me. And a lot of folks were saying they're using JEV as an instant router. It's like, JEV, you make the decision.

31:51Here's what we're doing. You pick the model in milliseconds. Great. But JEV is wrong 20 % of the time. If you pick the wrong model for me coding a mission critical feature 20 % of the time, I'm going to be trying to build this thing bug ridden all day long. Listen, people will figure this out. It's just getting more complicated to pick your model, not easier. And it's good for investors, but it makes building more complicated.

32:15Harry Stebbings:If you're Anthropic or OpenAI, what do you think the conversation is internally when they look at Jeff? OpenAI have become ruthlessly commercial. Their take will be like, screw it. If someone's going to do that, we should do that. We can get something like this out in a few weeks. Let's compete and have a low cost offering too, because they're trying to make a buck. And Anthropic, they're trying to build God and this isn't God. So why would they even bother? In fact, the launch video for Jeff was prod, not God, right? So they're deliberately saying not God. And if you talk to Anthropic, the mission is AGI slash God.

32:49So they're like, you are just a minor nothing thing. Why would I even deign to sully my hands on vulgar commerce? I think that Anthropic and OpenAI have made a very strategic decision. They will not play in this market for now. They have, OpenAI and Anthropa each have the two worst models that exist. They're called OpenAI Mini and Haiku. They're terrible. They're terrible. Now, if you ask Claude, what should I use for simple workflows? Haiku. And if you ask ChatGPT, it will tell you Mini is great. It's so cheap. And at least my little evals, they fail 100 % of the time. Should Rory and Jason have coffee?

33:22Yes. Send them to London. Worst answer. I mean, I'm exaggerating. These are the worst models I've ever used, Mini and Haiku. And so they've decided to launch crippled models that they can lightly promote, but they don't want to play in these low margin businesses for now. They could build this, right? I think they could build a version of Jev in an hour or over the weekend, but they've intentionally decided to cripple the low end of the market. And I think they're puckered about the open weights models that just got a little bit closer earlier than they planned, right? Because that is more of a threat than abandoning the bottom of the market.

33:53This is just my view, but I don't think they've ever taken the bottom of the market seriously they have check the box offerings that no serious developer uses i don't think go on claude and switch to haiku if you can and ask it a question you it doesn't remember anything since 2023 and it doesn't know know where anything is and that in a nutshell is the jev opportunity

34:12Harry Stebbings:it's not quite one for one but yeah you're right i'm i'm going slightly off on a tangent on this but people do like it when we talk about venture it was a 40 million dollar seed round for jev and you know i just had a conversation with my team right before this and they're like did we We never see anything less than a$20 million first raise for anything anymore. The seed rounds minimum are like eight to 10 with someone spinning out of a good company. Are we seeing the evaporating of traditional seed? Why do you think Andreessen just did a university? They need to go pre-inception. You think I'm kidding?

34:46No. I mean, finally someone figured out that Peter Thiel got this right 18 years ago at the Thiel Fellowship and the dorm room fund, which did curse or like sort of did curse. You got to go pre-Inception if you want to do seed now. Inception is, Inception's too expensive. You got to go pre-Inception. But Andreessen Horowitz did launch Horowitz Andreessen University today with$40 million to do pre-Inception investing, right? To do the Teal Fellowship on steroids. I think it's a very rational response to your point. But I do think Peter Teal saw this space before anybody did and executed. The only thing he didn't want to do was scale it up.

35:20He didn't want to build a Teal-Raboy University like Horowitz Andreessen. He just didn't want to scale it up. It could have been. I mean, they have the best people in the Teal Fellowship. They get the best. Today, too, they get the best people.

35:32Harry Stebbings:Do you know what? I don't think they do anymore. I think Z Fellows get the best today, actually. OK, maybe. Z Fellows gets unbelievably good people. At the end of the day, same idea, right? The problem with these things is if you don't put enough people into them, they don't scale, right? That's why Z Fellows maybe is more interesting than the Teal Fellowship and why Horowitz and Dreesen is more, if it's the same, is more interesting because you're just putting more resources and things that, you know, you used to be able to run a fund with a blog. Like that would give you all the deal flow in the world you needed for like five unicorns in a row.

36:00Harry Stebbings:But you got to scale this stuff up, you know. Now you're on a podcast with a professor. Yeah, you used to be able to just do it with a podcast and one dude in a closet and do just fine. We haven't answered my question, though, which is. I will go back to your point, Harry, right? You are correct. Once you go beyond the visual to even an individual, an idea, you're right. You're seeing bigger checks. You are seeing 20. Look, I think the typescript was I think was even bigger. I could be wrong. I thought it was 40, but I could be wrong. But yes, people are writing bigger checks now up and down the stack.

36:27Or if you want to do traditional seed checks, right, you have to tolerate far lower ownership in many cases, not all cases. You can still hunt your own deals, right? And then when you do the math, you got to hunt$25 billion outcomes. If I'm going to do four into JEV or three into JEV, if JEV exits north of$25 billion after dilution, I can still do my 100x, right, that I need to do, or my 50x, right? But the low ownership for seed works, but man, you need the big outcomes. And then the other thing, just to take into account, that I always feel everyone forgets, right, is, it's going to sound really dorky economics comment, but nominal GDP, in other words, not just inflation, but inflation plus growth from 2010 to the day is about two and a half x.

37:11So, you know, what that means is 100 million bucks in 2010 is 250 million bucks today. Just in terms of your ability to command, money is an ability to command resources because obviously software salaries have at least kept up with nominal GDP growth. So what it means is if you were writing$3 million checks in 2010, let's do$4 million checks, you should be writing$10 million checks in 2026. That's just math before anything else has changed. Then on top of that, you take into account the fact that in 2010, the world wasn't a shitter. And in 2026, everything in tech looks amazing. You get to 20 million before you blink.

37:49Harry Stebbings:Would you actually argue then that now is a better time because your check size requirements have gone up two and a half to 3x, but the outcome sizes on the back end have gone up significantly more than two and a half to 3x when we look at the cursor? No, I wouldn't make that argument at all, because what you're confusing, the outcomes today happened from the checks that were smaller. In other words, because what you're saying is, hey, the outcomes today on checks written five years ago are amazing. Therefore, the checks today, which are much bigger, will be amazing too. Implicitly in that you're assuming that the$25 billion outcome today becomes the$50 billion outcome three years from now.

38:31And if that's the case, then you're correct.

38:33Harry Stebbings:I'm assuming the same rate of inflation applies to the exit scenario. But the exits didn't just go up by nominal GDP, by even more than that. In other words, that's why it's always hard to disaggregate things. You have nominal GDP go up, but then the stock market has massively outpaced that. And venture exits have even more massively outpaced that again. So there is a long-term secular trend in the size of exits going up. But there's probably an overlay of a valuation lift right now that might persist. And here I got to give a shout out to Venki from Menlo, who did a really nice piece that went around all the venture community yesterday, just about playing the game at the top of the cycle.

39:12And how do you think about it when the music stops, be sure you have a chair. It's worth reading.

39:17Harry Stebbings:I get you, but with the greatest respect, Menlo have paid the highest price of everyone on most rounds. Yeah, that's why they're playing the music. That's why. But I think... No, I think what he would say is... I think he would say that. He would say, we very wisely... Look, I think it was a really good analysis. I didn't mean to take us off on it, but he said there's two players now. There's players who are playing with the house money, and he put themselves in that category. They've done so well on Tropic, they're probably feeling a little happy, and they're probably going to be aggressive. And then he said there's some players who didn't do those early rounds and are now playing to catch up.

39:48And the point he was making, the macro point he was making is, between the giddily happy people and the terrifyingly desperate people, there's a lot of people writing checks with fear in their heart of miss a FOMO. And it gets back to your comment. Some part, it's why it's always a, some part of the increase in size is justified by math. But let's be honest, I think some part of it is justified by FOMO and the fear of missing the next cursor. And that's fine. But that's the kind of thing that can change on a dime. And that was the insight.

40:18Harry Stebbings:Does that change how you invest when you reflect on that? What should I take from that, Rory? What should LPs listening, GPs listening take from this? It's a good question. And again, I'm always in the middle. I think you have to say at times leaning in can pay out, but you don't want to find yourself so lent in on so many deals that are so high priced that if a downturn comes, you just can't survive it. As often is the case, investing is not a rules-based business. Do A and only A. It's typically do some A, but some B and the mix is everything. I think for us, it's a consistent pace, broadly the same stuff and recognize that it's super hard to time that.

41:02But be cognizant of the risk you're taking is the bare minimum you have to do.

41:06Harry Stebbings:I'm not being rude. So I'm going for you here, but fuck it, you go for me. Be cognizant of the risks you're taking. Seriously. I thought that piece was a blowhard piece, if I'm honest. Be careful of the music stopping. Be cognizant. cognizant. Again, you guys have paid up. That's what the next fund's for. Why do you need to be careful of the music stopping? You raise a fund every 18 months. We all can get a mulligan. Yeah. If I don't make any carry, I don't make any carry. I make it on the next one. It's all right. Doesn't matter. But I just got to point, I don't think that that's... I'm not saying that is it, but what I'm saying is there's just, there's not that much to take away from that.

41:43Harry Stebbings:Yeah, be cognizant of the music stopping. Thanks. I'm with you. I'm with you on Harry. It's a little condescending in its own way, right? Oh, thank you. I wasn't aware that the AI gold rush might end someday. Good point. I was so lost in Jev all weekend. I missed the point. You're right. I missed the point. From the guys who made out like bandits, which I'm thrilled of, that awesome people. Okay, watch this. They made out by bandits by being aggressive at a time when people were still uncertain, right? And therefore price of those deals, while high in absolute terms, reflected a fair amount of uncertainty relative to traction, right?

42:23The same deal today would probably be three or four X higher. And it's simply a point, I mean, if all you say to yourself is that deal that worked four years ago had that risk return profile and underwriting that same deal today probably means I'm going to get four times less return because of where pricing is, you should at least pause and think rather than blindly saying X worked, therefore all the other deals that just look just like X will work also. I know, but that's fucking obvious. Harry, in general, one of my favorite quotes, and I'm going to take you, you're coming for me, I'll come for you, right?

42:58Barney Baruch, I think I quoted this before, right? And I'm sorry if I did, but he was a Wall Street financier in the 20s and 30s. He just said, if every day you look in the mirror and you say to yourself, two and two makes four, you probably could avoid a lot mistakes, right? Stating the obvious, typically the things that bite you in the ass are things that are actually obvious all along and you just chose to ignore them. So yeah, it is obvious, but you know, you have to take it into account. What do you do about that, right? Like I'll give you an example. In 2021, I made one investment. I did the seed rounded owner, which just closed at 2.3 billion.

43:29It's a pretty large position for me. Okay. Now we've had ups and downs, great founder team, one deal in all of 2021, only deal I did. You could do the same thing right now. You can say it for the next four years. I'm going to do like one or two deals Like I have to have a little dislocation in the force. It's got to be this it's got to be that And that that's how you take that the chairs are gonna and otherwise you you just got it It's you got to deploy the fund. It's other people's money

43:52Harry Stebbings:You got to put it to work or they could be a really rational assumption that hey music's gonna stop pretty soon And we're gonna go through stack rank where we can get liquidity from and really be proactive in selling positions now Cool. Well, that's one thing right and that's that's an interesting question But let's say you wanted to be conservative. What do you do? Invest in the company at 50 million growing 60 % a year and hope it re-accelerates and is worth three times revenue and sells to Bending Spoons? I mean, what's the plan B? Like Bending Spoons looks at a thousand deals a year and still only does two or four.

44:25Where am I going to sell these more conservative companies that are going to compound at sub AI rates for 40 years? I just don't know who's going to buy them. If there is a market for these assets, so be it. I love the quiet compounders. There's just no market for them anymore. I'm not sure I agree that there always won't be a market for quiet compounders above a certain scale, to be clear. Right? I think profitable business - Could come back. What? It could come back, but right now it feels pretty thin. Yeah. I actually like Goku's tweet that he was like, yeah, I'll happily do three, you know, double, trouble, trouble, double, double deals all day long right now, if you're capital efficient, right?

44:58Yeah. If you're burning nothing and the price is right and I can get my 20 % ownership, you'll

45:03Harry Stebbings:do it. Why would you? I'm sorry. let's just push back. Why would you be happy to do that? Because there are other GPs, like your Sarah Gros of the world, who are not doing that. And they are putting up some phenomenal numbers. And so you can do those triple, triple, double, doubles, have average IRRs, and your LPs will leave in droves. Sorry. Okay. Okay. Watch. I can, we'll take some. Yeah. Sarah, absolutely. Did the seed round at inception at 50 million pre, In the following four months, it raised money at 50 million pre, 350 million pre from Kleiner, two and a half billion for I think index and benchmark for memory, and might be raising now at 10.

45:44Those are four rounds in the same four-month period. And you cannot say the risk in all four of them is the same, because one of them is 20 times more expensive. I didn't say it was the same. I'm saying. So the answer is, if you do an early deal like that. But Harry, you're saying, what can you do with that information? You can bet aggressively on $5 at$50. Love it. The fact that Sarah's done an amazing job in that fund, right? But betting just as aggressively on$250 at$10 billion, that's intrinsically a riskier deal. And do you want to do that?

46:17Harry Stebbings:No, you're getting this completely wrong. I'm saying, gawkels, triple, triple, double, double, I'll take them all day. I'm saying that is a ludicrous statement to make because you are in a competitive capital market where LPs can choose where to put dollars. And if you have managers like Sarah Guo, who can post incredible numbers quickly with high IRRs, they will get the dollars versus your steady compounding growers with bad IRRs and no good up rounds. It will be much harder. But you know, Harry, here's the thing. Here's my view. I think you're right. Having said that, I think Gokul's model is to do that, and no matter what you call that model, you still have to achieve IRRs north of 30.

46:57So you have to pick very well, and they have to compound properly. Okay. Some of your, like the average LP, average top LP, I remember writing this up in Sasson 21, in 2021 had 90 % IRR, like the top quartile of LPs had 90 % IRR. It did not last. 2026 will look like that. I bet the top LPs will have 90 % IRR this year. Okay. Some LPs will only invest in those managers and that's great. Others will take the pen longer, but, and so you can do these other deals or, or to his point, I think you can do both. Like the answer might be to do both. And the real truth is you should do every great deal. You should see if you have enough capital.

47:34Okay. Every great deal. Okay. So if he sees five instant instincts and, uh, and a Harvey's ear and he sees five triple, triple, double doubles that he can own 20 % of, and can achieve the requisite IRR, right? This is why I worry about the exits. you should do both, right? It's okay. You'll blend to 60 % IR. But I do think, I think you're going to lose LPs to your point. But I do think many LPs that have been around will still back repeat managers that deliver north of 30 % IRR. If you look at all the numbers, that's pretty rare, man. It's pretty rare to have 30 % IRR, no matter what anybody claims in a given year, 2021, 2026.

48:12If you can compound, what is compounding 90 % IRR over a decade? Rory, help me. It's pretty good. It's mathematically impossible, right? It doesn't happen. Exactly right. It can't happen. So the low 30s is as good as it gets, right, in the real world, right? It's as good as it gets.

48:26Harry Stebbings:I think Gockel is a rare exception who will likely be able to pick very well. I think the idea that you can do the triple, triple, double, double to say pick well. Agreed. Yeah. That's why he said very clear. I mean, it was a very clever statement. I really admire him for saying, he's like, this is what I do if you're a capital efficient. So basically, everyone's going to find him. He solves his search problem brilliantly by saying, if you've got these criteria, and then he's going to pick carefully. You're exactly right. It turns out no matter what you do, picking matters. Again, going back to the thing, I think I'm listening to the conversation.

48:55And I do it. Look, you want to do the most exciting deals possible. And those are almost entirely AI forward deals at this point in time. No dispute. I think all the point I make, and I think the point Vangu is making is at some level, and I like what he said, actually, at 10x the price matters. Because what's happened is Andreessen about 10 or 15 years ago had the very simple but profound insight other people have had, but they claim it, so let's go with it. It really doesn't matter about price, you just got to get the best deals. And it's true. But what Venk is saying, if you're wrong by 10x, then it's not true.

49:28And it may well be we're at that point in the cycle where you are in fact wrong. In some deals, you are wrong by so much that in other words, the momentum trade has worked so well and for so long that you might be at that one point in the cycle where you just we overreach your skis and it has to unwind. That's the point you're making, right? And I think, you know, will every one of the hundred odd Neo Labs become the next Entropic? Maybe not. Maybe most, some of them will return capital because they get acquired. But that's the only point, Harry.

49:55Harry Stebbings:Can I ask you, we have a lot of LPs that listen, a huge amount. If you were an LP that has traditionally allocated to seed and series A in venture, like we know many of, what would you advise them today looking at what you see every day in the trenches? That's easy because you said seed and series A, right? And you're not listening, but that's OK. I'll answer the question. I would do managers who are doing the very best seed and series A investments in new, massively exciting high-growth opportunities like the genius who did, as I say, gives her credit for doing Instinct. I would do those managers all day, every day because you follow - Do you mind low ownership?

50:32No. I mean, you do unmind it. You prefer high ownership, but no. Look, especially in the seed and A fund where you're relatively small dollars, relative to the kind of dollars we're dealing with later on, you want to be in the best deals. So I like, we target 10 % ownership at the ARB stage. So at a seed or A, you'd like 15 to 20. But I don't think you discriminate in or out on that. Because the truth is this, a seed investor who consistently shows up, as Jason will attest, with smaller ownership, but in the best deals, will get more ownership over time because they'll get more capital and get more opportunities.

51:05So I wouldn't solve on that. So to your question, on an LP, for seed in Series A, you should be looking at people doing the very best deals in the very newest spaces where you really believe they have an edge. My point, and I think Vance was, as the rounds get later and larger, the dollars get bigger and the multiple return gets smaller. So it's in much the same way as growth was an amazing place to play in 23, 24, 25. It might be more like 21 now. That's the only point. So going back to your what should you do? You should do the seed at instinct all day, every day, but you should think long and hard at 10 billion four months later.

51:40I don't think that's an unreasonable position. Now, maybe that particular deal will work at 10 billion, because as we just said, open AM might buy it at 50. But you have to admit, if you use the Buffett margin of safety comment, your margin of safety at 50 pre is infinite. You've got a world-class exec, technologist with a great idea. Your margin of safety at 10 billion, yeah, maybe you get a 1x, but there's risk, is my point in a downside scenario.

52:06Harry Stebbings:And I completely agree with you and get that to be clear. I think the tough question we could, we should break. I think the tough LP question is it's hard to be in, I think it's hard to be an LP, right? Is chasing returns is tough because it's very hard, especially at the seed. Everyone wants to chase returns, right? Everyone wants to be in Sarah's next fund. It's the easiest investment there is, right? We all, I'm sure it was 50X oversubscribed in one email, right? And so do you believe, and most LPs believe returns decay, Like we peak at some point in our careers as investors and they decay.

52:36Maybe you build a team or whatever. But so do you chase returns or do you take risks that the returns are coming? It's very hard to invest in seed management. And a lot of the best ones have weird strategies. It's complicated. So you have to look for pre-inception. You have to look for precursors. I think it's actually in some ways harder as an LP today than it is in more normal times because you're so tempted to chase returns and you won't get into the next one Because you will screen it out, right? You will screen it out. Agreed. Even though it's chasing returns. It's funny. Just stating for the record, mutual fund persistence is almost nothing.

53:13In other words, good performance. Chasing returns in the public market is a total fool's errand because the data says persistence is super low. Oddly enough, which makes sense. In venture, persistence is not infinite, but it's quite high, right? Because you get these increasing returns to success until there's some kind of discontinuity, right? So it's not crazy to partially change return, quote unquote, chase returns in venture because of the persistence in a private market. In a way, it's utter folly in the public markets where literally the dude who bought energy last year might be totally wrong this year because the trade is to buy semis.

53:47Thinking of you there, Leo.

53:50Harry Stebbings:I much prefer the show when we have a little contretemps. Yeah. Very good, Harry. For an English person, that's not bad French. Thank you so much. I am slightly cultured. I hide it well. Okay, ding, ding, ding. It's Jason's IC time. We're moving into the world of private markets with Factory. Triple valuation to$5 billion,$200 million round. For those that don't know, Factory is an enterprise coding agent provider that can primarily have a Droid product, which is scaled phenomenally. I don't think I'm allowed to say their revenues, but they're chunky and they've done an amazing job. Jason,$5 billion valuation.

54:30Harry Stebbings:Are we going to be doing this round for Modriskel Stebbings' Lampkin Ventures? I think this is a good risk to take. First of all, I will caveat, I'm not as much of a factory expert as you. I know it's your investment, this one, Harry, so you're the deeper expert than I am. But there's certainly one obvious and one mostly obvious trend. The second one you got in one of your 20VC other podcasts this week. One, obviously, whatever model we have for inference, for coding and otherwise, it's too low. The demand is only going up, whether Muse gets it or Factory gets it or Anthropic gets it. I don't know how each token will be monetized directly or whether it'll be FAV, but the demand is going to exceed already our most wild models.

55:17There's a couple of things that make me excited about Factory. and I've just, having gotten back from the Dreamforce, which is one of the world's largest enterprise software conferences all about AI, two themes really stood out. And Harry had a guest this week on this, which is one of the reasons I recommend this talk. Sovereignty, I want to be able to trust where my data is, right? And I want choice of model. These things really matter. And the one thing I got talking to C-level executives at Dreamforce is they don't trust Anthropic and OpenAI with their data. They don't trust it. This is not something manufactured on X or Twitter.

55:46They genuinely believe, and honestly, for what it's worth to the IC, I believe this as well. If I upload my confidential data, I'm not sure it's not going to my competitors through an LLM. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is on some level. I don't think these are these are malevolent companies. This is the way LLMs work. And so I think these are a lot of things that go into factory. This is a crack team. The time is right. You know, Brad Gerstner, that guy's always right from from A.I. to the calcium CT scans. I would always back him. I think we do this round. We pair it with instinct at 10 billion.

56:15We roll the dice. It's good times. And this may be one we regret with the musical chairs, guys, but the trends are right here. And we need to bet into these trends. Sovereignty, trusting my data, trusting my data at rest, not having it pooled by the big guys. I think in a year, no one is going to trust in the enterprise, anthropic and AI with their data. They're solving this too, but this is something we need to bet on. So I approve the investment. And I'm going to chime in here, having been a little bit more Debbie Downer earlier and actually agree with Jason. I think genuinely, look, one of this, I mean, you made a comment here earlier about some things are obvious.

56:48And I actually really believe sometimes stating the obvious is the highest value thing you can do. And one of the statements that we've been saying internally for the last couple of years is coding is the mother load. Coding, it's everything, right? It's 10x everything else in terms of value being created from AI today, right? So I would argue you just can't have too many bets on coding. Up and down the stack, it can be coding. It can be QA, it can be test, it can be review. All across the board, this is where it's going to happen, the first and the mostest. In fact, this is a really nice position.

57:19I mean, there are three standards, because I think Jason's totally right. You're going to want to buy your coding solution, for lack of a better word, which I mean by the harness and also people from someone who's not also selling you the model, because you no longer believe OpenAI on Tropic are benign if you're corporate America. So I think Jason nailed that one, right? you worry about their data. Even if you don't think they're going to blow up the damn world, you worry about their data retention policies. Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous, right? From the big to the little, right?

57:48You're like, okay, they mightn't kill every human on the planet like they said they would, but they might steal all my shit. I want to have something different, right? And Cursor has been swooped off the table. It was a standalone, more individual project. You really only have these guys and Cognition at this point who are basically going to the enterprises and saying what enterprises love, especially big enterprises, I'm coming to you, Mr. Corporate Customer, and I will make this go away. You've got your board on your ass saying you need to be doing way more coding. You know you don't have quite the people to do it.

58:17You need help to get along on that. We need to make this happen. We're here to help you do it. We'll make you, it's good branding, a software factory. So yes, I think this is a market where even if there is a bump in the world in the next 12, 24 months, and I think there could be, going back to how is the fear actionable. I think one of the things you can do when you're leaning in is leaning into trends that you think will kind of keep on compounding, even if there's a slowdown in overall AI adoption. And this is one. I too would pile in with Mr. Lemkin and think this is coding is the mother load.

58:51It's that simple.

58:52Harry Stebbings:Coding is the mother load. I'm thrilled. I agree. I don't know how much, I genuinely don't know how much of factory is sort of air gapped versus sort of on-prem versus private cloud coding. I don't know, but I seriously believe what I said. I think people in the next 12 months are gonna be like, whether it's my data for my drug or just my code, I don't want my code, my core code polluted in Anthropic and OpenAI where they're gonna train on it, right? And I really think the only reason people have tolerated this is because of just insane demand from developers. Like, it's so great. These products have become so great this year that we are, I mean, when I was, it was a while ago, when I was an SEB at Adobe, me, this was the one code red was any pollution of the source code.

59:34It was the crown jewel. And my God, and we were the first group ever to use GitHub. And I can't tell you the hoops we had to jump through to get GitHub brought in, but my team revolted. My engineering team said that we will quit if we can operate and get it. It just took endless arguments and even air gapping that. And it couldn't test. I don't know how much of factories, I mean, it's part of their marketing pitch, right? But man, it's compelling to think you get all the benefits of the big guys, but all the protection of having my code, walled off, air gap, on-prem, whatever, semi-prem. They've trained on all of our data.

1:00:09Every YouTube, every piece of open source, every piece of closed source, of course, they're going to train on your data. Give me a break. And if they don't, the agents are going to escape and train on it without telling us. They're going to swarm out of it

1:00:20Harry Stebbings:and they're going to train on my data. You said coding was the mother load. The next potential mother load that people think we've talked about a lot before but lagora announced they've hit 200 million in ar today lemkin ventures yeah would you lead their next round proactively their next round is that 11 billion dollars well i'm a fan of both them and harvey i i underestimated this we talked about this right as maybe the number three use case the information did say harvey's margins were now minus 50 because there were a lot they had to move back i don't know if that's true. It could be one week.

1:00:51It could be like CMRR. It could be an hour. They had minus 50 % margins. I'm not beating up on Harvey or Legora. I would say if the margins were minus 50 % and going down, I might be slightly nervous. They're not going to have a cursor like turnaround. I might be a little nervous, just enough to not lead the next round. Okay. I'm not saying not to have been thrilled to have led an earlier round, but if that, if the margins are going, are spiraling down rather than V-shaping, that would make me a hint nervous. Minus 50 is, is, is, you know, it is just you got to raise a lot of money right if it's really true but that was an information report right but i find they're usually pretty accurate right so we got a for what's the round

1:01:29Harry Stebbings:at 11. if the margins if if if super fan both great companies if the margins are minus 50 percent i will still recommend we do factory and back back harry's investment here and i'm gonna i'm gonna unfortunately i love rory but if i have a vote i'm gonna vote against his proposal to Lagora. I understood the margins were closer to zero and improving due to their post-training on their own version of an open weights model, but minus 50. Rory should have told us about that before the IC. I felt that was a Monday shocker, and I'm a little uncomfortable with the kid on the team for not socializing that ahead of time.

1:02:03Funnily enough, look, I'm not going to be leading around that Harvey or Lagora were investors in GCAI on the in-house GC space, but actually, in defense of Harvey, for a long time, the rap was, oh, my God, people not use the product enough. So I would argue if I was Harvey, if they could truly say the gross margins are negative 50, the correct spin on that is, my God, lawyers are pounding on our shit. And as soon as we get our own internal models, they're never going back. Maybe stepping back, what do I think about this category? I think it's an amazing category. It's not as what I said two weeks ago, nothing's changed because I try not to change.

1:02:36In five-year and 10-year investments, it's really bad if everything changes every week. But yeah, it's a really good category. It's not going to be as big a spend per headcount as software engineers, because I think a lot of the laws, the lawyers work will remain to be done. But I think it's a good category. I think it's all about valuation at this point. And, you know, it's a two way race in the AMLAW space. And so the kind of second order tactical questions here around TAM and thing would kind of decide, make a decision for you where I don't have the facts in front of me on that. So don't have a profound opinion on it, except to say I am interested in the negative gross margin comment as a positive spin.

1:03:19My word.

1:03:20Harry Stebbings:That was a very long way to say very little, Rory. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your concision intern in the corner. That was super helpful. I agree. It was not concise, Harry. That's OK. But you're right. That's fair. It was not one of my more concise ones. But if you prefer a sharp no, I'll give you. No, I won't do it at$10 billion. Because I think when you count the legal heads, you don't get to$10 billion law lawyers. We can do one more ding, ding, ding. Do we invest in this? We got Crusoe,$3.9 billion series app at$30.9 billion. For those that don't know, Crusoe is in the data center, build out a business.

1:03:59Harry Stebbings:They build data centers, they provide GPUs, and they also do managed inference, full stack. They have a huge order book, about$140 billion of total contracted value. For those that don't know, business is flying in a hot market. Jason,$3.9 billion at$30.9 billion. Are we riding our biggest check from this fund? I mean, to be honest, as you know, the fund doesn't believe there's anything really defensible in these data center models other than the backlog and access to infrastructure. but we believe Crusoe is at the top of the second tier there, right? They have some interesting things, right? They're able to build their own modular data centers, right?

1:04:37They own the chain from power to tokens. There's a lot of appealing things in this. I think our approach at the fund needs to be a portfolio approach. We should invest in all the data centers that rise above a certain level of projected DCF, projected growth, projected margins, and most importantly, circular guaranteed circular financing. And this is all, this is all, as much as I love the boys at Crusoe, this is all a spreadsheet investment. I've done the math and I believe it's just below the fold. It's just a hint too expensive to hit our margin despite the growth. But I think we should do all of these deals that have the requisite level of circular financing and the ability to access infrastructure.

1:05:15So I give them that. I'm just a little bit worried about the valuation here. So reluctantly, reluctantly, I'm going to have to pass on Crusoe. 10 billion, though, would have been great, boys. You guys, a bonus this year will not be what you'd hoped. They will be epic bonuses this year. I make them all the decisions as the managing general partner, but I think you'll each take a couple million dollar hit by missing the last round. Telegraphing that in September. Pushing back and taking that and going back to my earlier comment, how is something, when I said about worrying about a slowdown, how is it actionable?

1:05:45This is an example of where it is actionable, right? Because something like a coding agent, something like a AI app, like Harvey Lagoer or whatever, there's a long trajectory. They're not levered plays. you probably can survive a one-year bump. Conversely, the data center trade is very levered, so very exposed, not just to AI usage, but to growth in AI usage. You're really leaning in on the upside, which means there are amazing investments to the up, and there probably will be tough investments to the down. You wouldn't want to be out of that sector. But again, going back to how do you make these concerns actionable?

1:06:19Right now, I'd be saying to myself, if I had a portfolio across the whole kind of AI spectrum, I wouldn't want it all to be in that AI CapEx trade where any kind of slowdown when you've got like four or five to one leverage can be pretty brutal. So I would be a little bit afraid. I'm not going to... The specifics on Cruiser... Jason, you're right. It is a spreadsheet exercise and I haven't run a spreadsheet. So I don't know, right? But I would be thinking in macro, how much of that bet would I want, right? I'd want some because it's been an amazingly good bet. I mean, look at Corweave. But you also look at the market cap.

1:06:49I want to think Corweave's at 60 and Nevis is at 40. I could be wrong. It could be the other way around. And so Crusoe at 30, I mean, I think it's smaller than CoreWeave growing much more quickly. So again, it's, and they all have pretty substantial negative free cash flow. So a lot of your success is betting on future CapEx. And maybe the other statement, Harry, to further prove that you're wrong and that you can, in fact, take into account some of those risk things, my appetite for a deal like this would go up directly proportional to how much, as Jason said, a long-term commitments you have from a Microsoft versus a second tier, and then B, how much visibility you have on your debt runway for the next three years.

1:07:30I would prefer a slightly lower price, slightly more dilution, and a longer runway, such that if there's a data center bump in the next 12 months, you're protected. I got to finish by saying a really fun day in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. I don't know if you saw it, but I read the journal in the morning. I check in in the evening. It was so funny yesterday because the headline in the morning was deals pull as Wall Street worries about data center trade. It was SB Energy, and there was two others. There was a nuclear company and one other. So that was the headline, top of the page, first thing in the morning.

1:08:01We then had the best single day in the NASDAQ since the dawn of time. It was an amazing day. And the headline at the end of the day was, NASDAQ explodes as AI CapEx fears recede. So literally, what you saw in that literally, in the space of eight hours and one trading day, people went from, oh my God, CapEx is scary, to the Wall Street Journal is like, It's all going to be great. And it was just it was fun to watch that kind of oscillating, you know, terror, greed moment in real time, literally in the same eight hour period. Boys, what have I missed? Clearly the last Crusoe round. But I missed it too, dude.

1:08:34Or is there any other that you think I've missed?

1:08:37Harry Stebbings:It is a slight recycle, but I do just think it's worth saying. I'm sure you guys saw the Twittersphere. Keith Raboy, Joe Lonsdale going for our Wallachs. unbelievably again. I don't get this one. I really don't get, let's put aside the issue. Let's put aside the issues for a minute. Okay. Let's, my gut is that there's a little bit of racism here. There's a little bit of anti-culturalism, but let's put all that aside. Let's just, a ramp is obviously a big investment, right? For, for them. So I get supporting the home team, right? And I get pushing the envelope there and it's 2026. This just seems, and maybe if you're Keith, who's very experienced and very smart, maybe it's worth it because he doesn't have any bridges to burn or worry about, but it, it just seems a lot, I guess if it works, if this destroys air wallets, right.

1:09:21If, if the X and the house, whatever it is, the house review of it, if it destroys your competitor, Machiavelli and I get it. Right. But I don't know, maybe it's not too far. It just, it just feels very aggressive. Right. You know, it's like, uh, what do we call them back in the day? Dippling and real deal back real, but on steroids, but on steroids is dippling and real on steroids. And maybe it makes sense. It just struck me. Maybe I'm too, maybe I just care too much. But it struck me as just aggressive, just aggressive, right?

1:09:50Harry Stebbings:I'm always very careful because I am an investor now, to be very clear. I'm also a friend of Keith's and I like Keith a lot and I respect him a lot. But the allegations have consistently changed from you are a CCP agent who is working for China to more than 20 % of your cap table is in China and Chinese, which is not true, by the way. They have got more and more diminished over time as the arguments have weakened. When you look at the companies that have employees in China, it's basically every big company today has some form of their employee base in China from Microsoft to Zoom, you name it.

1:10:23Harry Stebbings:Candidly, it's ridiculous. Well, you know, I mean, I mean, Finn got rid of all of their open, open weights models before they're acquired by Salesforce. I don't know that it's ridiculous. I don't agree with it. Like I would not be making those tweets. This is a big deal fin to close its three point whatever bill now had to had to rip out all of open weight's model out of his company before the deal would close all gone people care about this china stuff we could argue both sides of it and i don't like that i don't like the tweets but i wouldn't say there's nothing nothing to concern concerns about okay so then we should put the same scrutiny on zoom and microsoft i don't want i i started this by saying i don't like it right i'm not on the side of it but i am saying the fin thing is it's interesting it's it matters to businesses not just Twitter audit.

1:11:05Harry Stebbings:I don't think that, respectfully, I don't think there's a correlation. Because if you think then that it is interesting and we should have put that in the future. Well, you said Chinese ownership. What are you saying, Howard? They don't have the Chinese ownership. That's my point. I know I've got the cap table. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm saying why there is sensitivity around Chinese ownership. If it's not true, it's not true. I'm not arguing the point. I'm making the point that in a more traditional world outside of X, a very large transaction had to rid itself of all Chinese IP to close.

1:11:35I just had another portfolio company. Last week, we had the same discussion. They had an M &A offer and they were being told they had to rid their company of all Chinese IP as well. Rid all of it before the deal could close. And Airwallex isn't trying to sell itself to Salesforce. And I'll take it on your faith. I trust you implicitly that it's not 20%. I'm just telling you that it is a real world issue, this Chinese ownership, even if I don't care about it or agree with it. It is impeding transactions. It is impeding commerce. And it is a concern. I think what's the frustrating thing on it just observing from a distance is, I know no one elected me.

1:12:05I don't think anyone elected Keith, and I don't think anyone elected Harry. This is why you have, everyone should play their position. We should be doing what we do in our little venture business. But the government is the person who has the role to decide what risk we are willing to take in commerce with China, what risk we're not. Because let's get real here. No matter what we exclude, we're still doing a huge amount of commerce with China. They're doing a lot of commerce with us. I think this very weekend, our two beloved leaders are meeting in D.C. to talk about doing more commerce. So there has to be rules.

1:12:34They have to come up by the U.S. government. There has to be some restrictions on what kind of high-tech goods we're willing to trade, not trade, what kind of risk companies can have, especially removing money and things like that. But it feels very much like, come on, government, step up, do your job, so we're not trying to do it here on Twitter, right? Because once there's clear rules, you can say either they abide by the rules or they don't. But it all feels very ad hoc at the moment, which is at one with the way we're currently making policy. Let's get real across the board. You know, we can sell chips to China if Jensen checks in.

1:13:05It's all good. So it does feel very ad hoc at the moment. This is just a function of that. I'll tell you my micro learning here. You could chime in because you would know this better than anybody. I'll tie Jev to Airwallex as we end it. OK, so I think Jev was a masterclass in launch PR. It was everywhere. It was on Vercel. It was on Opener. Everyone was talking about it. everyone had a Twitter article and a tweet lined up and a video of how great it was, which was probably handed and made to them. I mean, whoever they hired to do this launch, S tier. I think Jack, who I don't know, right, but I've followed on social media.

1:13:37He seems like the kind of CEO that I would love. I wish I'd invested in him. I believe in it. I believe in the mission. I trust him implicitly. I might be wrong, but I would, based on what I know, I would, I would invest in period. Okay. Having said that he doesn't have, he's out there arguing with Keith himself. He needs, you need an army of people advocating you to do this kind of stuff. Okay. This is the Jeff lesson. And he, and the poor guys out there, not poor, I mean, he's a billionaire, but he shouldn't be doing this. He should have his Keith and his, uh, sorry, what's the guy from, uh, the Palantir?

1:14:05He should have Joe and you need your own army of the, I do believe if you, if you're going to run a deck of corner bigger, you need an army of advocates for you. And I feel like Jack doesn't have enough. And I think it's just, if our jobs aren't hard enough as founders and CEOs, you need to build this bench of advocates out there for you. And you can make fun of them, but they matter. And who the cares, who the cares what three effing VCs on a podcast think. But, you know, between all of us, we've got a couple million followers. There could be worse things than us saying how great these companies are.

1:14:35And line up 20 of these guys so that poor Jack doesn't have to be defending himself. Jack should not have to defend himself to Keith and Joe. He should have an army of Jevers, of Jevson's out there saying, here is a screenshot of the cap table. This is not true. Here is the error. Here are the exact employees in China. Here's why it is less than Microsoft. He should have an army of folks disarming this and Jack can just sit there and click like or heart. That should be his job. So I give his comms team and I'm going to fire his comms team next week. Okay. I'm not a big firer, but so I'm being conceptual rather than literal.

1:15:09I give them an F minus. Where's your army of influencers and backers? Where are they? I give them an F.

1:15:15Harry Stebbings:Come to the rescue. I think candidly, you're absolutely right. He needs to build that. I also think it's challenging for him because where Ramp have very prominent social media backers like your Keiths and like your Joe Lonsdales of the world. You know, he's got DST. Do not do social. He's got Lee Fixel. Do not do social. And you can laugh and say it doesn't matter. It does matter, actually. They just don't have any social presence at all. He has friends like me. So find another way. Cry me a river. You're right. It's a good analysis. But find your tribe. Find your tribe. It's the job. Like the job's gone up here, right?

1:15:48I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt. It's a good analysis. He doesn't have that inherently on the cap table, right? But it's not the only place to find it. Always good to remind yourself that DST does not do social despite doing the 10 billion pre-round at Facebook in 2008. That was a genius round. But yeah, you're right. You can go buy Matthew McConaughey. He's like 14 million bucks a year. The guy will show up to anything. He's really good. He looks good, too. Jack can afford Matthew McConaughey. He's got, how much is it? Air Wallach? Seriously. I mean, I'm just making it. You can go buy Matthew.

1:16:17Matthew McConaughey is for sale. And he's great. I did not expect this to go here. His AI ads for Salesforce are great. And I don't believe he's doing it for free or out of the love of the artificial, what is it now called? General and general artificial intelligence? Yeah, I think he'd say he's for hire, not so much for sale, because sale implies a permanence. He's just for rent. Yeah, let's get Sidney Sweeney for air wallocks. No, I don't know. Oh, God. There's nothing to hide. Sidney and Jack. I got nothing to hide in air wallocks. That is so good. We have nothing to hide. Born in Australia and as American as it gets, right?

1:16:55You could have the Thor guy, the Hemsworth brothers, the Hemsworth brothers, Australia, US, and Sidney. I want to record that I left this conversation 20 minutes ago. You think I'm being facetious? I'm not being facetious. I felt bad that he's defending himself. You need Sidney and Thor.

1:17:09Harry Stebbings:That is such a good idea. It is a good idea. On that note, Rory obviously left about half an hour ago. It's just been me, Jason, and an AI that sounds like Rory. Guys, we have that product. What an ending. Thank you so much, guys. As always, never a dull hour. But before we leave you today, you have the idea, but with most AI tools, you hit a wall. The setup, the config, the gap between what you pictured and what you actually ship. Well, Base 44 is where that wall disappears. You describe it? Yeah, Base 44 builds it. Apps, websites, AI agents, real working products built in minutes using nothing but plain language.

1:17:49Harry Stebbings:And it's all batteries included. The backend, the database, the authentication, the hosting, the heavy lifting is handled. So you just really stay in the flow. This doesn't just take the busy work off your plate, but it gives you an advantage and pushes you past what you thought you could build alone. So in this market, fast is the baseline. To win, you just have to be first. Base44 is that edge, the move that skips the troubleshooting and gets you straight to the breakthrough. Build your next thing at base44.com. That's base44.com. While Base44 turns ideas into apps, Plot turns conversations into insights.

1:18:25Harry Stebbings:Founders and operators spend way too much time every week jumping between meetings, Investicles, brainstorms, customer conversations And then trying to piece everything back together afterwards And that's why I've been using Plaud Plaud instantly captures conversations, voice notes, meetings Random ideas with one press And then turns them into clean summaries, action items, mind maps And searchable notes that you can actually come back to later Honestly, it feels less like a recorder And more like an AI-powered brain memory system And the crazy part is the hardware itself The Plaud Note Pro is literally as small and thin as a credit card so it's just always with you when something important comes up.

1:19:03Harry Stebbings:There are already more than 2 million founders, operators, investors, consultants, and professionals using Plaud to stay organized. So think more clearly and stop losing great ideas and important details. Go to plaud.ai slash 20VC and use the code 20VC for 10 % off. That's P-L-A-U-D dot A-I slash 20VC and use the code 20VC for 10 % off. While Plaud captures the conversation, Finn helps continue it. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job. Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience, from service to sales to success and beyond.

1:19:48Harry Stebbings:Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers. It's powered by custom models, trained on years of real customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self-manageable, so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves. No third parties required. Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash, and Crypto.com already use and love Fin to deliver better customer experiences.

1:20:24Harry Stebbings:So for a limited time, you can get$500 a month in Fin credits. For your first three months, learn more at fin.ai forward slash 20VC.