20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried
episode
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
1h 8m
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What are the dangers of the 'Scaling Laws are Dead' rumor?
Our guest today is the most prominent AI investor in the ecosystem, Ange Midha. Why is he the most prominent? Three reasons. Number one, he's one of the founding investors of Anthropic. Number two, he led AI investments for Andreessen Horace, where he made investments in Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Sesame, among others.
What are the four bottlenecks hindering super intelligence?
And then third and finally, today he's the founder of AMP, where he provides compute and invests in the world's best AI companies. But before we dive into the show today, you have the idea, but often with AI tools, you hit a wall. Well, Base44 is where that friction disappears, turning how you talk into how you build. Full stack web and mobile apps, sites, autonomous super agents, all built in minutes, not weekends spent on damn configuration. Base44 ships it all out of the box. The backend, the database, the authentication, and the hosting.
Where will value accrue in an AI-driven world?
It handles the heavy lifting.
Why is Europe building a 'Sovereign Stack' against US dominance?
So so you can just stay in the flow. It doesn't just replace the busy work, it multiplies you.
What happened during the early days of Anthropic and why did 21 VCs turn it down?
It makes you so much more capable, an effective version of yourself. In this market, being fast is the baseline, but to win, you gotta be first. And Base44 is that edge. It's the move that lets you skip the troubleshooting and get straight to the breakthrough.
Why are successful AI startups moving away from a profit-first motive?
Launch your next big thing at Base44.com. That's Base44.com. After Base44 helps you launch, Corgi helps you cover what comes next. My word, what an arresting first line. Get your ass covered with Corgi insurance, and I'll tell you why. If you're running a business right now, you already know this pain all too well. Getting insurance, it's really slow, it's confusing, and my word, it's full of paperwork. Well, that's exactly why Corgi is here to change the game. Corgi is the first and only insurance carrier designed specifically for tech companies, allowing you to get covered in minutes instead of days. Corgi provides essential coverages for all growth stages, such as DNO, E&O liability, cyber, commercial, general liability, and more.
Get your ass covered, I love the way we say ass, with Corgi Insurance alongside thousands of other startups at corgi.com forward slash 20VC today. That's corgi.com forward slash 20VC. You won't regret it. While Corgi handles the coverage, Turing handles the talent.
What is the significance of the GPU wastage bubble in the AI landscape?
Frontier labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks, but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools, and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core blocker for agentic models. That's why NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, Gemini, and other leading lab partners
Is the CCP winning the full-stack AI systems race?
partner with Turing. Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next-generation data quality systems built from real-world operational traces, and coding datasets that stress models under conditions where failures matter. date changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls, and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur.
To find out how, visit Turing.com forward slash 20VC. That's T-U-R-I-N-G dot com forward slash 20VC. You have now arrived at your destination. And I am so looking forward to this, dude. I have stalked the shit out of you for the last three or four days. I spoke to Bing Gordon. I had a catch up with Bing before this. Very nice to speak to him. So thank you so much for joining me today, dude.
Thanks for having me. It's too long. It only took us, what, eight years, nine years? I forget when it was. I was 12 when we last did it. 12 in startup land is 25, right?
Dude, I'm confused. Help me out. I had Demis on the show the other day from DeepMind.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the dangers of the 'Scaling Laws are Dead' rumor?
0:00–0:20
2
What are the four bottlenecks hindering super intelligence?
0:20–0:54
3
Where will value accrue in an AI-driven world?
0:54–0:55
4
Why is Europe building a 'Sovereign Stack' against US dominance?
0:55–1:00
5
What happened during the early days of Anthropic and why did 21 VCs turn it down?
1:00–1:14
6
Why are successful AI startups moving away from a profit-first motive?
1:14–2:17
7
What is the significance of the GPU wastage bubble in the AI landscape?
2:17–2:37
8
Is the CCP winning the full-stack AI systems race?
2:37–1:08:48
Speakers
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