20VC: NEW FORMAT: Mega Funds Will Come Back, Why Markups Have Corrupted VC, Why RIFs Should Always Be An Embarrassment To SaaS Founders and Why Pitching is BS and Fake with Jason Lemkin and Rick Zullo

23:40First question is a lot of VCs are sitting on books that are just incredibly highly priced with many companies like this. If you were advising an LP today on how much they should discount the value of books. What would you tell them? It comes down to the company level. I've definitely heard some secondary offers on some big, big companies that I know that are going to turn some of our peers from seven X phones to one X phones. That would be really, really scary, but I think this is going to wash out a ton of venture firms. I think a lot of folks who weren't honest with their LPs, who did a ton of SPVs and these things on the way up, you know, trying to kind of grab every buck that they had and they didn't take liquidity on something that was a three to five billion dollar outcome across like and it was the one company working in their 50 company portfolio.

24:22That's a really, really tough situation now that you're under $600 million of preference and that company is not really worth anything and your LPs are going to be really pissed with you if you screwed up on an SBB and didn't deliver fun returns to them. So I think that's a tough situation. I have two two thoughts. I'll tell you what I've done myself right once the market turned right. First I basically decided anything north of 15X ARR had to suspect valuation in the current world. That's what the top pup and most startups are not going to be the very top. They're most are going to be dated auger snowflakes on their hand there earlier.

24:53So I said anything over 15 XAR is suspect and I did a matrix. Here's the revenue of everything. Here's the last round valuation and here are the asterisans and daggers for ones that are overvalued based on public comms. And if you want a snapy, you could value it this way. You could value the portfolio based on this way. It doesn't work if you're too early, right? But it works anywhere north of five to ten million revenue. That's one approach. On the other hand, once you've done that and maybe you take a haircut or two, right? And I took two mark downs from this process, but not 20. Then the question is, okay, you got to look how healthy is this company?

25:24What are the probabilities that you will still have big outcomes and did those valuations make sense? And then I asked two of my top LPs, what would you like to see? Would you like to see huge mark downs or something crazy or a massive discount? And their response was no. Their response was, if these valuations are reasonably market correct, They're not done by crazy tiger or soft bank things that don't make sense and they're in the zone evaluation that makes sense They said we don't care. You're not that much money to us. You're not a $10 billion commitment We want it directionally correct You're not a problem and so the meta learning was it wasn't as big an issue Or I didn't even get engagement on it frankly.

26:00I didn't even get the engagement Then no, then no directionally correct. I mean that's beyond this. I've got why they're not directly correct Well, I'm looking quite a few around like 50 60 million an hour, which is great. It's fantastic Yeah, I'm list and it's about last round 1 .7 last round 1 .4 Right, so what's 50 times 15? 750 if it's a good one so mark that one down by half Okay, so I forget to zero I'm not suggesting market is zero but market down by half is a lot like that's not right you correct the market goes up And down to why shouldn't our funds go up and down but is that direction?

26:35no, 50 % markdown is directly incorrect. It's a severe markdown. I think the way we've done markups, especially for smaller and other funds, has completely corrupted the industry. Then one would be radically different if there were no markups. I'm confident it would be a better industry with no markups. Or at best, even though it's expensive and ahead a conservative black sholes analysis of these assets that would be annoying, but you'd sit on a 1 .2x, 1 .5x, 2x fund for a decade, and so be it. It's not that I don't think Mark to market is, is I do think it's telling, I do think there's something to all of it, right?

27:10But it's corrupted behavior in a way that, that I don't think we anticipate. It's corrupted everything up and down the stack, right? Why? It's created an incentive to overfund companies. When times are good, you hear Rick and others saying, hey, let's keep companies properly funded. Let's leave room for proper ag. that no one gave a hack when they got a markup, when they had a 5x fund and could raise another fund, even less discussed is that a lot of LPs at the bigger LPs, they're compensated based on paper marks, too. This is less well understood. They're compensated. This drove crazy. Where did all this unicorn explosion come from?

27:46People don't understand that the cash had to come from somewhere, right? It didn't all come from what's his name at Softbank himself. And the fact that not most, but many LPs got compensated themselves Some paper markups drove an endless round of markups to the seed VCs wanted it because the seeds guys looked like genius for the first time my last fund It the first year at a hundred and forty percent IRR that's more on it It can't last I'm not that good you can't lack it can't last for 14 years And so of course you get addicted to it right you want that and it and it means raising too many rounds at two I valuation maybe we took a pause on it briefly but that corruption is gonna come back every CVC wants a 4x or higher fund in a couple unicorns to sustain their business.

28:26Everyone wants it. Everyone says they don't, I think, is lying. Am I? These are our wiser to that now, Jason. I don't know. Yeah, but they don't want nothing, but they don't want a one X fund forever or a nonex fund. They sure don't want the opposite. Like they say that, Rick. And I don't mean they say that, but they don't want, I don't think they want the opposite. I don't think they want. All of them are gonna be sub nine figure exits or all of them are dogs or, you know, soft banker. Whoever, and Dries and one invest in Annie, they don't want that either. I think they want 10 background funds and they want trust and I think the reality is like if they could be an Emergence fund or a USB fund that has a 20 -bag.

29:01I am the returns of those funds are amazing and Very confident that those didn't look like a hundred forty percent IRR funds right at the gate like they took time to compound But I think those funds have developed a tremendous amount of trust with their LP bases say okay We're gonna let the game play out now if you're an emerging manager like I certainly fell pressure on this on equal one of like Okay, I want to show our Alps that, and I want to show the market, you know, we have a great portfolio So, you know, let's go and get all these markups and that's really helped us the best LPs do think that they're saying Hey, like you don't know what your portfolio is worth here Like what's your process that you have do we believe in that process?

29:36Do we believe you're a team do we believe in your approach? But I think all the emerging managers that have come to the game over the last couple of years like we were all fighting for so much capital with each other Like a lot of those doors are now closed and I think it's LPs figuring out how much trust do I have that these people are not bullshitting me on these numbers. How much trust do I have that? Like, these are actually high quality companies and I'm hopeful that actually gets us all a little bit off the hamster wheel because, you know, there were times where last couple of years that I felt like investment banker and that's like the last thing that I want to be.

30:03Do you think LPs trust them, Lamish's? LPs trust when you're big, it's different, but most funds that aren't huge have a few core anchors. And typically those relationships are trust driven. The rest it is transactional and LPs should be suspect. There's there's suspect GP behavior, there's suspect CEO behavior. I think And this suspect GP behavior is more subtle. It's overstating things, it's exaggerating your role with companies, it's connecting dots that don't quite exist in terms of ownership and stake and time. And 2021 was a weird world. It's hard for all but the best funds to raise LP capital.

30:36And so that naturally leads to everyone trying to be as aggressive with the facts as they can be and LP seeing them as a product. It's a complicated relationship. And I'll tell you my learned, you know, I just met with a great LP who has been a bit of a mentor to me and he was thinking about dropping a top tier fund because managers had changed and they hadn't been properly communicated and he wasn't sure what would happen with the next generation of the fund, right? There's just lots of dynamics and it's very hard to be an LP. It's just very, it's it's it's it's an easy job and that it's very, very slow but it's very hard to get good at it.

31:08It's it's another order of magnitude slower feedback loop than venture which is which is pretty slow. I mean you do hit on something that's really important on the is that there's just been like such a focus on salesmanship across the entire venture ecosystem. It's like, that's a good thing. I watch the demo down. GPs like pitching as much as they can, let's just cut through the sales for a second and actually just like have substance, which I think I haven't taken a pitching eight years because I think pitching is bullshit. Because I think it's all about salesmanship and rather than actually like me understanding your understanding of a company.

31:40And I think if we all did 10 % less sales and actually 10 % more substance, everyone will be a lot better off. Jason, do you agree with that in terms of the pitch? Because I know you like an email that's like very structured, has everything, has a deck, has a lot of substance. Rick, were you talking about LPs or were you talking about Farr? Talking about up and down the entire... Like, when we went out for fun one, our pitch was terrible. Like, I want to say which fun to fun, but one of my friends showed me the notes in their CRM from, you know, like, this pitch sucks. Like, doesn't make sense.

32:09The LPs that we ended up resonating with, they took time to understand us, They realized that we sucked at pitching and really got on board with the story in a process. Those are the type of founders that I like. I don't like it pitch. I just want to understand them and see how they work. But I do think that this overselling across like founder selling GPs, GPs sounding out these, everything feeling like it's a demo day. I think it takes us away from what we're supposed to be doing on the field and actually makes us just obsessed with pitching all the time. I see your point. Yeah, I actually do, Erie's right.

32:37I do really like it when the founder is good at pitching. I like it when the first email is so good that you want to invest by the bottom of the email. I like it when I'm already wanting to invest before the Zoom starts. I want to invest before the minute I meet them and you miss stuff. Like going to Ricks Point, you would have missed Ricks First Fund. You would have missed these other founders, right? I did this catch up with the Monday .com founders the other day and they showed me the pitch email they sent me. It was the worst ever when they were starting. It had a different name. It was terrible.

33:06ball. It's like, we're thinking about doing something productivity. Would you like to talk? Okay. And it was, and these are the best guys in the world. Right. That was the worst. So I didn't take the meeting. Not that I lost. I didn't even take the meeting for, forget about passing or missing it. So you'll miss the Mondays by this approach. But you gain a ton of efficiency because in B2B, you got to sell, man. No one needs another SaaS product. We already have 11 payroll companies and 88 CRMs and 96 mark. We don't need one. So So if you can't force your way into a market and selling stock as sales, it's a weird niche sales, but you better get it as a founder.

33:39So I like the ones not that are used car salesmen, but I like the one that are new car salesmen. Like, they convinced me there's a model three that came out of nowhere and I got to buy it and I'm all in. Like I'm all in when I see that. I'm just like, you know what is a founder? You have to pitch. You have to be fucking good at pitching because you have to sell customs. You have to sell investors and you have to sell employees. And actually if you can't crisply articulate it to all three, you're in trouble. If you can't get a cash in the door, you're in trouble. You can't get a customer in the room in trouble.

34:08You can't get the engineers or employees in the room in trouble. So if you can't pitch well succinctly and get people on board with your vision and they need time and they need patience, I think you're likely to have winning as dramatically reduced. So I would say like when numbers do you're talking for you, that pitch is so much easier. But I do think that pitching is very much in our form that Silicon Valley like has embraced, like it's very much in this Don Valentine archetype. Yeah, there's people that all they do is practice pitching and they forget how to run a business. Salesmanship is one thing, but like if you're selling to the insurance industry or selling to truck driver, that's very, very different than selling to a venture capitalist.

34:45And I do think, Jesus, and what you do, like very locked into a certain type of sales process or not selling to CIO, CTOs, enterprises, like you understand that 10 times better than I will ever if I spend the next 20 years of my life focused on it. But I do find at least in what we do where the customer bases are very different. We just haven't seen a lot of correlation between the folks who are like really great at raising money at the seed stage and the folks who are really great at building a business. The people who are really great at building a business, they get pretty good at pitching over time too.

35:14But I don't think the pitch always has to be positive. Like a question that I like is to ask is like, what are the top three reasons why I shouldn't invest? And if you can clearly articulate the three biggest weaknesses and why they are challenges, but then maybe articulate a plan of how you plan to mitigate them. That shows incredible self -awareness. It shows incredible knowledge of ecosystem of your own flaws. That's not like pitching in the salesmanship we're great, but it teaches me a lot about how you think strategically as a leader about positioning about your own flaws, about resource allocation.

35:43So I think we, like, can note success and salesmanship with pitching, which is like, you can pitch and still present challenges. I love it when I found it's like, oh my god, But there's so many things on fire, we've grown out of Astias, we're spending too much on Facebook, but there's this crux of this brilliance that's working. I still think that's incredibly exciting. So I think there's more to it than like positive picture. It depends how much gamification is happening. So if someone knows that you're going to ask that question, someone's going to prepare for that question. It's like the way that people are preparing for the GMAT.

36:15Is it really a test of intelligence when you know if you spend enough time training to answer a certain typewriter, you're gonna get good at it. Like, the answer is yes. So at least my approach, which is different from other members of our team. This is just me. Is through all these like, I review your deck. I actually know the four or five key questions to get me to conviction and I come in there and like I spring in and find, hey, we're not gonna do a bitch. I want to talk about these four or five things. Like here's what now I need to get to conviction. Like, let's go. If they really understand their business, they're gonna be able to talk through this.

36:43If they don't, they are gonna completely like, it's a bad meeting very, very early. It is absolutely true that at some point as a founder, you will get good at pitching in the VCs. I do think Rick's got a good point that people aren't necessarily born great fundraisers. Most founders are born great builders, like we build products. And the question is, do you want to put in the energy to cut them the slack? Because what I do takes no energy, right? To judge somebody by their email. Like it does cut out education bias and a bunch of other country bias, but it doesn't cut out sell your vision well bias, right?

37:14But if his two best investments are ones that had terrible pitches and no traction, You got to put it in the time. Like you got to really meet the fouts and companies a year. I'll read 50 emails a week, but I only want to do one pitch a week. And I find when I do two, three, or four, the other three are worth it. And then I got to fold with the email and I got to explain why they don't listen. And it's like 11 emails. And I never should have done the third or fourth meeting because it was on the bubble. Right? So you got to do 50 to do this strategy. James, you want to hear something absolutely insane?

37:42Yeah. I Jake, one new founder meeting a week. We are so meticulously thesis driven that I really try to dance like and there's this bar that we have there's like Does this deal have the potential to change your life if not pass? How do you know that because like bluntly you know your Monday dot com's your pride drives your set like sales loft If you saw the pre -seed or seed like no offense Jason I don't think it would have like oh this could change my family's life with the ground vision of sales loft It's not that obvious. So here's my mental model around it and it's one does this have the chance to be such a a few big outcome that like it's going to completely like return our fun five ten times that like you believe in your heart of hards that it's an oversized outcome with decocorn potential that you see that so early that you cannot miss it and that's a a meeting that I need to take to we have a process that we call hunting like we have our top 10 15 ideas on our big board that like I am laser focused on finding companies related to those and screening for the quality of those companies and our team screening for the quality of those so if it's an idea that I feel like I need to flip the like flipping that car changes my life, or third, is it one of these founders that you believe that has the chance to be like truly wants an in -generation, that is that exceptional in a very objective way?

38:54Not like a good founder, but someone who has the chance to be absolutely that insanely good. At least for me, like yeah, we miss a ton of great companies, a ton of great companies. But you do find screening that down and really focusing on like, how can I win the best companies that are the best fit for our approach? I did the MAMA, which was a show where we interviewed lead investors of amazing breakout companies and we did lead investor for SNAP, lead investor for Twilio, lead investor for Instacart and the single commonality of that investing thesis was we all underestimated the size of the outcome.

39:26Yeah, we thought SNAP could be like up 300 million acts at Facebook. Twilio and the biram was like, oh, it kind of had no idea. I mean, honestly, it could have been something that sells for so Oracle by, but they were consistently like, we thought it could be interesting and picked up for a decent amount But the size and the normative of the exit was deeply underestimated and so I just really struggle with that fuss One of like oh, I can tell the FU size because I think you'll miss the big I agree I think you can tell you the cheek code something we forgot about Harry when I started investing I was taught this this very simple Heuristic or heubic and then we all forgot about it when I was taught when I was investing when exits were all small and Sass when I started 2013 2014 there were no hub spot I poted 800 million like there weren't these big outcomes So I was taught this simple thing, are you confident the next round will be 3x this valuation?

40:12If you're confident, do it. It solves for a lot of issues if you slow it down and think about it, right? Do you think it might be worth more while every VC doesn't have deal flow? Think since it's kind of be worth more, it doesn't have good deals. Forget about whether sales off is going to be worth 2 .5 billion in cash, which didn't know or pipe -drive a billion and a half or all, or all, or whatever. Didn't know to the buy -and -point. But I was confident for a variety of reasons they would be worth 3x the price. And this all got blown up with crazy valuations. but it does force you to break it into one atomic unit, right?

40:42Which is, is this company doing enough good things, right? With enough good founder and enough things so that you're gonna have not even a 2X, a 3X outcome. That was what I used in the beginning of investing and now thinking about it live, I regret that I moved away from it because it actually forced a pretty decent way of thinking. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen with PyDrive or Algoli or TalkDesk or sells off, but shoot. I'm pretty sure we're gonna, the next round, pretty good founders, like 3X, yeah. Yeah, like, yeah, you know, and if every investment's 3X is dumb as a sound, you'll have a 3X fund.

41:11That's pretty good. I think you're right that that first one of this will change my life. It is really, really, really hard to figure out what is going to be a massive company at the seed stage that plenty of people have heard about things and expressed the upside. The scariest thing about Venturer is when you really cut yourself off that, like if you're a European seed stage VC and the only way you can win is if you have Spotify, that is a really, really tough position to be in. If that's the only way you can 3 -5 extra fine, chances are is that you're not going to succeed. And then you're going to lose to guys like you.

41:44I mean, you got a way better chance to get in that than 99 % of the other you know, VCs that are out there. But our job is to go and find ways to make money in and I think there's plenty of privately fund, growth equity funds that have found ways to deliver 40, 50 % IRRs to their LPs without being inside those. When you get on such a big fun cycle that you're required to do that. And then when we force a company that, like, rightfully is not going to be a decor or a company down that a rational path, it's like flushing money down the toilet. It's just an interesting question of a mistake I've made and maybe others made is thinking through it, I think there's two ways to build a unicorn plus.

42:18You can stare step it or you can swing for the fences from the start. And the swing from the fences, you can have the perfect idea and thesis and make sure it's a large space and make sure that there's a $50 billion $10 accessible. Or you can stare -step and you say, look, am I 100 % sure? 90 % sure there's going to be 3x to the next round. Thinking on it, I think I've done better stair -stepping. I've done better stair -stepping than whiteboarding. I've done better. Now, stair -stepping does force you to be more valuation sensitive, which is maybe why a lot of us abandoned it. Like it's hard to stair -step from 100 to 300.

42:49It's much easier to stair -step from 15 to 45 or 10 to 30. And when we all lost discipline in the peak, maybe we all stopped stair -stepping and looked for markups. But the Twilio example or even even Shopify bests them are exited Shopify They didn't know right you got a stair step some of these maybe that's the back to basics founders don't do this anymore Harry and Rick I don't think I don't think this is if I want to be grouchy about something They don't raise around and say am I 100 % sure I'm gonna three exit because they shouldn't take the money Like slow it down if you're and I literally had a founder the other day who had an offer at 4 .50 And just turned it all down for the first time in history this company and I asked him why it's like at the 3x mad that's not worth it.

43:26Your VCs may pressure you on this, but if you triple their money, everything works out for everyone on the cap table. It may not make the fund, it may not, but if everyone, three X's, it's enough. And so, stair step, you're, well, and I do think you can build unicorns and large funds stair stepping. And that's what I'm going to get back to, right? A stair, stair stepping deal. Just stair step in them. Twenty million post fine, but I got to know it's going to be 60. How do you feel about that in this market, though? Where like seed seals are absurdly expensive and A's have definitely depressing value.

43:55I would almost wonder whether you're seeing some adverse selection in there. You'll always say that. A lot of these investment strategies, everyone will say there's adverse selection. When I started investing in European founders, some folks I invested and said, don't even tell the LPs that you're doing that because it shows you can't get any Americans to invest in. Well, I wouldn't have done a goalie or a pipe drive or gorgeous or others if I was prejudiced against Europeans, right? I wouldn't even met Harry. And so, but this adverse selection thing, I think you can take it too far because you want to find the undiscovered gems.

44:23The adverb selection focuses on the eight guys from Stripe. They white men from Stripe that have the perfect Stripe 2 .0. That's what positive selection gets you and works for big funds, right? From like deck of corn hunting to like, okay, like, you know, maybe Jason is in the back to the basics, like, you know, can't, you know, now, which, you know, I just think it's simple. But I think Harry's got the point from the memo, which is you can stare step your way to an epic outcome. That's what we lost track of. You can stare. It's not mitigating risk. It's just stair stepping the way and keeping life simple, right?

44:55Just making sure as an investor and as a founder, you're just ultra confident you can triple that value or you raise because you have no choice. That's always okay. I get your back and it's the wall and just get that deal done. But I think life simple is actually really hard, which I think as a early stage VC, it's all right. How can you get enough really high quality shots on net on the field? Get those companies to product market. They get them to early stages of scale. Do all those hard things. And then at that point, hopefully you own a ton of some companies that actually have the chance to ascend to greatness.

45:26But you got to also be really draconian with the portfolio. And it's okay, like, can I get a couple turns on my fund on some of these other ones that are going to ascend to a tech decor type agome, but you've kept alive and got enough ownership and done the hard things that really gets thrown to the wayside when, you know, you're looking for a deck of corn between seed and series ad. And you know, the stair stepping, I think, is better for founders and is better for investors. It just gets really, really hard when people don't have patience in the ecosystem. They're like, wait, if I didn't get my next round done by Sequoia, this isn't going to be the one.

45:57Turns out that Sequoia didn't invest in every single decor company. That's what he's saying. Sometimes it digs a little bit later. So many people give advice on how to win an adventure. And I feel so many people try to follow the Sequoia Playbook when they are not Sequoia. The competitive advantage is that Sequoia has to run and execute that Playbook, make them extremely, extremely good at it. I was talking to one of our LPs majoring down, and I was like, I get that that works for Sequoia, but like the reality is, I'm not Sequoia. We are a very different strategy. We're doing something very, very different.

46:25I'm gonna try to be the best version of Rikzulong, I'm gonna try to be the best version of Equal Ventures. We'll see how it all goes out. Give me another 10, 15 years, and I'll either be really poor or really happy. Right, Japs, I wanna do a quick far -around with you. So I've pelt questions at you, and you answer them in a short supply. What is the most important trend in venture the world or the ecosystem is not paying attention to Rick? I think the reality is the broken incentives that venture firms have of all these zombie PCs that are Series A, Series B, Series C, and multi -stage funds. A lot of those venture investors may not be there three to five years from now If you are building a company if you're trying to construct your board knowing who will and will not be there as your company is going through scaling going public that is a major risk that no one's talking about and something that we are really concerned about as we look at downstream funding for companies and figure out, okay, how can we partner with folks like Jason who we know for better or worse like Jason's going to be running it's fun for you know here at the end of time because his name's on the door.

47:23Jason most of the most common reason companies don't scale from seed to A goodness. But what I think the most common reason is they have good but not great growth. The risk for seed investors especially late seed investors and I didn't used to want to think this was true. When I started investing, I did a white board and I looked it, I said, okay, when I was at 10 millionaire, I was growing 100%. So I only want to invest in companies growing at least 120 and I boiled that down to at least 8 % a month growth at sort of the mid seed stage and I kept it as a rule, right? And I've bent that rule a little bit and people will tell you otherwise and they'll tell you about folks that got lost in jungle, but that's where I don't see it happen is you do good.

47:59Like you're building a real company that's growing but it goes from one to two in a year or it goes from two to three point one in a year and the founders don't get it but that's where you fall it's it's it's tough but that's where you fall off the track and you can still have make them good money as a founder but you're off the venture track without realizing it. The dime between good and great is subtle but it's painful but it's so real it's just so real. What's the biggest investing mistake that you've made and how did it change your mindset? Honestly I'm incredibly thesis driven and I've missed a lot of amazing companies because that around investing the guys from bettery and then they started a public company in our office and we did invest.

48:35That company is called Archer Aviation and that's incredibly depressing. I'm very, very happy for those folks. They do think it's maybe very much more about that third aspect of how folks can change their life and being more open for founders that aren't in your thesis, that you have a real deep connection with, like I should've just written those guys a check. That was insane of me. We're gonna do a bass and we're gonna finish on the bat. I like to get that as we've learned, but the bet is how much VC spending goes into AI in 2024 versus 2023? We've got three options. Is it 2x? Is it 1x? Or is it down?

49:11Where are we placing on chips? I'm down. I'm voting 2x. Okay. I have a one -sided investor and I think this says just started and I think Big money needs somewhere to go. Big money is still out there. And it can't go into SaaS companies at 500K and AR. It's going to go into where massive spend is. And Nvidia is not going down and OpenAI is not going bankrupt. And these may be terrible bets, in my opinion. But every top SaaS investor I know is now an AI investor. And I'm not sure they're ready to go back to SaaS. You know what I'm asking question? Are we talking about dollars deployed or number of deals done?

49:47I'm talking about dollars. I'm convinced right or wrong. It's gonna double next year even if it makes no Actual sense. It's gonna. It's too big if we're talking about high -quality deals where money should be put I don't think it should be in AI next year I'm already hearing like a lot of fatigue from folks. I'm like, okay, like yeah, we we drove that But they're not gonna be a lot of these late stage companies Well, but yeah, I could take like another two billion three billion dollar check and then be like okay That's actually like all of what went into climate tech actually just went into open AI one company I'm gonna go with Jason on 2x, but I think there's gonna be a consolidation of capital I think it's gonna go to open AI and Thropic some of the largest runway, so I don't think it's gonna be as spread out as it has been But I 100 % think the dollar deployment will increase to x Fantastic you need someone to take the other side of the bet right made his bet.

50:34He's down. I'll get it down Oh, then I'll take that I'll take the bet. Okay listen guys. I so appreciate this. I so appreciate you are joining me for this session. I've loved chatting, this has been fantastic, so thank you so much. Thanks for having us. I really just love having more than one on one, I have to say it's just a lot more animated and fun you have the disagreements, you have the debate. As always Jason, you are fantastic, Rick, it was a joy to welcome you to the show for the first time. I would love to hear your thoughts on that format of show, let me know on Twitter at Harry's Steppings, but But before we leave you today, you know all those mind -numbing tedious tasks that seemingly take up half your day will code is here with their new AI -powered work assistant that helps you and your team not just finish tasks but make progress.

51:20So your product team can bring a feature to market faster by using code AI to tag customer feedback, draft PRDs, suggest target audiences summarising product gussians and more. Your sales team can engage more customers by bringing in data from sources like Salesforce and then use Coda AI to suggest action items meeting agendas or lead scores, and your marketing team can drive an impactful launch. With Coda AI summarizing user insights, creating briefs generated from notes, and writing mock press releases to visualize taglines. With Coda AI, you can reimagine your stu -list and how you collaborate, so you're not only finishing to us, but really making progress.

51:57If you want to work a system that lets you get back to work, you can get started with Coda AI's day for free, head over to coder .io slash 2 .0 VC. That's coder .io and get started for free. And to be here of amazing tools we cannot live without, travel in a spence and never associated with cost savings. But now you can reduce costs up to 30 % and actually reward your employees. How do you do this? Well, Navan rewards your employees with personal travel credit every time they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true? Novann is so confident you'll move to their game changing all in one travel, corporate card and he spends super app that they'll give you a $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo.

52:43Check them out now at navan .com forward slash 20V scene and last but by no means least we need to talk cash. As of the 29th June you can get 5 .5 % yield on your cash with 26 week treasury bills but buying treasury bills It's not that easy and you have to navigate a website that looks like it was made before I was born, Enter Public .com. Their Treasury accounts make it simple to earn a high yield on your cash and it takes 20 seconds. Here's how it works. Sign up at Public .com, easily purchased 26 -week Treasury bills that automatically roll over at maturity for a compounding yield. Plus there are no minimum hold periods.

53:22You can access your cash at any time, with the flexibility of a bank account, of course, to receive the full -gown tea deal. Of course, to receive the full -gown tea deal, you do have to hold to maturity. But here's the thing, these are tea bills, which means your investment has the complete backing of the US government, making one of the safest places to park your cash. Go to public .com -2 -0VC to lock in a historic 5 .4 % yield on your cash. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible 20 -product episode on Friday with the one and only howie -loo, co -found and CEOed air table.