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

David Tisch is the Founder of Box Group, one of the best seed funds of the last decade with early investments in Cursor, Baseten and Clay to name a few. Today the fund invests from two funds, a $275M seed fund and a $275M opportunity fund.

AGENDA:

10:40 Why we have less dilution now than ever before 12:50 Why I don't want to compete with the best VCs, and why it's a trap 16:15 What concentrated funds know but do not admit to 17:25 Why multiple tranched rounds can be good for founders 18:45 Why the Lean Startup was a total fake 28:55 Why LPs are frustrated by a market that we can't change 31:50 What is the single best-returning investment in the history of BoxGroup? 33:15 Why fund returners are not always obvious in the early years 40:05 Why funding consumer brands at seed no longer makes sense for venture 42:00 Rogo, the now $2B company, got passed on by 39 out of 40 investors 45:40 Why the marketing message that pro rata is not a right is BS 1:01:50 Why we do not allow negativity in the investment decision-making process 1:03:00 The true magic of early-stage venture capital 1:04:35 Why YC has the best business model in all of venture

AGENDA:

04:00 Anthropic Files S-1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO 14:50 Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees 20:45 Zuckerberg Taps Equity Markets for $95 Billion AI Spending Spree 23:00 DeepSeek Raises $15 Billion as Chinese AI Faces US Backlash 34:45 OpenAI and Wiz Uncover Decade-Old Security Flaws 37:05 Instinct's Rumoured $30 Billion Valuation Divides the Panel 45:30 Invest Committee: Put 20% of the Fund Into OpenAI at $1.25 Trillion 49:40 Palmer Luckey's War Dog Startup Hits $1.5 Billion Valuation 55:00 Zuckerberg Threatens California Exit Over Billionaire Tax

Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft and one of the greatest CEOs of our time. Satya has been at the company for an astonishing 34 years. When he joined, Microsoft had a market cap of $23.5BN. 22 years later, the company was worth $300BN. At this point, Satya took the reins as CEO. Under his leadership, he has taken it from $300BN to $3.9TRN.

AGENDA:

03:08 Should We Assume Every AI Model Is Compromised? 04:13 How Do We Stop AI Agents From Causing Harm? 06:15 Can We Trust an AI Model's Chain of Thought? 07:05 Is China's Lead in Open-Source AI a Safety Risk? 08:28 Will Open or Closed Models Win the Next Two Years? 10:08 Why Should Every Company Own Its Intelligence? 12:12 Will Every Company Become AI Native? 13:22 Are We Entering an AI Implementation Economy? 15:10 Do You Need to Own the Entire AI Stack to Win? 16:49 Can the World Support $100 Billion AI Training Runs? 18:34 Can AI Radically Accelerate Global Economic Growth? 19:39 Will AI Transform Sales, Finance and Marketing Like Coding?

Quickfire round

What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

What looks crazy today but will be incredibly common in 5 years?

What's the exercise routine given the travel schedule?

Favorite cheat meal on a rest day?

What are you most excited for in the next 10 years?

AGENDA:

05:00 Will we run out of energy? 19:00 Will specialised chips threaten NVIDIA's dominance? 26:00 Can we trust AI agents more than humans? 31:00 Will data companies become commodities? 36:00 What comes after transformers? 41:00 Are software investors f****** in a world of infra and compute? 52:00 How big will the inference market be in 10 years? 53:00 Could robotics be 100x bigger than coding agents? 59:00 Why are coding agents the most overrated AI investment?

AGENDA:

04:20 Billion-Dollar Bets or Nothing: Why VCs Are Rejecting Fast-Growing Startups 13:20 CoreWeave Sell-Off Sparks Fears of Cracks in AI Boom 18:50 Anthropic's IPO Valuation Could Fall From $2 TRN to $1.5 TRN 32:10 Modal Raises $750M at a $15.75B Valuation as Inference Booms 35:50 Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Have Startup Valuations Lost Touch? 42:15 Berkshire Hathaway Doubles Down on Bending Spoons 45:05 37signals' Profit Machine Challenges the Venture Capital Model 49:20 General Atlantic Eyes an IPO; Harvard's Endowment Hits $68B 54:15 Elon's Flying Roadster and $10B SpaceX Share Giveaway

Sameer Dholakia is a Partner @ Bessemer, the first that has just raised $5.75BN across a $1.75BN seed fund and $4BN growth fund. Sameer has led investments into the likes of Anthropic, Fireworks and Legora to name a few. Prior to venture, Sameer was the CEO of SendGrid, taking it from $30M in ARR to over $200M.

AGENDA:

04:55 Why This Is a Supercycle Like Never Before 07:40 Why We Backed Anthropic to Compete With the Hyperscalers 10:05 Why Anthropic Was One of Bessemer's Most Contentious Deals 11:05 Why Open Models Don't Destroy the Market for Closed Models 16:45 Does Price Matter in AI—and Which Metric Really Determines Value? 19:45 How Much Should Consumer Businesses Be Discounted for Their Revenue Quality? 20:20 Why Today's Gross Margins Matter Less Than You Think 23:00 Competition Hasn't Changed—but the Capital Behind It Has 24:00 Why Capital Is a Moat Today 25:55 Is "Triple, Triple, Double, Double" Dead? 28:00 Can You Still Succeed With a Small Seed Fund? 29:45 Who Wins and Who Loses in the Future of Venture Capital? 32:15 Why Founders Shouldn't Hate Being an "Option Bet" 34:35 Why Signalling Risk Doesn't Worry Me 51:55 Why Companies Will Stay Private Longer—and Why the IPO Window Could Reopen by 2028 56:00 How Should Retail Investors Participate in Venture Capital? 57:25 How Fireworks Could Become a $250 Billion Business 01:02:35 Why Bessemer Is Confident It Can Deliver 5x Returns on $5.75 Billion

Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, which helps developers build, test and deploy AI agents. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and IVP, LangChain has announced approximately $160 million in funding with the last round at a $1.25BN valuation. The company works with 35% of the Fortune 500, has surpassed one billion open-source downloads and processes over one billion events daily through LangSmith.

AGENDA:

04:10 Why Is It Still So Hard to Build AI Agents? 08:50 Will the Model Labs Eat the Agent Stack? 16:25 Is Model Routing a Real Business or a Commodity? 25:45 Why Has No One Solved AI Memory? 35:45 Why Are AI Bills Exploding as Tokens Get Cheaper? 43:25 Should Companies Be Afraid of Chinese AI Models? 46:20 Where Would Harrison Not Be Investing Today? 53:05 Should Founders Take a Discount for Benchmark and Sequoia? 57:35 OpenAI at $1.5T or Anthropic at $2T: Which Would You Buy?

AGENDA:

04:00 Valar Atomics Sues Seed Investor Day One Ventures Over Pro Rata 17:00 Meta Returns to the AI Frontier With Muse Wonder 20:00 NVIDIA Eyes $30B Reflection Deal as Amazon Circles Decart 26:00 Jev Raises $870M at a $7.5B Valuation—Weeks After Launch 31:00 42 New Decacorns: The AI Boom Overtakes 2021's Record 36:00 Isomorphic Labs Eyes $50B Valuation in New Funding Talks 46:00 Anthropic Slashes Haiku Prices by 90% as AI Price War Intensifies 52:00 Bending Spoons Slashes Airtable's Team: What Do Founders Owe Employees? 57:00 Bumble to Go Private in $1.3B Deal: Can AI Transform Dating? 01:01:00 The SaaSpocalypse Deepens: Why $500M ARR May No Longer Be Enough 01:06:00 Flock Safety Cuts 270 Jobs Amid Privacy and Security Backlash

Mike Cannon-Brookes is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, the company behind Jira, Confluence, Trello and Loom. Atlassian generated $6.5BN in ARR in 2026, and serves more than 350,000 customers, including over 85% of the Fortune 500. Today, Mike is leading its expansion into enterprise AI through Rovo and the Teamwork Graph, connecting company knowledge with AI agents.

AGENDA:

03:00 Do AI Agents Turn Traditional Software Into Just Databases? 16:00 Will Enterprises Ever Trust Chinese AI Models? 20:00 Is Building Your Own AI Model a Losing Bet? 24:00 Can AI Startups Survive When They Finally Have to Care About Costs? 30:00 What Happens When AI Gets Cheaper Than Anyone Expects? 35:00 Is Company Context the Real Moat in Enterprise AI? 41:00 What Happens When OpenAI and Anthropic Come for Your Customers? 44:00 Why Are Young Founders Cashing Out More Than Ever? 49:00 What Does Nobody Tell You About Getting Rich?

Max Freeman is SVP of Sales at Ramp. He joined the company as its first sales hire. By 2025, he was leading more than 300 salespeople, helping build Ramp's sales organisation from the ground up. Ramp's latest reported revenue exceeds $1.7BN, with a valuation of over $40BN.

AGENDA:

00:00 Inside Ramp's Sales Playbook 05:00 How Do You Find Exceptional Sellers—and Why Bankers Make the Best? 18:00 How Do You Build an Outbound Machine That Scales Beyond Your SDR Team? 24:00 How Do You Shorten Sales Cycles Without Slashing Your Price? 27:00 How Should You Pay Your First Reps—and Incentivise New Products? 34:00 How Do You Onboard Reps Who Can Actually Sell? 40:00 How High Should Quotas Be—and How Long Should Reps Get to Ramp? 44:00 How Do You Drive Customer Expansion and Forecast Revenue Accurately? 54:00 How Do You Grow as a Sales Leader Without Taking Over Every Important Deal?

Joinin the trio today we have Dev Ittycheria, CEO @ MongoDB.

AGENDA:

04:00 OpenAI Nears $70B Run Rate—Anthropic's Lead Under Threat 12:00 Factory vs Cognition: Silicon Valley's Talent War Turns Ugly 23:00 Vinod Khosla Blasts His Own Portfolio Company 25:00 Reflection Launches Beam: America Strikes Back in Open-Source AI 34:00 ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B 37:00 Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B—Sequoia Cashes In 46:00 Vercel Hits $600M ARR as Agents Drive Half Its New Business 55:00 Former Groq Engineers Sue Over Nvidia's $17B Deal 01:01:00 Meta's Muse Steals the Show as OpenAI's Dots Underwhelms 01:05:00 Oura Pulls Its IPO Despite 74% Growth—A Warning for VC

Venky Ganesan is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, whose portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora and Higgsfield, alongside earlier hits Uber and Roku. Venky's own investment track record includes Palo Alto Networks, Upwork, Poshmark and Rover. He is a three-time Forbes Midas List investor and former Chair of the National Venture Capital Association.

AGENDA:

07:00 Can You Still Do Seed Without a $1 Billion Fund? 11:00 How Much of AI's Revenue Growth Is Actually Real? 19:00 When Is "Overpaying" the Smartest Investment You Can Make? 25:00 Does Ownership Still Matter in a World of Trillion-Dollar Outcomes? 31:00 Is "Big Tech Will Buy Us" a Dangerous Investment Thesis? 36:00 Why Invest in Venture When You Can Just Buy the Magnificent Seven? 45:00 When Should You Sell a 40x Winner—and When Should You Double Down? 54:00 Can a $50 Million Fund Still Compete With the Venture Giants? 58:00 Quickfire: Is Benchmark Harder to Beat Than Sequoia?

Chase Lochmiller is the Co-founder and CEO of Crusoe. Crusoe builds and powers the data centres that companies use to train and run AI. It has raised approximately $6.4 billion in equity, including its latest $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation. Its backers include NVIDIA, Founders Fund, Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

AGENDA:

04:40 What Does Climbing Everest Teach You About Building a Company? 17:40 What's Really Stopping Us From Building Enough AI Data Centres? 25:50 Are Data Centres Really Driving Up Your Energy Bills? 28:05 Will Half of Planned AI Data Centres Never Get Built? 32:10 How Quickly Can a GPU Pay for Itself? 38:35 Will Your GPUs Become Obsolete Before You've Paid Them Off? 44:20 What Does It Take to Produce the Cheapest Intelligence? 49:50 Will Companies Building Their Own Models Eat Into OpenAI's Business? 51:55 Can You Build a $30B Company and Still Be a Great Dad?

AGENDA:

00:00 Highlights: Jack Altman Joins The Trio 05:00 Anthropic's S-1 Leaks: $8B Operating Loss and $518B in Compute Commitments 10:00 Instinct Raises $1B at a $10B Valuation to Take On Meta 25:00 AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B 39:00 Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO as Shares Plunge 20% 43:00 AI Startup Seeks $10B Valuation Just One Week After Seed 47:00 Modal Hits $15B Valuation as Baseten Eyes $26B 54:00 OpenAI Reopens Its $200 Plan—and Halves What You Get 57:00 Oura Pulls IPO After Targeting a $16B Valuation 01:03:00 Nubank Eyes $8–12B Monzo Takeover 01:08:00 Bessemer Raises $5.75B as NFX Switches to Its Own Capital 01:14:00 Anthropic Founders Move to Lock In 50.1% Voting Control

Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield, the third fastest scaling company to $1BN in ARR behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Reports suggest their latest funding round could place an $8BN valuation on the company. Prior to Higgsfield, Alex sold his prior company to Snap Inc for $166M. Alex was a competitive programmer as a kid, reaching third best in the world.

AGENDA:

00:00 The Programming Prodigy Who Sold to Snap for $166M 09:00 Burning $10M: The Pivot That Saved Higgsfield 12:00 A $1B Revenue Run Rate in 18 Months; How Real Is It? 16:00 Will OpenAI and Google Wipe Out $20 AI Subscriptions? 21:00 Are AI Labs Gaming the Benchmarks? 28:00 Spending $4M a Month on AI; Genius or Insanity? 36:00 Are AI Moats Bullshit? The Great "Wrapper" Debate 43:00 One Full Day With His Son in Three Months: The Cost of Ambition 54:00 Quickfire: Is Snap Broken—and Will HubSpot Survive AI? 01:02:00 $10B in the Next 12 Months? Alex's Audacious Growth Bet

Parag Agrawal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Parallel, building web search infrastructure for AI agents. Parallel has announced $230M in funding from Sequoia, Khosla, and First Round Capital. Previously, he was CEO of Twitter, succeeding Jack Dorsey after serving as CTO and becoming the company's first Distinguished Engineer.

AGENDA:

03:00 What Breaks When Agents Search the Web 1,000x More? 07:00 Speed, Cost or Accuracy: What Do Agents Really Need? 13:00 Will Tiny Models Catch Today's Most Powerful AI? 16:00 Is Model Routing a Commodity? 21:00 Is Amazon Making a Mistake by Blocking AI Agents? 23:00 Does the Ads Business Model Die in a World of Agents? 27:00 Can You Pay Publishers Without Killing Your Margins? 33:00 Why Parag Wants a Race to the Bottom on Price 43:00 What Stops Your AI Agent Breaking the Rules to Get Results? 45:00 Why AI Hacks Should Embarrass the Labs 52:00 What Parag Saw Working With Elon Musk

AGENDA:

04:35 Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO Delayed. Cracks in the AI Boom? 10:30 OpenAI Faces $278 Billion Cash Burn. Out of Money by 2028? 12:55 Meta's Muse Hits No. 1. ChatGPT Finally Has a Rival? 17:05 Amazon Blocks AI Shopping Agents. Shopify Welcomes Them. 24:10 ChatGPT Inventor Launches Jev. Vercel's Fastest Launch Ever. 34:15 A $40 Million Seed Round. Is Traditional Seed Investing Dead? 39:00 Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm. Harry Calls BS. 54:00 Factory Triples Its Valuation to $5 Billion. Coding Is the Mother Lode. 1:00:20 Legora Hits $200 Million ARR. Is $11 Billion Too Rich? 1:03:50 Crusoe's $3.9 Billion Round. Is the Data Centre Trade Overheating? 1:08:55 Keith Rabois vs Airwallex. Fintech's Feud Escalates. 1:16:40 Sydney Sweeney for Airwallex? Lemkin's Wild PR Plan.

Daniel Dines is one of the greatest European founders of the last decade. As the Co-Founder of UiPath, he has scaled the business to a market cap high of $ 44BN in 2021, with the company now generating $1.72BN in revenue, growing 15% year-on-year. The company raised $2BN before its IPO, backed by Sequoia, Accel, CapitalG, Coatue and Kleiner Perkins.

AGENDA:

05:00 Why Dario is Wrong About Millions of AI Einsteins? 13:00 Is AI Safety Becoming an Excuse to Kill Open Source? 21:00 Does UiPath Really Need 4,000 Employees? 28:00 Would You Help Train the AI That Could Replace You? 32:00 What Percent of Salary Spend Does Daniel Spend on Inference? 34:00 Can You Really Vibe Code Your Way Out of Paying for Software? 37:00 Why Would Anyone Take Their Company Public Today? 39:00 Could an OpenAI–Anthropic Duopoly Break Nvidia's Business? 45:00 Will AI Models Capture the Value—or Will the Apps? 49:00 Is Fireworks Still Undervalued at $15 Billion? 56:00 Has Europe Already Lost—and Should Founders Leave? 1:03:00 What Could Kill UiPath—and How Is AI Changing the CEO's Job? 1:06:00 60 Supplements a Day: How Far Would You Go to Live Longer?

Thomas Sohmers is the co-founder and chairman of Positron AI, building chips to make running AI dramatically cheaper and more energy-efficient. The company recently announced an $875 million Series C at a $5 billion valuation, backed by investors including Gavin Baker's Atreides Management, NEA, Valor Equity Partners and Netscape co-founder Jim Clark.

AGENDA:

04:30 Why Does AI Inference Need Different Hardware from Training?

10:25 What Is Nobody Telling You About AI's Token Economics?

13:10 Should We Really Slow Down the AI Frontier?

16:55 What Happens If America Slows Down—and China Doesn't?

19:30 Should We Restrict China's Access to AI Chips?

20:15 Why Aren't Zuckerberg and Jensen Backing an AI Slowdown?

21:25 Are We Being Misled About Data Centers?

23:25 Can the West Beat China While Drowning in Regulation?

26:20 How Many Planned Data Centers Will Actually Get Built?

27:15 Data Centers in Space: Real Opportunity or Elon Hype?

28:10 Is Energy AI's Biggest Bottleneck?

29:55 Could the Debt Boom Derail AI?

31:25 What Is KV Caching—and Why Does It Change AI Economics?

35:25 Does Compressing AI's Memory Make It Less Intelligent?

41:05 How Do We Solve AI's Exploding Memory Demands?

43:45 Will Every Company Own Its Own AI Model?

47:10 Why Bet on Ever-Bigger Models?

48:20 If We Already Have AGI, What Comes Next?

53:25 What Happens When Every AI Lab Builds Its Own Chips?

57:30 If DeepSeek Can Slash Costs with Software, Why Build New Hardware?

59:50 How Cheap Will AI Tokens Be by 2028?

1:03:15 What Would Be the First Warning Sign of an AI Bust?

1:03:55 Could Open Models Break OpenAI and Anthropic's Growth?

1:05:55 Could Mercor and Surge Become $200 Billion Companies?

AGENDA:

03:40 Dario Calls to "Pace the Frontier" 11:30 Why the Fed Will Raid Anthropic if Needed 21:50 Meta Launches Muse to Take On Instinct 28:30 Instinct Raising $1BN at $10BN—Would You Invest? 39:55 Miro Sells for $1.35BN After a $17.5BN Valuation 47:45 Could Sam Bankman-Fried Win His Freedom? 51:25 WordPress Power Struggle: Matt Mullenweg Ousted, Then Returns 1:01:20 Mistral Raises €3BN in Europe's Biggest-Ever Tech Round 1:05:00 Adobe's New CEO & Canva's Slowing Growth: SaaS Giants Under Pressure

David Morehead is one of the most respected CIOs in the endowment fund world as Chief Investment Officer at Baylor University, overseeing its $2.6BN endowment. Before joining Baylor in 2011, he was a senior portfolio manager at several Chicago hedge funds, investing across corporate securities, distressed debt and public and private energy.

AGENDA:

04:00 The Portfolio Construction of a $2.6 Billion University Endowment?

09:00 Why We Spend More Time on Porfolio Construction Than Manager Selection?

14:00 Should LPs Back VC's Biggest Names or Find the Next Breakout Manager?

21:00 How Baylor Made Millions in the SaaSpocalypse?

26:00 Are Public Markets a Casino or Are Private Valuations the Real Fiction?

34:00 How Do You Buy a Market Crash Without Catching a Falling Knife?

49:00 Would You Fire a Fund Manager Who's Making You Money?

57:00 Could the Backlash Against Data Centres Derail the AI Boom?

01:02:00 Which Asset Class Is Overhyped—and Where Is the Next Big Opportunity?

AGENDA:

04:30 How Do You Hire Exceptional People in the AI Era? 08:00 What Actually Works in Growth—and Why Can't You Trust Meta's Numbers? 17:00 How to Run Hundreds of Millions in Marketing with Zero Employees 19:30 "Our Engineers Stopped Coding": What Stack Does Eight Sleep Use? 24:00 Is China Leaving the Rest of the World Behind? 35:00 How Do You Turn Superstar Athletes into Investors and Brand Ambassadors? 43:00 What Happens When Your Co-Founder Is Also Your Wife? 51:30 Should You Match Anthropic's Salaries—or Let Your Best People Leave? 59:30 Will Children Born Today Ever Need to Work? 01:05:00 What Drives You to Succeed—and Why Can't You Ever Switch Off?

AGENDA:

00:00 Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived 04:05 Instinct and GrokBot Ignite the AI Assistant War 13:32 OpenAI's GPT Astra Redefines What AGI Means 26:00 GPT Astra and Fable 5.1 Accelerate the Model Race 30:38 OpenAI's Chief Scientist Calls for Enforced AI Safety Limits 40:50 Tesla Launches Cybercabs as Travis Kalanick Returns to Robotaxis 45:55 Index Pulls Out of Town Deal Following Instinct Conflict 49:45 Anthropic Abandons $6BN Descartes Acquisition After Due Diligence 56:18 Robinhood Earns First Underwriting Role in Oura IPO 01:00:28 Wonderful Doubles to $5BN and Approves $170M in Secondaries 01:09:02 Thinking Machines Targets $40BN Valuation in $6BN Funding Round

Jean-Denis "JD" Grèze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $1BN valuation. Before founding Town, JD spent seven years as CTO of Plaid. Before Plaid, he was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. He is also a prolific angel investor backing companies including Modal, BaseTen, Merge and NexHealth.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why AI Assistants Are Silicon Valley's Hottest Market 07:00 How Does Town Compete With Grokbot, Instinct and Big Tech? 11:00 Will We Have One AI Agent or Different Agents for Every Part of Our Lives? 17:00 How Many Mistakes Can AI Agents Make Before We Stop Trusting Them? 20:00 How Does Town Choose the Best Models Without Destroying Its Margins? 29:00 Is the AI Assistant Market Already Too Crowded? 37:00 Can Apple Win the Agent Race—and Are We Entering a Cybersecurity Nightmare? 41:00 What Does a Successful Town User Look Like—and Which Pricing Tier Makes Money? 47:00 What Will AI Agents Be Able to Do in Three Years That They Cannot Do Today? 54:00 Is the Skepticism Around Billion-Dollar AI Assistant Companies Justified? 58:00 What Needs to Happen for Town to Become a $100BN Company? 1:02:00 How Has AI Changed Hiring—and Why Does Town Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools? 1:06:00 What Is JD Most Excited About Over the Next Decade?

Cliff Weitzman is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify, the world's leading AI voice and text-to-speech platform, used by more than 60 million people globally. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, Cliff first built Speechify at Brown University to help him consume written material through audio.

AGENDA:

00:00 Cliff Weitzman Reveals His Biggest-Ever Strategic Mistake 03:08 Why Speechify Is Paying Millions to Build Their Own Data Centres 09:59 What No One Knows About Buying Chips That Everyone Should Know? 20:19 The AI Data Gold Rush Has a Brutal Business-Model Problem 23:42 How ElevenLabs Leapfrogged Speechify—and Why It Was Cliff's Fault 31:00 The $15M AI Talent War: Can Startups Still Compete for the Best Talent? 36:57 The New 10X Engineer: Ten Killer Decisions Every Day 46:12 The Voice-AI Bloodbath: Who Survives Commoditisation? 53:21 The Screen Is Dying—and Voice Will Replace It 57:58 How Cliff Plans to Use AI to Cure His Brother's Disease

AGENDA:

00:00 Nvidia crushes $96.2B quarter and nears $12.9B Hugging Face deal 13:52 OpenAI cuts off Cursor as the Altman–Musk feud escalates 17:40 OpenAI's 1,000-agent cyberattack triggers an industry wake-up call 22:58 Instinct hits $2.5B valuation as AI assistants gain spending power 36:39 Cognition targets $1.6B ARR as the coding-agent market explodes 40:31 AI forces every startup to become a compound company—or get left behind 52:42 Salesforce embraces Claude and outcome-based pricing in major AI reset 1:00:52 Stripe–PayPal deal collapses as both sides clash over price 1:02:31 Clay hits $7B and Linear reaches $100M ARR as agents choose their tools 1:11:52 Texas pauses Flock cameras as police-surveillance backlash grows

Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale revenue from approximately $5M to $500M and led the company through its IPO. Before Elastic, he spent 12 years at Salesforce, working alongside Marc Benioff and helping transform it from a 200-person startup into a global software giant.

AGENDA:

4:05 Are we in an AI bubble? 13:40 How does software change when agents—not humans—make buying decisions? 22:28 Will 90% of tokens flow through open models; can enterprises trust them? 31:09 Why did ClickHouse sponsor Fulham; and could sports teams become $20B assets? 35:49 When will ClickHouse hit $1B ARR? 38:31 Can startups still win elite talent from OpenAI? Biggest remote work mistake? 44:54 Is zero-to-$100M ARR now table stakes; or is durable growth what matters? 48:51 Is college still worth it; which jobs will survive AI? 57:58 When will ClickHouse go public; and why not next year?

Eno Reyes is the co-founder and CTO of Factory, the agent-native software development platform building autonomous "Droids" for enterprise engineering teams. Factory has raised $220 million, most recently a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, from investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, 20VC, NEA, Blackstone, Insight Partners and Nvidia. Before founding Factory, Eno worked as a machine-learning engineer at Hugging Face, training, optimizing and deploying large language models for enterprise customers.

AGENDA:

00:00 Are We Underestimating AI by an Order of Magnitude?

06:35 Why Can the Smartest AI Model Be the Cheapest?

18:51 Is Anthropic's Coding Business Really Worth $2 Trillion?

33:41 Will Continuous-Learning Models Help or Hurt Factory?

40:43 Will 80–90% of Neo-Labs Die in the Next 18 Months?

44:33 Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models?

55:42 Must AI Founders Radically Rethink What a Great Outcome Looks Like?

1:04:30 Do Pedigree and Credentials Still Matter in AI Hiring?

1:19:17 Which Is the Biggest Threat: Claude Code, Codex, Cognition or Cursor?

1:24:20 What Seems Crazy Today but Will Be Obvious in Five Years?

AGENDA:

00:00 NVIDIA Launches a Three-Deal Blitz Across the AI Stack 04:31 NVIDIA's $12BN Poolside Deal Exposes Frontier AI's Capital Wall 15:39 NVIDIA Moves to Back Mercor at $20BN and Perplexity at $30BN 26:55 OpenAI Confirms 2027 IPO as Anthropic Seizes the Lead 40:42 Hugging Face Draws $13BN Takeover Interest as Open Models Boom 44:56 Citadel Cashes Out 80% of Its Leopold Aschenbrenner AI Trade 51:51 AI Boom Is "Less Than One-Third Over"—But Token Addiction Has a Price 01:04:07 Stripe Reaccelerates to 41% as AI Reshapes Software's Leaderboard 01:07:45 Instinct Security Scare Exposes Why AI Agents Still Cannot Be Trusted 01:23:55 VCs Name AI's Biggest Bubbles: Support, Defense, Humanoids and Roll-Ups

Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world. At Sequoia, he has partnered with companies including Rillet, Tacto, and Auctor. Before joining Sequoia, Julien spent five years at Accel, where he worked with companies including Miro, Melio, and BeReal. He is also an angel investor in Revolut and Attio.

AGENDA:

06:35 – What did Julien only discover about Sequoia after joining the firm? 08:05 – What does everyone get wrong about Sequoia? 13:00 – Is Series A the hardest stage at which to invest today? 14:00 – Is Sequoia less focused on ownership as outcomes become larger? 19:20 – Does Sequoia simply pay more than everyone else to win deals? 22:00 – Is the "triple, triple, double, double" growth model dead? 25:00 – What is Sequoia's investment process really like behind the scenes? 27:15 – Can a partner still invest when the rest of Sequoia votes against them? 30:00 – Why can a flawless founder pitch actually be a warning sign? 31:00 – How do you judge whether a founder is exceptional in just 30 minutes? 33:00 – How can investors tell whether a founder's story is genuine? 35:10 – Is arrogance a bad trait in a founder? 36:00 – Which great founder did Julien completely misread? 37:15 – How should investors adjust their founder assessment across different cultures? 39:00 – What does a founder's childhood reveal about their future trajectory? 40:30 – What has Julien learned from Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Alfred Lin and Shaun Maguire? 47:00 – What does it mean when "agents become the new customer"? 49:00 – Does UI become irrelevant in an agent-first economy? 50:15 – Will answer-engine optimisation become larger than SEO? 52:00 – Will AI agents destroy software margins and brand loyalty? 53:00 – How quickly will enterprises allow agents to make purchasing decisions? 54:00 – Is AI infrastructure a safer investment than applications? 56:00 – Do software margins matter less when the potential outcomes are larger? 58:00 – Could the next trillion-dollar company masquerade as a services business? 01:00:00 – Which service industries can AI truly automate end-to-end? 01:02:00 – Are enterprises simply crying out for more help implementing AI? 01:03:10 – Will AI lead to dramatically smaller teams? 01:06:15 – Is traditional private equity screwed? 01:07:00 – The most overfunded and underfunded categories in venture 01:08:15 – What is the best AI agent company outside Sequoia's portfolio? 01:09:00 – Which missed investment still haunts Julien? 01:09:45 – Which founder trait will Julien never compromise on? 01:10:00 – Which competing fund makes Sequoia bring its A-game? 01:10:45 – How Julien missed Revolut—and helped his mother retire by investing anyway 01:14:00 – What does Julien believe that other Sequoia partners might disagree with? 01:15:00 – What is Julien most excited about over the next five years of AI?

Jerry Murdock is the Co-Founder of Insight Partners, which manages over $90 billion in assets. Jerry personally backed companies including Twitter, Nest and Docker, while Insight's portfolio includes giants such as Shopify, Wiz and monday.com. Across three decades, Insight has helped produce 55+ IPOs and become one of the most powerful technology investment firms in the world.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?

11:00 — Will Half of All Neoclouds Disappear Within 36 Months?

13:00 — Can Open Source Models Actually Beat OpenAI and Anthropic?

22:00 — Are We Entering the Golden Age of Cybersecurity Attacks?

32:00 — Have AI Valuations Completely Lost Touch With Reality?

42:00 — Is AI About to Wipe Out an Entire Generation of SaaS & Private Equity?

47:00 — Should We Ban U.S. Chips From Being Exported to China?

48:00 — Should We Be Fearful of Open-Source Chinese Models?

49:00 — Will Continuous Learning Kill Every AI Model We Use Today?

53:00 — Why Microsoft Remains a Mega Buy

56:00 — Which Mag 7 Giant Would You Short — and Is Apple's AI Strategy a Disaster?

AGENDA:

04:20 Elon's Deal of the Decade: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60BN 06:10 Why Cursor Was Surprisingly Cheap at $60BN 07:00 Why Zuckerberg Failed to Buy the AI Prize Elon Secured 12:00 Elon vs Zuck: Who Would You Rather Work For? 14:00 Will Microsoft or Amazon Now Race to Buy Cognition? 17:05 Stripe's $7BN OpenRouter Deal Creates Huge VC Winners 25:00 OpenRouter's Fatal Risk: Enterprises Don't Want 10 Models 28:15 Anthropic Turns Its First Profit on $11.5BN of Quarterly Revenue 32:15 Can Anthropic Really Reach $600BN in Revenue? 37:00 Why Every Elite Engineer Could Soon Get $100K in AI Tokens 39:30 Would Rory Buy Anthropic at a $2.5TN Valuation? 44:50 Silver Lake's $43BN Workday Bet: SaaS Isn't Dead, It's Mature 53:00 How Silver Lake Could Make $30BN From Workday 57:00 Lovable vs Higgsfield: Similar Revenue, Radically Different Valuations 58:00 Is Lovable's $13.3BN Price Actually Cheap? 63:30 Why the DOJ Is Coming After Andreessen Horowitz 69:00 Why A16Z Has "50 Legal Battles" Happening at Once

Andrew Macdonald (Mac) is the longest-serving employee at Uber. Today, he is the President and COO. No one on the planet has spent more time mastering ride-sharing than Mac. Uber now does 300M rides per week, has 200M users, and is one of the most recognised brands on the planet. Mac never does interviews and so this was a rare look behind the scenes at the Uber machine.

AGENDA:

05:39 – How was Mac the only survivor from the Travis era? 10:39 – How does Uber decide what to include in Uber One membership? 11:45 – How does Uber decide which new products to pursue? 16:08 – What does Uber need to do to reach 500 million users? 20:37 – Why Uber was right to focus on its core business and divest autonomy? 24:08 – Why India and Brazil will delay Uber's autonomous future? 28:34 – The craziest story from Uber's battle in China 29:27 – Why Travis Kalanick believed money was the moat? 31:17 – Was Uber structurally disadvantaged in China from day one? 35:48 – Inside Uber's SWAT team of its 30 best AI engineers 37:55 – How companies need to extract real efficiency from AI? 42:00 – Will Uber have more or fewer employees in five years? 43:52 – Will companies that do not work with frontier models be disaggregated? 46:02 – Will AI agents disaggregate Uber's interface and customer relationship? 48:26 – Why Brian Chesky was right: chat is not the best interface for everything 55:52 – Why it is bullshit to say DoorDash would not be number one if Travis were still CEO 59:13 – The single biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick 1:00:07 – The second biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick

Matt Swulinski is one of the best growth leaders in AI. He is currently Head of Growth at Viktor, the Accel-backed AI coworker. Previously, he was Head of Growth at Wispr Flow, where he was marketing hire #1 and built the growth function from pre-launch to millions of users. Matt also built the AI-powered marketing OS that automated 100 newsletter sponsorships a month and enabled a lean team to scale dramatically faster. Before Wispr Flow, Matt worked in growth at Superhuman.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why SaaS Founders Should Steal the E-Commerce Growth Playbook 04:47 How Does PLG Change When AI Agents Become the Customer? 07:46 When Should an Early-Stage Founder Start Spending on Paid Growth? 10:36 How Do You Build the Tracking Stack to Know Whether Paid Is Working? 17:38 How Much Should You Spend on Creative—and How Do You Produce 500 Ads a Month? 23:10 How Long Should You Test Paid—and How Do You Scale Meta, Google and YouTube? 39:38 How Do You Build Referral, Paywall and AEO Loops That Compound? 49:46 How Do You Hire and Structure an AI-Native Growth Team? 1:04:27 Which Growth Channels Are Most Underrated—and Most Overrated? 1:09:28 How Do You Build an AI Operating System That Makes Your Work Compound?

AGENDA:

Alex Atallah is the Founder and CEO @ OpenRouter, the unified interface for LLMs. The company has raised over $153M in funding, with the latest valuation pricing the company at $1.3BN. OpenRouter is reportedly in an acquisition process with Stripe for $10BN.

AGENDA:

00:00 Is OpenRouter Selling to Stripe for $10 Billion? 04:05 What Did Alex Learn From Scaling OpenSea? 06:38 What Did OpenRouter's Founding Thesis Get Wrong? 14:47 Is AI Model Routing Already Being Commoditized? 19:12 Do Falling Token Prices Help or Hurt OpenRouter? 27:16 Should America Be Alarmed by Chinese Open Models? 32:43 Will US Open-Source Models Compete With Chinese Models in the Next 12 Months? 39:26 Will the Router Be Swallowed by the Agent Framework? 48:56 Is Distillation Wrong—and How Should We Look at It? 50:01 Is the Reported $10 Billion Stripe Deal Actually Happening?

David Frankel is one of the great seed investors of our time. As the Co-Founder of Founder Collective he has backed the likes of Uber, Coupang, Suno, PillPack, Airtable, Whoop, Shield AI and many more. In a world of expanding fund sizes, David and Founder Collective are one of the only successful franchises to truly stick to small, boutique funds.

AGENDA:

00:00 The Bubbles Are Getting Bigger—and There Will Be a Lot of Roadkill

05:21 The Worst-Performing Funds Will Be the $50M–$100M Seed Funds

25:06 "We're Greedy for Returns, Not Management Fees"

30:10 "Pro Rata Is the Original Sin"

32:59 "A $1BN Valuation Is the New Series A"

46:39 "I Have Never Seen Secondary Markets This Liquid"

58:03 Microsoft Has Done a Crappy Job of AI—and Another Dot-Com Crash Is Inevitable

01:08:25 OpenAI and Anthropic Will Be Disrupted—and China Could Do It

01:16:12 "Anyone Who Claims They Knew Is Full of Shit"

01:19:56 Our Children Won't Need to Drive—and Chemotherapy Will Look Prehistoric

Special Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO @ Palo Alto Networks.

AGENDA:

04:50 Airtable Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B 17:00 Leo Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up as Citadel Buys His $16BN Book 22:30 Anthropic's AI Models Breach Three Companies as Cyber Threat Accelerates 33:35 Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B as Chinese Models Crush AI Prices 38:05 Valar Atomics Triples to $6B as Sequoia Bets on Nuclear Power for AI 42:50 OpenAI and Anthropic Could Trigger a Massive Public-Market Dislocation 52:55 Big Tech and Palantir Earnings Ignite the Next Phase of the AI Gold Rush 1:04:30 Procore Buys DroneDeploy for $900M in a High-Stakes 12x Revenue Bet 1:10:55 Scale AI Hits $1.5B ARR After the Meta Deal Left It for Dead

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit…

05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now?

07:30 – Do Chinese open source models cannibalize the closed frontier labs?

10:30 – Why has America's open source community lagged so badly behind China?

17:20 – Will Chinese models be banned in the US — and does hosting locally really kill the backdoor risk?

23:20 – Are enterprises really terrified of working with the frontier labs?

27:20 – Why hasn't inference got cheaper — and what happens when Anthropic's "disgustingly high" margins go public?

30:20 – Who should decide if a model is safe to release: the government, a neutral body, or nobody?

33:10 – Are we about to see cyberattacks like we've never seen before? (The fake candidate who passed every interview)

37:00 – 75 Neo labs: what separates the winners from the two-thirds worth nothing?

40:45 – Is data actually a commodity — and can data providers be $100BN companies?

48:00 – Can you be the referee when the players are paying you? (And Arena's real revenue)

50:45 – Will the model providers eat the application layer? Are Harvey, Lagora and Figma in trouble?

54:10 – Quickfire: Why hasn't NVIDIA bounced on the rise of open source, who hits $10 trillion first, and does the compute debt cycle end in insolvency?

Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before making a decision in the real world. Simile has now raised $300 million in total, including a $200 million Series B announced last week at a $2 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures.

AGENDA:

00:00 We Will Pay $100M for a Single Query on Some Models

10:00 Why Stock Markets May Not Exist in 5 Years Time

15:00 The Best Companies All Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies

19:00 The Best AI Companies Have Clear and Fast Reward Functions

24:00 How We Sign Fortune 500 Companies for $10M Contracts in Weeks

32:00 Does Similie Kill Kalshi and Polymarket? Prediction vs Changing the Future

42:00 Inside Similie's $300M Raise; What Every Founder Needs to Know

AGENDA:

05:00 Jensen's Open-Weights Letter Puts Anthropic on an Island 10:00 OpenAI's Model Targets Hugging Face in a Cyber-Security Scare 18:00 America's Open-Model Push Accelerates as China Looms Large 30:00 Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia 34:00 Google Cloud Grows 82%—So Why Did the Market Panic? 41:00 Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms and Physical AI 51:00 Francisco Partners Raises $21B: Can Private Equity Still Save SaaS? 1:00:00 Mark Pincus Says Quit When It's Too Hard—Jason Lemkin Erupts 1:07:00 Stripe vs Revolut: Which $100B+ Fintech Would You Own?

Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, who just raised $3 billion in fresh capital, its largest pool ever. Matt's portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora, OpenRouter, Chai Discovery, Axiom, OpenEvidence and more.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why Menlo Broke All Its Investing Rules to Back Anthropic 09:00 Why Ownership Matters Less in an Outlier-Driven Venture Market 13:00 Do We Have an SPV Problem in Venture Today? 20:00 Do Margins Still Matter in AI? 23:00 Why Open Source Won't Derail Anthropic's Growth 26:00 Does Every Model Provider Need to Build Its Own Chips? 29:00 Why Anthropic Is Not a Threat to Legora 32:00 Why Series A Is the Hardest Place to Invest Today 36:00 Why Signalling Is B.S. and Every Fund Is Going Full Stack 42:00 Why Building a Company in Europe Is Hard Mode 47:00 Why Triple-Triple-Double-Double Is No Longer Venture-Scale Growth

Osvald Nitski is the Chief Product Officer at Mercor, the AI-training and expert-data marketplace powering frontier-model development. Mercor last raised a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation, and is reportedly in discussions for a new round at a $20 billion valuation. Mercor crossed $2BN in ARR in June; doubling from $1 billion in only four months.

AGENDA:

00:04:00 Will open-source models kill the data-provider business?

00:07:00 Are enterprises still terrified of working with frontier model companies?

00:09:00 Does every company end up with its own specialised AI model?

00:10:00 Do enterprises actually have an AI ROI problem?

00:11:00 How should founders balance AI performance against exploding token bills?

00:14:00 Does AI mean product teams build 10x more—or ruthlessly simplify?

00:15:00 What does it now take to be a great product manager in an AI-native world?

00:20:00 Is the boom in AI services and forward-deployed engineers here to stay?

00:37:00 Can Mercor escape its dependence on a handful of frontier-model customers?

00:47:00 Are AI-generated code and agents creating a cybersecurity arms race?

00:56:00 When will robotics have its real "ChatGPT moment"?

AGENDA:

00:04 China's Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned 00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion? 00:21 OpenRouter's Moment: Is This the Perfect Time to Sell? 00:31 Fireworks' $1.5B Raise Signals the Real AI Money Is in Infrastructure 00:39 Why Every Great AI App May Need to Build Its Own Model 00:50 Stripe's Bold Play to Buy PayPal 01:01 The AI Funding Frenzy: Why Late-Stage Venture Is Winning 01:12 Nuclear Startups Go Wild While Databricks and Stripe Stay Private 01:15 The AI Supply Chain War: TSMC, ASML, DRAM—and Nvidia's Next Move

Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch.

AGENDA:

00:07 — Why Did Fireworks Bet on Inference When Everyone Else Was Chasing Training?

00:13 — Can Open-Source Models Turn AI Infrastructure into a Commodity?

00:19 — Should Enterprises Trust Chinese Open Models With Their Most Sensitive Data?

00:25 — Will Model Progress Keep Moving This Fast—or Are We Nearing a Plateau?

00:28 — Will the Multi-Model World Create a $100BN Routing Layer?

00:37 — How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years?

00:43 — Will Token Costs Fall 10x—and Unleash 100x More Demand?

00:49 — Does Fireworks Eventually Have to Build Its Own Data Centres?

01:02 — What Is the Real Bottleneck Holding Back the AI Economy?

Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare.

AGENDA:

00:00 How Did a Spare-Time COVID Test Become a $5BN Business?

07:00 How Do You Go From Testing Cows to STDs, Sepsis and COVID?

21:00 When Did Fred Realise COVID Was Massive—and How Did Curative Scale to $5BN?

36:00 Why Pivot Into Health Insurance—and What Is Broken About US Healthcare?

40:00 How Is AI Rebuilding Curative—and Which Departments Go to Zero?

45:00 Is SaaS Dead? Why Is Curative Cutting 80% of Its Software Spend?

48:00 Are Legacy Insurers Screwed? What Will Anthropic Be Worth in Three Years?

59:00 Will AI Make Companies Smaller? Which Jobs Will Survive?

1:10:00 Why Nuclear—and Could Subcritical Become Bigger Than Curative?

1:17:00 What Have Marriage and Fatherhood Taught Fred? What Has He Changed His Mind On?

AGENDA:

Avishai Abrahami is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wix, the NASDAQ-listed website creation platform serving millions of businesses worldwide. Today, Wix generates more than $2BN in ARR and has a market capitalization of approximately $2.1BN, after reaching a peak valuation of $17BN over the past two years. The company also acquired Base44, one of the fastest-growing AI application-building platforms, scaling it to $150M in ARR in record time.

AGENDA:

00:00 The SaaS Apocalypse: What Does Wall Street Still Not Understand About Wix?

07:00 Is the Market Valuing Wix's Core Business at Less Than Zero?

12:55 Will AI Kill Wix... or Make Base44 Bigger Than the Entire Company?

19:15 "You Are NOT Going to Vibe Code Shopify" — Why Everyone Is Getting AI Wrong

23:00 Would You Really Pay $80M for a One-Person Startup?

24:15 The Buyback Disaster: Would Avishai Do It All Again?

31:00 Why Every AI Customer Support Startup Keeps Failing (According to Wix)

37:00 Should a 22-Year-Old Still Learn to Code in the Age of AI?

42:20 Has AI Been Overhyped? Avishai's Most Controversial Prediction Yet

49:00 The Hardest Lessons on Leadership, Marriage & Building Through Chaos

Arvind Jain is the Founder & CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI leader valued at $7.2 billion after raising more than $770 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, and more. Before Glean, Arvind co-founded Rubrik, helping build it into one of the world's leading cloud infrastructure companies before its successful IPO. Prior to that, he spent over a decade at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, working across Search, Maps, and YouTube.

AGENDA:

00:00 – The Shocking Truth About Frontier AI: 90% Is Already a Commodity 02:04 – Can OpenAI & Anthropic Own Enterprise AI? The Battle for the Workplace Begins 10:18 – Will OpenAI and Anthropic Win the App Layer 18:03 – Microsoft Is the Real Enemy… Not OpenAI? 20:53 – "Where's the ROI?" Why Enterprises Are Starting to Question the AI Hype 26:00 – Will AI Replace Your Job? Harry & Arvind's Heated Clash Over the Future of Work 33:43 – The Billion-Dollar Mistake Every AI Company Is Making on Token Spend 39:20 – The AI Land Grab Is On: Why Founders Must Move Now or Lose Forever 42:20 – China vs America: Who Really Wins the AI Race? 47:20 – Rapid Fire: The Future of Computer Science, Hiring, Fundraising & AI's Biggest Winners

AGENDA:

05:00 Washington Just Put Frontier AI on a Leash 06:30 Sam Altman's Wild 5% Government Stake Idea 19:00 The AI Funding Bubble: Why Founders No Longer Fear Dilution 28:00 Alex Karp's Brutal Warning: Enterprises Don't Trust Frontier AI 33:00 Meta's Shock Pivot: Has Zuck Accidentally Built the Next CoreWeave? 41:00 Nvidia's Dangerous New Game: "Compute Now, Pay Later" 45:00 Anthropic & DeepSeek Go After Nvidia's Crown 48:00 Kling vs Sora: Did China Just Win AI Video? 52:00 Is China Secretly Winning the Open Source AI War? 01:02:00 Microsoft & Amazon's $6B Bet: AI Still Needs Humans 01:11:00 Ashton Kutcher Walks Away From Sound Ventures 01:16:00 The New Startup Talent War: No Liquidity, No Chance 01:20:00 Final Thoughts: Who Wins the AI Endgame?

Mike Mignano is a General Partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the most iconic venture firms in the world, whose investments include Coinbase, Stripe, Etsy, Twilio, Cloudflare. Before joining USV, Mike was a Partner at Lightspeed, where he backed breakout AI companies including Granola and Suno. Prior to investing, he co-founded Anchor, acquired by Spotify.

AGENDA:

00:00 Is Fear of Failure the Secret Weapon Behind Great Founders?

07:20 Why Leave Lightspeed for USV — and Is Thesis-Driven Venture Still Alive?

09:50 Is the Real AI Money Still in Infrastructure, or Are Apps Finally About to Explode?

13:00 Who Wins the AI Model War: OpenAI, Anthropic, Open Source, or the "Rebel Alliance"?

19:00 Are We About to Hand Our Entire Lives Over to AI Agents?

21:00 Can Anthropic Keep Growing Like This — or Will Token Spend Break the Model?

26:00 Can AI Routing Become a $50BN Company, or Is It Just a Commodity Pipe?

30:00 Will the AI Energy Crisis Create the Next Monster Venture Outcomes?

36:00 Can Startups Survive Microsoft, OpenAI, and the Brutal Power of Bundling?

45:00 Should VCs Ignore Price When Backing Generational Companies?

55:30 Is Traditional Media Dead — and Who Becomes the New Tech Kingmaker?

Clay Bavor is the Co-Founder of Sierra, one of the world's fastest-growing enterprise AI companies. Sierra is valued at approximately $15.8 billion, has raised more than $1.5BN from leading investors including Sequoia, Benchmark, Greenoaks, GV and Tiger Global, and today serves more than 40% of the Fortune 50. The company recently surpassed $150 ARR, making it one of the fastest-growing enterprise software businesses in history.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Why Frontier AI Demand Will Be Unlimited

08:00 – Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins?

17:00 – China's AI Advantage & The Distillation Debate

20:30 – Inside Sierra: The AI Agents Running the Entire Company

24:00 – The $100,000 Token Budget Every Engineer Will Soon Need

29:00 – Building AI for 40% of the Fortune 50

37:00 – Why Forward-Deployed Engineers Are the Future of Enterprise AI

43:00 – Sierra's Unusual Board Meetings & Billion-Dollar Company Playbook

48:00 – The Four Values Behind a $16B Startup: Craftsmanship, Intensity & Family

56:00 – Clay Bavor's Hiring Philosophy, AI-First Teams & What's Coming Next

AGENDA:

00:00 Coinbase Slashes AI Spend 50%—Is the AI Token Bubble Bursting?

12:55 Anthropic Warns Open Source Could Destroy the AI Business Model

18:10 Dario Escalates the AI War with China & Open-Source

22:00 Should the US Ban Chinese AI Models?

33:15 Microsoft's AI Strategy Is Breaking Down

38:00 Kalshi's $40B Valuation Signals a New Consumer Gold Rush

41:15 Has SpaceX Frozen the AI IPO Market?

43:20 Why Bending Spoons May Be the Smartest IPO of the Year

46:00 The $100B Opportunity to Buy Broken SaaS Companies

53:30 Which Software Companies Would Jason Buy Tomorrow?

1:04:30 The Great AI Talent War Is About to Get Worse

1:11:20 Every Company Is Becoming an AI Company—or Dying

KR Sridhar is the Founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, the distributed power company powering the AI revolution. Under his leadership, Bloom has grown to a market cap of approximately $93 billion, with revenue surpassing $2 billion as demand from AI data centres has surged. Over the last 12–18 months, Bloom has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure boom. It's also the largest position in Leo Aschenbrenner's investment portfolio, making up around 16% of his fund.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why Failure Is Never an Option: The Mindset That Built a $90B Company

05:20 The 25-Year Bet: Why Bloom Never Doubted AI Would Need Its Technology

12:10 Andy Grove's Brutal Leadership Lesson That Changed Everything

18:40 AI Isn't a Bubble—It's a "Hockey Stick on a Hockey Stick"

25:30 Why Electricity, Not AI Models, Will Decide the Winners of the AI Race

34:20 The Radical Vision: Why Power Must Move to the Edge of the Grid

40:40 How Bloom Beat Everyone to Power Oracle's AI Data Centres in Just 55 Days

50:00 The Future of Cities, Energy Sovereignty & Why AI Will Democratise Power

52:10 Parenting, Purpose & the One Belief KR Thinks Everyone Gets Wrong About AI

55:00 The Next 10 Years: Why AI Could Create Global Energy Abundance

Paul Erlanger is the Co-Founder and CEO of FOMO, the social-first trading platform building the future of on-chain investing. Since founding the company in 2025, Paul has raised approximately $94 million, including a $17 million Series A led by Benchmark and a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures with participation from USV, valuing the company at $550 million. Today, FOMO has grown to 600,000 users, processed over $4 billion in trading volume, and is adding thousands of new users every day—all with a team of just 17 people.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Building a $550M Company with No Salaries, No Managers & No 1:1s

03:58 – Why Traditional Brokerages Will Lose in the Next 10 Years

09:30 – Why Robinhood's Strategy Is Wrong; The End of the Financial Super App?

13:05 – "Markets Aren't a Casino" — The Case for Retail Investors Fighting Wall Street

16:45 – The Radical Hiring Bet: Giving Employees Founder-Level Equity

23:40 – AI Kills Org Charts: Why FOMO Will Stay Under 25 Employees

29:30 – Why Taste Beats AI & The Biggest Mistake Most Consumer Startups Make

33:10 – The Social Media Playbook That Every Startup Gets Wrong

39:20 – How Benchmark, Index & USV Won the Deal—and the VC Advice Founders Need to Hear

46:10 – The Future of Investing: Social Trading, Creator Economies & Financial Networks

AGENDA:

00:00 – Google Loses Two AI Legends as Anthropic Wins the Talent War

14:45 – China's $50B DeepSeek Bet Changes the AI Power Balance

27:15 – AI's Memory Crisis Has Begun — Apple Warns of a '100-Year Flood'

30:00 – Wall Street Finally Asks the $725 Billion Question: Who Pays for AI?

41:00 – We Built an AI Finance VP... and It's Better Than Humans

46:30 – The Death of Moats? Why Founders Should Stop Talking About Defensibility

58:30 – Databricks, ServiceNow & the New AI Software Winners

01:07:00 – The Seat-Based SaaS Model Is Dying

01:12:00 – OpenAI's Custom Models Could Rewrite Enterprise Software

01:17:00 – OpenAI's Biggest Threat Isn't Anthropic Anymore

Nikesh Arora is the Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity leader. Since taking over in 2018, he has transformed the company from an $18 billion market cap business into one worth more than $225BN with more than 21,000 employees globally. Previously, Nikesh was President and COO of SoftBank, where he worked alongside Masayoshi Son and helped shape the firm's technology investment strategy.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why AI Token Prices Will Fall 90% — And Why That's Bullish for AI

07:40 The Frontier Model Problem: Breadth vs Depth in AI

11:30 Most Enterprises Are Using AI Completely Wrong

13:10 Why AI Could Cut Marketing, HR & Finance Teams in Half

16:00 AI Applications Will Have Opinions — SaaS Never Did

20:00 OpenAI, Anthropic & The Most Important Valuation Question in Tech

24:00 The Real Business Model of AI: Transaction Revenue Beats Advertising

25:10 Why Token Prices Must Collapse

28:20 Where Value Actually Accrues in AI: Models, Memory or Apps?

29:00 Why Memory Becomes the Biggest Moat in AI

32:00 Why Every Enterprise Should Be Scared Right Now

33:15 Should Governments Regulate Frontier AI Models?

37:10 Why Brian Armstrong's AI-First Playbook Doesn't Work Everywhere

40:00 The Biggest AI Mistake CEOs Are Making Today

42:00 How Nikesh Creates Darwinian Competition Inside Palo Alto

43:00 Do AI Companies Really Need Forward-Deployed Engineers?

45:00 Why Enterprise AI Products Still Aren't Ready

52:00 Systems of Record vs Systems of Intelligence: The Future of Software

54:00 Why AI Applications Will Replace Traditional SaaS Workflows

58:00 What Nikesh Learned From Google That Still Matters Today

1:04:00 From $200 and Two Suitcases to Running a $225B Company

1:10:00 Happiness, Gratitude and Why Tomorrow Matters More Than Ten Years From Now

Ryan Peterson is the Founder & CEO @ Flexport, the logistics darling of the venture capital world that has raised $900M+ with the last round valuing the company at $8BN. Today, the company does $450M in revenue growing 30% YoY.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Why Does Ryan Petersen Call Remote Work "White Collar Fraud"?

08:30 — Does Having More Money Actually Make You a Better Founder?

11:40 — When Will Flexport IPO? What Price Would It Go Out At?

19:00 — Can AI Actually Automate Entire Companies or Is the Productivity Boom Overhyped?

22:00 — Which Jobs Will Exist in 5 Years That Don't Exist Today?

26:00 — OpenAI vs Anthropic: If Ryan Could Only Own One, Which Would He Buy?

27:45 — Are Chinese Open-Source Models a National Security Threat—or Is Silicon Valley Overreacting?

30:15 — The $500M Fundraising Mistake Ryan Wishes He Never Made

35:00 — Why Flexport Abandoned San Francisco & Remote Work Damaged Flexport's Culture

41:00 — Why Marketing Is the Hardest Executive Hire in Startups

43:00 — Do Great CEOs Hate HR?

46:00 — Why Most Startup Founders Hire Executives Too Early

48:00 — What Ryan Learned Investing Alongside the Greatest YC Founders

55:00 — The Single Biggest Mistake Founders Make When Fundraising

1:09:00 — Does Founder Brand Actually Drive Enterprise Value?

1:11:00 — What Makes a Great Board Member—and Why Most Boards Add Negative Value

1:13:00 — The Sports Team Ryan Dreams of Buying Just to Troll His Biggest Competitor

AGENDA:

Aravind Srinivas is the Founder and CEO of Perplexity, one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world. Since the start of the year, Perplexity has tripled revenue to well over $500M in ARR. Aravind has raised over $1BN for the company with reported valuations reaching $20BN.

AGENDA:

05:40 – "Perplexity Changed Google More Than Any PM Ever Has"

10:15 – Why Search Is Not the Future of AI

13:05 – The Most Important Insight in AI: The Model Is NOT The Product

16:10 – Why AI Agents Will Become Bigger Than Google Search

22:00 – AI Will Design Chips, Discover Drugs & Cure Diseases

24:15 – The Secret to Building a 24/7 AI Agent

32:40 – Aravind's Wild Prediction: Micron Could Become More Valuable Than Meta

41:00 – Why Power Will Be The Biggest Bottleneck In AI For The Next Decade

45:00 – Have U.S. Export Controls Accidentally Made China Stronger?

49:00 – Why Dario Amodei's AI Doom Narrative Is Wrong

55:20 – Why Token Budgets are Total BS and Useless

58:00 – When Agent Traffic Surpasses Human Traffic, What Happens To The Internet?

01:08:00 – SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic IPOs: Is There Enough Capital For All Three?

01:14:00 – What Elon Musk Is Really Like Behind Closed Doors

Matan Grinberg is the Founder and CEO @ Factory, an AI research lab, bringing autonomy to software engineering. Matan has raised over $220M for the company from the likes of Sequoia, Khosla, NEA, Evantic and 20VC. Last round valued the company at a whopping $1.5BN.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Why AI Means Everyone Will Become a Builder

04:55 – Will AI Finally Break the 200-Year GDP Growth Ceiling?

06:45 – The Rise of the 100x Engineer & Load-Bearing Talent

08:00 – The New Executive Job: Allocating Tokens Like Capital

10:35 – Kirkland's $500M AI Bet: Brilliant or Delusional?

12:45 – The AI Value War: Models vs Applications vs Infrastructure

18:45 – Token Maxing, AI Hangovers & The Coming ROI Reckoning

22:00 – Why AI Spend Could Soon Exceed Developer Salaries

24:00 – Open Source Can Already Replace 80–90% of Frontier Model Work

28:00 – What Makes a Great Engineer in the Age of Agents?

35:00 – Jobs That Will Disappear First Because of AI

40:00 – Why Matan Isn't Worried About AI Taking Jobs Long-Term

46:00 – From String Theory to Startup Founder: The Sequoia Origin Story

52:00 – The Meeting That Led to Sequoia's First Check

58:00 – Why America's Lack of Frontier Open Models Is Embarrassing

1:08:00 – What Matan Looks for in Every New Employee

1:12:00 – Why Elite Companies Will Treat Employees Like NBA Athletes

1:16:00 – The Most Important Prediction Matan Has Changed His Mind On

AGENDA: 00:00 – SpaceX Launches the Largest IPO Roadshow in History at $1.77T Valuation

05:00 – Did Elon Break the IPO Playbook? The High-Risk Pricing Strategy Explained

12:00 – Will SpaceX Create a New Generation of Venture Billionaires?

17:00 – OpenAI Files to Go Public as the AI IPO Race Officially Begins

19:00 – Sam Altman's Vision: Why AI Is Becoming Always-On Infrastructure

22:00 – Apple Admits Defeat on Siri and Turns to Google AI

25:00 – Uber Cuts 23% of HR as AI Reshapes White-Collar Work

31:00 – Founders Revolt Against VCs: The Fundraising Horror Stories Going Viral

38:00 – Lovable Hits $500M ARR: The Rise of the 100-Person Billion-Dollar Company

48:00 – Elon's Masterstroke: Why the Cursor Acquisition Could Be the Deal of the Year

Roman Chernin is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius, one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies in the world. Today, Nebius operates some of the largest AI compute clusters globally and serves leading AI labs, enterprises, and developers. Today, Nebius has a market cap of $57BN.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Why AI Infrastructure Is Not a Bubble

05:00 — The Real Impact of Open Source on OpenAI & Anthropic

11:00 — Jevons Paradox: Why Cheaper AI Creates More Demand

13:00 — The Four Layers of AI Infrastructure Explained

19:00 — If Nebius Had 10x More Capacity Tomorrow

26:00 — The Shift from Training to Inference and Agents

31:00 — How Token Factory Cuts AI Costs by 70%

44:00 — Sovereign AI, Europe, and the Future of Model Building

49:00 — Competing Against Hyperscalers with 10x More Capital

59:00 — The Biggest Threat to Nebius Isn't Competition—It's Consolidation

Jacob Lauritzen serves as the CTO at Legora, the fastest growing B2B enterprise company in history; hitting $100 million in ARR in just 18 months . Legora boasts a valuation of $5.6BN and has raised a total of $866 million in funding. Legora's investors include the likes of Accel, Benchmark, and Bessemer Venture Partners, alongside strategic tech giants NVIDIA (NVentures) and Salesforce Ventures.

AGENDA:

05:01 - How to Hire the Best Product Talent in 2026

06:21 - The New Product Bottleneck: Shifting Beyond Code Creation

09:24 - System Design vs. Code Creation: The Future Role of the Engineer

14:04 - The Evolving Software Development Lifecycle & The Death of the Design Phase

22:23 - Will Product and Engineering Fully Converge?

29:16 - Scalability and UX: Designing for 10x vs. 100x Spikes

38:15 - Scaling the Organization: What Breaks with a 250 Person Product Team

47:05 - Quick-Fire Round: Hyper-Growth Tactics & Out-Working the Giants

AGENDA:

00:00:00 — Private Markets Are "F***ing Done" & The Shift to Heavy CapEx

00:00:46 — Anthropic Files to Go Public

00:04:59 — Will the Anthropic IPO Break the Startup Ecosystem?

00:06:22 — The "Billion-Dollar Position" Era: VCs Reset Their Expectations

00:18:11 — The Trillion-Dollar Cash Grab: Google, SpaceX, and OpenAI Rush the Queue

00:23:15 — Is the SaaS Apocalypse Over? Bouncing Off the Bottom

00:25:34 — The Death of Human Per-Seat Licenses as Multiples Shift

00:27:18 — Winners vs. Losers: How Agentic Focused Products Captured the Market

00:30:26 — Cognition Raises $1 Billion at a $26 Billion Valuation

00:33:04 — Token Budgeting Panic Hits Corporate America

00:35:46 — Multi-Model Workflows and the Future of Cost Containment

00:41:20 — Choosing Tokens Over Humans: The 2027 Engineering Reality Check

00:46:42 — Can Large Companies Survive Slashing One-Third of Their Engineering Talent?

00:57:40 — Big Law Flex: Kirkland & Ellis Pledges $500 Million to Build In-House AI

01:01:21 — Giving Away the Crown Jewels: Will Firms Trust Claude?

01:08:44 — Robinhood's AI Move: Automating Financial Planning vs. Beating the Market

01:16:15 — Apollo Warns PE Software Returns Are About to Be Disastrous

01:19:15 — $10 Billion Carry Pools: Will VC Winners Quit the Game?

01:24:10 — The 9-9-6 Work Ethic: Performative Theatre or Startup Reality?

01:30:10 — The Great Valley Contradiction: Working 24/7 to Automate White-Collar Work

Brendan Foody is the Founder and CEO @ Mercor, one of the leading data providers to the largest labs on the planet including OpenAI. In the last two years, Brendan has scaled the company to $1.5BN in ARR and a valuation of $10BN.

AGENDA:

True or False:

Mercor lost Meta and OpenAI as a customer with the hack?

Mercor has been poaching competitor talent, paying them millions?

Mercor revenue is not real revenue and is only GMV?

12:56 Would Brendan sell Mercor for $30 billion?

14:23 Why everyone is wrong that AI will lead to labor displacement?

15:59 We will create many new jobs that do not exist with AI.

16:59 Why training agents will be a massive labor category that does not exist today

19:51 Will we see the data provider market unbundle and specialize into verticals?

22:24 Is the stated revenue really revenue or is it really GMV?

27:55 How a 1 million ARR company secured one of the best investors in the world with a helicopter ride

29:41 How Felicis secured the deal of the decade with a race track and a set of Ferraris

32:59 Which investment round felt like the highest price to grow into?

34:49 Why will value accrue to the infrastructure layer, not the application layer, in the next 12 months?

35:46 Why the model is the product and why application layer companies should be scared as a result

37:22 Why network effects will be the determinant of value creation

38:46 Why the forward-deployed motion, not the GTM motion, will determine true value creation.

41:59 Why token spend within organizations is going to continue to increase

43:54 Why agent evaluation to commoditize the model layer will be a massive business for enterprises?

51:13 Why we should have increased capital gains tax

01:01:31 How to compete with $20 million a year from Meta?

01:08:49 Will Mercor go public and when?

Nico Laqua is the Co-Founder and CEO of Corgi Insurance, an AI-native insurance carrier built for startups. Corgi is the most intense workplace culture in America. The team works 7 days per week. The founder sleeps in the office. ⅔ of the first 30 team members have a Corgi tattoo. This week, Corgi raised $106M, valuing the company at a whopping $2.6BN.

AGENDA:

06:35 Why going to university was a massive waste of time

09:42 Why we work seven days a week

11:58 Why we do work trials and how that is a test of people's stamina

18:41 Why we created a cafe in the biggest annoyance with San Francisco

22:00 Why I am so bullish on London

23:49 Why I haven't sold a single secondary

24:19 Why people who found companies in New York prioritise dating over their company

30:46 Biggest lessons on cash comp and equity

31:13 Team members can be split into three separate groups

34:59 Biggest lesson from Brian Chesky on price

35:44 What is the right amount of time to be fundraising for?

36:47 Good companies get deals done and what makes the best venture investors?

40:34 Why AI makes sales and marketing more valuable

43:12 Why I don't like boards and I don't think they're effective

46:19 What I would like to see more of from venture funds

48:05 Who was Corgi's first believer?

AGENDA:

05:16 Nvidia Blowout Quarter: $81BN Revenues and Stock… Flat!

10:39 Uber and Microsoft Declare Productivity Gains Questionable from AI

25:26 The Layoffs Continue: ClickUp and Cloudflare

34:39 OpenAI S1: Is it a Race? How Will it be Received?

38:28 Do Anthropic Rush Out Their IPO Also?

45:49 SpaceX S-1: "Why I Would Never Invest"

48:06 Why Colossus is a Stroke of Genius By Elon

51:31 Data Centers In Space is BS and Will Not Be Core to SpaceX

58:04 Polsia Raises $30M at $250M Price: Is this the Peak?

01:06:08 Exa Raises at $2.2BN to Build Search for Agents

01:14:34 Is Replacing Your CRM with Vibe Coding Always Ragebait

Andrew Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems. This month, Cerebras went public achieving a market cap of $70BN, the largest semiconductor IPO in history. Cerebras has a massive commercial backlog with a monumental, multi-year $20 billion compute agreement from OpenAI.

AGENDA:

05:58 - Why we are not in an infrastructure bubble and it is just the start

08:00 - Sam Altman's superpower is his ability to forecast capex spend.

08:58 - Anthropic did not get a good deal with Elon. They got a deal that was available.

10:39 - What is going on with the price of memory and why is it a problem?

16:40 - Are Google best positioned to produce tokens and what challenges do they face?

19:23 - Is Coreweave dramatically undervalued or overvalued?

24:34 - My biggest advice to entrepreneurs scaling their business

30:13 - Why most of the layoffs are AI-washed and

33:41 - What will we spend on tokens for software engineers in five years?

34:48 - Why does the role of HR change so significantly in the world of AI?

35:36 - Why lawyers are the biggest inhibitor of enterprise AI adoption

39:20 - Why Jensen and Nvidia are wrong to sell chips to China

42:49 - What needs to change in the U.S. to build a strategic asset in chips?

51:00 - Should Cerebras invest in companies building on top of their platform; as Nvidia is?

53:28 - Nothing changed when Cerebras IPO'd but I did make 800 millionaires.

Chad Peets is one of the most straight-talking, no BS sales leaders of our time. Today, he partners with founders of the fastest growing companies in the world, like Harvey, Factory to build the best sales teams in a world of AI.

Chris Degnan is a legendary technology sales leader who achieved the historic feat of scaling Snowflake from $0 to $4BN in ARR.

AGENDA:

00:00 – The $100M CRO Packages Nobody Believes Are Real

04:10 – Why Most "Elite" Salespeople Are Actually Just Order Takers

08:00 – The Secret to Hiring Killer Sales Talent at Early-Stage Startups

10:05 – 20x Quotas & The Death of Traditional Pipeline Generation

16:20 – The ARR Scam: Why Most AI Revenue Numbers Are Fake

17:45 – Why the Best Engineers Do Not Want to Be Forward Deployed Engineers

21:10 – Why Paying Everyone the Same Kills Great Sales Organisations

24:15 – Anthropic's Crazy Compensation Is Breaking the Entire Sales Market

29:00 – The Brutal Truth About Replacing CROs & Firing Sales Leaders

32:20 – Forecasting in AI Is Completely Broken

38:20 – The Fatal Mistake Founders Make Chasing Venture Valuations

39:40 – Why Most VCs Give Absolutely Terrible Sales Advice

42:10 – Global Sales From Day One: The New AI Go-To-Market Playbook

44:15 – "Anthropic Is a $5 Trillion Company"

47:40 – The Death of the Traditional SDR & The Rise of Full-Stack AI Sellers

49:00 – Consumption Pricing, Vertical AI & Why SaaS Is Getting Rewritten

52:00 – What the Best Sales Cultures Still Get Right in the AI Era

AGENDA:

00:00 – Anthropic Eyes $900B Valuation & Andre Karpathy's Shock Move

04:46 – Unpacking Anthropic's $30 Billion War Chest

10:52 – The True Cost of AI Tokens: Is Salesforce Spending Too Much?

15:59 – The Bear Case for Token Growth & Why Software Leaders Must Adapt

22:56 – Public Tech Rebound: Figma & Datadog Crush Expectations

26:59 – The Death of Traditional Web Builders? The Decline of Wix & Squarespace

36:59 – Compute Starvation: Is the Semiconductor & Hardware Boom Sustainable?

45:59 – Cerebras IPO Smashes Day One: The Biggest Tech Public Debut Since Snowflake

48:17 – SpaceX Sets Date For the Largest IPO in History

57:28 – Y Combinator's Mic Drop Deal & The Drama Behind Elon Musk's OpenAI Lawsuit

01:11:57 – The Looming Backlash: Mass Tech Layoffs and the Politics of AI

20VC:

Josh Browder is my favourite emerging manager. As the Founder of Browder Capital he has been the first check into unicorns like Micro1, Owner.com and Yuzu Health to name a few. He turned his Thiel Fellowship Grant of $100K into a whopping $10M angel portfolio. All new investments move into Josh's Four Seasons Residence where he then trains them on company building. They are only allowed to leave when they raise their seed round. In addition to this, Josh is the Founder & CEO @ DoNotPay, the now profitable company that has raised $22M from Marc Andreessen and others.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why I believe young founders make the best founders

02:10 What do I look for in founders I'm investing in?

10:00 How I test for founder commitment pre-investment

11:00 What do I want to see in the childhoods of the entrepreneurs that I back?

12:05 Why I make founders live with me in my Four Seasons residence after investing

14:00 There are three reasons why pre-seed companies fail and how I solve for them

15:45 What do I look for in a team to assure me they will last?

16:50 Is $5 million post still attainable in this world?

17:15 Should we be worried about the increasing levels of fraud at the early stages?

18:10 Which Silicon Valley investor was the most impressive?

20:00 Do VCs really add value?

20:50 Does university carry less value than ever and should founders drop out if they have a dream and an idea?

24:00 The advice of one lawyer changed the entire trajectory of this multi-million dollar company

28:10 I would never invest in someone that I met over Zoom

29:20 Are all the best founders you invest in delusional?

31:10 What is the biggest benefit of being a Thiel Fellow?

36:20 The problem of accelerators and why artificial constraints can enforce quality

38:20 How we used Mark Zuckerberg's house as a viewing instrument tool to get users

41:20 My pre-seed cheque in Micro One is now worth hundreds of millions and my lessons

43:20 The biggest mistake VCs are making in assessing founders

44:10 Why I will never tell the entrepreneur what to build and why I place little value on ideas

47:00 Why kingmaking is real and why you should accept half the price from a tier one firm

49:00 My biggest lessons on reserve investing

53:00 Why price rounds are bullshit and we should do more SAFEs

54:20 What all founders need to know about signing with a VC

55:10 Single biggest advice to founders on how to get the best price

57:30 What role does not exist today that will be massive in five years' time?

59:10 Stocks are bullshit. Cash is bullshit. I put my money in land. My personal investing strategy

1:01:00 Why the Trump administration is unwaveringly good for US business

1:03:20 Why competitive markets are the best investments

1:05:40 The serendipity of San Francisco is unmatched

1:08:10 What things does no one know about Marc Andreessen that everyone should know?

Shiv Rao is the CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge, a leader in generative AI for healthcare. The company reached a $5.3 billion valuation following a $300 million funding round with investors including Jensen Huang, Henry Kravis, USV, Bessemer Venture Partners and Elad Gill. A practicing cardiologist, Shiv has scaled the company to 450 employees and partnered with major health systems like Emory and Yale.

AGENDA:

04:00 — You just have to survive long enough to not die

06:00 — Did USV liking music make them billions of dollars?

13:58 — The three variants of an AI native company

15:00 — How do you know if foundation models are going to kill or help you?

22:15 — Why OpenAI and Anthropic doing consultancies is such an obvious move

41:00 — Biggest lesson from Jensen Huang at Nvidia

41:00 — What Founder Mode truly means

52:00 — What the founder of Duolingo taught me about sacrifice

56:37 — If I started a company again, Elad Gill would be the one investor I go to

AGENDA:

00:05:11 — Anthropic freezes secondary sales, requiring board approval for all transfers.

00:10:45 — Why Anthropic is buying capacity from Elon Musk.

00:15:35 — Anthropic's massive $200B revenue commit to Google.

00:18:55 — Goldman Sachs predicts a 24x surge in token consumption driven by agents.

00:31:05 — Will AI labs eat the app layer? The threat to Legal and CX verticals.

00:37:55 — SaaS public markets: HubSpot tanks 18% while Monday.com finds its footing.

00:42:40 — Growth theft: How Clay is commoditizing ZoomInfo's data business.

00:46:25 — Cerebras prices IPO at $150–$160 with a $48B market cap.

00:52:15 — Real Venture Capital: Celebrating the early bets by Foundation and Benchmark.

00:58:30 — Ramp's valuation vs. the Chapter 7 collapse of e-commerce card Parker.

01:06:20 — Success and Sacrifice: Is mental health the price of building a $20B company?

Patrick Forquer is the Chief Revenue Officer at Legora, the fastest growing enterprise business to ever hit $100M in ARR and now on track to hit over $250M in ARR by the end of the year. They recently raised a $550 million Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation, led by Accel, note 20VC did participate and is an investor in the company.

AGENDA:

0:00 – How Jude Law Generated $50 Million in Qualified Pipeline

4:00 – Why Implementation is Your Secret Weapon to Win in AI

5:50 – Why AI Enterprise Sales Require "Legal Engineers"

7:45 – The 6-Figure Rule: When Should Humans Control Sales

12:55 – Is Legora Vastly Overvalued at $5.5BN?

15:45 – How to do global expansion in a world of AI

18:00 – How to Win Supremely Competitive Markets

24:45 – Why Giving Your Product Away for Free is a Death Sentence

33:55 – Legora's Onboarding and Training Playbook for Sales Teams

38:25 – Spotting Red Flags: How to Know if a Sales Rep Will Fail in 45 Days

46:30 – How to Structure Sales Commissions in a World of AI

49:40 – How to do Revenue Forecasting in a World of AI

1:00:30 – Will companies vibe code solutions and no longer buy a SaaS products?

Cliff Weitzman is the Founder & CEO of Speechify AI. He solved his dyslexia and ADHD in college by building a Voice AI agent that's now used by over 60 million people and has over 1 million five-star ratings. Over 200 software and AI engineers work on Speechify which won the Apple Design award last year.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Until You Hit $100K Do Not Spend on any Channel Other than Meta

04:53 — How I hacked the college system by applying to 26 universities

06:33 — The "Great Guy" yearbook prank that accidentally outed me

08:35 — What I learned from hunting down the top 100 CEOs in the world

11:51 — The "Warrior" rule: Why I force my senior leaders to edit their own ads

13:52 — Why companies are like bodybuilders: The Bulking and Cutting cycle

17:34 — I test 1,000 AI-generated ads every single day

20:13 — How I built a custom AI ad platform in just four days

23:19 — The one $3,000,000 ad I filmed in a hot tub with red headphones

32:15 — Why we will soon spend more on AI tokens than employee salaries

34:55 — "I'm disappointed in you": The 1,000-credit daily AI requirement

36:31 — How LLMs helped me find my father's cancer when doctors couldn't

41:13 — Why 40% of billionaires are dyslexic—and why you should be too

45:41 — Why I refuse to hire anyone who has worked at Google

47:05 — I flew into a war zone in Ukraine just to keep one engineer

55:49 — Why performance reviews are a total waste of time

58:32 — QA is the most valuable skill in the world (and you're probably bad at it)

01:03:59 — Why we keep our valuation and funding a total secret

01:07:51 — The "Virus" Strategy: How Logan Paul hijacked the WWE

01:11:32 — What I learned from sleeping at Mr Beast's house for three weeks

01:14:15 — How we made a 36X return on Nvidia using high-leverage options

01:23:44 — I found the hacker who stole $200k—then I hired him

01:32:45 — Why I spent 11 days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot

AGENDA:

00:00 – Mag Seven Earnings: The "Super Bowl" of Tech Results

04:45 – Google's Cloud Explosion & The AI Search "Disruption" That Never Came

15:53 – Microsoft's $190B Bet: Is AI the Only Thing Keeping Growth Flat?

21:59 – Meta's $150B Future Bet vs. Wall Street's Need for Spreadsheets

28:50 – Palantir's Home Run: Why Big Companies Spend Big Money on AI

38:43 – Apple's Quiet Consistency & The Stealth Inflation of Memory Chips

41:11 – The SaaS Apocalypse Over? Atlassian and Twilio Lead the Re-acceleration

50:50 – Anthropic's $50B Raise & The Math Behind Token vs. Salary Spend

01:05:59 – Sierra's $15B Valuation: Replacing the $400B Customer Service Labor Market

01:13:39 – Musk vs. Altman Trial: Statute of Limitations, Standing, & Private Diaries

01:17:42 – The End of Managers? Brian Armstrong & The Rise of the "Individual Contributor"

Tobi Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, the global e-commerce titan with a $160 billion market cap. Under his leadership, the company generates over $7 billion in annual revenue and has seen its valuation grow nearly 100x since its 2015 IPO. Today, Shopify has over 8,000 employees and AI now generates over 50% of the Shopify's code.

AGENDA:

00:10:36 - The $160 billion CEO who did not want to be CEO.

00:11:51 - Why don't companies become public? Because it is much worse to be an untrusted public company.

00:16:53 - Why we are about to enter a golden age of entrepreneurship.

00:17:54 - Why AI is being used as a scapegoat for mass layoffs.

00:17:41 - How will labor markets change in a world of AI?

00:24:43 - Why we should praise Elon Musk so much more than we do.

00:27:59 - Why we need to place more, not less, scrutiny on charitable giving.

00:31:56 - Why we have too many charity dollars and why they are inefficient.

00:34:57 - Why governments are so bad at what they do.

00:37:27 - The Trump derangement syndrome in Canada.

00:39:51 - Why will governments regulating technology push us into the hands of the Chinese?

00:41:59 - Europe has to get rid of the bullshit green parties and go back to Prussian economics.

00:48:29 - Why is looking at the ticker such bullshit?

00:50:48 - Why young coders are not as advantaged in AI as I thought they would be.

00:53:56 - The best engineers in Shopify are not writing code anymore and the AI does it for them.

00:56:40 - The cheat code for any career from the billionaire founder of Shopify.

Becca Lindquist is Head of Sales at Clay, one of the fastest-growing AI companies to reach $100M+ ARR. She previously helped scale dbt Labs into a category-defining data platform, building and leading high-performing sales teams. Before that, she was an early sales leader at Heap, where she played a key role in scaling the GTM motion.

AGENDA:

00:00 Why most sales reps plateau—and when you should leave your company

02:45 Should you jump from SaaS to a hot AI startup right now?

05:30 How long is too long at one company—and what great tenure actually looks like

08:00 How to read a LinkedIn profile like a world-class sales leader

13:30 The biggest hiring mistake sales leaders make (and how to catch it fast)

16:00 Titles vs salary: what actually predicts a great hire

20:00 What early-stage founders must look for in their first sales hires

24:00 How to evaluate AI startups: PMF, retention, and real signals that matter

27:00 Sales comp decoded: quota, OTE, and how to design winning incentives

33:00 How to build a high-performance sales culture (and avoid a toxic one)

41:00 What makes a true champion—and why most reps get this wrong

45:00 Weekly forecasting: how elite sales teams run pipeline reviews

50:00 Are SDRs dead? How AI is really changing outbound sales

52:00 Why every rep owns pipeline—and how top teams generate it

54:30 The future of sales productivity: AI tools, workflows, and what actually works

AGENDA:

00:00 $45B Floods into Anthropic from Google & Amazon

05:10 OpenAI Misses Growth Targets — Is This a Real Problem?

08:40 The Rise of AI Agents: Why Humans No Longer Pick Models

12:05 "Compute ≠ Revenue": The First Crack in the AI Business Model

20:30 China Blocks $2B Manus Deal — AI Cold War Escalates

34:10 Why Google May Be the Biggest Winner in AI Infrastructure

41:50 The Death of SaaS? Agents Replace Apps Like Jira & Canva

46:20 Thoma Bravo Hands Medallia to Creditors — $5B Wiped Out

52:10 The Collapse of Private Equity Exit Routes in VC

Adam Foroughi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Applovin, one of the most underdiscussed but incredible businesses. Applovin has a market cap of $160BN, the company does $5.48BN in revenue and has an astonishing $10M EBITDA per head. The margins; 80%+. There is almost no other business in the world like it.

AGENDA:

00:00 – Why Winning (Not Fear) Drives the Best Founders

04:30 – When Money Stops Mattering: The Real Founder Motivation

07:15 – $83M CEO Payday: The Truth Behind the Headlines

10:45 – The Hidden Cost of Being a CEO: What No One Tells You

13:00 – Down 92%: How Do You Not Lose Your Mind?

17:00 – Layoffs: AI Revolution or COVID Hangover? Will the Layoffs Work?

24:30 – Why Most Companies Can't Build a Culture of A-Players

29:30 – What % of Applovin Code is AI? What Will it Be in 5 Years Time?

33:30 – Building on OpenAI: Opportunity or Existential Risk?

40:00 – The Dark Side of Short Sellers & Market Manipulation

50:00 – Do Great Founders Doubt Themselves?

52:00 – TikTok, Meta & The Future of Recommendation Engines

53:30 – The Path to a $1 Trillion Company: What Needs to Happen?

56:00 – Stock Buybacks: How to Do Them and When They Go Wrong?

59:00 – Is the SaaS Model Breaking? What Happens Now?

Amjad Masad is the Co-Founder and CEO of Replit, one of the leading "vibe-coding" platforms. Under his leadership, Replit has raised a total of $922 million in funding, recently raising at a whopping $9 billion valuation. Replit has over 50 million registered users and is used by employees at 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Replit's revenue jumped from $10 million to $100 million in nine months, and the company is on track to reach $1BN in ARR by the end of 2026.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Why Coding Models are Hitting a Performance Plateau

07:21 — Is Most of the Value of Replit Not Anthropic Model Quality?

10:04 — Why Did Replit Decide to Not Build Their Own Model, Like Cursor Did?

11:58 — Why Product Quality Must Always Beat Cost Optimization

14:51 — How Do Replit Choose Which Model To Route To For Different Tasks?

24:43 — The SaaS Apocalypse: Why it is Fair and Just?

29:55 — What Will the Cost of Tokens Be in 5 Years?

31:09 — Is Cursor Dead? Debunking the Twitter Narrative

33:36 — Are IDEs Dead?

35:54 — Should Students Still Study Computer Science?

42:47 — Are US Companies Using CCP Subsidised Open-Source Chinese Models

56:59 — What Do No Founders Know About True Product-Market Fit

AGENDA:

04:00 — 🤯 Cursor Acquired for $60B?! Breaking down the mind-blowing deal with xAI/SpaceX.

07:00 — 🤝 A Marriage Made in Heaven: Why Cursor and Elon Musk actually make perfect sense.

11:00 — 🏆 Who Won the Deal? The $60B question and why SpaceX public shareholders might be the secret losers.

15:00 — 💰 Venture Payday: What this means for the investors and the "lock-up" reality for the founders.

19:30 — 🚀 SpaceX as an AI Lab: Is Elon using $2 trillion in market cap to buy his way into the AI race?.

20:30 — ⚠️ The AI Advantage: Why high-price stocks are the ultimate weapon for massive acquisitions.

23:30 — 🏛️ The $100 Billion Prediction: Jason explains why we'll see an even bigger startup acquisition within 12 months.

33:30 — 🍎 End of an Era: Tim Cook steps down at Apple—was it a home run exit or "AI Terror"?.

37:30 — 📉 The Stealth Churn: Why Netflix, Canva, and Adobe should be terrified of YouTube and AI.

39:30 — 🦄 Anthropic Hits $1 Trillion: The "white heat" of secondary markets and the race to go public.

48:30 — 🎨 Claude Design vs. Figma: Is Anthropic's new app an existential threat to the design world?.

01:03:30 — 🔥 Rippling's God-Mode Growth: How they hit $1B in revenue while accelerating past the "SaaS is Dead" meme.

01:09:30 — 🧠 Salesforce Goes Headless: Marc Benioff's genius move to survive the AI agent revolution.

01:13:00 — 🕸️ The "Agent Fabric": The next trillion-dollar battleground for the enterprise.

01:23:30 — ⚡ Cerebras IPO 2.0: Can the "wafer-scale" chip challenger actually take on Nvidia?.

01:29:30 — 🥊 Jensen Huang vs. The Podcasters: Reacting to the legendary (and cagey) Nvidia interview.

01:34:30 — 🇬🇧 London vs. The Valley: Why 91% of AI unicorns are in the Bay Area and Harry's thoughts from the UK.

Aaron Levie is one of the most forward-thinking public company CEOs when it comes to enterprise adoption of AI. Aaron is the CEO of Box, the enterprise storage company that does over $1BN in revenue but only has a market cap of $3.2BN. Something we discuss today…

AGENDA:

00:00 — Why the Experts are DEAD WRONG About the US-China AI Race

10:55 — Everyone is Wrong About Labour Markets: You Will Not Lose Your Job

13:10 — What Role Does Not Exist Today But Will Be So Common in 5 Years

16:45 — Is Your SaaS Tool Actually a Valueless Database in an Agentic World?

20:50 — The Cybersecurity Tsunami: Why Agents are Your Biggest Threat

25:50 — Token Maxing: What Every Company Needs to Know About Budgeting Tokens

34:55 — Is Silicon Valley Secretly Being Powered by Open-Source CCP Models?

39:15 — The Brutal Truth: Is This Generation of CEOs Too Low-IQ for AI?

46:55 — Frontier Labs: Why Aaron is Still Betting Everything on the Labs

Jake Paul is one of the most influential creators of the digital era, with over 70M+ followers across platforms. He transitioned from YouTube stardom to become one of the biggest pay-per-view draws in boxing history with fights against Mike Tyson and Anthony Joshua. Jake is also Co-Founder of Anti Fund, where he has made investments in Ramp, Anduril, Cognition and Olipop to name a few.

Geoffrey Wu is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Anti Fund. He previously built his career at Goldman Sachs and Point72. He is at the forefront of a new model of investing—where distribution is as powerful as capital.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Why Attention is Now More Valuable Than Cash

04:36 — Inside the Secret $BN Jake Paul Business Empire

06:50 — Jake Paul's MasterClass on How to Tell Great Stories

10:50 — Why Jake Paul Is Literally Uncancelable

16:15 — The Brutal Reality of VC: Why Seed Investing is for Amateurs

25:10 — Is AI About to Make the Entire Human Race Unemployed?

33:15 — Trump Endorsed Me: Is Jake Paul Actually Running for President?

41:10 — The 60/40 Rule: How to Build an Unbreakable Relationship

44:15 — Dark Side of Greatness: Is Jake Paul a "Psychopathic" Work Addict?

50:20 — The Ultimate Choice: Boxing, Content, or Investing?

AGENDA:

00:00 — Anthropic Unveils Mythos: The Model "Too Good at Hacking" to Release

05:56 — Why Mythos is a Quantum Leap in Cyber Risk

10:11 — The "Boy Who Cried Wolf": Jason's Critique of Dario Amodei

14:00 — The Oppenheimer Moment: Are Founders Using Doom as a Marketing Tool?

19:22 — Amazon's $20B Secret: Is NVIDIA's Chip Stranglehold Finally Loosening?

22:28 — Claude vs. Lovable & Replit: Anthropic Moves into App Building

25:24 — The 60% Death Spiral: Why Public SaaS Stocks are Entering a Doom Loop

39:51 — Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Alex Wang's First Model from Super Intelligence Labs

44:18 — OpenAI's $50B Ad Vision: The Plan to Monetize Intelligence

53:50 — Token Maxing: How CIOs are Reclaiming Control Over AI Budgets

57:57 — SpaceX's Leaked Financials: The Math Behind the $2 Trillion IPO

1:08:00 — Thoma Bravo Shuts Growth Equity

1:16:18 — Who IPOs First; OpenAI or Anthropic?

Anj Midha is the founder of AMP, and a founding investor in Anthropic. Most recently, Anj was General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, leading frontier AI investments. He serves on the boards of Mistral, Black Forest Labs, Sesame, LMArena, OpenRouter, Luma AI and Periodic Labs and is an early angel in ElevenLabs among others. Prior to that, Anj was the cofounder/CEO of Ubiquity6 (acquired by Discord) and a partner at Kleiner Perkins.

AGENDA:

04:00 Why the "Scaling Laws are Dead" rumor is dangerously wrong

05:30 The 4 bottlenecks stopping us from reaching Super Intelligence

11:30 Where will the actual value accrue in an AI-dominated world?

12:00 Why Europe is building a "Sovereign Stack" to escape US dominance

15:00 Inside the brutal early days of Anthropic and the 21 VCs who said "No"

19:30 Why the most successful AI startups are ditching the "Profit-First" motive

34:30 The 1885 Industrial Revolution: Why we have a "GPU Wastage" bubble

38:00 Is the CCP actually winning the full-stack AI systems race?

43:30 Monopoly Mafias: Will model providers eventually kill the App Layer?

Carles Reina is VP of Sales at ElevenLabs, where he was the first investor and fourth employee. Carles has scaled the revenue org from Day 1 to over $350M in just 3 years. Carles is also an active investor with investments in ElevenLabs, Revolut, Happy Robot and more.

AGENDA:

00:00 - Is the Traditional CRO Dead in the Age of AI?

01:01 - Building the AI Sales Machine: Agents that Actually Generate Revenue

08:35 - Will AI Shrink the Sales Teams of the Future?

09:51 - The ElevenLabs Masterclass: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota

11:00 - How to Structure Explosive Sales Accelerators

12:15 - Why You Should Stop Paying Commission on Pilots

14:00 - Customer Success: Is it 'Total Bullshit' or a Growth Engine?

16:15 - The 'Global-First' Fallacy: Why You Need to Open Every Market Now

17:23 - Why Startups Are Wrong to Ignore 20-Year Sales Veterans

19:15 - The Pipeline Construction Secret: Liquidity vs. Whales

24:30 - Forecasting the Unpredictable: How to Hit a $1B Revenue Target

31:55 - The Substitution Threat: Is AI Voice Just a Commodity?

34:10 - Verticalization Mistakes: Lessons from Scaling India

38:40 - The 'IBM Effect': Does Brand Actually Shorten Sales Cycles?

40:15 - Extreme Expectations: Why ElevenLabs is a Hard Company to Work For

42:15 - Internal Leaderboards: How to Use Public Competition to Drive Results

44:20 - Hunting the Obsessed: Identifying the 'Inner Psychopath' in Hires

46:40 - The SaaS Apocalypse: Will Companies Build Their Own CRM?

48:30 - Formula 1 Branding: The Mindset Behind the Audi-Revolut Deal

50:15 - Dinner vs. Conferences: Which Marketing Channels Actually Scale?

52:45 - Designing Un-Salesy Content: How to Run a Legendary Summit

54:20 - CVC Strategy: Turning Corporate Investors into Distribution Channels

01:01:45 - The Globalization Nightmare: Why You Can't Sell in English Everywhere

01:06:45 - Operator-Investors: Can You Be a High-Performer and a VC Simultaneously?

01:11:30 - Unit Economics in AI: Why Good Early Numbers Might Mean Failure

01:18:25 - The Next Wave: Why Foundational Model Consolidation is Inevitable

AGENDA:

03:59 — Anthropic Surpasses OpenAI in Revenue

12:43 — OpenAI Management Reboot

18:24 — OpenAI Buys TBPN

29:00 — SpaceX Files for IPO Targeting $2 Trillion Valuation

37:21 — Doug Leone Returns to Sequoia Capital

41:14 — YC Kicks Out Delve

45:21 — The Rise of Open Router

57:59 — Supabase Targeting $10B Valuation

01:08:18 — The Mercor Hack and AI Cyber Threats Moving Forward

01:17:25 — The $1.8B Two-Person Company

Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder & CEO of Google DeepMind - working on AGI, responsible for AI breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the game of Go; and AlphaFold, which cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction and was recognised with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Demis is revolutionising drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs. Ultimately, trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality.

AGENDA:

00:04:00 — What Actually Counts as AGI; and Where Are We Today?

00:05:00 — What Are the Biggest Bottlenecks Holding AI Back Today?

00:06:00 — Have We Hit the Limits of Scaling Laws?

00:07:00 — Where Is AI Ahead of Expectations; and What's Still Missing?

00:07:30 — Why Can't AI Systems Learn Continuously Like Humans?

00:08:30 — How Did DeepMind Go from Behind to Leading the Pack?

00:11:00 — Are We Heading Toward Model Commoditization; or Winner-Takes-All?

00:12:00 — What Does the Future of Open Source Really Look Like?

00:13:00 — What Does a Post LLM World Look Like?

00:14:45 — Can AI Really Fix Drug Discovery—and Cut the 10-Year Timeline?

00:17:00 — What Does "Good" AI Regulation Actually Look Like?

00:18:00 — Who Should Be the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in an AI World?

00:19:30 — If Demis Had One Shot to Fix AI Safety, What Would He Do?

00:21:00 — Is This Time Different for Jobs; or Will History Repeat Itself?

00:22:00 — Is AGI Bigger Than the Industrial Revolution; and Faster?

00:23:00 — Are We Underestimating AI Despite All the Hype?

00:23:30 — Does AI Lead to Massive Inequality; or Universal Prosperity?

00:24:30 — How Do We Solve the Energy Crisis Created by AI?

00:26:00 — Why Stay in the UK Instead of Moving to Silicon Valley?

00:28:00 — Will Europe Ever Build a Trillion-Dollar Tech Giant?

00:29:30 — Meeting Elon Musk for the First Time?

00:31:00 — What Big Questions About AI Is No One Talking About?

00:31:30 — What Does Demis Want His Legacy to Be?

Andrew Dudum is the Founder and CEO of Hims, the company reshaping consumers relationship to healthcare. It has been a rocky ride over the last 6 months, the company is down 66%, their market cap today is $4.3BN on $2.3BN of revenue. They just bought their largest international competitor, Eucalyptus for $1.5BN.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Why Being Public Is Better Than Private

02:50 — My Advice to The Collisons on Taking Stripe Public

07:15 — How to Hire for the Most Gritty People: The Test

10:55 — How AI Will Reshape All of Customer Acquisition

15:30 — What Did Hims Do That Andrew Wishes They Had Not Done

20:15 — What is the Least Profitable but Most Important Hims Product

27:10 — The $1.5BN Acquisition: Why Hims Bought Their Biggest Global Competitor

33:45 — Why Brand Marketing Beats Performance Marketing

39:40 — The Future of Prevention: Why Your Next Blood Test Should Be Free

46:50 — Disrupting the PBMs: How We Are Breaking the Corrupt US Healthcare System

AGENDA:

00:00 — Anthropic's Monster Month: 6 Billion in February Revenue

04:30 — The "Claude Mythos" Leak: 10 Trillion Parameters

11:50 — OpenAI Kills "Sora": A Massive Strategic Own Goal?

14:30 — OpenAI Hits $100M in Ads: Why OpenAI Must Make Ads Work

20:50 — Masa Son's $40BN Bridge Loan: Investing More Into OpenAI

21:50 — Cybersecurity Stocks Tank: Is the Anthropic Panic Justified?

27:10 — The Golden Age of Cyber: Why AI Agents are a "Golden Goose" for Security

31:30 — Gross vs. Net: The Truth Behind AI Revenue Accounting

34:50 — The "Vibe Coding" Era: Reselling Tokens and Triple-Counting ARR

41:00 — Oura Going Public & Whoop Raises $500M at $10BN Valuation

49:50 — Epic Games Layoffs: The Reality of the Attention Economy

52:40 — The Manus Scandal: Founders Trapped in China After Meta Deal

59:00 — The Billionaire Tax: Why the Golden Geese are Leaving California

01:03:20 — Do VCs Actually Add Value? The Ron Conway vs. Matthew Prince Spat

Marc Andreessen is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. The firm now manages over $90BN and has invested in the likes of OpenAI, Airbnb, Coinbase, Anduril and many more. Marc is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape (sold to AOL for $4.2 billion). He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.

AGENDA:

05:00 — Why Introspection is Overrated: The Dangers of Learning from the Past

08:00 — The One Trait Marc Andreessen Looks For in Every Founder

14:30 — Are the Best Founders Broken? What Makes the Best Founders?

16:00 — "Extreme Ownership": Why Everything Being Your Fault Changes Everything

19:00 — "Do You Read the Comments?" Fame, Criticism & How to Deal with Haters

26:00 — Is Venture Now Go Big or Go Home? The Real Future of VC

30:00 — Does Price Matter Anymore? The Dangerous Truth About Valuations

33:00 — "Stop Chasing Diamonds in the Rough": Why Most VCs Get This Completely Wrong

36:00 — Do You Actually Need to Like Founders? The Uncomfortable Answer

40:00 — Are Companies 75% Overstaffed? The Most Controversial Take on Hiring

45:00 — When Will a16z Go Public?

50:00 — Why Labour Displacement Theory Around AI is Totally Wrong

55:00 — Why Silicon Valley Is More Dominant Than Ever?

01:00:00 — Why a16z Invested $300M into Adam Neumann

01:05:00 — What Still Drives Marc Andreesen?

01:10:00 — What is the Biggest Mistakes VCs Still Make Today?

Gili Raanan is the Founder of Cyberstarts, one of the best performing venture funds of the last decade. He is famed for being the seed investor in Wiz, Islands and Cyera, leading to multiple 10x+ funds. He has the only remaining monopoly in venture; cyber security in Israel. If it is good, Gili sees it, it is that simple.

AGENDA:

00:00 — Does the Venture Business Even Work Anymore?

05:58 — The Insane Rise of $150M Seed Rounds!

08:58 — Will Mega Funds Ever Actually Return Venture Economics?

11:13 — How Do You Value Companies Growing at Impossible Speeds?

14:50 — The Truth About Growth: Why Most Companies Eventually Plateau

18:50 — Do Margins Still Matter in the Age of AI?

24:32 — How To Make Mega Money in the World of Secondaries

28:11 — What Are Core Misalignments Between GPs and LPs That No One Discusses?

37:57 — Quick Fire: Best Investment, Most Memorable Founder, Investing Icon

AGENDA:

05:00 — Anthropic vs. OpenAI: Who Is Actually Winning the Enterprise War?

07:55 — "Air of Desperation": Is OpenAI Losing Its Invincibility?

18:00 — SpaceX at $2 Trillion: Elon's Insane Plan to Build Data Centers in Space

29:00 — Jeff Bezos' $100 Billion Fund: The End of "Doing It the Hard Way"

34:00 — The $20 Billion "Acqui-hire": The Groq Deal Broken Down

40:40 — Figma's Death Spiral? Why the Markets Are Terrified of AI Disruption

56:00 — The Broken VC Math: Why You Need $1BN To Do Series A

01:04:00 — Win or Die: The Terrifying Reality of the Unicorn "Dead Zone"

Matthew Steckman is the President and Chief Business Officer of Anduril. Matt played a central role in securing the $20BN contract Anduril just won with the US military. Prior to Anduril, Matt served as Chief Revenue Officer for Zipline. Before Zipline, Matt held several leadership positions at Palantir.

AGENDA:

3:45 — Anduril's $20BN Army Contract Broken Down

6:30 — What Do Most Defense Founders Get Completely Wrong?

9:15 — Can You Build a Billion-Dollar Defense Company Without the US?

12:05 — Why Government Contracts Are Brutal (And Why Most Fail)

15:40 — How Does Anduril Predict Wars 5–10 Years Before They Happen?

18:20 — Why Cyber Warfare Is the Most Dangerous Battlefield No One Understands

23:50 — Why There Will Only Be ONE Winning Drone Company

28:10 — How Anduril Decides Where to Deploy $100M+ Product Bets

35:20 — What Would Anduril Buy If They Had an Unlimited Checkbook?

41:10 — Why Anduril Must Go Public

45:00 — Quickfire: The Future of War, VC Mistakes & Career Advice

Shaunt Voskanian is the CRO @ Figma, where he has scaled the sales machine to over $1BN in ARR and over 400 people. Prior to Figma, Shaunt was Senior VP of Global Sales at Datadog where he scaled the revenue org to $1BN in ARR.

AGENDA:

04:33 - Are Great Sales Leaders Born or Trained?

06:55 - In a world of PLG, is sales less important than ever?

11:51 - Why does Shaunt not believe in traditional customer success teams?

14:31 - Does the role of the SDR survive in two years' time?

19:19 - When is the right time for sales to intercept in a PLG motion?

21:43 - How to Set Sales Quotas in a PLG AI Sales World?

31:19 - How has what you look for in sales hires changed over time?

42:54 - How do you judge sales performance if not on quota?

54:49 - Quick fire: Outdated sales tactic, What Role Dies, Best Sales AI Tool

AGENDA:

04:02 NVIDIA's GTC: What You Need to Know

11:39 Meta's 20% Layoffs & Atlassian Lets Go of 1,600

21:42 How to Test AI Fluency in Employees

30:59 Anduril Lands $20BN Army Contract

46:46 Travis Kalanick Returns With Atoms

49:55 If Travis Kalanick Ran Uber Today, Would it be $1TRN Company?

56:03 When is it Right to Replace Founders

01:04:24 Adobe CEO Exit Shock

Gokul Rajaram is one of the greatest operators turned investors of the last 2 decades. He is trusted as the go to advisor for the greatest founders in the world. Today he serves as a Board Director at three public companies: Coinbase, Pinterest and The Trade Desk. Prior to Marathon (his firm), Gokul served on the executive team at DoorDash and Block. Before Block, he served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook. Earlier in his career, Gokul served as a Product Management Director for Google AdSense. Gokul is also a prolific angel investor, having invested in 700+ companies, including Airtable, Figma, Groq, Runway, Supabase, and Vercel.

AGENDA:

03:53 — Investing Lessons from Google, Doordash and Facebook

05:32 — Why Mark Zuckerberg is the Greatest Distribution Genius Alive

07:23 — Why Every Company Today Needs to be Multi-Product

09:16 — Negative Gross Margins: Are the Best Companies Actually Built on "Shit" Economics?

10:50 — The SaaS Apocalypse: Is the Entire Sector Going to Zero?

12:15 — The 8 Moats of Enduring Software Companies: How to Analyse Companies

14:50 — Why Brand is No Longer a Strong Moat (And What Replaced It)

16:13 — Salesforce vs. Atlassian: Which Systems of Record are Dying?

18:13 — Outcome-Based Pricing: Is This the Total Death of Seat Pricing?

20:16 — The Bolt-On AI Trap: Why Rebuilding Your Entire UX is Non-Negotiable

23:44 — Are the Outcome Sizes of Vertical SaaS Large Enough for VC Today?

28:16 — The Zombie Cohort: What Happens to Private Companies with High Valuations?

32:44 — Is "King Making" Complete Bullshit?

34:21 — Durability Over Margins: What Really Matters in a 100x Growth World

35:36 — The Non-Consumption Miracle: Why Granola and Gamma are Crushing It

38:50 — The PayPal Rule: Can You Raise Prices 5 Times in 3 Years?

42:47 — My Biggest Miss: How I Misread the Shopify Billion-Dollar Mark

45:18 — The Courage to Bet: Why Instacart is the Best VC Deal Ever

46:33 — Seed vs. Growth Pricing: When Does Price Actually Destroy Returns?

50:53 — Does "Proprietary Founder Access" Even Exist?

54:33 — Double Down or Diversify? The Truth About Fund Reserves

59:44 — The Vanta Anti-Portfolio: A Mistake I'll Never Forget

01:01:21 — When to Sell: The "Sell a Third, Hold a Third, Trade a Third" Rule

01:04:12 — Why Remote Early-Stage Companies are Dying

01:07:33 — Why Mid-Level Partners are Fleeing Mega Funds

01:09:47 — The Best CEO Superpowers: Larry, Mark, Jack, and Tony

01:12:33 — The Next 10 Years: Why Dropouts are "AI Maxing" the World