Ev Williams

speaker

383 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Ev Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20VC: SpaceX Soars to $2.7TRN | Anthropic's Fable Banned by US Government | Wix and Adobe Hit All-Time Lows | Mistral Raising at $20BN and The Case for Sovereign Models | Fin Acquired by Salesforce for $3.6BN · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

And so I do think just the talent, the capital and the focus over a long period of time to actually be best in class at pre-training, at mid-training, at post-training, doing everything that you've done

or doing everything that you need to do in order to create a really, really good model is an extremely scarce skill set.

And I don't think it's this fungible thing where everyone's going to be able to do it.

And so I don't know if that leaves people where maybe the answer for a lot of countries is to just take an open weights model from China or elsewhere, post-train or fine tune their own version and have that be what they start from.

I also don't think that it's just this trivial thing that every country or every region can have their own sovereign player because most of the sovereign players, they've fallen far behind.

Like Mistral itself has fallen very far behind on the actual model side.

And they've done a very good job becoming this inference platform and the FDE model and all these things.

But outside of China, there's been no great model producers besides people at the frontier.

It's a complete and utter failure on our part.

And I think we'd all say that.

And we had dinner with some of the leadership of another, one of the other best funds in the Valley that also, they have a large position now, but they weren't early in the model providers either.

You can't be in a situation where you have a chance to make a 30X on scale of capital

if you want to claim that you're one of the best firms in the valley and you have a chance to make a 30x on scaled capital in four or five years and you don't do that that's always a failure so that's always it's always a failure um no matter the way you cut it so it sucks so it's great that we did a bunch of other amazing investments these were all obviously before my time but you know the sierras and fireworks and lagoras and records and lane chains and agents of the world in that fund and many others as well and so the the funds obviously look look awesome but

But no, it stings, especially when all your friends, you know, are sending you their implied look through ownership of Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX.

You know, those are eye-watering numbers.

And so it definitely stings.

Yeah, congrats to you, Rory.

Huge one.

And I think that Owen and the team have laid out the golden path for pre-AI SaaS companies and what they need to do in terms of burning the boats to getting to a great outcome.

There's a partner here at Benchmark that says any liquidity for pre-AI SaaS companies is top decile performance, any liquidity at all.

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