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

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

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

Website ↗ Last published 2 November 2026 1,530 posts collected by Sputnik

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

“I don't think anybody knows anything about markets at the early stage. Markets evolve. … If you name a company at early stage, I can tell you why it's going to fail. Any company. … So you explaining why something isn't going to work is incredibly obvious and incredibly irrelevant. The magic of our business is squinting and seeing why something is going to work.” — David Tisch, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
David Tisch · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Every concentrated manager will say that we win 90% of the deals we want to win. And I think that's total BS. I think it's like 20%. … I think you actually offer that deal to upwards of 120, maybe 150 companies to get your 30. And I don't think people admit that. So I do believe that the best companies, the ones you're most excited about, don't always make it into the portfolio.” — David Tisch, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
David Tisch · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Never has such a successful startup maimed itself so poorly that I can think of as OpenAI. I mean, it would have killed almost any other startup what they went through, right?… Anthropic… owned the playbook for the chessboard for almost 12 months. There was no point in using any other coding solution… They literally letting Dario walk out the door rather than build it in-house and then firing the CEO and bringing him back over the night of long knives… talk about own goals, right?” — Jason Lemkin, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jason Lemkin · 29 Oct 2026 Listen →
“80% of the revenue comes from models that are less than six months old… In this case, you invent something, you get most of the revenue from it in six, 12 months, and then you have to continue to invent masses of money to build the next one… This is a game where you have to spend like billions and billions and billions of dollars just to play.” — Rory O'Driscoll, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Rory O'Driscoll · 29 Oct 2026 Listen →
“One of the things that I'm very gung-ho about is we all become, every firm will have a private eval benchmark, which is their core IP. And every model comes in and tries to sort of hill climb on that eval. And that to me is how a firm works.” — Satya Nadella, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Satya Nadella · 26 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I think the biggest change now I have is I used to always think that alignment will just fall out. I no longer believe that. So I think this alignment thing may be a harder, different problem.” — Satya Nadella, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Satya Nadella · 26 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I think commoditization doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. It just means that margin, yeah, falls quite a lot, but it also means that the market is very big. So you could argue that tomatoes are commoditized, but we still eat them.” — Naveen Rao, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Naveen Rao · 24 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The inference market is going to be a $10 trillion market within 10 years. … If we knock off a zero, one order magnitude of efficiency on delivery of a token, that effectively 10x's the market in some ways. … So I actually think robotics is going to be 100 times larger than agentic coding.” — Naveen Rao, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Naveen Rao · 24 Oct 2026 Listen →
“No. I would say if you're a pure software investor, you're kind of fucked, honestly. And I'll say that pretty confidently because SaaS, I don't think, is going to be where you gain margin anymore. … I just don't see software being a huge market in 20 years.” — Naveen Rao, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Naveen Rao · 24 Oct 2026 Listen →
“A billion today is the new $100 million, right? A billion is just the entry point for like a classic B round. In the old days ... Series B investors used to say, as long as it's 100 million or less, it didn't matter because the classic Series B wanted a billion dollar plus IPO.” — Jason Lemkin, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Jason Lemkin · 22 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Oh, Harry, you have no idea. According to Byron, he said it was the lowest voted deal in the history of the firm of the time he had been there. But the fact that we were both there and had conviction… they're like, dude, that's where alpha comes from. If you guys really believe, go do it.” — Sameer Dholakia, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Sameer Dholakia · 19 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The hardest part about memory is actually not the database at all. When we talk to a number of companies, the way that they do memory is they just store it in a single file. Very, very kind of simple. The hard part is taking all of the observations that happen … and distilling that into information that's valuable enough to go into this context layer.” — Harrison Chase, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Harrison Chase · 17 Oct 2026 Listen →

Hosts

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch is hosted by Harry Stebbings , Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll .

Recent Episodes

  1. 2 Nov 2026

    20VC: Who Wins the Inference Market | Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute | The Real Limits of Post-Training and RL with Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO

    With Erik Bernhardsson

  2. 31 Oct 2026

    20VC: David Tisch on Why High Ownership and Concentration is BS | Why No Manager Actually Wants to Stay Small | Why Competing with the Mega Platforms is a Losing Game | Why the Lean Startup is a Fake?

    With David Tisch

  3. 29 Oct 2026

    20VC: Anthropic Files S1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO | Instinct's Rumoured $30 Billion Fundraise | Microsoft Laysoff 27,000 While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95 Billion Capex Spending Spree

  4. 26 Oct 2026

    20VC: Satya Nadella on Open vs Closed Models: Who Wins | Whether to Trust Frontier Model Providers | Why Companies Need to Own Their Own Intelligence | The Importance of Verticalisation: From Chips to Models and More

    With Satya Nadella

  5. 24 Oct 2026

    20VC: Why Robotics Will be 100x Bigger than Coding Agents | Inference Will Be a $10TRN Market: What No One Sees | Why Software Investors are F***** Today with Naveen Rao, Unconventional

    With Naveen Rao

  6. 22 Oct 2026

    20VC: Trillion or Bust: The New VC Game | Coreweave Sell-Off Creates Panic | Town at $1B, Anduril at $90B: Revenue Multiples Out of Control | General Atlantic Eyes IPO & Modal Raises $750M at $15.75B

  7. 19 Oct 2026

    20VC: You Need $1BN To Do Seed Today: The Untold Truths of Venture | Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next Decade of VC | Why Margin and Price Matter Less in a World of AI with Sameer Dholakia, Bessemer

    With Sameer Dholakia

  8. 17 Oct 2026

    20VC: Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value | The Future of the Inference Market | Why Founders Should Take Discounts for Tier 1 Firms with Harrison Chase, LangChain

    With Harrison Chase

  9. 15 Oct 2026

    20VC: The Pro-Rata Battle: Valar Atomics Sues Day One Ventures | Meta Returns to the AI Frontier With Muse Wonder | NVIDIA Eyes $30B Reflection Deal & Jev Raises $870M at a $7.5B Valuation

  10. 12 Oct 2026

    20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models | Why The Jury Is Still Out On The Benefits of Specialised Models with Mike Cannon-Brookes

    With Mike Cannon-Brookes

  11. 10 Oct 2026

    20Sales: Inside Ramp's Sales Playbook: How to Build a $1.7BN ARR Sales Machine with Max Freeman, SVP Sales @ Ramp

    With Max Freeman

  12. 8 Oct 2026

    20VC: Cognition vs Factory: Vinod Khosla Creates a Storm | OpenAI Nears $70B Run Rate: Anthropic Under Threat | ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B & Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B

    With Dev Ittycheria

Guests

David Tisch (7 episodes), Keith Rabois (6 episodes), Bill Gurley (6 episodes), Michael Eisenberg (6 episodes), Tomasz Tunguz (5 episodes), David Frankel (5 episodes), Scott Belsky (5 episodes), Sarah Tavel (5 episodes), Mike Maples (5 episodes), Andrew Dudum (4 episodes), Geoff Lewis (4 episodes), Elena Verna (4 episodes), and 1,177 more.