Mike Mignano

speaker

1,346 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Mike Mignano’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 Jul 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

Actually, we've talked to a number of companies building at various different levels of the stack that when you talk to them about their business model, they talk about building a routing layer and monetizing the routing layer.

I think it's a really interesting area that has a lot of opportunity and a lot of different companies are going to go after it because they see the potential.

It's a good question.

I think a lot of companies right now are thinking about charging a small margin on top of it.

And I think to your point, that might not be a great business model.

I put out a piece on X about this a few weeks ago, and a number of people chimed in.

with some of their ideas.

And one interesting idea I heard was this notion of almost a bounty model at the routing layer, where the routing layer gets rewarded for choosing the right model, right?

So if you choose the most efficient model or the best model for a certain task, that's when they collect a fee.

And I thought that was kind of an interesting idea.

Haven't necessarily seen it built out yet, but I thought it was a pretty interesting idea.

Maybe.

On the other hand, we've seen time and time again in the enterprise, in infrastructure specifically, that these infrastructure companies, they become deeply embedded in the developer workflows and in the developer ecosystems, and you just can't rip them out because it just becomes the gold standard.

So maybe somebody will build that routing layer that every developer adopts and never wants to remove.

Would you say it's unfair of me to say that USV missed the model game?

I think USV was playing a different game.

And that's actually been the history of USV.

Is the game not unbelievable returns in generational defining companies?

So USV, again, I think has never been afraid to take a position.

And I think USV did not invest in any of the big model layer companies.

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