The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Harry Stebbings
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. On...
20Growth: Inside Ramp's Growth Engine: How Ramp Became the Fastest Growing SaaS Company Ever | What Worked & What Did Not Work | How to Hire for Growth | How to Find Alpha in Channels Where No One Else Can with George Bonaci
George Bonaci is the VP of Growth at Ramp, where he’s helping one of the fastest-growing fintech companies scale even further. Prior to Ramp, George was VP of Growth at Gong. Before Gong, George was at Samsara where he helped grow revenue from $650M ARR, and played a pivotal role in the company’s successful IPO. In Today’s Growth Masterclass We Discuss: 03:57 How the Best Growth Teams Experiment 05:10 How to Allocate Bets and Resources for Growth 07:09 Velocity vs. Quality in Growth 15:05 The Role of Postmortems and How to Do Them 19:16 Growth Team Structure and Standalone or Not? 20:01 The Three Ways to Find Alpha in Growth 30:01 How to Hire for the Best Growth Hires 31:30 How to do Take-Home Assignments When Hiring for Growth 32:51 Common Pitfalls in Hiring Growth Talent 34:16 Investing in Management and Learning 42:43 How AI Changes Growth Products and Strategies 46:43 Quick Fire Round: Common Mistakes and Growth Channels
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20VC: The Insane Story of Glovo: Selling 30% of the Company for €100K | The McDonalds Deal That Saved Them | Running out of Money Three Times | Burning $1M Per Day | Being Acquired for $2.2BN with Oscar Pierre, Founder @ Glovo
Oscar Pierre is the Founder and CEO @ Glovo, the food delivery site that will get you anything you want to your doorstep. This story is insane, the company was started by Oscar 11 years ago, in their pre-seed round they sold ⅓ of the company for €100K. The company was later saved by a deal they made with McDonald's. The company nearly ran out of money on several occasions, one time the funding round came from the CEO of Rakuten who Oscar met an FC Barcelona drinks. Today, they are a part of DeliveryHero who acquired them for $2.2BN, they have delivered 1BN orders and have almost 60M customers. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:27 Starting with Nothing 07:30 The First Funding Round: Selling ⅓ of the Company for €100K 09:23 Marketplace Dynamics and Expansion 15:34 The McDonald's Deal That Saved the Company 18:38 Running out of Money Three Times: Fundraising Hell 25:57 International Expansion: What Worked 29:25 Lessons from Failures: What Brazil Taught Us 31:36 How to Win in Emerging Markets 32:02 The Burn Rate (Burning $1M per day) and Investor Concerns 33:29 Scaling Challenges and Competitor Threats 34:29 The Biggest BS Elements of Company Values 35:40 How I Ruined the Culture of the Company 41:14 Layoffs and Talent Management 42:06 Biggest Lessons from M&A 44:41 The Future of Quick Commerce 45:38 Acquisition by Delivery Hero 48:56 Post-Acquisition Reflections 54:47 The CEO on Trial and Facing Prison
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20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML
Steeve Morin is the Founder & CEO @ ZML, a next-generation inference engine enabling peak performance on a wide range of chips. Prior to founding ZML, Steeve was the VP Engineering at Zenly for 7 years leading eng to millions of users and an acquisition by Snap. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:17 How Will Inference Change and Evolve Over the Next 5 Years 09:17 Challenges and Innovations in AI Hardware 15:38 The Economics of AI Compute 18:01 Training vs. Inference: Infrastructure Needs 25:08 The Future of AI Chips and Market Dynamics 34:43 Nvidia's Market Position and Competitors 38:18 Challenges of Incremental Gains in the Market 39:12 The Zero Buy-In Strategy 39:34 Switching Between Compute Providers 40:40 The Importance of a Top-Down Strategy for Microsoft and Google 41:42 Microsoft's Strategy with AMD 45:50 Data Center Investments and Training 46:40 How to Succeed in AI: The Triangle of Products, Data, and Compute 48:25 Scaling Laws and Model Efficiency 49:52 Future of AI Models and Architectures 57:08 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 01:00:52 Why OpenAI’s Position is Not as Strong as People Think 01:06:47 Challenges in AI Hardware Supply
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20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO @ Mercor, an AI recruitment platform and one of the fastest-growing companies in technology. They have scaled to $70M in ARR in just 24 months. They are famed for working 6 days per week, 9AM to 9PM. All of their founders are Thiel fellows, they are also the youngest unicorn founders ever with the fundraise announced today raising $100M led by Felicis at a $2BN valuation. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:36 How Debating Makes The Best Founders 06:05 Do People Treat You Differently When a Unicorn Founder 10:58 Scaling to $70M ARR in 24 Months 13:42 How Culture Breaks When Scaling So Fast 23:49 The Future of Foundation Models 24:05 OpenAI vs Anthropic 24:32 Data: Synthetic vs Human 27:10 The Future of Programming and AI 28:15 The Impact of AI Tools on Software Development 28:51 Why Software Will Become Commoditised 29:55 Network Effects and Marketplaces 33:13 Raising From Benchmark After a Helicopter Ride 37:30 Quickfire Round: Insights and Reflections
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20VC: NVIDIA vs Groq: The Future of Training vs Inference | Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments: Who Wins | Data, Compute, Models: The Core Bottlenecks in AI & Where Value Will Distribute with Jonathan Ross, Founder @ Groq
Jonathan Ross is the Founder & CEO of Groq, the creator of the world’s first Language Processing Unit (LPUTM). Prior to Groq, Jonathan began what became Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first-generation TPU chip. Jonathan next joined Google X’s Rapid Eval Team, the initial stage of the famed “Moonshots Factory”, where he devised and incubated new Bets (Units) for Google’s parent company, Alphabet. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:20 Interview with Jonathan Ross Begins 04:59 Scaling Laws and AI Model Training 06:22 Synthetic Data and Model Efficiency 12:01 Inference vs. Training Costs: Why NVIDIA Loses Inference 17:06 The Future of AI Inference: Efficiency and Cost 18:15 Chip Supply and Scaling Concerns 20:57 Energy Efficiency in AI Computation 25:40 Why Most Dollars Into Datacenters Will Be Lost 31:05 Meta, Google, and Microsoft's Data Center Investments 41:11 Distribution of Value in the AI Economy 42:10 Stages of Startup Success 43:17 The AI Investment Bubble 45:00 The Keynesian Beauty Contest in VC 48:40 NVIDIA's Role in the AI Ecosystem 53:39 China's AI Strategy and Global Implications 57:51 Europe's Potential in the AI Revolution 01:10:14 Future Predictions and AI's Impact on Society
About 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.
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