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
Immad Akhund is the CEO of Mercury. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $500M in funding from Sequoia, Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz and others. He is a former part-time partner at Y Combinator and is an active angel investor, with more than 350 investments in startups including Rippling, AirTable, Rappi, Applied Intuition, and Substack.
In Today’s Episode We D...
Eléonore Crespo is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Pigment, one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. With Pigment, Eleonore has raised over $397M from the best in the world including ICONIQ, Greenoaks and IVP to name a few. Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was on the other side of the table as an investor with Index Ventures.
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Today’s Topics:
04:44 Analysis of $3 Billion Windsurf Acquisition
12:39 Will Mega Funds Win the Future of Venture Capital
18:39 Does Every Fund Have to do Pre-Seed to Win Series A and B Today
27:53 Why AI Will Create Massive Unemployment
31:06 The $100,000 Bet on the Future of Work
35:52 Why ...
Bucky Moore is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, announced exclusively in the show today on 20VC. Prior to Lightspeed, Bucky spent an incredibly successful 7 years at Kleiner Perkins working with Mamoon Hamid to build one of the most successful early stage firms of the last decade. Bucky has made investments in the likes of Prisma, Netlify, Browserbase and more.
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Reggie Marable is the Head of Global Sales at Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. Sierra enables companies like ADT, Sonos, SiriusXM, and WeightWatchers to build AI agents that transform customer experiences. The company has rapidly become a hypergrowth leader in Silicon Valley, recently securing a funding round that values it at $4.5 billion. Before joining Sierra, Reggie was the Head of Sales in Nort...
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:56 Why The Risk Lever Has Been Turned Higher than Ever in VC
06:04 Why IRR is the Hardest Thing to Control
09:36 Is Lack of Liquidity Short Term Temporary or Long Term Structural
12:17 Why Fund Returners Are Not Good Enough Anymore
16:03 Sequoia: The Best Strategy at the Worst Time
26:30 What it Takes to be G...
Taavet Hinrikus is a Partner at Plural, the early-stage fund that backs the most ambitious founders on a mission to change the world through technology. He co-founded Wise in 2010, where he was CEO and later Chairman, which went public in the first-ever direct listing in Europe in 2021. Prior to that, Taavet was Skype’s Director of Strategy until 2008, having joined as its first employee. He’s been an active investor f...
Mayur Gupta is currently the CMO at Kraken, one of the largest crypto platforms in the world. Prior to that, he lead Marketing, Business Transformation and Growth at Gannett - USA Today Network, led Growth at Spotify and was the CMO at Freshly which eventually got acquired by Nestle. He was the first ever Chief Marketing Technologist at Kimberly Clark.
In Today’s E...
In Today’s Show We Discuss:
04:49 Breaking Down the $3BN Windsurf Acquisition
06:18 Why Sam Altman is Playing a Master Game
12:40 Why Multi-Stage Funds are Destroying Seed Managers
21:52 Are Endowment Funds F******
27:38 What Would Rory Do If He Was CFO of an Ivy League Endowment Fund
43:38 Th...
Jason Wilk is the Founder and CEO of Dave, the greatest turnaround in the public markets of the last 12 months. Dave went public with a market cap of $4BN, just months later the company had a market cap of $50M. Today, they are back with a market cap of $1.1BN. In 2024, CNBC named Dave the best-performing financial stock in the country, achieving 900% growth.
In To...
Rich Socher is the Founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of the AI startup MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. He is widely recognised as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has ove...
Jason Lemkin is one of the leading SaaS investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat, Saleloft and more.
Rory O’Driscoll is a General Partner @ Scale where he has led investments in category leaders such as Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), and WalkMe (WKME), among others.
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Victor Lazarte is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the mot renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Victor has led deals into the likes of HeyGen and Mercor. As an angel, he was the first investor and board member of Brex, and as a Founder he scaled Wildlife Studios, bootstrapping into the largest gaming company in LatAm, with about 4 billion downloads.
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Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:...
Tom Hulme is a General Partner @ GV and leads GV’s European investing. He has led rounds in Monzo, Nothing, GoCardless, Lemonade, Snyk and is widely considered one of the best investors in Europe.
Stan Boland is one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the UK. In 1999, he co-founded Element 14 which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 for $640 million. Following this, Boland co-founded Icer...
Ernest Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Carvana. Under Ernie’s leadership, Carvana went from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a $50+ billion public company, became the fastest-growing online used car retailer in U.S. history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right, in 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just $400M. Today they are back with a market cap of...
Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more.
In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss:
1. The Rules of Investing:
-
What have been...
Ishan Mukherjee is the Co-Founder/CEO of Rox, a Sequoia-backed AI-powered sales productivity platform. Before Rox, he was the Chief Growth Officer at New Relic where he scaled the self-serve business from $0-$100M in ARR. Prior to New Relic, Ishan founded Pixie Labs (acq by New Relic). Before that he led product at Siri Knowledge Graph at Apple, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), Premise Data, and Amazon Robotics. Ishan...
Welcome to The Daily Deal — the new show with Harry Stebbings and Jason Lemkin, where we break down the biggest stories in tech, venture, and B2B. From market meltdowns to billion-dollar raises, wild valuations, and the drama behind the deals. We’re covering it all! Plus, we’ll be joined by some incredible guests to go deeper on the moves shaping the future of ...
Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft, where he leads the company’s AI and technology strategy at global scale and played a pivotal role in Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Prior to Microsoft, Kevin spent six years at Linkedin as SVP of Engineering. Kevin has also enjoyed advisory positions with Pinterest, Box, Code.org and more.
In Today’s Epi...
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