The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Matt Biilmann is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify. Under his leadership, Netlify has become one of the fastest-growing platforms for modern web development. Matt recently introduced agent experience (AX), a new way of thinking about how software is built and experienced in the AI era. Matt is also known for coining Jamstack, a concept that redefined how developers build for the web.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

03:43 How Does the Design Process Change When Designing For Agents

06:27 How Does the Product Building Process Change When Building for Agents

12:52 Will AI Kill SaaS Tools

16:12 If Prototyping Becomes Phase 1: Does Figma Survive?

17:35 Is Chat the Best Interface for a World of AI

21:52 Why AI Services Will Be One of the Biggest Economies

27:24 Open vs. Closed Platforms in an Agent-First World

31:09 Specialization of Large Language Models

35:13 Shifting Labor Costs to Agent Spend

36:28 The Future of Stripe and What Happens with 100M Developers in the World

38:39 Quickfire Round: Insights and Predictions

Jake Saper is a General Partner @ Emergence Capital, one of the leading venture firms of the last 20 years. Their many wins include being early investors in Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva and more. In total, the firm has invested $2BN and returned an astonishing $8BN in cash with much more to come.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:45 The Zoom Investment Story

10:21 Founder, Market, Traction: Rank Them

26:37 Why Market Pull is the Most Important Thing and How to Know

27:23 Are the Best Deals Always Expensive?

28:25 What is the One Framework Emergence Use for Every Investment

29:08 Lessons from the 16x DPI Zoom Fund

30:44 Why Does Every Partner Do Reference Calls on Every Deal?

35:16 We Have Lied to SaaS Founders: The Revenue Rules Changed

37:53 Where Will Value Accrue in a World of AI?

41:37 Three Reasons Why AI Will Not Replace Vertical SaaS

46:38 Who Wins in AI: Startups or Incumbents?

50:09 Why Should Every Company Aim to Be a "Board Discussion"

55:12 Why is Jake Worried About AI's FTX Moment?

56:00 What Losing Billions on Salesforce Taught Us About Selling

01:00:07 Why Most VC Partnerships are Broken

01:03:07 Grok vs Anthropic vs OpenAI: Buy and Sell?

01:14:25 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections

Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile's Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.

Julian Teixeira is the Chief Revenue Officer at 1Password, where he has grown B2B revenue over 8x and scaled a team of more than 450 in go-to-market. 1Password set the record for the largest raise in Canadian history at the start of 2022 and has raised nearly $1B in capital throughout his time with the company. Prior to 1Password, Julian served as the head of global sales at Lightspeed Commerce, a company he helped scale from startup to IPO and through over 10 acquisitions throughout his decade-long tenure.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:27 Sales Lessons from Scaling to $1BN in ARR

05:20 How to Create and Master a Sales Playbook

07:53 Lessons on First Sales Hires

09:41 Setting Goals and Targets for Sales Teams

13:22 The Reality of Tech Sales Today

16:19 Evaluating and Managing Sales Reps

19:07 Outbound Prospecting and Pipeline Generation

22:22 Hunter vs. Farmer Sales Models

24:15 Compensation and Specialization in Sales Teams

28:56 Outbound vs Inbound Sales

32:47 Pipeline and Deal Reviews

37:37 Sales Tech Stack and Tools

38:40 Maintaining Sales Morale

44:55 Are Remote Sales Teams Less Effective

46:44 Final Thoughts and Advice

This episode is brought to you by:

Gong, the revenue AI platform centralising all your revenue workflows in a single unified platform.

Capchase, helping SaaS companies grow without dilution. Learn more at capchase.com/20vc

Anton Osika is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Lovable, the fastest growing startup in Europe. With Lovable, you can turn your idea into an app in seconds with just a prompt. After just 3 months, the company has scaled to $17.5M in ARR. They are adding $2M in net new revenue every single week. Even better, Lovable has 85% Day 30 retention rate, making it more retentive than ChatGPT.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

03:41 How a Side Project Turned into a $200M Company

05:39 Why Talent is 10x More Valuable Than Experience

08:57 How to Use a Waitlist Pre-Launch to 10x Growth

12:29 How to Master a Public Launch: $0 - $1M ARR in a Week

18:02 Why Raise a Large Seed Round

22:22 How Sustainable is Lovable and AI Revenue

25:22 What are Lovable's Biggest Threats: Incumbents or Open Source

27:00 Raising Series A: Should You Always Take the Money

27:46 How to Compete in the US from Europe

28:25 Is Europe as F****** as the World Thinks

29:02 Building in Europe vs. Silicon Valley

31:20 The Future of Foundation Models: Who Wins

33:47 Grok vs OpenAI vs Anthropic: Buy and Short

41:37 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections

Mike Krieger is the Co-Founder of Instagram and now CPO @ Anthropic.

In Today's Episode with Mike Krieger We Discuss:

03:07 Where Will Value Be Created and Sustained in a World of AI?

04:59 Are Foundation Models Commoditised Today?

08:36 Should Founders Build for the Models of Today or Build for Models of the Future

12:19: Why Will Models Become More Different Than More Similar

16:38: Will Human or Synthetic Data Be More Prominent in the Future

19:28 Model Quality vs. Product UX

23:36 The Competitive Landscape of AI

32:27 Do We Underestimate China's AI Capabilities

33:59 What Did Anthropic Learn from Deepseek

34:07 Is Deepseek a Sustaining and Credible Threat?

37:04 Transitioning from Model Provider to Application Provider

38:26 Where Has Anthropic Chronically Under-Invested

39:08 Why Has Anthropic Been Slow On Consumer Product Development

43:50 What is the Role of a Software Developer in the Future

48:29 Balancing API and Consumer Products

51:09 Is Europe Stronger or Weaker in a World of AI

52:40 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections

George Bonaci is the VP of Growth at Ramp, where he's helping one of the fastest-growing fintech companies scale even further. Prior to Ramp, George was VP of Growth at Gong. Before Gong, George was at Samsara where he helped grow revenue from $650M ARR, and played a pivotal role in the company's successful IPO.

In Today's Growth Masterclass We Discuss:

03:57 How the Best Growth Teams Experiment

05:10 How to Allocate Bets and Resources for Growth

07:09 Velocity vs. Quality in Growth

15:05 The Role of Postmortems and How to Do Them

19:16 Growth Team Structure and Standalone or Not?

20:01 The Three Ways to Find Alpha in Growth

30:01 How to Hire for the Best Growth Hires

31:30 How to do Take-Home Assignments When Hiring for Growth

32:51 Common Pitfalls in Hiring Growth Talent

34:16 Investing in Management and Learning

42:43 How AI Changes Growth Products and Strategies

46:43 Quick Fire Round: Common Mistakes and Growth Channels

Oscar Pierre is the Founder and CEO @ Glovo, the food delivery site that will get you anything you want to your doorstep. This story is insane, the company was started by Oscar 11 years ago, in their pre-seed round they sold ⅓ of the company for €100K. The company was later saved by a deal they made with McDonald's. The company nearly ran out of money on several occasions, one time the funding round came from the CEO of Rakuten who Oscar met an FC Barcelona drinks. Today, they are a part of DeliveryHero who acquired them for $2.2BN, they have delivered 1BN orders and have almost 60M customers.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:27 Starting with Nothing

07:30 The First Funding Round: Selling ⅓ of the Company for €100K

09:23 Marketplace Dynamics and Expansion

15:34 The McDonald's Deal That Saved the Company

18:38 Running out of Money Three Times: Fundraising Hell

25:57 International Expansion: What Worked

29:25 Lessons from Failures: What Brazil Taught Us

31:36 How to Win in Emerging Markets

32:02 The Burn Rate (Burning $1M per day) and Investor Concerns

33:29 Scaling Challenges and Competitor Threats

34:29 The Biggest BS Elements of Company Values

35:40 How I Ruined the Culture of the Company

41:14 Layoffs and Talent Management

42:06 Biggest Lessons from M&A

44:41 The Future of Quick Commerce

45:38 Acquisition by Delivery Hero

48:56 Post-Acquisition Reflections

54:47 The CEO on Trial and Facing Prison

Steeve Morin is the Founder & CEO @ ZML, a next-generation inference engine enabling peak performance on a wide range of chips. Prior to founding ZML, Steeve was the VP Engineering at Zenly for 7 years leading eng to millions of users and an acquisition by Snap.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:17 How Will Inference Change and Evolve Over the Next 5 Years

09:17 Challenges and Innovations in AI Hardware

15:38 The Economics of AI Compute

18:01 Training vs. Inference: Infrastructure Needs

25:08 The Future of AI Chips and Market Dynamics

34:43 Nvidia's Market Position and Competitors

38:18 Challenges of Incremental Gains in the Market

39:12 The Zero Buy-In Strategy

39:34 Switching Between Compute Providers

40:40 The Importance of a Top-Down Strategy for Microsoft and Google

41:42 Microsoft's Strategy with AMD

45:50 Data Center Investments and Training

46:40 How to Succeed in AI: The Triangle of Products, Data, and Compute

48:25 Scaling Laws and Model Efficiency

49:52 Future of AI Models and Architectures

57:08 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

01:00:52 Why OpenAI's Position is Not as Strong as People Think

01:06:47 Challenges in AI Hardware Supply

Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO @ Mercor, an AI recruitment platform and one of the fastest-growing companies in technology. They have scaled to $70M in ARR in just 24 months. They are famed for working 6 days per week, 9AM to 9PM. All of their founders are Thiel fellows, they are also the youngest unicorn founders ever with the fundraise announced today raising $100M led by Felicis at a $2BN valuation.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:36 How Debating Makes The Best Founders

06:05 Do People Treat You Differently When a Unicorn Founder

10:58 Scaling to $70M ARR in 24 Months

13:42 How Culture Breaks When Scaling So Fast

23:49 The Future of Foundation Models

24:05 OpenAI vs Anthropic

24:32 Data: Synthetic vs Human

27:10 The Future of Programming and AI

28:15 The Impact of AI Tools on Software Development

28:51 Why Software Will Become Commoditised

29:55 Network Effects and Marketplaces

33:13 Raising From Benchmark After a Helicopter Ride

37:30 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections

Jonathan Ross is the Founder & CEO of Groq, the creator of the world's first Language Processing Unit (LPUTM). Prior to Groq, Jonathan began what became Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first-generation TPU chip. Jonathan next joined Google X's Rapid Eval Team, the initial stage of the famed "Moonshots Factory", where he devised and incubated new Bets (Units) for Google's parent company, Alphabet.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

04:20 Interview with Jonathan Ross Begins

04:59 Scaling Laws and AI Model Training

06:22 Synthetic Data and Model Efficiency

12:01 Inference vs. Training Costs: Why NVIDIA Loses Inference

17:06 The Future of AI Inference: Efficiency and Cost

18:15 Chip Supply and Scaling Concerns

20:57 Energy Efficiency in AI Computation

25:40 Why Most Dollars Into Datacenters Will Be Lost

31:05 Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments

41:11 Distribution of Value in the AI Economy

42:10 Stages of Startup Success

43:17 The AI Investment Bubble

45:00 The Keynesian Beauty Contest in VC

48:40 NVIDIA's Role in the AI Ecosystem

53:39 China's AI Strategy and Global Implications

57:51 Europe's Potential in the AI Revolution

01:10:14 Future Predictions and AI's Impact on Society