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

Max Freeman is SVP of Sales at Ramp. He joined the company as its first sales hire. By 2025, he was leading more than 300 salespeople, helping build Ramp's sales organisation from the ground up. Ramp's latest reported revenue exceeds $1.7BN, with a valuation of over $40BN. 

AGENDA:

00:00 Inside Ramp's Sales Playbook
05:00 How Do You Find Exceptional Sellers—and Why Bankers Make the Best?
18:00 How Do You Build an Outbound Machine That Scales Beyond Your SDR Team?
24:00 How Do You Shorten Sales Cycles Without Slashing Your Price?
27:00 How Should You Pay Your First Rep...

Joinin the trio today we have Dev Ittycheria, CEO @ MongoDB. 

AGENDA: 

04:00 OpenAI Nears $70B Run Rate—Anthropic's Lead Under Threat
12:00 Factory vs Cognition: Silicon Valley's Talent War Turns Ugly
23:00 Vinod Khosla Blasts His Own Portfolio Company
25:00 Reflection Launches Beam: America Strikes Back in Open-Source AI
34:00 ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B
37:00 Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B—Sequoia Cashes In
46:00 Vercel Hits $600M ARR as Agents Drive Half Its New Business
55:00 Former Groq Engineers Sue Over Nvidia's $17B Deal
01:01:00 Meta's Muse Steals the Show as OpenAI's Dots Underw...

Venky Ganesan is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, whose portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora and Higgsfield, alongside earlier hits Uber and Roku. Venky's own investment track record includes Palo Alto Networks, Upwork, Poshmark and Rover. He is a three-time Forbes Midas List investor and former Chair of the National Venture Capital Association.

AGENDA:

07:00 Can You Still Do Seed Without a $1 Billion Fund?
11:00 How Much of AI's Revenue Growth Is Actually Real?
19:00 When Is "Overpaying" the Smartest Investment You Can Make?
25:00 Does Ownership Still Matter in a World of Trillion-Dollar Outcomes?
31:00 Is "B...

Chase Lochmiller is the Co-founder and CEO of Crusoe. Crusoe builds and powers the data centres that companies use to train and run AI. It has raised approximately $6.4 billion in equity, including its latest $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation. Its backers include NVIDIA, Founders Fund, Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

AGENDA:

04:40 What Does Climbing Everest Teach You About Building a Company?
17:40 What's Really Stopping Us From Building Enough AI Data Centres?
25:50 Are Data Centres Really Driving Up Your Energy Bills?
28:05 Will Half of Planned AI Da...

AGENDA: 

00:00 Highlights: Jack Altman Joins The Trio
05:00 Anthropic's S-1 Leaks: $8B Operating Loss and $518B in Compute Commitments
10:00 Instinct Raises $1B at a $10B Valuation to Take On Meta
25:00 AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B
39:00 Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO as Shares Plunge 20%
43:00 AI Startup Seeks $10B Valuation Just One Week After Seed
47:00 Modal Hits $15B Valuation as Baseten Eyes $26B
54:00 OpenAI Reopens Its $200 Plan—and Halves What You Get
57:00 Oura Pulls IPO After Targeting a $16B Valuation
01:03:00 Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover
01:08:00 Bessemer Raises $5.75B as NF...

Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield, the third fastest scaling company to $1BN in ARR behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Reports suggest their latest funding round could place an $8BN valuation on the company. Prior to Higgsfield, Alex sold his prior company to Snap Inc for $166M. Alex was a competitive programmer as a kid, reaching third best in the world.

AGENDA: 

00:00 The Programming Prodigy Who Sold to Snap for $166M
09:00 Burning $10M: The Pivot That Saved Higgsfield
12:00 A $1B Revenue Run Rate in 18 Months; How Real Is It?
16:00 Will O...

Parag Agrawal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Parallel, building web search infrastructure for AI agents.
Parallel has announced $230M in funding from Sequoia, Khosla, and First Round Capital. Previously, he was CEO of Twitter, succeeding Jack Dorsey after serving as CTO and becoming the company's first Distinguished Engineer.

AGENDA:

03:00 What Breaks When Agents Search the Web 1,000x More?
07:00 Speed, Cost or Accuracy: What Do Agents Really Need?
13:00 Will Tiny Models Catch Today's Most Powerful AI?
16:00 Is Model Routing a Commodity?
21:00 Is Amazon Making a Mistake by Blocking AI Agents?

AGENDA:

04:35 Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO Delayed. Cracks in the AI Boom?
10:30 OpenAI Faces $278 Billion Cash Burn. Out of Money by 2028?
12:55 Meta's Muse Hits No. 1. ChatGPT Finally Has a Rival?
17:05 Amazon Blocks AI Shopping Agents. Shopify Welcomes Them.
24:10 ChatGPT Inventor Launches Jev. Vercel's Fastest Launch Ever.
34:15 A $40 Million Seed Round. Is Traditional Seed Investing Dead?
39:00 Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm. Harry Calls BS.
54:00 Factory Triples Its Valuation to $5 Billion. Coding Is the Mother Lode.
1:00:20 Legora Hits $200 Million ARR. Is $11 Billion Too Rich?
1:03:50 Crusoe's $3.9 Billion Round. Is the Data Centre...

Daniel Dines is one of the greatest European founders of the last decade. As the Co-Founder of UiPath, he has scaled the business to a market cap high of $ 44BN in 2021, with the company now generating $1.72BN in revenue, growing 15% year-on-year. The company raised $2BN before its IPO, backed by Sequoia, Accel, CapitalG, Coatue and Kleiner Perkins. 

AGENDA: 

05:00 Why Dario is Wrong About Millions of AI Einsteins?
13:00 Is AI Safety Becoming an Excuse to Kill Open Source?
21:00 Does UiPath Really Need 4,000 Employees?
28:00 Would You Help Train the AI That Could Rep...

Thomas Sohmers is the co-founder and chairman of Positron AI, building chips to make running AI dramatically cheaper and more energy-efficient. The company recently announced an $875 million Series C at a $5 billion valuation, backed by investors including Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, NEA, Valor Equity Partners and Netscape co-founder Jim Clark.

AGENDA:

04:30 Why Does AI Inference Need Different Hardware from Training?

10:25 What Is Nobody Telling You About AI's Token Economics?

13:10 Should We Really Slow Down the AI Frontier?

16:55 What Happens If America Slows Down—and China Doesn't?

19:30 Should We...

AGENDA:

03:40 Dario Calls to "Pace the Frontier"
11:30 Why the Fed Will Raid Anthropic if Needed 
21:50 Meta Launches Muse to Take On Instinct
28:30 Instinct Raising $1BN at $10BN—Would You Invest?
39:55 Miro Sells for $1.35BN After a $17.5BN Valuation
47:45 Could Sam Bankman-Fried Win His Freedom?
51:25 WordPress Power Struggle: Matt Mullenweg Ousted, Then Returns
1:01:20 Mistral Raises €3BN in Europe's Biggest-Ever Tech Round
1:05:00 Adobe's New CEO & Canva's Slowing Growth: SaaS Giants Under Pressure

David Morehead is one of the most respected CIOs in the endowment fund world as Chief Investment Officer at Baylor University, overseeing its $2.6BN endowment. Before joining Baylor in 2011, he was a senior portfolio manager at several Chicago hedge funds, investing across corporate securities, distressed debt and public and private energy.

AGENDA:

04:00 The Portfolio Construction of a $2.6 Billion University Endowment?

09:00 Why We Spend More Time on Porfolio Construction Than Manager Selection?

14:00 Should LPs Back VC's Biggest Names or Find the Next Breakout Manager?

21:00 How Baylor Made Millions in the...

AGENDA: 

04:30 How Do You Hire Exceptional People in the AI Era?
08:00 What Actually Works in Growth—and Why Can't You Trust Meta's Numbers?
17:00 How to Run Hundreds of Millions in Marketing with Zero Employees 
19:30 "Our Engineers Stopped Coding": What Stack Does Eight Sleep Use?
24:00 Is China Leaving the Rest of the World Behind?
35:00 How Do You Turn Superstar Athletes into Investors and Brand Ambassadors?
43:00 What Happens When Your Co-Founder Is Also Your Wife?
51:30 Should You Match Anthropic's Salaries—or Let Your Best People Leave?
59:30 Will Children Born Today Ever Need t...

AGENDA: 

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 i...

Jean-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 Li...

Cliff 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 Wa...

AGENDA: 

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 agen...

Aaron 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?

Eno 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 An...

AGENDA: 

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

Julien 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...

Jerry 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?

AGENDA:

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...

Andrew 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...

Matt 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 A...

AGENDA:

Alex 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 M...

David 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"

Special 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 Dr...

Anastasios 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 f...

Joon 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...

AGENDA:

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?

Matt 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 T...

Osvald 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...

AGENDA:

00:04 China's Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice
00:08 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...

Lin 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 Mo...

Fred 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 G...

AGENDA:

Avishai Abrahami is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wix, the NASDAQ-listed website creation platform serving millions of businesses worldwide. Today, Wix generates more than $2BN in ARR and has a market capitalization of approximately $2.1BN, after reaching a peak valuation of $17BN over the past two years. The company also acquired Base44, one of the fastest-growing AI application-building platforms, scaling it to $150M in ARR in record time.

AGENDA:

00:00 The SaaS Apocalypse: What Does Wall Street Still Not Understand About Wix?

07:00 Is the Market Valuing Wix's Core Business at Less Than Zero?

Arvind Jain is the Founder & CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI leader valued at $7.2 billion after raising more than $770 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, and more. Before Glean, Arvind co-founded Rubrik, helping build it into one of the world's leading cloud infrastructure companies before its successful IPO. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, working across Search, Maps, and YouTube.

AGENDA:

00:00 – The Shocking Truth About Frontier AI: 90% Is Already a Commodity
02:04 – Can OpenAI & Anthropic Own Enterprise AI? The Battle for the Workplace Begins
10:18 – Will Op...