The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Sam Altman vs Elon Musk: The $100BN Battle | The Implosion of Thinking Machines | Can VC Survive Public Market Pricing Today? | ClickHouse and Replit's New Rounds: Analysed
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
If Figma isn't good enough, what hope is there for the rest of us in software? I look at my portfolio. What the hell am I going to say at board meetings this week, Rory?
Chapter 2: Can VC survive with public market prices today?
It's going to be the gift that keeps on giving. If you're the kind of person who slows down at a traffic accident, in other words, if you're like 90% of humanity, you're going to be slowing down every time the depots come out. It's going to be great. If I just stayed at Stripe and just played Minesweeper, I could be worth 10 billion. Elon's in an asymmetric win-win situation and OpenAI is not.
Advertising is not valueless to consumers when it's perfectly executed.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it is my favorite show of the week. Jason Lemkin, Wario Driscoll. discussing the biggest news in tech. This week, my word, we have a lot to discuss. We have can venture survive when public markets price assets the way they are today?
Sam Altman versus Elon Musk, the $100 billion fight that is about to ensue, the implosion of thinking machines, Replit and ClickHouse's new multi-billion dollar rounds, this and so much more.
Chapter 3: What led to the implosion of Thinking Machines?
I always want your feedback. Let me know what you think of these shows. Harry at 20VC.com. 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?
Chapter 4: What are the implications of the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI legal battle?
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. Get a .tech domain.
After .tech establishes your digital presence, Checkout powers the payments experience your customers see. Digital commerce is exploding, but payments are still where revenue leaks. Checkout.com launched in 2012 to fix that. They don't try and be everything to everyone.
Chapter 5: Can OpenAI succeed in the advertising space?
No, they just do one thing better than anyone. Digital payments, cloud native, sub 500 millisecond latency, and 99.999% uptime. Today, that bet has paid off with a $12 billion valuation and 65 plus merchants, each processing over a billion dollars annually. 65 doing over a billion annually is insane. Checkout powers $300 billion in e-commerce for brands like Uber, Klarna, eBay, Vinted and more.
Now they're building for agentic commerce, where AI agents buy on behalf of your customers in real time, partnering with Visa, MasterCard, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. 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. There's data all over the place. There's legacy tech and manual workarounds.
It's a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart.
Chapter 6: What are the details of ClickHouse's $15BN deal?
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.
Chapter 7: How did Replit achieve a $9BN valuation?
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.
Team, I am excited to be back. I'm excited to be back. We've got a lot of stuff to go through this week. And I wanted to start with a really optimistic view of public markets, which makes me question whether venture today as a model can still make money. Because when we look at Figma down to pre-IPO levels, when we look at Datadog, now 20% down, even co-attached.
Chapter 8: What types of deals do VCs want to pursue today?
Monday, killed. We talked before about pager duty. Consistently, we're just in the dumps of public markets. How do we analyze this? And do public market multiples today make the venture model increasingly challenging?
No, they don't. Because the public markets, actually, it's almost the exact opposite. Those multiples, what they say is when companies go X growth, they get much lower multiples, right? Slow growth companies get low multiples. High growth companies get absurdly high multiples.
And, you know, you could have also cited at Palantir at 70 times forward sales for a 45% grower, every venture capital is going to make a trillion dollars. So what you're really saying is the markets are just basically doing what they always do. They're sifting and they're basically saying low growth. We're going to value them very low and perhaps too low. We can come back to that in a second.
And so that's what's really going on here. So it's not a, oh, tech is doomed. What it is, is it's a sifting and a sorting. Things that look like they're going X growth are getting thrown out, getting discarded at pretty low valuations. And things that are perceived as exciting and on trend are getting very high valuations. And venture is nothing if not a trend business.
So I would argue for venture, it's pretty good. It just reinforces the dynamic of this business. It's the always be in the hot stuff and you'll be fine. If you're in the trailing edge stuff, you're toast. Goodness, here's how I think about it. Just be more pragmatic. If Figma isn't good enough, what hope is there for the rest of us in software?
I'm not saying that there aren't folks that are exploding, the ones we know, the 11 labs and the replets and the lovables. But I feel like none of the unicorns are better than Figma, almost none of the prior. And if Figma isn't good enough, It is not a great IPO. I'm not even sure it's a great public. It's a great product, right? I'm not even sure it's a great public company.
And I look at my portfolio. What the hell am I going to say at board meetings this week, Rory? Great job, guys. But have you seen Figma? Yeah. But hang on, I'm just going to say something. Great job, boys. Great job, lads. This is the problem with anchoring. Figma, it's a little bit down from its IPO. But then all the screen, it's hugely down from when all retail priced it the day after the IPO.
If you look at it versus the IPO, you're right. It's still down a little, but it's not nearly as catastrophic. It's still a $12 billion market cap company. It's still growing. It's still trading at 10 times forward sales, growing at 30% plus. It's an up. awesomely good company, that's just the value. In other words, 10 times- Maybe not if you invested at eight or six though.
Again, the message is really clear. When you pay up for high growth companies and the growth slows even a little, and the belief goes out of the multiple, You're in for a long, hard haul. And we've come back to this, I think, a few times before you can be valued on free cash flow.
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