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

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

Harry Stebbingswww.thetwentyminutevc.com
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.

Episodes

20VC: The Biggest Lies of Silicon Valley, Why Entrepreneurship is Not For Everyone, Why VCs are Out of Touch, Why Many Would Be Great Entrepreneurs Will Burn Out, Why You Should Let Your Children Suffer and Why You Will Choose The Wrong Partner with Nick

Nick Huber is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and content creator focused on real estate and small business. In the last 9 months, Nick has co-founded 6 companies including RE Cost Set, RecruitJet, Titan Risk, Blue Key Capital, Tax Credit Hunter, and WebRun Labs. His primary business, Bolt Storage, owns 1.8M sqft of self-storage facilities across 62 locations in 11 states. In Todays Episode with Nick Huber We Discuss: Wealth: What the richest families in the world all understand and what the ma...

Aug 21, 202358 min

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 Software Engineers & Future of Jobs with Richard Socher

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 de...

Aug 18, 202346 min

20Growth: Why Product-Market Fit is Not Enough, Revenue Does Not Create Usage, Metrics Must Be Before Strategy, Why it is Always Better to Concentrate than Diversify Marketing Channels and Secrets from Hubspot's Growth Engine with Brian Balfour @ Reforge

Brian Balfour is the Founder and CEO of Reforge . Previously, he was the VP of Growth @ HubSpot. Prior to HubSpot , he was an EIR @ Trinity Ventures and founder of Boundless Learning and Viximo. He advises companies including Blue Bottle Coffee, Gametime, Lumoid, GrabCAD, and Help Scout on growth and customer acquisition. In Today's Episode with Brian Balfour We Discuss: 1. Entry into Growth and Lessons from Hubspot: How did Brian make his entry into the world of growth? What does Brian know now...

Aug 16, 202358 min

20VC: Scaling Wait But Why to 600,000 Subs; Behind the Scenes on The Research Process, How to Learn Entirely New Topics Fast, The Writing Process and Building Good Habits & The Distribution Process and the Business Behind the Blog with Tim Urban

Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator and co-founder of Wait But Why , a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of half a million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Tim’s 2016 TED main stage talk is the third most-watched TED talk in history with 66 million views. In 2023, Tim published his bestselling book ...

Aug 14, 202359 min

20VC Roundtable: NEW FORMAT: Why the Seed Investing Model is Broken, How to Make Money at Seed Moving Forward; Who Wins and Who Loses, Why Venture Value Add Platforms are BS and Failed and Why There Will be an IPO per Week in H2 2024

Sam Lessin is a Co-Founder and Partner @ Slow Ventures with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Robinhood, Slack, Solana, PillPack and many more unicorn companies. Prior to Slow, Sam was a VP Product at Facebook having sold his company to Meta. Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors , one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms investing today with a portfolio including the likes of Klarna, Kavak, Quinto Andar, Credit Karma and more. As for Frank, prior to QED, Frank w...

Aug 11, 202354 min

20VC: The Memo: The State of the VC Market: Why Seed Funds Can't Invest in "Hot Startups" Anymore, Why Series A & B is Terrible, Why the IPO Market Will Explode in 2024 & Why VC DD is BS & Every VC Has More Fraud in their Portfolio with Jason Lemkin

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia , Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product. In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin We Discuss: 1. WTF is Happening At Seed Right Now: Why does Jason believe seed is more active than ever? Is the pricing of se...

Aug 09, 20231 hr 9 min

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 bigge...

Aug 07, 202344 min

20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela

Ilir Sela is the Founder and CEO of Slice , the all-in-one ordering and marketing tech platform for local pizzerias. Through its partnerships, Slice has driven over $1B in earnings for over 18,000 independent pizzerias nationwide. Fun fact, Slice is also one of the largest employers in Macedonia and at one point, employed so many people there, they had to start their own school to train more people. Before Slice, Ilir started Nerd Force and sold it in 2008. Huge thanks to Jeff Richards (GGV) and...

Aug 04, 202346 min

20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp

Lori Jimenez is the Chief Revenue Officer at WorkRamp where she is responsible for sales, customer success, solutions engineering, sales development, and revenue operations. Over her 25-year career, Lori has a track record of scaling high-growth GTM teams at companies including Google, TripActions/Navan , Facebook, and Box. In Today's Episode with Lori Jimenez We Discuss: 1. From a First Sales Job at 15 Years Old to Leading Sales Teams at Google and Facebook: How Lori made her foray into the wor...

Aug 02, 202352 min

20VC: Marcelo Claure & Shu Nyatta on Lessons from Investing $7.5BN at Softbank & Why Dumb Money has Gone, Why "LATAM is Under Construction" and the Next 10 Years Will Be the Best & Investing Lessons from Missing Nubank & OpenAI & Investing in FTX

Marcelo Claure is the Founder & CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm. He is the Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Bicycle Capital, a $500M Latin America-focused growth equity fund, and was appointed Chairman in Latin America of SHEIN , the global #1 on-demand fashion company in the world. Claure was also the CEO of SoftBank Group International where he launched SoftBank’s $8B Latin America Funds, and had direct oversight for SoftBank's operating compani...

Jul 31, 202358 min

20VC: Four Criteria to Assess Great Founders, Why and How the Best Leaders Make the Wrong Decisions 40% of the Time, Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400 and Making $1BN of EBITDA with Stephane Kurgan, Venture Partner @ Index Ventures

Stephane Kurgan is widely considered one of the best operators in Europe. During his tenure as COO @ King, King went from $65m to $2.4B in bookings, from 100 to 2,400 employees, and did a $7B IPO before being acquired by Activision Blizzard. Prior to joining King, Stephane served as CFO of Tideway Ltd. (acquired by BMC Software) and was the co-founder and CEO of Digital Reserve. Today, Stephane serves as a Venture Partner at Index Ventures , one of the leading venture firms of the last decade an...

Jul 28, 202349 min

20Growth: Biggest Growth Lessons from Instacart and Opendoor, Why 70% of Growth Experiments Should Fail and How to Fail Fast, How to Hire a Growth Team; Secrets and Tips & Why Operator Investors WIll be the Best Investors in 10 Years with Sri Batchu @ Ram

Sri Batchu currently leads Growth at Ramp . He previously led Growth Strategy and Operations at Instacart where he also helped grow their Ads business. Prior to that, he was one of the first 50 employees at Opendoor where he built, scaled, and managed a variety of business teams including Analytics, Sales, and Pricing. During his time, the company grew from $100M to $5B+ revenue and to 1500+ people. He started his career in management consulting at McKinsey and also held various investing roles ...

Jul 26, 202358 min

20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G

Adam Mosseri is the Head of Instagram , where he is responsible for overseeing the engineering, product, and business teams and leading Meta’s efforts on creators and Reels. Adam has been at Meta for more than fifteen years. He started at Meta as a designer for Facebook's mobile app before moving to product management, where he led the Facebook News Feed product and engineering teams, and served as the Head of Facebook News Feed. Adam began his career founding a design consultancy focused on gra...

Jul 24, 20231 hr 10 min

20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai

Jean-Denis Greze is Chief Technology Officer at Plaid where oversees global product business units across North America and Europe. Prior to joining Plaid , Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Jean-Denis is also a prolific angel investor with a portfolio including the likes of Nex Health, Merge.dev and Rupa Health to name a few. In Today's Episode with Jean-Denis Greze We Discuss: 1. The Journey to One of the Most Powerful CTOs: How JD made his way into the world of tech with his ...

Jul 21, 202350 min

20Product: The Secret to Successful Onboarding from Notion and Airtable, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make in PLG Today& Why 90% of Onboarding Today is Done Poorly with Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth @ Notion

Lauryn Isford is the Head of Product Growth at Notion , managing Notion's product-led growth engine and self-serve business. Before Notion, she led growth at Airtable, and previously worked on growth teams including Meta, Dropbox , and Blue Bottle Coffee. Lauryn is an active angel investor and advisor supporting companies building product-led go-to-market motions. In Today's Episode with Lauryn Isford: 1. From Blue Bottle to Airtable and Notion: How did Lauryn first make her way into the world o...

Jul 19, 202347 min

20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport

Dave Clark is the CEO of Flexport , the global freight forwarder and logistics platform that has now raised over $2.5BN to build the category leader. Prior to Flexport, Dave began his career at Amazon in 1999 as an Operations Manager, working his way up to become the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business in 2021. By the time Dave left, he was responsible for over 1 million employees. Dave spearheaded the launch of Amazon Robotics and grew the company’s logistics divisions to include Amazon...

Jul 17, 202343 min

20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV

Sheel Mohnot is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Better Tomorrow Ventures , a $225M fund that leads rounds in pre-seed and seed-stage fintech companies globally. Sheel and Jake (his co-founder) invested for many years together before founding BTV and wrote checks into Mercury, Flexport, Ramp , and Hippo Insurance to name a few. As for Sheel, before BTV he ran 500 Fintech for close to 7 years, and before that was a founder, founding two companies, both of which were acquired. In Today's Episode...

Jul 14, 202349 min

20Sales: Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox: Five of the Biggest Lessons on Starting, Scaling and Managing Sales Teams from 25 Years Leading the Best with Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian

Kevin Egan is the Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian and brings more than 25 years of enterprise sales experience and leadership to the company. Prior to his current role, Kevin served as the Vice President of North America Sales at both Slack and Dropbox and has held various senior sales leadership positions at Salesforce. In Todays Episode With Kevin Egan We Discuss: 1. The Makings of a Truly Great Enterprise Sales Leader: How did Kevin first make his way into the world of enterprise...

Jul 12, 202337 min

20VC: Simon Sinek on Trust; How it is Gained and Lost | Why Millennials Avoid Conflict | How to Listen Effectively | What Makes The Best Feedback and How to Provide It | Why Humans Do Not Change & How To Find Out Who You Really Are

Simon Sinek is an optimist and author, as we discuss in the show today. Simon is best known for his TED Talk on the concept of WHY (62M views) , and his video on millennials in the workplace (80M views in 7 days). Simon is also a bestselling author including global bestseller Start with WHY, Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game. In addition, Simon is the founder of The Optimism Company, a leadership learning and development company, and he publishes other inspiring thinkers and doers through h...

Jul 10, 202352 min

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 @ Contextual AI

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 Comp...

Jun 30, 202342 min

20VC: The Rent the Runway Memo: How Paid Marketing & Growth Hacking Ruined a Generation of Companies, When Will Rent the Runway Be Profitable & How Does it Compare to Other Fashion Co's and Why "I Wish I Ran My Startup Like a Public Company"

Jennifer Hyman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, the world’s first and largest shared designer closet. Under Jennifer’s leadership, RTR has made history by being the first company to go public with a female founder/CEO, COO, and CFO. Jennifer serves on the Board of The Estée Lauder Companies and Zalando, and also is a Founding Member of the NYSE Board Advisory Council, a Member of the Women.nyc Advisory Board and a Member of the Launch with GS Advisory Council for Goldman Sachs. In T...

Jun 28, 202340 min

20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios

Akin Babayigit is a serial entrepreneur and an active angel investor. He is currently the Founder and COO of Tripledot Studios, one of the fastest-growing mobile gaming companies in the world, which was recently valued at over $1.4BN. In just 4 years, Tripledot grew to generate several hundred million dollars per year in revenue and currently entertains over 50 million people every month. Tripledot was recently named as the #1 fastest-growing European company by FT , as well as being named as th...

Jun 26, 20231 hr 7 min

20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview

Rob Go is a co-founder and Partner at NextView , one of the leading seed firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Attentive, Devoted Health, Whoop , and Grove Collaborative. Prior to co-founding NextView, Rob was an investor at Spark Capital and held product and product marketing roles at Ebay. He began his career as a consultant at The Parthenon Group. In Today's Episode with Rob Go We Discuss: 1. Entry into the World of Venture: How a cold call from a VC firm led to Rob entering the...

Jun 23, 202355 min

20Growth: How to Master PR and Comms, How to Get Your Startup Written About; Press Releases, Fundraising Announcements, Embargos etc & Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users with Gina Gotthilf, Co-Founder @ Latitud

Gina Gotthilf is a Co-Founder and COO at Latitud , an a16z-backed platform supporting the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America through digital products, a community and fund. Previously, Gina led growth and marketing at Duolingo from 3 to 200 million users via organic strategies and was part of the executive team. She also worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign, helping oversee the creation of digital ad campaigns at a historical budget, and led growth and communi...

Jun 21, 202355 min

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, Founder & CEO @ Nabla

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 Luc...

Jun 19, 202356 min

20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

Noah Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack , overseeing the product team’s strategy and development. Over his seven years at Slack, Noah has led various parts of the product organization, including the self-service SMB business and product-led growth; the Virtual HQ team that launched huddles and clips; and the search and machine learning teams. Prior to Slack, Noah served as SVP of Product and Analytics at Foursquare. He started his career at Google leading the structured data search team...

Jun 16, 202352 min

20VC: UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak on Investing More in AI Safety Research Than Any Other Country in the World, How AI Changes the Future of Education, His Top 5 Priorities as Prime Minister Today & How to Make the UK the Centre of AI

Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was previously appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer from 13 February 2020 to 5 July 2022. He was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 24 July 2019 to 13 February 2020, and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government from 9 January 2018 to 24 July 2019. Before entering the world of politics, Rishi co-founded an investment firm. In Today's Episode with Rishi Sunak We Discuss: 1. The...

Jun 14, 202322 min

20VC: Larry Summers on How to Manage Inflation; Should We Increase Rates Even Higher, Why We Need To Change The US Tax System, Why Europe is a Museum, China is a Jail and Bitcoin is an Experiment & How a Trump Win Would Hurt the US Economy

Larry Summers is the Former Treasury Secretary and one of America's leading economists. In addition to serving as 71st Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Summers served as Director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, as President of Harvard University , and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank. Huge thanks to Sarah Cannon for the intro to Larry today. In Today's Episode with Larry Summers We Discuss: 1. The Journey to Being One ...

Jun 12, 202340 min

20VC: What are the World's Tech Leaders Running From? Fear? Insecurity? Poverty? What Drives the Best with Orlando Bravo, Bill Ackman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Parker Conrad, Tobi Luttke, Brian Armstrong and more..

Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo . He led Thoma Bravo’s early entry into software buyouts and built the firm into one of the top private equity firms in the world. Tobi Lütke is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shopify , the powerhouse company allowing anyone to start and grow their e-commerce business. Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber , where he has managed the company’s business in more than 70 countries around the world since 2017. Parker Conrad is the Founder &...

Jun 09, 202328 min

20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw

Rich Liu is the CRO @ Everlaw and a unicorn GTM exec having scaled five multi-billion dollar tech unicorns across two IPOs, a successful acquisition, and numerous funding rounds. Prior to Everlaw, Rich architected the GTM motions for companies like Navan (TripActions), MuleSoft, and Meta (Facebook). As a result of his incredible success, Rich has been recognized as a 2021 Top 100 Global Sales Leader. In Today's Episode with Rich Liu We Discuss: 1. Entry into the World of Sales: How Rich made his...

Jun 07, 202351 min
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