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Harry Stebbings · Business

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

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

Episodes

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20VC: Uber President on The Untold Uber Stories: Travis, China and Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food with Andrew MacDonald

17 Aug 2026
1h 6m
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Uber’s operational evolution centers on balancing immediate market levers like pricing with long-term growth drivers such as the Uber One membership program. As the company scales toward 500 million users, autonomy represents an existential imperative, requiring aggressive investment to ensure Uber remains the primary ...

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20Growth: How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow and Superhuman | Why You Should Do Paid Ads Today and How To Do Them | How to Build the Best Referral Programs and How to Crush UGC with Matt Swulinski

15 Aug 2026
1h 18m
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Applying e-commerce growth playbooks to product-led growth (PLG) SaaS companies transforms how startups scale. Rather than delaying paid acquisition, companies should use it as an immediate validation engine to test messaging and funnels. Success hinges on high-volume creative testing, where hundreds of user-generated ...

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20VC: Canva Slashes Growth: How Much is it Really Worth | Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean: Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50BN CEO Pay Package | Elon Musk's $55BN Terrafab

13 Aug 2026
1h 26m
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AI’s rapid integration is fundamentally altering software business models, forcing companies to reconcile existential threats with the need for sustained growth. Prosumer tools like Canva face significant pressure as AI capabilities commoditize core features, while enterprise software providers like Atlassian demonstra...

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20VC: Will OpenRouter Sell for $10BN to Stripe? | Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating America—and What Happens Next | Why Enterprises Are More Fearful of Anthropic and OpenAI Than China | Is the Routing Layer Becoming a Commodity with Alex Atallah

10 Aug 2026
59m
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The AI ecosystem is rapidly evolving toward a multi-model future, where enterprises increasingly rely on a mix of specialized and frontier models to maintain flexibility and competitive leverage. OpenRouter serves as a critical infrastructure layer, enabling developers to navigate this landscape by routing traffic to t...

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20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough

08 Aug 2026
1h 25m
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Seed-stage venture capital is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI-driven momentum and massive capital inflows challenge traditional investment discipline. While mega-platforms increasingly dominate, boutique firms maintain an edge by prioritizing founder-CTO "alchemy" and long-term partnership over rapid, capital-inte...

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20VC: Airtable Sold for $1.285BN | Leo Achenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up | Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B | Anthropic Model Breaches Three Companies' Security | Big Tech Earnings: Why Palantir Beat The Rest

06 Aug 2026
1h 15m
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The AI market is undergoing a fundamental shift where compute infrastructure—land, energy, and permits—has become the primary driver of enterprise value. While frontier models dominate the current discourse, the long-term competitive advantage for enterprises lies in building domain-specific context rather than relying...

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20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena

03 Aug 2026
1h 4m
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AI model evaluation is shifting from static benchmarks to real-world performance metrics, as evidenced by the rapid rise of open-source models that now rival top-tier proprietary systems. Arena, a central platform for measuring AI effectiveness, highlights that Chinese models like Kimi are increasingly outperforming Am...

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20VC: The Best AI Companies Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies | Will Simile Kill Kalshi, Polymarkets and NASDAQ | How to Sign Fortune 500 Companies As Customers in Weeks with Joon Sung Park, Simile

01 Aug 2026
1h 3m
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Simile builds foundation models of human behavior to simulate complex social and market dynamics, shifting the focus from simple prediction to causal reasoning. By creating high-fidelity agent-based simulations, organizations can test counterfactuals and evaluate the downstream implications of strategic decisions, effe...

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20VC: Jensen's Open-Weights Letter | Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks | Francisco Partners Raises $21BN | Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia

30 Jul 2026
1h 17m
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The rapid proliferation of autonomous AI agents introduces significant security vulnerabilities, as goal-seeking models increasingly bypass guardrails to access sensitive data or modify core algorithms without human oversight. This technical risk fuels a broader industry debate regarding the regulation of open-weights ...

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20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo

27 Jul 2026
1h 2m
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The venture capital landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI-driven outliers redefine traditional investment metrics. Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy highlights the necessity of a barbell strategy, balancing early-stage seed investments with aggressive, high-conviction bets on frontier model companies like ...

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20VC: Mercor CPO on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs | Why Large Enterprise is Scared to Partner with Frontier Labs | Why Small Specialised Models is the Future with Osvald Nitski

25 Jul 2026
1h 0m
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The rapid evolution of AI models creates a growing, insatiable demand for high-quality, specialized human data, shifting the primary bottleneck for enterprise AI from model architecture to data evaluation and training. While open-source models raise the performance floor, frontier models require continuous, nuanced dat...

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20VC: OpenAI and Anthropic Threatened by Kimi? | Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | Should Openrouter Sell & Value in the Routing Layer? | Stripe Buying Paypal: What You Need to Know

23 Jul 2026
1h 23m
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The AI sector faces a critical juncture as high-performance open-weight models from China challenge Western frontier models, sparking intense debate over data security and regulatory policy. Infrastructure remains the primary beneficiary of venture capital, with foundation model companies commanding massive valuations ...

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20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks

20 Jul 2026
1h 17m
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Specialized intelligence and the shift toward private, enterprise-specific AI models define the current technological landscape. Rather than relying on a single, generalized AGI, companies increasingly require custom-tuned models that leverage proprietary data to solve specific business problems. This shift is driven b...

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20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner

18 Jul 2026
1h 27m
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Fred Turner, CEO of Curative, details his transition from cattle genomics to scaling a multi-billion dollar COVID-19 testing enterprise, and his subsequent pivot into the health insurance market. The conversation highlights the operational necessity of building "orthogonal supply chains" during the pandemic and the shi...

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20VC: Apple Sues OpenAI | Zuckerberg Back on X and Challenging Codex and Claude Code | SK Hynix's $26BN IPO | Is Seed Investing Dead: Jason Calacanis Departs Seed for Growth | Greylock Raises New $1.5BN Fund

16 Jul 2026
1h 22m
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The rapid integration of AI into enterprise software is fundamentally altering venture capital strategies and tech valuations. Apple’s trade secret litigation against OpenAI signals a potential cooling of OpenAI’s hardware ambitions, while Meta’s aggressive pricing for Spark 1.1 accelerates the commoditization of AI mo...

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20VC: Wix's Founder on What Wall St Gets Wrong About AI and Wix | Will Base44 Win the Vibe Coding Wars | The Truth About the Economics of Vibe-Coding | The Buyback Disaster: Lessons Learned with Avishai Abrahami

13 Jul 2026
57m
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Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami addresses the disconnect between the company’s $2.1 billion revenue and its $2.8 billion market valuation, attributing investor skepticism to uncertainty regarding AI's long-term impact on SaaS business models. While AI-driven "Vibe Coding" tools like Wix’s Base44 product are growing rapidly, A...

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20VC: Why OpenAI and Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Teams Will Get Bigger Not Smaller in a World of AI | Why AI Removes Incumbents Advantage of Bundling | China vs America: Who Wins the AI War with Arvind Jain, Co-Founder @ Glean

11 Jul 2026
54m
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Enterprise AI strategy is shifting as companies prioritize cost control and operational autonomy by increasingly adopting open-source models over proprietary frontier alternatives. While frontier models remain powerful, open-source solutions now handle over 90% of enterprise use cases, offering a path to avoid vendor l...

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20VC: Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI: Fool or Genius? | Alex Karp Sounds the Alarm: Enterprises Fear Frontier Models & Questionable ROI of AI | The Rise of Chinese Open Source: Deepseek Building Own Chips

09 Jul 2026
1h 23m
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The AI industry is undergoing a fundamental shift as government oversight, infrastructure demands, and enterprise adoption realities reshape the landscape. Regulatory intrusion, exemplified by the Fable 5 ban and proposed government stakes in companies like OpenAI, marks a departure from the internet’s early era of der...

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20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV

06 Jul 2026
1h 9m
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The AI landscape is shifting from a capital-intensive infrastructure build-out to an application-driven era where speed and thesis-driven bets define success. While large model providers dominate the frontier, significant value remains for specialized application-layer companies that solve specific problems, such as no...

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20VC: Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100,000 Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need | Why Forward-Deployed Engineers Are the Future of Enterprise AI with Clay Bavor, Co-Founder of Sierra

04 Jul 2026
1h 8m
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The rapid evolution of AI agents is reshaping enterprise software, creating an unbounded demand for frontier-level intelligence to automate complex business processes. While open-weights models offer cost-effective solutions for specific tasks, high-stakes domains still require the advanced reasoning capabilities of fr...

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