JL

Person

Jason Lemkin

Where to Find Them

Jason Lemkin hosts and writes The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors and hosts The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch . They have also been a guest on 20VC (19 times) , Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth (2 times) , My First Million (2 times) , 20VC with Harry Stebbings , StrictlyVC Download , Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing and This Week in Startups .

Recently: “20VC: Why "Pacing the Frontier" is BS | Instinct Raising $1BN at $10BN & Meta Launches Muse | Miro Sells for $1.35BN After a $17.5BN Valuation | Mistral Raises €3BN & Could Sam Bankman-Fried Win His Freedom?” on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (September 2026); “20VC Newsletter - 13th September 2026” on 20VC (September 2026); “20VC: Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | GPT Astra and Fable 5.1 Accelerate the Model Race | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town & Anthropic Pulls From Descartes Acquisition” on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (September 2026); “20VC Newsletter - 6th September 2026” on 20VC (September 2026); “20VC: NVIDIA Crushes Quarter and Buys Hugging Face | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5BN Valuation and The Race for AI Assistants | Cognition Raises at $46BN, Linear $2.5BN and Clay $7BN” on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (September 2026); “SaaStr 876: Shipping Enterprise AI Agents with the CPOs of Rubrik, Glean, and Harvey” on The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors (September 2026).

What They Said

“What's the killer app? Another reservation at a Cheesecake Factory or TGI Fridays? We need to see the VisiCalc of Muse.” — Jason Lemkin, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Lemkin is skeptical of Meta's Muse agent. He says every horizontal platform has needed one killer app, that OpenClaw never found one, and that restaurant bookings and carpool scheduling are not it. A moment later he admits Muse is beautiful and fun to use.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 2026-09-17 Permalink → Listen →
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 23:48 into the episode
Harry Stebbings

What do you mean, does it matter? Sorry.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yeah.

Jason Lemkin

What's the killer app? Another reservation at a Cheesecake Factory or TGI Fridays? We need to see the VisiCalc of Muse. We need to see what is the killer app. Every horizontal platform needs a, you know, traditionally needs some sort of Killer app, right? I'm just skeptical. I'm just wondering, right? I don't think in this whole thing, I don't think there was a killer app for OpenClaw. And I don't know if there is a killer app for Muse because, or Instinct, because there wasn't one for OpenClaw.

Harry Stebbings

Is it not being your discovery mechanism to shopping? Like a WeChat, a super app? You know, Zuck has spoken about taking portions of transactions as being the business model as well.

Jason Lemkin

The model's good, but what are his examples? Scheduling his daughter's carpool. Is that really what a trillionaire needs to do with a general? He can't even come up with a good use case of Muse for himself. He's making up consumery things. I had to schedule ballet lessons from my daughter. I mean, great, but you need to run this thing eight hours a day, I think, like Claude Code or Codex to really matter. And so if we're in it eight hours a day, like a super app, it's cool. If it's a random task, I'm just waiting to see what the killer app is. And I've run, and Muse is really fun. Like, it's so beautiful. The beauty is it gives you all the ideas. It has an idea tab and it tells you all the things to do. I've done most of them and they're great. I just don't know if it's killer.

Harry Stebbings

I don't know if it needs to be. And I know that sounds stupid, but no, but I use Instinct in a similar power user way. I think latency is a real problem with Instinct, by the way, which might not be with Matt. I wait for responses. Minutes. It's like the first days of Chat GPT. It's a real problem. But I don't know if it needs to be. It does all of my bookings, travel, restaurants. It does all of my shopping. It's very good. It does all of my calendar invites. I know there's no killer app, but it's just incrementally better than everything else. I don't know, but there's lots of little bits, not good enough.

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