A company discussed on 20VC with Harry Stebbings.

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.

ClickHouse CEO: AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern
Aug 31, 2026 · 1:05:57
Aaron Katz, co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse, tells Harry Stebbings the AI cycle is 'just getting started' — revenue growth is unprecedented, but the biggest risk is revenue durability because agentic apps have low switching costs. He accepts lower gross margins if expansion is possible, measures AI token spend by ROI, and predicts agents will have identities, budgets, and pick their own infrastructure. He argues open-weight models won't win the enterprise over trust concerns, and sees enterprises moving back on-prem. ClickHouse revenue went 0, 12, 50, 200, finishing north of 500 this year, with >200% NDR; Katz would take the under on $1B ARR by December 2027. He calls the $2B Series B with no product the priciest round; revenue concentration matters — AI customers are under 12% of revenue.

Uber President on Travis, China & Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash
Aug 17, 2026 · 1:09:44
In a rare interview, Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald tells 20VC host Harry Stebbings that autonomy is existential for ride-hailing and distribution beats superior technology. He says Uber One is the most efficient long-term lever — membership beats price incentives — and admits he was wrong to resist it. On AI, Uber blew through a year's budget in four months because usage is vertical; ROI is real but hard to quantify, so he advises combining compute and headcount budgets. Recounting Uber China, Uber burned $52 million a week on subsidies before exiting to Didi, a deal he calls successful. He also explains the Delivery Hero acquisition, why Uber Eats trails DoorDash, and leadership lessons from Travis Kalanick and Dara Khosrowshahi.
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