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

• 20VC: Benchmark's Victor Lazarte on Why Portfolio Construction is BS| Why SaaS Spreadsheet Investing is Dead | Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US | Three Traits All the Best Founders Have & The Lie All Big Tech Companies Have Been Telling

  Victor Lazarte is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the mot renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Victor has led deals into the likes of HeyGen and Mercor. As an angel, he was the first investor and board member of Brex, and as a Founder he scaled Wildlife Studios, bootstrapping into the largest gaming company in LatAm, with about 4 billion downloads.  In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:10 Lessons Scaling Wildlife Studios to 4BN Downloads 04:49 Why Predicting the Future is Wrong When Starting a Company 07:11 Three Different Categories of Company in an AI World: Who Wins & Loses? 09:25 Why You Should Always Ask What a Founder Does in Their Free Time? 17:30 Two Traits That All the Best Founders Have? 23:17 Why If You Start a Company in SF You are 1,000x More Likely to be Successful? 35:30 Why Spreadsheet SaaS Investing is Dead 36:10 Why Replacing Humans is the Most Exciting Opportunity in AI 37:02 Why Knowledge Work Will Be Destroyed and What Happens Then? 37:30 Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US 38:59 China vs. US: The AI Race 42:33 Why All Students Today Should Study Computer Science 44:38 Why Portfolio Construction is BS 47:04 What Makes Peter Fenton One of the Best Ever 51:31 Why Duolingo Will Be One of the Most Valuable Companies in the World 01:00:17 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions  

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• 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak

  Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people.  In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:21 Biggest Product Lessons from Scale AI 7:18 Why Product Managers Are Wrong: They are not the CEO of the Product 12:28 Why Market Selection is More Important than Anything Else 16:40 If Distribution is King then Product is President 22:06 Effective Product Strategy and Execution 26:24 How to Write the Best PRDs 31:01 Balancing New Features and Technical Debt 33:17 Analysing Retrospectives and Postmortems 33:55 Introduction to Pre-mortems 38:25 Biggest Product Mistakes and Lessons Learned 41:40 Evaluating AI Models and Lessons Learned 45:03 The Future of AI in Product Management 55:21 What Should Product People Learn to Win in a World of AI 59:37 The AI Talent War in San Francisco 01:01:26 Quickfire Round  

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• 20VC: How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem | Why We Need to Flood the UK with Venture Capital | What the UK Can Learn From Sequoia, Stripe and Norway | Why Now is the Time to be Bullish on China & Lessons from Jensen Huang with Tom Hulme & Stan Boland

  Tom Hulme is a General Partner @ GV and leads GV’s European investing. He has led rounds in Monzo, Nothing, GoCardless, Lemonade, Snyk and is widely considered one of the best investors in Europe.  Stan Boland is one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the UK.  In 1999, he co-founded Element 14 which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 for $640 million. Following this, Boland co-founded Icera Inc. in 2002, a fabless semiconductor company which he sold to Nvidia for $367 million.  In Today’s Discussion We Cover: 04:26 Is The UK’s Biggest Problem a Talent Problem 09:50 Why We Need to Flood the UK With Venture Capital 10:38 What Europe Can Learn from Stripe and the Collisons 15:21 How the UK Can Use Visas to Retain the Best Talent 16:46 Why the Government Needs to Put 10x More Cash Into Fund of Funds 24:32 Is the London Stock Exchange F****** and Does it Matter? 34:38 What The UK Can Learn From Sequoia and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund 40:42 What is a “National Goal for Wealth Creation” & How Do We Implement It? 48:10 What are the Most Broken Elements of the UK Tax Regime 52:11 Is It Stupid to Remove the Non-Dom Tax Status 53:15 Why is Now the Time to Be Bullish on China 01:00:19 Biggest Lessons from Working with Jensen Huang 01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions    

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• 20VC: Carvana CEO on Buiding a $50B Company, Losing 99% and Coming Back | Ernest Garcia: Inside the Mind of the Most Misunderstood CEO in America

  Ernest Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Carvana. Under Ernie’s leadership, Carvana went from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a $50+ billion public company, became the fastest-growing online used car retailer in U.S. history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right, in 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just $400M. Today they are back with a market cap of $35BN, that is a 100x in the public markets and selling 400,000 cars sold annually, with a logistics network that rivals Amazon.  In Today’s Episode with Ernie Garcia We Discuss:  04:12 Are all great founders just “stubborn egomaniacs”? 06:55 How Carvana Almost Died on Several Occasions 08:46 Is Carvana’s Inability to get VC Funding a Sign the VC Model is Broken? 11:58 Operators vs. Strategists: What Hires Can Make or Break a Company? 21:46 Billionaire’s Biggest Lessons on Parenting 26:52 Is Life About Happiness or Achieving 32:21 The Reality of Being a Public Company CEO 39:07 Why Companies Should Go Public  43:55 Why You Should Price Your IPO to Perfection with No Pop 50:50 “What I Wish I Had Known About Debt in Building Carvana” 52:32 Quick Fire Round: Favourite CEO, Marriage Advice, Carvana in 10 Years  

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• 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

  Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more.  In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss: 1. The Rules of Investing: What have been Nabeel’s biggest lessons on price sensitivity? When did he not pay up and with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had of paid up? How important is ownership to Nabeel and Spark? How does Nabeel think about reserve investing and doubling down? Why does Nabeel not engage in secondary markets? How does Nabeel think about when is the right time to sell? Why does Nabeel think the majority of market sizing is total BS? 2. The Venture Landscape: Run by Principles and Broken:  Why does Nabeel believe this generation of AI investing will require a different mindset to the one that made VCs successful over the last decade? Why does Nabeel believe that venture is currently run by principals and associates? Why is that such a problem? Why does Nabeel believe that the majority of venture firms today are dead but do not know it yet? What does Nabeel believe happens to the mega multi-stage firms who have raised billions and billions? 3. How to Win the VC Game in a World of AI: Infrastructure, models, apps: where does Nabeel believe the most value will accrue in the next decade of AI investing? What does Nabeel mean when he says there are three categories of AI apps today? Where does Nabeel believe the most valuable will be built? Does Nabeel believe Deepseek hurt or helped the future for Anthropic? How could Anthropic be a $100BN company from this point? What does no one see about the next 10 years of AI that everyone should see?  

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