The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Episodes
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO @ Mercor, an AI recruitment platform and one of the fastest-growing companies in technology. They have scale...
20VC: NVIDIA vs Groq: The Future of Training vs Inference | Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments: Who Wins | Data, Compute, Models: The Core Bottlenecks in AI & Where Value Will Distribute with Jonathan Ross, Founder @ Groq
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Ross is the Founder & CEO of Groq, the creator of the world's first Language Processing Unit (LPUTM). Prior to Groq, Jonathan began what ...
20VC: From Penniless Printing Shop Offices to Public Company and One of the Largest Entertainment Companies: The Story of LADbible | The Future of Content & Social Media | US vs Europe: Is Europe F****** with Solly Solomou
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Founder and CEO of LADbible Group, Solly Solomou has built one of the largest and most engaged digital media entertainment companies in the world. Und...
20VC: Monzo: The Greatest Turnaround in Tech: From £40M Revenues, Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS to $1BN in Revenue, Profitable and 10M Customers with TS Anil, CEO @ Monzo
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
TS Anil is the CEO @ Monzo, where he has been the mastermind behind the greatest turnaround in tech in the last 10 years. When TS took over at Monzo t...
20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fabien Pinckaers is the Founder & CEO of Odoo, one of the most incredible businesses that you might not have heard of. Built from the countryside of B...
20VC: Why Model Providers Will Kill Many Startups Moving into the Application Layer | Why Deepseek is not a Threat to OpenAI & Why OpenAI Beats Anthropic | Apps vs Models vs Infrastructure: Where is Value in AI with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake CEO
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO @ Snowflake, the $60BN public company with $3.5BN in revenue growing 30% per year. Sridhar joined Snowflake following his...
20Product: Product Secrets Behind Uber and Opendoor | How AI Changes the Role of the PM & The Product Development Process | How to Hire the Best Product Teams & What No One Does That Everyone Should Do with Brian Tolkin
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Tolkin is the Head of Product @ Opendoor where he has spent the last 6 years and is responsible for product strategy and product and design team...
20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Max Levchin is one of the great founders and technologists of our time. As the Founder and CEO of Affirm, he has built am $18.7BN monster in the buy n...
20VC: Lime's CEO on Going from Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | How Lime Built the Global Leader in Micromobility When Competitors Went Bust | Losing 90% of Revenues in COVID and The Uber Deal That Saved the Company with Wayne Ting
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wayne Ting is CEO of Lime. The global leader in micromobility, the first to achieve a fully profitable year (2022). Last year, Lime did over $600M in ...
20VC: Deepseek Special: Is Deepseek a Weapon of the CCP | How Should OpenAI and the US Government Respond | Why $500BN for Stargate is Not Enough | The Future of Inference, NVIDIA and Foundation Models with Jonathan Ross @ Groq
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Ross is the Co-Founder and CEO of Groq, providing fast AI inference. Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan started Google's TPU effort where he de...
20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness
24 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Carlos Delatorre is one of the legendary go-to-market leaders of the last 20 years. Today, Carlos is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Harness, where...
20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, is one of the fastest-growing gen AI companies and they recently raised a $130M series B. Investors i...
20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hussein Kanji is the Founder and Managing Partner of Hoxton Ventures, one of Europe's leading early-stage firms with mega wins in the form of Darktrac...
20VC: Monday.com: Scaling from $6M to $120M in ARR in 3 Years | How Monday Have Built the Best Performance Marketing Engine in SaaS | Going Upmarket, International and Multi-Product; The Biggest Lessons and Mistakes with Eran Zinman
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Monday.com is insane, turned down by most VCs, then scaled from $6M to $120M ARR in just three years. Today the company is public with a ...
20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Victor Riparbelli is the CEO and Co-founder of Synthesia, the world's leading AI video communications platform for enterprises. To date, Victor has ra...
20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shervin Pishevar is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Shervin is famed for leading Uber's Series B at Menlo alongside leading Warby Parker's Series ...
20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mikey Shulman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Suno, the leading music AI company. Suno lets everyone make and share music. Mikey has raised over $125M fo...
20VC: Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets: From $60BN to $400M and Back to $40BN | The Biggest Opportunities, Mistakes and Challenges Ahead for One of the Public Market's Only 100x Investments
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Carvana is one of the most wild stories in the public markets. The company IPO'd with a market cap of $2BN before skyrocketing to $60BN, only for the ...
20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mike Maples is one of the OG seed investors of the last two decades. As a co-founding Partner at Floodgate, Mike has been on the Forbes Midas List eig...
20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Matt Plank is Rippling's Chief Revenue Officer where he oversees all Sales and Account Management functions in the US and Internationally. Matt joined...
20VC: UiPath's Daniel Dines on Why Agents Do Not Mean RPA is F***** | Why We Have Reached the Upper End of Scaling Laws | The Future of Work in an Agent World and What Everyone Misunderstands About Enterprise AI
18 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Dines is the Founder & CEO @ UiPath, one of the most incredible journeys in startups. For 10 years, UiPath was a bootstrapped company that scal...
20VC: Reid Hoffman on The Trump Administration | Elon Musk and DOGE | The US Defence Budget, NATO and The War in Ukraine | China, Tariffs and TikTok | The Future of Chips, Nuclear Energy, Quantum Computing and Climate
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Reid Hoffman is one of the most impactful people in technology and startups. As a Founder he founded Paypal and Linkedin before moving to the investin...
20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Guillaume Moubeche is the Founder of Lempire, a company he has bootstrapped in the most competitive market in technology and scaled to a staggering $3...
20VC: The Future of War: Are We Ready & What Needs to Be Done | China, Russia and Trump: What Happens Now | Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | Torsten Reil, Co-Founder @ Helsing
11 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Torsten Reil is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Helsing, a new type of defence company providing artificial intelligence to protect our democracies. Tors...
20VC: Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff on The Future of LLMs | The Future of Agents | The Future of Labour | Management Lessons from Steve Jobs
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Marc Benioff is one of the iconic founders and visionaries of our time. From the founding of Salesforce 25 years ago, Marc has in many ways created an...
20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Zachary Bookman is Co-Founder and CEO of OpenGov, the GovTech cloud software leader that was acquired for a staggering $1.8BN earlier this year. Prior...
20VC: Revolut Founder Nik Storonsky on When and Where Revolut Will IPO & What Revolut Need to Do to Hit $100BN Valuation
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nik Storonsky is the Co-Founder and CEO of Revolut, one of the fastest-growing companies in the world with a $45BN valuation and 50M customers around ...
20VC: Grindr: The Most Insane Story in Startups | How the Chinese Bought and Lost Grindr | The Successful IPO with $300M Revenues and 40% EBITDA Margins | How Grindr Built a Free Cash Flow Machine
04 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
George Arison is the CEO of Grindr. The app that results in 40% of lesbian and gay marriages, the average user uses the app for 1 hour per day and sen...
20Product: Is an AI Winter Approaching | The Future of AI Software Development: What is Real & What is BS | OpenAI: WTF is Going on & How Far Into Application Layer Do They Go | The Future Role of Software Engineers with Guy Podjarny
29 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Guy Podjarny founded Tessl, Snyk and Blaze. Tessl is reimagining software development for the AI era and shaping AI Native Development. Snyk created a...
20VC: Why Price Sensitivity is BS | Why "Portfolios" are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy | Why the Best Investment Never Happen in "Fundraising Rounds" | What Europe Needs to do to Become a Superpower Again | Klaus Hommels, Lakestar
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Klaus Hommels is one of Europe's leading start investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Spotify, Airbnb, Facebook, Coinbas...
20VC: Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS | Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? | Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jason Citron is the Co-Founder and CEO of Discord, a voice, video and text platform for friends playing games. Jason has raised $1BN for the company a...
20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dan Fougere is one of the most successful sales leaders of the last decade. Most recently, Dan was Chief Revenue Officer for Datadog, growing revenues...
20VC: Turning $16.5M into $2.1BN; Lessons from the Greatest Venture Investment in European History: UiPath | Why VC is Not Being Commoditised | Why Price Does Not Matter | Lessons on Loss Ratio, Selling and Signalling with Cem Sertoglu
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cem Sertoglu is one of the great venture investors of the last decade. Cem is famed for writing the first check into UiPath and over several rounds tu...
20VC Alain De Botton on Why Companies Are Not Families | Why Status is Making You Miserable | Why Parents Want Their Kids to Fail | Why We Are Richer Yet More Anxious Than Ever & Why You Should Not Always "Be Yourself"
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alain De Botton is one of the greatest philosophers of our time. His work has had a profound impact on me more than any other. I have wanted to do thi...
20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Raman Malik is the Head of Growth at Perplexity where he is responsible for growth marketing, onboarding, activation, retention, and monetisation. Pri...
20VC: Bolt; The Most Insane Story in Startups | Turning a $5K Loan into an $8BN Company | Why Every VC Turned Down One of Europe's Biggest Winners | Competing with Uber & The Future of Micromobility and Self-Driving
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Markus Villig is the Founder and CEO of Bolt, a global mobility platform with more than 200 million lifetime customers in more than 50 countries and 6...
20VC: Anduril Co-Founder on How a Trump Administration Changes the Defence Industry | What Happens Between China vs Taiwan, Israel vs Palestine, Russia vs Ukraine | How Software Changes War & Why TikTok Should Be Banned with Matt Grimm
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Matt Grimm is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Anduril Industries, an American defense technology company that specializes in advanced au...
20VC: Sam Altman on The Trajectory of Model Capability Improvements: Will Scaling Laws Continue | Semi-Conductor Supply Chains | What Startups Will be Steamrolled by OpenAI and Where is Opportunity
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, one of the most important companies in history. OpenAI is on a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence...
20VC: Robinhood's Vlad Tenev on Founder Mode | Building 8x $100M Revenue Lines | Lessons from Raising $5BN and the Gamestop Saga | The Future of Artificial Intelligence, Wealth Management and Home Ownership
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Vlad Tenev is a Co-Founder and CEO of Robinhood, the commission free stock trading and investing app with a market cap today of $20.7BN. Over the incr...
20VC: Linear's Karri Saarinen How to be Grow Capital Efficiently in a World of BS Growth | How to Fundraise with Leverage | How to Select Investors and How to Give Them Homework in the Raise Process & Growth Lessons from Airbnb and Coinbase
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Karri Saarinen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Linear. The company has raised from some of the best in the business including Sequoia and Accel. Before f...
20VC: Why SaaS is Dead | Why AI First Companies Will Win | We are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent | Why Europe is F******* and We Need to Stop Whining with Daniel Khachab, Co-Founder @ Choco
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Khachab is the co-founder and CEO of Choco. Today, Choco's AI platform facilitates half of all food traded in major cities like New York, Paris...
20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Goldberg is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Chemistry, a $350M fund announced just yesterday with the mission to lead the best seed and Seri...
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
AJ Tennant is the Vice President of Sales & Success at Glean, Glean has more than 20x'd its revenue and 100x'd its user base in the just two and a hal...
20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner @ Kleiner Perkins and one of the greatest venture investors of our time. In the past, Mamoon has led rounds in Figma...
20Growth: Revolut's Chief Growth Officer on The Growth Playbook Revolut Used to Scale to $2.2BN in Revenue | How Revolut Launch and Grow Products | Why the Best PMs Don't Need A/B Tests & Why CAC is a BS Metric with Antoine Le Nel
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Antoine Le Nel is the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut, one of the fastest growing fintechs on the planet. Prior to Revolut, Antoine spen...
20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Zach Perret is the CEO and Co-Founder of Plaid, a technology platform reshaping financial services. To date, Zach has raised over $734M for Plaid from...
20VC: Investing Lessons from FC Seeding Uber, Airtable and Coupang | Why Pro Rata is the Original Sin in VC | Why Liquidity Has Died in 2024 | Why LPs are Pissed with VCs | The Hard Truth About Seed Fund Economics with David Frankel @ Founder Collective
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David Frankel is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Founder Collective, one of the best seed firms of the last decade. David has led rounds in com...
20VC: Why Most AI Investments Will Do Worse than the S&P 500 | Why Early Stage VC is F******* | The Danger of Kamala Harris and Why Trump and Vance are Best | Freedom of Speech, Censorship and Government Control with Eoghan McCabe @ Intercom
11 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Eoghan McCabe is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Intercom, one of the largest private software companies in the valley with hundreds of millions in revenue a...
20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE
09 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jeff Wang is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital Global Equities (SCGE), a public/private crossover investment firm with investments spanning from...
20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Eiso Kant is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poolside.ai, building next-generation AI for software engineering. Just last week, Poolside announced their $50...
20Product: How the Best Teams Do Product Reviews | What Everyone Gets Wrong in Hiring Product Teams | Product Lessons Leading Facebook App Monetisation Team to Billions in Revenue with Maria Angelidou, CPO @ Personio
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Maria Angelidou is a seasoned product leader, having spent close to a decade at Meta where she was VP of Product and General Manager for some of the ...
20VC: Bret Taylor: The AI Bubble and What Happens Now | How the Cost of Chips and Models Will Change in AI | Will Companies Build Their Own Software | Why Pre-Training is for Morons | Leaderships Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bret Taylor is CEO and Co-Founder of Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. Previously, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Sal...
20VC: How SHEIN Got So Big So Fast: Behind the Scenes at One of the Fastest Growing Companies in History with Donald Tang, Executive Chairman @ SHEIN
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Tang is the Executive Chairman of SHEIN, with oversight of public affairs, business strategy, corporate development, and finance. Donald began...
20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jeetu Mahtani was an early member of the HubSpot team. Under his leadership and the sales organization, the business grew its non-US revenue from $3M...
20VC: Benchmark's Eric Vishria on Where is the Value in AI: Chips, Models or Apps | Why Nvidia Will Not Be The Only Game in Town | The Commoditisation of Foundation Models | Which AI Apps Have Sustaining Value vs Hype and Short Term Revenue
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Eric Vishria is a General Partner @ Benchmark Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms. At Benchmark, Eric has served on over 10 boards incl...
20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dmitry Gurski is the Co-Founder and CEO of Flo Health, the leading women's health app and the first European femtech unicorn. Launched in 2015, Flo H...
20Growth: The 7 Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Packaging, Notifications, Discounts, Paywalls | The Breakdown with Phil Carter
20 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Phil Carter is one of the best growth leaders of the last decade helping world-class companies like Faire, Quizlet, and Ibotta accelerate their growt...
20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Akshay Kothari is Co-Founder at Notion, one of the fastest-growing companies of the last decade. Akshay has run every function in the company from sa...
20VC: Index's Shardul Shah on Why Market Size is a Trap | Biggest Lessons on Pricing from Leading Rounds in Wiz & Datadog | Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | How Index Makes Decisions and Why Growth & Early are the Same Investing Style
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Shardul Shah is a Partner at Index Ventures and one of the greatest cyber security investors of the last two decades. Among his many wins, Shardul ha...
20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mike Hudack is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sling, a peer-to-peer payments app whose vision is to simplify the way the world connects financially. Previ...
20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"
11 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David Schneider is a General Partner @ Coatue and one of the great operators of the last 20 years. Prior to Coatue, David was instrumental in Service...
20VC: Tinder Founder Sean Rad on Lessons Scaling Tinder to the Fastest Growing Consumer Social App in History | Leadership Lessons Scaling Tinder | The Future of Love, Dating and Social Media | The Secret to Your Relationship with Money and Marriage
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sean Rad is the Founder and former CEO of Tinder. Sean has made more romantic connections between humans than anyone in history with Tinder having ma...
20VC: Why VC is a Ponzi Scheme Today | Why Most VCs are Bankers | Why Big VCs Ruin Startups | Why Incentives in VC are Broken | Why American Dynamism is a Tool for VCs to Raise Money with Nick Chirls, Asylum Ventures
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Chirls is the Founder of Asylum Ventures, a new venture firm dedicated to the creative act of building companies; treating founders like artists...
20VC: OpenAI's Newest Board Member, Zico Colter on The Biggest Bottlenecks to the Performance of Foundation Models | The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | How to Regulate an AI-Centric World
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Zico Colter is a Professor and the Director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research spans several topics in ...
20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scott Gorlick was employee #99 at Uber. Over 6 years, Scott built Uber in Atlanta and helped the company scale from 10 cities to $10B in revenue. Sco...
20VC: AI Scaling Myths: More Compute is not the Answer | The Core Bottlenecks in AI Today: Data, Algorithms and Compute | The Future of Models: Open vs Closed, Small vs Large with Arvind Narayanan, Professor of Computer Science @ Princeton
28 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Arvind Narayanan is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a co-author ...
20VC: Why the IPO Market is not Closed | Why Revenue Multiples are BS and Founders Need to Change | Advice From Jack Ma, Jamie Dimon and Evan Spiegel | Lessons from Taking Snap & Alibaba Public with Imran Khan
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Imran Khan is the OG of IPOs having taken some of the biggest companies public including Alibaba, Snap, Box, Weibo and more. Today, Imran is the foun...
20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets
23 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill V...
20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Aman Narang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Toast, one of the best-in-class vertical SaaS companies of our time with a market cap today of $13.5BN. Five ...
20VC: Chips, Models or Applications; Where is the Value in AI | Is Compute the Answer to All Model Performance Questions | Why Open AI Shelved AGI & Is There Any Value in Models with OpenAI Price Dumping with Aidan, Gomez, Co-Founder @ Cohere
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Aidan Gomez is the Co-founder & CEO at Cohere, the leading AI platform for enterprise, having raised over $1BN from some of the best with their last ...
20VC: Capital G's Laela Sturdy on What Stripe, UiPath and Duolingo Taught Me About Company Building and Investing | How to Analyse Valuation, Market Timing, Sizing and Exiting | Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund
16 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Laela Sturdy is Managing Partner of CapitalG, Alphabet's $7 billion independent growth fund, where she has invested in Stripe, Duolingo (DUOL), Gusto...
20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kaz Nejatian is Shopify's VP of Product & Chief Operating Officer. Before Shopify, Kaz founded Kash, a payment technology company which was acquired ...
20VC: Sequoia's Shaun Maguire: Will We See WW3 Shortly | Why DEI is a Cancer for Society | Why Iran is the World's Greatest Evil | Why Trump is the Only Hope for Peace in the Middle East | Trump vs Harris: Who Wins & What Happens
12 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. At Sequoia he led their investment into SpaceX, The Boring Co and X among many others. Before Sequoia ...
20VC: Why VC is Distorting a Generation of SaaS Companies & With $900M in ARR and a Market Cap of $2.6BN is Lightspeed the Most Misunderstood Public Company with Dax Dasilva, Founder & CEO @ Lightspeed
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dax Dasilva is the Founder & CEO Lightspeed Commerce, one of the most incredible stories in startups. For 7 years they did not raise outside funding ...
20VC: How a Angel City Makes $31M per Season | How Sports Teams Can and Should Be Better Businesses | Why Every Sports Team Will Look Like a Media Agency and Founding The Most Valuable Women's Sports Team with Alexis Ohanian
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alexis Ohanian is the Founder and General Partner of Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm with $970M AUM. Prior to 776, Alexis was th...
20VC: Sequoia's David Cahn on AI's $600BN Question | Why the Data Centre is the Most Important Asset | Servers, Steel and Power: The Core Pillars Powering the Future of AI
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David Cahn is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the great venture firms of the last 5 decades. Before joining the Sequoia partnership, David led Co...
20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Fiechtner is Chief Revenue Officer at Clari, where he drives global go-to market & revenue operations. Ben previously served as SVP at UiPath, gr...
20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ethan Mollick is the Co-Director of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, which builds prototypes and conducts research to discover how AI can help human...
20VC: Twitter's Most Controversial VC Delian Asparouhov on Inside the Walls of Founders Fund: What the World Does Not See | Why Western Europe Will Be Like the Third World | Why SaaS as an Industry Might Be Dead
29 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Delian Asparouhov is a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder and President of Varda Space Industries, which is building the world's first space fa...
20Growth: How Transferwise Acquired Their First 5M Customers: The Two Types of Content All Companies Must Create, How to Crush Competition With Performance Marketing, What Growth Hacks Worked and Did Not with Nilan Peiris, CPO @ Wise
26 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nilan Peiris is Chief Product Officer at Wise, where he leads on growth across channels including product and platform. Prior to Wise, Nilan was VP G...
This Week in SaaS: Should Wiz Have Accepted Google's $23BN Acquisition Offer, Crowdstrike: WTF Happens From Here: The Bull and the Bear Case & $1BN into Legal Tech in a Day with Clio and Harvey with Jason Lemkin
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Saleslo...
20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A*
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kevin Hartz is a Co-Founder and General Partner at A*, an early-stage venture capital firm. Prior to founding A*, Kevin co-founded Eventbrite, a pub...
20Product: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? The Top 5 Product Lessons in Scaling to 185M Monthly Active Users with Canva Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Canva where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. Since launching i...
20VC: Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi on What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | Brex vs Ramp: Who Wins and How Does it Play Out | Battling Founder Mental Health and The Importance of Secondaries for Founders
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pedro Franceschi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Brex, the AI-powered spend platform with tens of thousands of customers, including DoorDash, Coinbase, R...
20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock, where he has led investments in Abnormal Security (incubated at Greylock), Apiiro Security and Opal S...
20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Hubspot from $0-$100M in ARR, The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise, How to do Channel Partnerships Right and How to Construct Sales Comp Plans Early On with Mark Roberge
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Roberge is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School. Prior to these roles, Mar...
20VC: ServiceTitan Would Not Be the Success if We Raised VC Earlier: How to Build a Dominant Vertical SaaS Business, How to Master Going Into Enterprise, When & How to Launch Second Products with Ara Mahdessian, Co-Founder @ServiceTitan
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ara Mahdessian is the Co-Founder and CEO @ ServiceTitan, one of the great vertical SaaS business of the last decade. Today the company powers over 11...
20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pat Grady is one of the most successful growth investors of the last decade. As the Head of Sequoia's growth investing practice, Pat has invested in ...
20VC: Turning a $15M Investment in Monday into $1.5BN in Cash | The Strategy Behind a 37x DPI $45M Fund | The Three Step Process to Selling Positions that has Netted Top Percentile Returns with Avi Eyal, Co-Founder @ Entrée Capital
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Avi Eyal is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Entrée Capital, an early-stage VC fund with a portfolio including the likes of Monday.com, Stripe, Co...
20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Matt Clifford is the Co-Founder of Entrepreneur First (EF), the leading global talent investor and incubator. EF has incubated startups worth over $1...
20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada
28 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Samir Vasavada is the Co-Founder & CEO of Vise, a technology-powered asset manager. Samir and his co-founder, Runik founded Vise from the Midwest at ...
20VC: Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki on Going Public in an IPO Winter, Is Klaviyo Under-Priced in Public Markets and Why, Why Every VC Turned Klaviyo Down in the Early Days & How Shopify's Partnership Changed the Game
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Bialecki is the Co-Founder and CEO of Klaviyo, the platform that powers smarter digital relationships for businesses and their data. To date, K...
20VC: Why Foundation Model Performance is Not Diminishing But Models Are Commoditising, Why Nvidia Will Enter the Model Space and Models Will Enter the Chip Space & The Right Business Model for AI Software with David Luan, Co-Founder @ Adept
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David Luan is the CEO and Co-Founder at Adept, a company building AI agents for knowledge workers. To date, David has raised over $400M for the compa...
20Growth: How Revolut Acquired Their First 10M Users: Tips, Tactics and Strategies From the Revolut Product & Growth Playbook with Val Scholz, Former Head of Growth @ Revolut
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Val Scholz is the former Head of Growth @ Revolut, where he led the company to their first 10M users. Post Revolut, Val played a crucial role in scali...
20VC: Foundation Models are the Fastest Depreciating Asset in History, Lina Kahn is a Threat to American Capitalism, PE is Not Coming to Save the M&A Market & How China Could Overtake the US in the AI Race with Michael Eisenberg
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Eisenberg is a Co-Founder and General Partner @ Aleph, one of Israel's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Wix, Lem...
20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on Investing Lessons from Hits like Figma, Discord and Etsy to Missing Snapchat, Airbnb, Facebook & Spotify | Why Valuation is a Trap and Market Sizing, Signalling and Sector/Geo-Specific Funds are all Noise
17 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Danny Rimer is a Partner @ Index Ventures and one of the most prominent VCs of the last two decades. Danny has led Index to be one of the top global ...
20Product: Loom CPO Janie Lee on Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs, How to Find, Pick and Train the Best PM Talent and Lessons from OpenDoor and Rippling on Product Breadth, Pricing and Talent Density
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Janie Lee is the Head of Product and the owner of the Self-Serve business at Loom. Janie previously worked at Rippling, leading the Identity Manageme...
20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Wang is the Founder and CEO @ Scale.ai, the company that allows you to make the best models with the best data. To date, Alex has raised $1.6BN ...
20VC: Reid Hoffman on Foundation Models: Who Wins & How Do Incumbents Respond | The Inflection AI Deal: How it Went Down | Why Trump is a Threat to Democracy | The Future of TikTok | Lessons from Sam Altman, Brian Chesky and the OpenAI Board
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Reid Hoffman has been one of the most impactful people in technology over the last two decades. He is the Co-Founder of Linkedin (acq by Microsoft fo...
20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ashley Kelly is the VP of Global Sales Development at Rippling, the all-in-one platform for HR, IT, and finance. Before Rippling, Ashley played a cruc...