The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Groq's $20BN NVIDIA Acquisition | Manus Acquired by Meta for $2BN | Why Sam Altman Does Not Care About Dilution | Navan Trading at 4x ARR & Why Going Public Does Not Make Sense Anymore | The Rise of Invisible Unemployment and Labour Markets in 2026
08 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What are the implications of Groq's $20 billion acquisition by NVIDIA?
Everyone's coming for NVIDIA now. NVIDIA's numbers are going to crush this year, but we're going to see all the daggers really coming out. In the end, words are words and half a billion dollars is life-changing, right? No, no, no. I just think for venture, this is the era of the spite startup. No one ever said to Winston Churchill, congratulations, you won World War II on budget.
They just said, congratulations, you won World War II. Honestly, I think the most important thing that's going to happen this year is when we are in AI 24-7. I do genuinely think you can identify a top 0.1% founder without talking to them. I've done multiple billion dollar exits from cold inbound. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. It is back. Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll.
I have missed this over the holidays. And my word, what a schedule we have for you today. Grok acquired for $20 billion by NVIDIA. Manus acquired for $2 billion by Meta.
Chapter 2: Did Meta sell Manus too early for $2 billion?
Then we have Navan trading at 4X ARR. And what that means for companies considering going public and so much more. But before we dive into the show today, I run the 20VC Fund and I get this question from founders all the time. Oh, Harry, I can't find a good dot com. Do you have a good hookup? Well, let me tell you now, the answer is always going to be no. I don't have a guy or a gal for that.
I do have a recommendation, though. If you're building a tech startup, get a .tech domain. Tech startup, .tech domain. It could not be more obvious. As an investor, I appreciate founders who put thought into their branding. When I see .tech in your name, it tells me right away that tech is at the core of your build. It'll say that to your customers too.
A clean and sharp domain like .tech pays off in the long run. You know, nothing .tech, 1x.tech, Aurora, .tech, all of these great tech companies, they all use .tech as their domain. These are my two cents. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it.
Chapter 3: How does OpenAI's stock-based compensation strategy work?
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Chapter 4: Will AI eventually replace venture capitalists?
Now, if you want payments built for what's next, talk to the team at Checkout.com. That's Checkout.com. Once Checkout gets customers through the paywall, Invisible helps you scale your operations with on-demand talent and processes. Why don't we hear more real AI success stories from big companies? The models are insanely good, but implementation is the problem. It's really, really hard.
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Chapter 5: What does it mean for Navan to be trading at 4x ARR?
Meet Invisible. Invisible trains 80% of the top models and then adapts them to the messy reality of your business. Take the Charlotte Hornets NBA team. Invisible took years of game tape and analog scouting notes to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and summer league championship win in weeks, not seasons.
Get the data in order first, and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise. If you want AI that hits the P&L, go to invisibletech.ai forward slash 20VC. You have now arrived at your destination. Guys, it is so good to be back. Now, so much happened while we were away. I want to start with one of the most prescient. Grok being acquired for 20 billion in cash.
It happened just before Christmas. Chamath obviously coming out as one of the big winners.
Chapter 6: What is invisible unemployment and how will it impact labor markets in 2026?
Price is 3x more than the last round price. How did we analyze this? I just had two thoughts. One is I was thinking a lot about both OpenAI buying up basically all the world's global RAM supply and Greg Brockman this week in the new year talking about how we will all be running 24 hours of inference by the end of the year.
Not all of us, but a subset of us of tech workers, of knowledge workers will be running AI 24 hours.
Chapter 7: How will education and work evolve in an AI-driven world?
I'm already up to a couple hours a day. I'm running AI myself. And so it's a world of inference, I think. And When we started this podcast, we talked about building models and LLMs and all of this. But JFC, if enough of us by the end of the year are running AI, maybe even 48 hours a day, 72 hours a day, multiple agents running 24 hours a day, inference is all of the growth.
And if Grok is even part of the answer, part of the existential answer for NVIDIA, it's worth it. And everyone's coming for Nvidia now, whether it's AMD, whether it's partnering with Broadcom, building your own chips. Nvidia's numbers are going to crush this year, but we're going to see all the daggers really coming out. We just saw the deck chairs being rearranged in 2025.
So I don't even know how great Grok is, but if it can possibly address this, it's worth taking out. I agree. I think a couple of things. One is Jason's comment on inference, I think, is key. It's that, broadly speaking, in the world of GPUs and TPUs, you know, there's two big picture tasks that every one of these AI companies have to do. You have to train your model once, and that's training.
And then you have to run your model every time I submit a query or a question, you're running a model, and that's inference. And the tasks are roughly similar, but they're not quite the same. NVIDIA is totally adequate for both. It's awesome for training. Grok had a particular edge for a certain kind of inference where it was very low latency, very deterministic.
In other words, where you have to predictably deliver low latency. And what we're seeing now, to Jason's point, is as you live in this always-on AI world, it's kind of irritating if you have a lot of latency. So there's a certain class of users for whom this was kind of a best in class option.
You know, one of my companies, Tavis, actually was a Grok customer precisely because for conversational AI with kind of real time digital presence, you can't have a frozen model. You need to be able to respond in real time. So there was a particular use case within inference for which Grok was best in class. So that's kind of the product comment. But the zoom out comment to Jason saying is this.
At a high level, NVIDIA's got the world's best business and the world's first or second largest market cap, depending on the day. They make a very complex technical product. They have a small number of customers whom they charge 75% gross margins to and kick off $100 billion a year in cash.
The last thing they need is anyone else wandering around the face of Silicon Valley who can make a vaguely comparable product. And precisely because Grok was able to make a vaguely comparable product, I think NVIDIA looked at the analysis and said $20 billion is less than 1% of our market cap and less than 20% of our annual free cash flow.
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Chapter 8: What are the future trends in the labor market and AI integration?
For that, we can buy up a competitor and eliminate that potential margin pressure. There's only five or six people that can exert margin pressure at all on NVIDIA. This was potentially one of them. And let's get it off the table. And, you know, it's kind of a reminder that startups is a it's a long game with lots of hard moments and then one great moment. A company started in 2016, 17.
The founders were part of the Google TPU team. just as the OpenAI and Atropic team were originally some of them part of the Google transformer team. In this case, they helped build the TPU chip at Google, spun out to do it themselves, funded by social and capital. It was a long walk in the woods.
You know, as recently as 2023, they were only doing sub $4 million in revenue, but suddenly the wave of AI hits. AI compute becomes, frankly, the most valuable intellectual property on the planet. They start to grow reasonably well, but it's still not a layup in terms of growth. You don't get to 20 billion, to be clear, on a revenue number.
This was, I think, a year ago, some $50 million in revenue. As I said, $4 million in 23, 40-ish in 24. You get there because it's a strategic asset that NVIDIA can take off the table for a modest amount of money relative to their absurdly gargantuan cash flow. So they did it. And as I say, I would love to know the dynamics of the discussion because it's an interesting thing in game theory.
When you have an asset that's only worth, say, $5 billion to you on a standalone basis, but is worth $40 billion to the acquirer on an acquired basis because it protects the $55 trillion market cap, how do you price that asset? There's no... finance weenie answer. And I say that because I'm often a finance weenie. I'm trying to look for, quote unquote, the right answer. What are the multiples?
Blah, blah, blah. None of that applies here. This was a poker game. You know, you can imagine. I mean, I don't know what the dialogue was, but you sit there and go, it's worth five billion to me. I know it's a terrifying deal, but it's worth 50 billion to you. Let's talk. And I think 20 billion, as you say, it made the last round look really smart. It made everyone a ton of money.
And NVIDIA said done and moved on. My guess is in part, it was the willingness to do one of these acqui-hire type deals that made it palatable. Because NVIDIA is probably sitting there going, if we announce this as a classic, quote unquote, M&A, I got to believe that even in the current regulatory environment, someone at the FTC will have an opinion.
But if we just do this as a straight license hire and just get the deal done overnight, yeah, we pay more, but they probably paid more for what I'd call transactional compliance. In other words, we're going to give you $20 billion, you guys are going to start on Monday, and we're going to announce it as another fait accompli. So lots of fun stuff there.
Someone had a very busy but very profitable Christmas. Another thing I thought about on the deal just for venture, who do you bet on? Do you bet on what I've done in my career, which is the outsider, folks no one has heard of, the young kid from Portugal or Sydney that no one's heard of that figures something out?
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