A company discussed on 20VC with Harry Stebbings.

Instinct Worth 30BN? | Microsoft Cuts 27,000 Jobs While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95B CapEx
Oct 29, 2026 · 1:00:17
Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll argue Anthropic's S-1 shows a company investors are still underestimating, with $16.3 billion first-half revenue and $110 billion of cash, though 80% of revenue comes from models under six months old. They break down Microsoft's buyout offers to 27% of its 223,000 employees, warning 2027 CapEx depreciation will force more AI-driven layoffs, and Meta raising $95 billion of equity for its spending spree. Jason argues Chinese open-weight models are finished in the US after Alibaba's Quen was caught uploading data to servers in China and Singapore. They debate Instinct at $30 billion as the 'super app of the West', whether OpenRouter's boom is a moment in time, and Jason's pitch to put 20% of the fund into OpenAI at $1.25 trillion.

How LPs Allocate to Venture in 2026: What They Want, What They Don’t | Baylor University CIO
Sep 14, 2026 · 1:16:29
David Morehead, Chief Investment Officer of Baylor University's $2.6 billion endowment, argues that velocity of capital matters more than fund multiples — a 3x growth fund compounding every six years beats a 15x venture fund held 18 years. He explains why Baylor holds about 2.5% of its endowment in Anthropic, why it bought the software crash down 50-60% by betting on human behavior, and why growth equity is its largest private allocation. Morehead details his rule that returns cannot be discussed without time, position sizing of $3 million per underlying company, and why managers must stick to the strategy they raised on. He names permitting as the data center bottleneck, is bearish on Europe, calls private credit overhyped, and argues biotech could be the next major opportunity.

How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It
Sep 5, 2026 · 1:04:40
Cliff Weitzman, co-founder and CEO of Speechify, tells Harry Stebbings that owning NVIDIA GPUs beats renting because renting costs 1.5x the purchase price yearly, so Speechify pays $100,000 per GPU to get Rubins and B300s early. He covers inference versus training workloads, liquid-cooling and insurance logistics, and NVIDIA's 25% buyback underwriting with Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs. Weitzman admits his biggest mistake was staying B2C as ElevenLabs leapfrogged Speechify through B2B APIs, and defends entering B2B against ElevenLabs and Bret Taylor's Sierra. He also argues founders should hire math olympiads over coders, details agent orchestration with Claude Code and Cursor, and explains how GPU clusters help him sequence genomes to cure his brother's orphan disease.

Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee | How the SpaceX & Citadel Deals Went Down | Julien Bek
Aug 24, 2026 · 1:28:28
Julien Bek, a Partner at Sequoia Capital, says Sequoia wins by hunting with conviction, not waiting for inbound calls, and shares founder-reading lessons from Don Valentine, Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Alfred Lin, and Shaun Maguire. He highlights Leone's 'worst reference' question, Lin's warning not to mistake an outlier operator for an outlier founder, and Maguire's ELO method for calibrating references. Bek also explains how asking 'why' five times exposed a fraudulent founder, how his read changes by country (French/German references get 1-2 extra points; Americans get subtracted), and why he missed Anton Osaka of Lovable. On AI, he argues agents become the new customer, AEO parallels SEO, and the next trillion-dollar company will be software masquerading as services. He tells how his mother invested in Revolut at a ~$200M valuation, now worth over $100B.

Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue?
Aug 20, 2026 · 1:17:47
Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll analyze SpaceX's $60B Cursor takeover, Stripe's $7B OpenRouter deal, Anthropic's first profit, Silver Lake's $43B Workday bid and Lovable's $13.3B round, arguing all reward speed and growth over margin. Musk got Cursor at ~10x forward revenue; Microsoft, not Meta, is the real loser. OpenRouter is a niche that may vanish in five years, yet could become 20-30% of Stripe revenue. Anthropic's first profit on $11.5B Q2 revenue was inevitable at ~40% gross margin; only 2027-28 projected revenue matters for its IPO. Workday is a 5.3x-revenue system-of-record LBO baseline versus 70x trailing for OpenRouter, and Higgsfield's $5.5B and Lovable's $13.3B are compared to Cursor, with Lovable 'not radically off' as AI apps accrete moats.
Powered by PodHood