20VC
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman. If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.
剧集列表
共 1507 集
20VC: Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | GPT Astra and Fable 5.1 Accelerate the Model Race | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town & Anthropic Pulls From Descartes Acquisition
2026年9月10日01:18:07AGENDA: 00:00 Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived 04:05 Instinct and GrokBot Ignite the AI Assistant War 13:32 OpenAI's GPT Astra Redefines What AGI Means 26:00 GPT Astra and Fable 5.1 Accelerate the Model Race 30:38 OpenAI's Chief Scientist Calls for Enforced AI Safety Limits 40:50 Tesla Launches Cybercabs as Travis Kalanick Returns to Robotaxis 45:55 Index Pulls Out of Town Deal Following Instinct Conflict 49:45 Anthropic Abandons $6BN Descartes Acquisition After Due Diligence 56:18 Robinhood Earns First Underwriting Role in Oura IPO 01:00:28 Wonderful Doubles to $5BN and Approves $170M in Secondaries 01:09:02 Thinking Machines Targets $40BN Valuation in $6BN Funding Round
20VC: The $100 Billion AI Assistant Race: Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | We Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble & AI Assistants Will Replace Every App on Your Phone with JD, Founder of Town
2026年9月7日01:10:54Jean-Denis "JD" Grèze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $1BN valuation. Before founding Town, JD spent seven years as CTO of Plaid. Before Plaid, he was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. He is also a prolific angel investor backing companies including Modal, BaseTen, Merge and NexHealth. AGENDA: 00:00 Why AI Assistants Are Silicon Valley's Hottest Market 07:00 How Does Town Compete With Grokbot, Instinct and Big Tech? 11:00 Will We Have One AI Agent or Different Agents for Every Part of Our Lives? 17:00 How Many Mistakes Can AI Agents Make Before We Stop Trusting Them? 20:00 How Does Town Choose the Best Models Without Destroying Its Margins? 29:00 Is the AI Assistant Market Already Too Crowded? 37:00 Can Apple Win the Agent Race—and Are We Entering a Cybersecurity Nightmare? 41:00 What Does a Successful Town User Look Like—and Which Pricing Tier Makes Money? 47:00 What Will AI Agents Be Able to Do in Three Years That They Cannot Do Today? 54:00 Is the Skepticism Around Billion-Dollar AI Assistant Companies Justified? 58:00 What Needs to Happen for Town to Become a $100BN Company? 1:02:00 How Has AI Changed Hiring—and Why Does Town Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools? 1:06:00 What Is JD Most Excited About Over the Next Decade?
20VC: How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It | How ElevenLabs Leapfrogged Us: What I Learned | The AI Talent War: How Your Hiring Process Needs to Change with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify
2026年9月5日01:05:13Cliff Weitzman is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify, the world's leading AI voice and text-to-speech platform, used by more than 60 million people globally. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, Cliff first built Speechify at Brown University to help him consume written material through audio. AGENDA: 00:00 Cliff Weitzman Reveals His Biggest-Ever Strategic Mistake 03:08 Why Speechify Is Paying Millions to Build Their Own Data Centres 09:59 What No One Knows About Buying Chips That Everyone Should Know? 20:19 The AI Data Gold Rush Has a Brutal Business-Model Problem 23:42 How ElevenLabs Leapfrogged Speechify—and Why It Was Cliff's Fault 31:00 The $15M AI Talent War: Can Startups Still Compete for the Best Talent? 36:57 The New 10X Engineer: Ten Killer Decisions Every Day 46:12 The Voice-AI Bloodbath: Who Survives Commoditisation? 53:21 The Screen Is Dying—and Voice Will Replace It 57:58 How Cliff Plans to Use AI to Cure His Brother's Disease
20VC: NVIDIA Crushes Quarter and Buys Hugging Face | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5BN Valuation and The Race for AI Assistants | Cognition Raises at $46BN, Linear $2.5BN and Clay $7BN
2026年9月3日01:17:40AGENDA: 00:00 Nvidia crushes $96.2B quarter and nears $12.9B Hugging Face deal 13:52 OpenAI cuts off Cursor as the Altman–Musk feud escalates 17:40 OpenAI's 1,000-agent cyberattack triggers an industry wake-up call 22:58 Instinct hits $2.5B valuation as AI assistants gain spending power 36:39 Cognition targets $1.6B ARR as the coding-agent market explodes 40:31 AI forces every startup to become a compound company—or get left behind 52:42 Salesforce embraces Claude and outcome-based pricing in major AI reset 1:00:52 Stripe–PayPal deal collapses as both sides clash over price 1:02:31 Clay hits $7B and Linear reaches $100M ARR as agents choose their tools 1:11:52 Texas pauses Flock cameras as police-surveillance backlash grows
20VC: The AI Bubble Is Wrong | AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern | Why People Over-Estimate Open Models But Enterprises Still Fear Frontier Models with Aaron Katz, ClickHouse
2026年8月31日01:03:37Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale revenue from approximately $5M to $500M and led the company through its IPO. Before Elastic, he spent 12 years at Salesforce, working alongside Marc Benioff and helping transform it from a 200-person startup into a global software giant. AGENDA: 4:05 Are we in an AI bubble? 13:40 How does software change when agents—not humans—make buying decisions? 22:28 Will 90% of tokens flow through open models; can enterprises trust them? 31:09 Why did ClickHouse sponsor Fulham; and could sports teams become $20B assets? 35:49 When will ClickHouse hit $1B ARR? 38:31 Can startups still win elite talent from OpenAI? Biggest remote work mistake? 44:54 Is zero-to-$100M ARR now table stakes; or is durable growth what matters? 48:51 Is college still worth it; which jobs will survive AI? 57:58 When will ClickHouse go public; and why not next year?
20VC: Is Anthropic's Coding Business Worth $2 Trillion? | Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? | Why 80–90% of Neo-Labs Die in the Next 18 Months? with Eno Reyes, Co-Founder @ Factory
2026年8月29日01:29:19Eno Reyes is the co-founder and CTO of Factory, the agent-native software development platform building autonomous "Droids" for enterprise engineering teams. Factory has raised $220 million, most recently a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, from investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, 20VC, NEA, Blackstone, Insight Partners and Nvidia. Before founding Factory, Eno worked as a machine-learning engineer at Hugging Face, training, optimizing and deploying large language models for enterprise customers. AGENDA: 00:00 Are We Underestimating AI by an Order of Magnitude? 06:35 Why Can the Smartest AI Model Be the Cheapest? 18:51 Is Anthropic's Coding Business Really Worth $2 Trillion? 33:41 Will Continuous-Learning Models Help or Hurt Factory? 40:43 Will 80–90% of Neo-Labs Die in the Next 18 Months? 44:33 Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? 55:42 Must AI Founders Radically Rethink What a Great Outcome Looks Like? 1:04:30 Do Pedigree and Credentials Still Matter in AI Hiring? 1:19:17 Which Is the Biggest Threat: Claude Code, Codex, Cognition or Cursor? 1:24:20 What Seems Crazy Today but Will Be Obvious in Five Years?
20VC: NVIDIA Bonanza: Buys Poolside & Invests in Mercor and Perplexity | Anthropic's $30TRN Revenue Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service, Defence and Robotics are Overinflated
2026年8月27日01:22:40AGENDA: 00:00 NVIDIA Launches a Three-Deal Blitz Across the AI Stack 04:31 NVIDIA's $12BN Poolside Deal Exposes Frontier AI's Capital Wall 15:39 NVIDIA Moves to Back Mercor at $20BN and Perplexity at $30BN 26:55 OpenAI Confirms 2027 IPO as Anthropic Seizes the Lead 40:42 Hugging Face Draws $13BN Takeover Interest as Open Models Boom 44:56 Citadel Cashes Out 80% of Its Leopold Aschenbrenner AI Trade 51:51 AI Boom Is "Less Than One-Third Over"—But Token Addiction Has a Price 01:04:07 Stripe Reaccelerates to 41% as AI Reshapes Software's Leaderboard 01:07:45 Instinct Security Scare Exposes Why AI Agents Still Cannot Be Trusted 01:23:55 VCs Name AI's Biggest Bubbles: Support, Defense, Humanoids and Roll-Ups
20VC: Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee: Lessons from Don Valentine, Doug Leone and Alfred Lin | How the SpaceX and Citadel Deals Went Down | What Sequoia Specifically Looks for in Founders with Julien Bek
2026年8月24日01:18:41Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world. At Sequoia, he has partnered with companies including Rillet, Tacto, and Auctor. Before joining Sequoia, Julien spent five years at Accel, where he worked with companies including Miro, Melio, and BeReal. He is also an angel investor in Revolut and Attio. AGENDA: 06:35 – What did Julien only discover about Sequoia after joining the firm? 08:05 – What does everyone get wrong about Sequoia? 13:00 – Is Series A the hardest stage at which to invest today? 14:00 – Is Sequoia less focused on ownership as outcomes become larger? 19:20 – Does Sequoia simply pay more than everyone else to win deals? 22:00 – Is the "triple, triple, double, double" growth model dead? 25:00 – What is Sequoia's investment process really like behind the scenes? 27:15 – Can a partner still invest when the rest of Sequoia votes against them? 30:00 – Why can a flawless founder pitch actually be a warning sign? 31:00 – How do you judge whether a founder is exceptional in just 30 minutes? 33:00 – How can investors tell whether a founder's story is genuine? 35:10 – Is arrogance a bad trait in a founder? 36:00 – Which great founder did Julien completely misread? 37:15 – How should investors adjust their founder assessment across different cultures? 39:00 – What does a founder's childhood reveal about their future trajectory? 40:30 – What has Julien learned from Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Alfred Lin and Shaun Maguire? 47:00 – What does it mean when "agents become the new customer"? 49:00 – Does UI become irrelevant in an agent-first economy? 50:15 – Will answer-engine optimisation become larger than SEO? 52:00 – Will AI agents destroy software margins and brand loyalty? 53:00 – How quickly will enterprises allow agents to make purchasing decisions? 54:00 – Is AI infrastructure a safer investment than applications? 56:00 – Do software margins matter less when the potential outcomes are larger? 58:00 – Could the next trillion-dollar company masquerade as a services business? 01:00:00 – Which service industries can AI truly automate end-to-end? 01:02:00 – Are enterprises simply crying out for more help implementing AI? 01:03:10 – Will AI lead to dramatically smaller teams? 01:06:15 – Is traditional private equity screwed? 01:07:00 – The most overfunded and underfunded categories in venture 01:08:15 – What is the best AI agent company outside Sequoia's portfolio? 01:09:00 – Which missed investment still haunts Julien? 01:09:45 – Which founder trait will Julien never compromise on? 01:10:00 – Which competing fund makes Sequoia bring its A-game? 01:10:45 – How Julien missed Revolut—and helped his mother retire by investing anyway 01:14:00 – What does Julien believe that other Sequoia partners might disagree with? 01:15:00 – What is Julien most excited about over the next five years of AI?
20VC: The AI Bubble Will Burst: Half the Neoclouds Will Die | China: Should We Ban Chip Exports & Be Fearful of Chinese Open-Source | Mag7: Who Dies and Who Thrives: Why Meta is Meh and Microsoft is Mega
2026年8月22日01:06:24Jerry Murdock is the Co-Founder of Insight Partners, which manages over $90 billion in assets. Jerry personally backed companies including Twitter, Nest and Docker, while Insight's portfolio includes giants such as Shopify, Wiz and monday.com. Across three decades, Insight has helped produce 55+ IPOs and become one of the most powerful technology investment firms in the world. AGENDA: 00:00 — Is the AI Bubble About to Burst? 11:00 — Will Half of All Neoclouds Disappear Within 36 Months? 13:00 — Can Open Source Models Actually Beat OpenAI and Anthropic? 22:00 — Are We Entering the Golden Age of Cybersecurity Attacks? 32:00 — Have AI Valuations Completely Lost Touch With Reality? 42:00 — Is AI About to Wipe Out an Entire Generation of SaaS & Private Equity? 47:00 — Should We Ban U.S. Chips From Being Exported to China? 48:00 — Should We Be Fearful of Open-Source Chinese Models? 49:00 — Will Continuous Learning Kill Every AI Model We Use Today? 53:00 — Why Microsoft Remains a Mega Buy 56:00 — Which Mag 7 Giant Would You Short — and Is Apple's AI Strategy a Disaster?
20VC: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60BN | Stripe's $8BN OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600BN in Revenue? | Lovable and Higgsfield Raise Mega Rounds
2026年8月20日01:13:12AGENDA: 04:20 Elon's Deal of the Decade: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60BN 06:10 Why Cursor Was Surprisingly Cheap at $60BN 07:00 Why Zuckerberg Failed to Buy the AI Prize Elon Secured 12:00 Elon vs Zuck: Who Would You Rather Work For? 14:00 Will Microsoft or Amazon Now Race to Buy Cognition? 17:05 Stripe's $7BN OpenRouter Deal Creates Huge VC Winners 25:00 OpenRouter's Fatal Risk: Enterprises Don't Want 10 Models 28:15 Anthropic Turns Its First Profit on $11.5BN of Quarterly Revenue 32:15 Can Anthropic Really Reach $600BN in Revenue? 37:00 Why Every Elite Engineer Could Soon Get $100K in AI Tokens 39:30 Would Rory Buy Anthropic at a $2.5TN Valuation? 44:50 Silver Lake's $43BN Workday Bet: SaaS Isn't Dead, It's Mature 53:00 How Silver Lake Could Make $30BN From Workday 57:00 Lovable vs Higgsfield: Similar Revenue, Radically Different Valuations 58:00 Is Lovable's $13.3BN Price Actually Cheap? 63:30 Why the DOJ Is Coming After Andreessen Horowitz 69:00 Why A16Z Has "50 Legal Battles" Happening at Once
20VC: Uber President on The Untold Uber Stories: Travis, China and Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food with Andrew MacDonald
2026年8月17日01:06:36Andrew Macdonald (Mac) is the longest-serving employee at Uber. Today, he is the President and COO. No one on the planet has spent more time mastering ride-sharing than Mac. Uber now does 300M rides per week, has 200M users, and is one of the most recognised brands on the planet. Mac never does interviews and so this was a rare look behind the scenes at the Uber machine. AGENDA: 05:39 – How was Mac the only survivor from the Travis era? 10:39 – How does Uber decide what to include in Uber One membership? 11:45 – How does Uber decide which new products to pursue? 16:08 – What does Uber need to do to reach 500 million users? 20:37 – Why Uber was right to focus on its core business and divest autonomy? 24:08 – Why India and Brazil will delay Uber's autonomous future? 28:34 – The craziest story from Uber's battle in China 29:27 – Why Travis Kalanick believed money was the moat? 31:17 – Was Uber structurally disadvantaged in China from day one? 35:48 – Inside Uber's SWAT team of its 30 best AI engineers 37:55 – How companies need to extract real efficiency from AI? 42:00 – Will Uber have more or fewer employees in five years? 43:52 – Will companies that do not work with frontier models be disaggregated? 46:02 – Will AI agents disaggregate Uber's interface and customer relationship? 48:26 – Why Brian Chesky was right: chat is not the best interface for everything 55:52 – Why it is bullshit to say DoorDash would not be number one if Travis were still CEO 59:13 – The single biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick 1:00:07 – The second biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick
20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski
2026年8月15日01:18:41Matt Swulinski is one of the best growth leaders in AI. He is currently Head of Growth at Viktor, the Accel-backed AI coworker. Previously, he was Head of Growth at Wispr Flow, where he was marketing hire #1 and built the growth function from pre-launch to millions of users. Matt also built the AI-powered marketing OS that automated 100 newsletter sponsorships a month and enabled a lean team to scale dramatically faster. Before Wispr Flow, Matt worked in growth at Superhuman. AGENDA: 00:00 Why SaaS Founders Should Steal the E-Commerce Growth Playbook 04:47 How Does PLG Change When AI Agents Become the Customer? 07:46 When Should an Early-Stage Founder Start Spending on Paid Growth? 10:36 How Do You Build the Tracking Stack to Know Whether Paid Is Working? 17:38 How Much Should You Spend on Creative—and How Do You Produce 500 Ads a Month? 23:10 How Long Should You Test Paid—and How Do You Scale Meta, Google and YouTube? 39:38 How Do You Build Referral, Paywall and AEO Loops That Compound? 49:46 How Do You Hire and Structure an AI-Native Growth Team? 1:04:27 Which Growth Channels Are Most Underrated—and Most Overrated? 1:09:28 How Do You Build an AI Operating System That Makes Your Work Compound?
20VC: Canva Slashes Growth: How Much is it Really Worth | Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean: Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50BN CEO Pay Package | Elon Musk's $55BN Terrafab
2026年8月13日01:26:39AGENDA: 05:00 Canva's Growth Gets Slashed as AI Costs Explode 20:00 The Great Software Reset: Why 2026 Will Punish AI Hesitancy 29:00 Canva's Valuation Reality Check—and the LP Liquidity Trap 35:00 Google's AI Brain Drain: Jeff Dean Leaves, Demis Steps Back 43:00 Why Google Can't Afford to Cure Alzheimer's 50:00 The Data-Centre Revolt: Can AI Survive the Political Backlash? 55:00 Elon Musk's $55BN Terrafab Bet to Break Free from TSMC 57:00 Revolut's $50BN CEO Pay Package—and the Return of Founder Control 01:13 AI Shopping, Atlassian's Revival, and Airtable's Brutal Sale Reality
20VC: Will OpenRouter Sell for $10BN to Stripe? | Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating America—and What Happens Next | Why Enterprises Are More Fearful of Anthropic and OpenAI Than China | Is the Routing Layer Becoming a Commodity with Alex Atallah
2026年8月10日59:59Alex Atallah is the Founder and CEO @ OpenRouter, the unified interface for LLMs. The company has raised over $153M in funding, with the latest valuation pricing the company at $1.3BN. OpenRouter is reportedly in an acquisition process with Stripe for $10BN. AGENDA: 00:00 Is OpenRouter Selling to Stripe for $10 Billion? 04:05 What Did Alex Learn From Scaling OpenSea? 06:38 What Did OpenRouter's Founding Thesis Get Wrong? 14:47 Is AI Model Routing Already Being Commoditized? 19:12 Do Falling Token Prices Help or Hurt OpenRouter? 27:16 Should America Be Alarmed by Chinese Open Models? 32:43 Will US Open-Source Models Compete With Chinese Models in the Next 12 Months? 39:26 Will the Router Be Swallowed by the Agent Framework? 48:56 Is Distillation Wrong—and How Should We Look at It? 50:01 Is the Reported $10 Billion Stripe Deal Actually Happening?
20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough
2026年8月8日01:24:23David Frankel is one of the great seed investors of our time. As the Co-Founder of Founder Collective he has backed the likes of Uber, Coupang, Suno, PillPack, Airtable, Whoop, Shield AI and many more. In a world of expanding fund sizes, David and Founder Collective are one of the only successful franchises to truly stick to small, boutique funds. AGENDA: 00:00 The Bubbles Are Getting Bigger—and There Will Be a Lot of Roadkill 05:21 The Worst-Performing Funds Will Be the $50M–$100M Seed Funds 25:06 "We're Greedy for Returns, Not Management Fees" 30:10 "Pro Rata Is the Original Sin" 32:59 "A $1BN Valuation Is the New Series A" 46:39 "I Have Never Seen Secondary Markets This Liquid" 58:03 Microsoft Has Done a Crappy Job of AI—and Another Dot-Com Crash Is Inevitable 01:08:25 OpenAI and Anthropic Will Be Disrupted—and China Could Do It 01:16:12 "Anyone Who Claims They Knew Is Full of Shit" 01:19:56 Our Children Won't Need to Drive—and Chemotherapy Will Look Prehistoric
20VC: Airtable Sold for $1.285BN | Leo Achenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up | Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B | Anthropic Model Breaches Three Companies' Security | Big Tech Earnings: Why Palantir Beat The Rest
2026年8月6日01:15:36Special Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO @ Palo Alto Networks. AGENDA: 04:50 Airtable Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B 17:00 Leo Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up as Citadel Buys His $16BN Book 22:30 Anthropic's AI Models Breach Three Companies as Cyber Threat Accelerates 33:35 Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B as Chinese Models Crush AI Prices 38:05 Valar Atomics Triples to $6B as Sequoia Bets on Nuclear Power for AI 42:50 OpenAI and Anthropic Could Trigger a Massive Public-Market Dislocation 52:55 Big Tech and Palantir Earnings Ignite the Next Phase of the AI Gold Rush 1:04:30 Procore Buys DroneDeploy for $900M in a High-Stakes 12x Revenue Bet 1:10:55 Scale AI Hits $1.5B ARR After the Meta Deal Left It for Dead
20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena
2026年8月3日01:04:20Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users. AGENDA: 00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit… 05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now? 07:30 – Do Chinese open source models cannibalize the closed frontier labs? 10:30 – Why has America's open source community lagged so badly behind China? 17:20 – Will Chinese models be banned in the US — and does hosting locally really kill the backdoor risk? 23:20 – Are enterprises really terrified of working with the frontier labs? 27:20 – Why hasn't inference got cheaper — and what happens when Anthropic's "disgustingly high" margins go public? 30:20 – Who should decide if a model is safe to release: the government, a neutral body, or nobody? 33:10 – Are we about to see cyberattacks like we've never seen before? (The fake candidate who passed every interview) 37:00 – 75 Neo labs: what separates the winners from the two-thirds worth nothing? 40:45 – Is data actually a commodity — and can data providers be $100BN companies? 48:00 – Can you be the referee when the players are paying you? (And Arena's real revenue) 50:45 – Will the model providers eat the application layer? Are Harvey, Lagora and Figma in trouble? 54:10 – Quickfire: Why hasn't NVIDIA bounced on the rise of open source, who hits $10 trillion first, and does the compute debt cycle end in insolvency?
20VC: The Best AI Companies Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies | Will Simile Kill Kalshi, Polymarkets and NASDAQ | How to Sign Fortune 500 Companies As Customers in Weeks with Joon Sung Park, Simile
2026年8月1日01:03:41Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before making a decision in the real world. Simile has now raised $300 million in total, including a $200 million Series B announced last week at a $2 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures. AGENDA: 00:00 We Will Pay $100M for a Single Query on Some Models 10:00 Why Stock Markets May Not Exist in 5 Years Time 15:00 The Best Companies All Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies 19:00 The Best AI Companies Have Clear and Fast Reward Functions 24:00 How We Sign Fortune 500 Companies for $10M Contracts in Weeks 32:00 Does Similie Kill Kalshi and Polymarket? Prediction vs Changing the Future 42:00 Inside Similie's $300M Raise; What Every Founder Needs to Know
20VC: Jensen's Open-Weights Letter | Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks | Francisco Partners Raises $21BN | Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia
2026年7月30日01:17:30AGENDA: 05:00 Jensen's Open-Weights Letter Puts Anthropic on an Island 10:00 OpenAI's Model Targets Hugging Face in a Cyber-Security Scare 18:00 America's Open-Model Push Accelerates as China Looms Large 30:00 Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia 34:00 Google Cloud Grows 82%—So Why Did the Market Panic? 41:00 Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms and Physical AI 51:00 Francisco Partners Raises $21B: Can Private Equity Still Save SaaS? 1:00:00 Mark Pincus Says Quit When It's Too Hard—Jason Lemkin Erupts 1:07:00 Stripe vs Revolut: Which $100B+ Fintech Would You Own?
20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo
2026年7月27日01:02:34Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, who just raised $3 billion in fresh capital, its largest pool ever. Matt's portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora, OpenRouter, Chai Discovery, Axiom, OpenEvidence and more. AGENDA: 00:00 Why Menlo Broke All Its Investing Rules to Back Anthropic 09:00 Why Ownership Matters Less in an Outlier-Driven Venture Market 13:00 Do We Have an SPV Problem in Venture Today? 20:00 Do Margins Still Matter in AI? 23:00 Why Open Source Won't Derail Anthropic's Growth 26:00 Does Every Model Provider Need to Build Its Own Chips? 29:00 Why Anthropic Is Not a Threat to Legora 32:00 Why Series A Is the Hardest Place to Invest Today 36:00 Why Signalling Is B.S. and Every Fund Is Going Full Stack 42:00 Why Building a Company in Europe Is Hard Mode 47:00 Why Triple-Triple-Double-Double Is No Longer Venture-Scale Growth
20VC: Mercor CPO on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs | Why Large Enterprise is Scared to Partner with Frontier Labs | Why Small Specialised Models is the Future with Osvald Nitski
2026年7月25日01:00:37Osvald Nitski is the Chief Product Officer at Mercor, the AI-training and expert-data marketplace powering frontier-model development. Mercor last raised a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation, and is reportedly in discussions for a new round at a $20 billion valuation. Mercor crossed $2BN in ARR in June; doubling from $1 billion in only four months. AGENDA: 00:04:00 Will open-source models kill the data-provider business? 00:07:00 Are enterprises still terrified of working with frontier model companies? 00:09:00 Does every company end up with its own specialised AI model? 00:10:00 Do enterprises actually have an AI ROI problem? 00:11:00 How should founders balance AI performance against exploding token bills? 00:14:00 Does AI mean product teams build 10x more—or ruthlessly simplify? 00:15:00 What does it now take to be a great product manager in an AI-native world? 00:20:00 Is the boom in AI services and forward-deployed engineers here to stay? 00:37:00 Can Mercor escape its dependence on a handful of frontier-model customers? 00:47:00 Are AI-generated code and agents creating a cybersecurity arms race? 00:56:00 When will robotics have its real "ChatGPT moment"?
20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell & Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know
2026年7月23日01:23:12AGENDA: 00:04 China's Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned 00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion? 00:21 OpenRouter's Moment: Is This the Perfect Time to Sell? 00:31 Fireworks' $1.5B Raise Signals the Real AI Money Is in Infrastructure 00:39 Why Every Great AI App May Need to Build Its Own Model 00:50 Stripe's Bold Play to Buy PayPal 01:01 The AI Funding Frenzy: Why Late-Stage Venture Is Winning 01:12 Nuclear Startups Go Wild While Databricks and Stripe Stay Private 01:15 The AI Supply Chain War: TSMC, ASML, DRAM—and Nvidia's Next Move
20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
2026年7月20日01:17:07Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch. AGENDA: 00:07 — Why Did Fireworks Bet on Inference When Everyone Else Was Chasing Training? 00:13 — Can Open-Source Models Turn AI Infrastructure into a Commodity? 00:19 — Should Enterprises Trust Chinese Open Models With Their Most Sensitive Data? 00:25 — Will Model Progress Keep Moving This Fast—or Are We Nearing a Plateau? 00:28 — Will the Multi-Model World Create a $100BN Routing Layer? 00:37 — How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years? 00:43 — Will Token Costs Fall 10x—and Unleash 100x More Demand? 00:49 — Does Fireworks Eventually Have to Build Its Own Data Centres? 01:02 — What Is the Real Bottleneck Holding Back the AI Economy?
20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner
2026年7月18日01:27:34Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare. AGENDA: 00:00 How Did a Spare-Time COVID Test Become a $5BN Business? 07:00 How Do You Go From Testing Cows to STDs, Sepsis and COVID? 21:00 When Did Fred Realise COVID Was Massive—and How Did Curative Scale to $5BN? 36:00 Why Pivot Into Health Insurance—and What Is Broken About US Healthcare? 40:00 How Is AI Rebuilding Curative—and Which Departments Go to Zero? 45:00 Is SaaS Dead? Why Is Curative Cutting 80% of Its Software Spend? 48:00 Are Legacy Insurers Screwed? What Will Anthropic Be Worth in Three Years? 59:00 Will AI Make Companies Smaller? Which Jobs Will Survive? 1:10:00 Why Nuclear—and Could Subcritical Become Bigger Than Curative? 1:17:00 What Have Marriage and Fatherhood Taught Fred? What Has He Changed His Mind On?
