20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge
episode
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
1h 4m
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You have to taste good things to have good taste. It is critical in vertical AI being one of the first. When you saw the announcements from OpenAI and Anthropic about forward deployed engineers and these partnerships with big private equity groups to go help their portfolios, if that wasn't a sign that there is absolutely an incredible opportunity for the foreseeable future for vertical AI, I don't know what is. We're in for a tsunami of healthcare needs and the system is not prepared to deliver it. They did the C and the A. USV was our business model initially. The more you can feel inevitable, the more you will be.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now joining me in the hot seat today, we have Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of Abridged. What I love about Abridged is, yes, it is a $5.3 billion company today. Yes, they have the best investors in the world in the company today, but they went through a five, six year wilderness period where they were founded in 2018. They did a seed round of five on 15. That level of dilution? Wow, those were the days. But now they are one of the hottest companies in AI, going to show that persistence and consistency in the face of people not always believing in you is the key to success. As I said, $300 million Series E last round at a $5.3 billion valuation. This is an incredible story, and I'm so happy to welcome Shiv at a Bridge.
But before we dive into the show today, here's a question for any founder listening. What would your marketing team do with an extra 30 hours a week? That's roughly what teams get back when they stop manually building every campaign, every workflow, every email. Right now, your best marketing people are spending their days cloning templates, configuring audience segments, and chasing data across systems. That's not what you hired them for. Conversion is the first marketing automation platform where AI agents handle the execution. Your team focuses on strategy, on messaging, and pipeline. The agents handle the rest, building campaigns, personalizing every touchpoint per account, and deciding the next best action automatically.
Whether that's pinging your AE, launching a retargeting sequence, or dropping someone into a nurture, the agents figure it out. And that's why over 4,000 B2B companies have already made the switch, including People Data Labs and Adaptive Security. So head on over to conversion.ai forward slash 20VC and get $10,000 off. That's conversion.ai forward slash 20VC for $10,000 off conversion. After Granola captures the conversation, Artisan helps start the next one. Meet Ava, the first autonomous AI BDR built by Artisan to run your entire outbound on autopilot.
Hey, Jason Lemkin from Sastr here. Artisan is S tier. We've replaced our entire outbound sales team with Artisan. I believe we've sent over 50,000 highly customized emails to Artisan. The open rate is twice what it was with humans and they close 100k deals day after day.
Ava sources leads from over 250 million contacts, enriches every prospect with intent signals, then writes and sends personalized multi-channel outreach, self-optimizing over time. When a lead replies, she handles objections and books meetings straight into your AE's calendars without any human input. Artisan is backed by Y Combinator and has raised $36 million to build the first truly autonomous AIBDR. Hire Ava, the AIBDR, and put your outbound on autopilot at artisan.co.co. And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years, I've watched some of the best founders and early go-to-market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work.
Well, that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI-native platform Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, lay in real-time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls, and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, drafts follow-up emails for you, and keeps deals moving forward.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:31
2
How did Abridge survive a five-year ‘wilderness’ to reach product-market fit?
5:31–34:47
3
How did USV’s cultural ‘music ritual’ influence Abridge’s early fundraising?
34:47–1:00:04
4
What is the difference between post-transformer, post-LLM and post-agent AI companies?
1:00:04–1:04:36
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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