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Harry Stebbings · Business

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman. If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.

Episodes

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20VC: Dario and Anthropic Declare War on Open-Source | Coinbase Slash AI Spend by 50% | Kalshi's $40BN Valuation and Impending IPO | Bending Spoons: Smartest IPO of 2026 and the Year for SaaS Roll-Ups

02 Jul 2026
1h 17m
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The tech industry is shifting from experimental AI spending toward a rigorous focus on ROI and cost-efficiency. Companies are increasingly scrutinizing "performative" AI investments, exemplified by Coinbase’s decision to cut AI spending by 50% through optimized token usage. This transition highlights a growing tension ...

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20VC: Leo Aschenbrenner's Largest Holding: Inside the $90BN Bloom Energy | Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race | Why We Are Not in an AI Capex Bubble | Energy Sovereignty and The Future of Power with KR Sridhar

29 Jun 2026
1h 0m
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The AI revolution functions as a "hockey stick on a hockey stick," transforming electricity into the essential raw material for manufacturing intelligence. Traditional, centralized power grids lack the speed, reliability, and modularity required to support this rapid growth. Bloom Energy, led by former NASA scientist K...

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20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

27 Jun 2026
57m
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FOMO operates as a social-first mobile trading platform, distinguishing itself by integrating social graphs into financial markets to enable real-time transparency and community-driven conviction. Paul Erlanger, co-founder and CEO, emphasizes that the company’s success stems from a lean, high-ownership team of 17 that ...

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20VC: Deepseek Raises $50BN | Wall St's $725BN AI Question | The Rise of Open Source & How it Threatens OpenAI & Anthropic | OpenAI Builds it's Own Chip: Jalapeno | The Death of Moats & The New AI Software Winners

25 Jun 2026
1h 24m
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AI investment is transitioning from a period of unconstrained "token maxing" to a rigorous focus on enterprise ROI. While hyperscalers and startups continue to pour billions into infrastructure, the emergence of high-performance open-source models—often backed by Chinese state subsidies—is hollowing out the middle of t...

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20VC: Nikesh Arora on the Frontier Model Problem: Breadth vs Depth | The Future of Token Costs | Memory Becoming the Moat | Where Value Accrues: Infra, Models, or Apps? | Why Enterprise AI is Not Ready & Systems of Record vs Systems of Intelligence

22 Jun 2026
1h 14m
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Enterprise AI adoption requires a fundamental shift from marginally improving existing workflows to reimagining them entirely through agentic systems. While consumer AI prioritizes breadth and tolerates higher false-positive rates, enterprise applications demand deep context and zero-tolerance for errors, necessitating...

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20VC: Why Remote Work is White Collar Fraud | Why Revenge and Patriotism are the Best Founder Traits | Two Questions Every Founder Needs to Ask | The Wild Story of Raising $1BN from Masa Son in an Hour Long Meeting with Ryan Peterson, Founder @ Flexport

20 Jun 2026
1h 18m
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Flexport founder Ryan Peterson explores the intersection of global logistics, artificial intelligence, and venture capital dynamics. The discussion centers on the transition from manual, email-heavy freight forwarding to fully automated, agentic workflows powered by large language models. Peterson emphasizes that while...

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20VC: SpaceX Soars to $2.7TRN | Anthropic's Fable Banned by US Government | Wix and Adobe Hit All-Time Lows | Mistral Raising at $20BN and The Case for Sovereign Models | Fin Acquired by Salesforce for $3.6BN

18 Jun 2026
1h 25m
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SpaceX’s historic IPO highlights Elon Musk’s ability to secure massive valuations by selling investors on long-dated, ambitious technological milestones rather than immediate P&L performance. This market dominance contrasts with the broader SaaS sector, where legacy companies struggle to pivot toward outcome-based busi...

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20VC: Micron Will Be More Valuable Than Meta | How Export Controls Helped Not Hurt China | Power is the Bottleneck to AI | Why Dario Has Done a Disservice to AI with his Labour Replacement Messaging with Aravind Srinivas, Founder @ Perplexity

15 Jun 2026
1h 20m
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AI development is shifting from simple answer engines toward sophisticated agentic orchestration, where the primary value lies in systems that autonomously execute complex, multi-step workflows. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas argues that the "frontier" of AI is now defined by the ability to orchestrate across models, ...

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20VC: Who Wins the Model War: OpenAI, Anthropic or Open-Source | Token Maxing, AI Hangovers & The Coming ROI Reckoning | Labour Displacement Fears are BS & Overblown | From Physicist to Sequoia Founder with Matan Grinberg, Founder @ Factory

13 Jun 2026
1h 21m
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AI-driven software development is shifting from a focus on individual coding output to a strategic resource allocation challenge, where the primary goal is maximizing business outcomes rather than just shipping features. As AI agents become integral to engineering workflows, the most effective organizations will treat ...

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20VC: SpaceX Launches Largest Ever IPO | OpenAI Files to Go Public | Uber Cuts 23% of HR | Lovable Hits $500M ARR | Founders Revolt Against VCs: The Fundraising Horror Stories Going Viral

11 Jun 2026
1h 13m
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The tech landscape is currently defined by massive, high-stakes IPOs and a fundamental shift in startup operational efficiency driven by AI. SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO, valued at $1.77 trillion, highlights a bold, fixed-price strategy that challenges traditional market discovery. Meanwhile, the rise of lean, AI-augmented...

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20VC: Nebius Co-Founder on AI Infrastructure Bubbles | The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic | How Price Elastic is Demand for Compute | Could Nebius Sell 10x More Compute If They Had It & more with Roman Chernin

07 Jun 2026
1h 6m
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AI infrastructure is currently in a phase of rapid expansion rather than a bubble, driven by the early stages of enterprise AI adoption and the continuous need for more complex, specialized models. Nebius operates across four strategic layers—physical capacity, managed cloud infrastructure, managed inference, and agent...

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20Product: Inside Legora's Tech Stack: Why Token Maxing is Failing Enterprise Startups with Jacob Lauritzen, CTO @ Legora

06 Jun 2026
54m
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The integration of AI into software development is fundamentally shifting engineering workflows, moving the primary bottleneck from manual code creation to systems architecture and product strategy. AI tools like Claude and Cursor have drastically increased developer productivity, enabling teams to ship faster while au...

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20VC: Anthropic Files to Go Public | Token Budgeting Panic Hits Corporate America | Cognition Raises $1BN at $26BN Valuation | Apollo Warns PE Software Returns Will be Disastrous | The 9-9-6 Work Ethic: Performative Theatre or Startup Reality?

04 Jun 2026
1h 34m
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The tech landscape is undergoing a structural transformation as AI-driven agentic workflows replace traditional human-centric software models. Corporate budgets are shifting from per-seat licensing to massive token consumption, forcing a reevaluation of engineering and customer support headcount. While trillion-dollar ...

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20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody

01 Jun 2026
1h 15m
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AI-driven automation is fundamentally reshaping the global economy, shifting the focus from traditional software layers to the underlying frontier models. As reasoning capabilities improve, enterprises are increasingly adopting agentic workflows that manage complex, end-to-end tasks, rendering traditional software moat...

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20VC: Corgi Insurance: The Most Intense Workplace Culture in America: 7 Days Per Week, Founder Sleeps in Office, Corgi Cafe Open 24 Hours a Day, 60% of First 30 Employees Have Corgi Tattoos | The Journey from $0 to $2.6BN Valuation in Just 2 Years

30 May 2026
53m
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Nico Laqua, co-founder and CEO of Corgi Insurance, advocates for an extreme, high-intensity workplace culture centered on winning and continuous growth. Operating on a seven-day work week, the company prioritizes total commitment, with Laqua personally living in the office to lead by example. This approach rejects trad...

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20VC: OpenAI & SpaceX S1 Drops | NVIDIA's $81BN Revenue Quarter | Cloudflare and ClickUp Do Controversial Layoffs | Exa, OpenRouter and Polsia Raise Mega Rounds | Uber and Microsoft Declare AI ROI for Developers is Questionable

28 May 2026
1h 25m
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The AI industry faces a critical inflection point as massive capital expenditure on infrastructure meets growing skepticism regarding measurable return on investment. While NVIDIA demonstrates unprecedented profitability, the market remains cautious about the sustainability of multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure proje...

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20VC: Cerebras CEO on the Future of Data Centres, Token Costs and Memory | We are Not in an Infra Bubble & Dario Got a Bad Deal with Elon for Compute | Should US Companies Sell to China & Why Most Layoffs are AI Washed with Andrew Feldman

26 May 2026
1h 1m
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AI infrastructure development is currently constrained by supply rather than demand, as data center capacity struggles to keep pace with the exponential growth in AI utility. Unlike traditional hyperscalers, specialized hardware providers like Cerebras are navigating these shortages by leveraging alternative memory arc...

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20Sales: The $100M CRO Bubble: Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis | Why You Should Never Hire From Salesforce or Service Now | How to Hire, Train and Forecase in a World of AI with Chad Peets and Chris Degnan

23 May 2026
1h 19m
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Building high-performing sales organizations requires prioritizing "hunters" who can generate new pipeline rather than relying on order-takers from established monopolies. Effective sales leaders must enforce rigorous performance management, including weekly one-on-ones and consistent field presence, while avoiding "so...

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20VC: Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic & Anthropic Raises $30BN at $900BN Price | SpaceX Files S1: How Does it Trade | Cerebras Smashes Day 1: What it Means for IPOs | Why Mass Layoffs Are More Worrying Than Anyone Sees

21 May 2026
1h 21m
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The AI industry faces a critical juncture as massive capital expenditure in compute capacity clashes with the need for tangible software revenue growth. While Anthropic and OpenAI command record-breaking valuations, their long-term viability depends on whether corporate R&D budgets can sustain significant token consump...

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20VC: Turning Peter Thiel's $100K into $10M Angel Portfolio | The One Man Accelerator at The Four Seasons | Why VCs Can Be Sharks and What Founders Need to Know | Why Stocks and Cash are BS and You Should Invest in Land with Josh Browder

18 May 2026
1h 29m
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Entrepreneurship and early-stage venture capital rely on identifying founders with a deep, personal connection to their problems and an unwavering refusal to quit. Josh Browder, founder of DoNotPay, advocates for a hands-on, "one-person accelerator" model, where he houses early-stage founders to provide tactical guidan...

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