20VC: The Twenty Minute VC
Fast, focused interviews with the top venture capitalists shaping AI investment. The pulse of where AI money is moving.
199 episodes curated
Episodes
20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could
Des Traynor is a Co-Founder of Intercom, and has built and led many teams within the company, including Product, Marketing, and Customer Support. Today Des leads all Intercom's R&D efforts, and parts of Intercom's marketing. In Today's Episode with Des We Discuss: 1. From Consultancy to Founding a Unicorn: What was the founding a-ha moment for Des and the team with Intercom? Why does Des believe that most startup advice is BS and outdated in 5 years? What does Des know now that he wishes he had known when he started? 2. LLMs: The World is Not Equal: What does Des mean when he says the world of
20VC Roundtable: Are IPOs Back? Is Growth Dead? What Does it Take to Raise a Growth Round Today? How Do VCs Solve The Liquidity Challenge? Will We See a Massive Resetting of Valuations? AI Hype Growth
Deven Parekh is a Managing Director at Insight Partners , one of the leading investing franchises of the last 25 years. Deven has made more than 90 investments since joining in 2000 including in the likes of Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Chargebee and Automattic (WordPress) to name a few. Woody Marshall is a General Partner @ TCV , one of the most successful growth funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, AirBnB, Spotify, LinkedIn and many more incredible companies. Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused o
20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hirin
Kevin Niparko is the VP of Product @ Twilio . Kevin joined Twilio through the acquisition of Segment where he spent an incredible 8 years in numerous different roles including as Head of Product. Before entering the world of product, Kevin was a Management Associate at the world-renowned, Bridgewater Associates . In Today's Episode with Kevin Niparko We Discuss: 1. From Bridgewater to Head of Product: How Kevin made his way from the world of asset management and analytics to leading product teams? What are 1-2 of Kevin's biggest takeaways from his time at Bridgewater with Ray Dalio? How did th
20VC: "How Being a Founder Almost Killed Me"; We Have Lied to a Generation of Founders | The Hardest Truths About Being a Founder Revealed | Why AI Co-Pilot is BS, Seat Pricing is Over & User Interfac
Christian Lanng is the Founder and Former CEO @ Tradeshift, a company he took from garage to unicorn raising over $900M for with a latest price of $2.7BN in 2021. Just last month, Christian stepped away from the company and is now Chairman @ Beyond Work , building a better work experience through AI native software. In Today's Episode with Christian Lanng We Discuss: 1. Burnout: When it Hits: How did Christian know when something was really seriously wrong? What were the signs? How did being a founder literally almost kill Christian? How was that not a wakeup moment? How does being a founder m
20VC: Are Foundation Models Becoming Commoditised? Do OpenAI and Anthropic of the World Have a Sustaining Moat? Why Smaller Models May Work Better? Why Incumbents with Data Power Win the AI War with C
Christian Kleinerman is the SVP of Product @ Snowflake . Before Snowflake, Christian spent close to 5 years at Google as a Senior Director of Product Management @ YouTube working on their infrastructure and data systems. Before YouTube, Christian spent over 13 years at Microsoft serving as General Manager of the Data Warehousing product unit where he was responsible for a broad portfolio of products. In Today's Episode with Christian Kleinerman We Discuss: 1. Lessons from the Greats: How did Christian first make his way into the world of product? What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from workin
20VC: The Biggest AI Leaders on What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size & Where Does The Value in AI Accrue; to Startups or to Incumbents
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com . Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI , building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. Alex Lebrun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nabla , an AI assistant for doctors. Prior to Nabla, he led engineering at Facebook AI Research . Alex founded Wit.ai, acquired by Facebook in 2015. Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ T
20VC: Lessons Building Nubank to the Largest Neobank in the World, How AI Changes The Future of Finance, Leadership Lessons from Sequoia's Doug Leone & What European and US Fintech Can Learn From LATA
David Velez is the Founder and CEO of Nubank , one of the largest and fastest-growing financial institutions in the world. 1 in 2 people in Brazil alone have a Nubank account. Nubank's purple credit card in Mexico is the highest-rated NPS product of any consumer product in the world. Before founding Nubank in 2013, David was a partner at Sequoia Capital between 2011 and 2013, in charge of the firm's Latin American investments group. Before Sequoia, David worked in investment banking and growth equity at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and General Atlantic. In Today's Episode with David Velez We
20VC: Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds & AUM is a Vanity Metric | Why 99% of Investments in AI Startups Will Go To Zero | Being a "Traction First" VC & Investing Lessons from Investing in Canva
Nikhil Basu Trivedi is Co-Founder & General Partner at Footwork , an early-stage focused venture firm investing its first fund. In his venture career, he has invested in the early rounds of several companies that have exited or are currently valued at over $1B, including Athelas, Canva , ClassDojo, Color Health, Frame.io, Imperfect Foods, Lattice , and The Farmer's Dog. Prior to Footwork, Nikhil was a Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, on the investment team at Insight Partners, and on the founding team at Artsy. In Today's Episode with Nikhil Basu Trivedi We Discuss: 1. From Summer Intern
20VC: Spending $2M to Train a Single AI Model: What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size | Hallucinations: Feature or Bug | Will Everyone Have an AI Friend in the Future & Raising $150M from a16z wit
Noam Shazeer is the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI , a full-stack AI computing platform that gives people access to their own flexible superintelligence. A renowned computer scientist and researcher, Shazeer is one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). He is a key author for the Transformer, a revolutionary deep learning model enabling language understanding, machine translation, and text generation that has become the foundation of many NLP models. A former member of the Google Brain team, Shazeer led the development of spelling cor
20VC: Why AI Models are not a Moat, Where Does the Value in AI Accrue; Startups or Incumbents, What the World Has Got Wrong About AI, Why AI Needs a New Story and Who is the Right People to Tell it wi
Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway , the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation. To date, Cris has raised over $285M for the company from the likes of Lux Capital, Felicis, Coatue, Amplify, and Nvidia to name a few. Runway's customers include academy-nominated movies, TV shows, media companies, and creatives across industries. In Today's Episode with Cris Valenzuela We Discuss: 1. From Childhood in Chile to Founding one of the Hottest AI Startups: What was the founding moment for Cris with Runway? His investors described Cris as an "outsider".
20Product: Enterprises are not Adopting AI Yet, When Will AI Break Into Enterprise, What are the Blockers, What Do Enterprises Need from AI & Why Services Companies Will Win in the Next 10 Years of AI
Howie Liu is the Founder and CEO @ Airtable , the fastest way to build apps for your business. To date, Howie has raised over $1BN with Airtable with the last round valuing the company at $11BN and an investor base including Benchmark , Thrive , Caffeinated, Greenoaks and Coatue to name a few. In Todays Episode with Howie Liu We Discuss: 1. Scaling into Enterprise: What are the single biggest challenges when moving from PLG to enterprise? Why does Howie believe you have only truly hit enterprise when you sign $1M contracts? How long did it take for Airtable to sign their first $1M ARR contract
20VC: Does Value Accrue to Incumbents or Startups in the AI Race, Why Model Size Matters More Than Data Size, Why Artificial General Intelligence is Far Away, Why Carpenters Will Be Paid More Than Sof
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com . Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford. In Today's Episode with Richard Socher We Discuss: 1. The Decade-Long Journey
20VC: Vinod Khosla on How AI Impacts The Future of Healthcare, Education, Income Equality, Geo-Politics, Music and Climate Change
Vinod Khosla is the Founder of Khosla Ventures , one of the leading venture firms of the last decade with investments in OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash , Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. Prior to founding Khosla, Vinod was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems. In Today's Episode with Vinod Khosla We Discuss: 1. The State of AI Today: Does Vinod believe we are in a bubble or is the excitement justified based on technological development? What are the single biggest lessons that Vinod has from prior bubbles? What is different about this time? What is Vinod conce
20VC: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size, Why The Google Employee Was Wrong; OpenAI and Google Have the Advantage & Why Open Source is Not Going to Win with Douwe Kiela, Co-Founder @ Contextua
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI , building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Last month Contextual closed a $20M funding round including Bain Capital, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and 20VC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. In Today's Episode with Douwe Kiela We Discuss: 1. Founding a Foundational Model Company in 2023: How did Douwe make his way into the world of AI and ML over a decade ago? What are some
20VC: Why No Models Today Will Be Used in a Year, Why Open Will Always Beat Closed in AI, Why Proprietary Data is Less Important Than Ever And Why EU AI Regulation is a Disaster with Alex Lebrun, Foun
Alex Lebrun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nabla , an AI assistant for doctors. Prior to Nabla, he led engineering at Facebook AI Research . Alex founded Wit.ai, an AI platform that makes it easy to build apps that understand natural human language. Wit.ai was acquired by Facebook in 2015. Prior to Wit, Alex was the Founder and CEO of VirtuOz, the world pioneer in customer service chatbots, acquired by Nuance Communications in 2013. In Today's Episode with Alex Lebrun We Discuss: 1. Third Time Lucky and Lessons from Zuckerberg: How did Alex make his way into the world of startups with the foundi