Instinct

AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B | Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO | Bessemer Raises $5.75B

Oct 1, 2026 · 1:20:28

Jack Altman of Benchmark, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll tell Harry Stebbings that Anthropic's leaked S-1—$4.6B 2025 revenue, $8B operating loss, $518B in compute commitments—held little new, and that Benchmark's $10B Instinct bet is an early-stage play on consumer agents. AMD's $8.2B buyout of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs starts a wave of neolab exits; Meta's $500M package lured MongoDB's CEO away as its stock dropped 20%. They argue open-source AI has peaked in share because OpenAI and Anthropic can undercut pricing and enterprises reject China-origin weights, and debate putting 30% of a fund into Jev at $10B. They weigh Oura's pulled $16B IPO, Nubank's $8–12B Monzo bid, Bessemer's $5.75B raise, NFX moving to its own capital, and Anthropic founders locking in 50.1% voting control.

The Ads Business Model Will Die & Lessons from Working with Elon at Twitter | Parag Agrawal

Sep 26, 2026 · 1:08:55

Parag Agrawal, former Twitter CEO and founder of Parallel ($230M from Sequoia, Khosla and First Round), argues agents will use the web 1,000x more than humans, requiring entirely new search technology and business models. He explains why agent search differs — inputs, outputs, latency and cost tradeoffs — claiming the same quality at 1/20th to 1/50th the compute, with Turbo for voice agents and Advanced for background agents. Because ads don't work with agents, Parallel is building an 'AdSense for agents' that pays content owners per agent use; he argues search prices must collapse from $10 to $1 per 1,000 queries, with another 10x coming. He also covers data licensing at inference time, the Monitor API shifting the web from pull to push, and the urgency he saw in Elon Musk.

Meta's Muse Hits #1 | Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm | Keith Rabois vs Airwallex: Who is Right?

Sep 24, 2026 · 1:20:44

Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll argue Meta's Muse hitting #1 is the first true ChatGPT competitor and a Trojan horse that added $100 billion to Meta's market cap, and that Anthropic's delayed $2 trillion IPO is a bet on a cleaner Q4 story, not a cracking market. They break down OpenAI's $278 billion burn and $700 billion of CapEx, argue Jev's $40 million seed shows 20% of a $100 billion LLM spend will leak to cheaper classifiers, and predict agentic commerce will maim Amazon while benefiting Shopify. They debate disappearing traditional seed rounds, FOMO-driven checks and what LPs should back today. They approve Factory at $5 billion — coding is the motherlode — pass on Crusoe at $30.9 billion, and side against Keith Rabois in his Airwallex fight, urging founders to build an army of advocates.

Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town

Sep 10, 2026 · 1:22:31

Rory O'Driscoll of Scale and Jason Lemkin tell Harry Stebbings that Jensen Huang's AGI declaration is a 'bullshit term' since only coding matters, while the AI assistant race between Instinct, Grok Bot and Meta hinges on distribution. They debate whether legal AI firms Harvey and Legora can match coding AI — Rory pegs legal's AI take at 10–15% versus 30–50% in coding — and warn goal-seeking agents, as in OpenAI's undisclosed DSC Wiki incident, pose a cybersecurity crisis. They assess Tesla's Cybercab as a Waymo rival, Index exiting Town's round after Instinct objected, and Anthropic abandoning its $6 billion Descartes deal. They close on Robinhood underwriting Aura's IPO, Wonderful's $5 billion raise with $170 million in secondary, and Thinking Machines' $40 billion valuation.

Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble

Sep 7, 2026 · 1:16:01

Jean-Denis Grèze, Co-Founder and CEO of Town, joins 20VC's Harry Stebbings to argue the AI assistant market is not a bubble and that Town can survive Google, Apple and OpenAI. He explains Town's pivot from AI tax prep to an assistant living in email and calendar, arguing the winning product will have agent-level network effects. Grèze says startups are subsidizing frontier model costs today, pricing for 20–30% margins in 18 months as prices halve every 9–12 months. He predicts people will trust agents to decide what data to share within five years, calls token maxing the wrong metric, and says Apple could lose because it lacks cloud DNA and is tied to on-device privacy. He also refuses to inflate announced round valuations, calling the practice unethical toward employees.

NVIDIA Crushes Quarter | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5B Valuation

Sep 3, 2026 · 1:20:29

Harry Stebbings hosts SaaS investors Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll breaking down NVIDIA's record $96.2 billion quarter, its $12.9 billion pursuit of Hugging Face, and 70% growth guidance signaling compute demand runs at least another 12 months. Lemkin defends OpenAI's cutoff of Cursor as rational, since coding is the model load for LLMs and Cursor competes directly. The panel argues every startup must now become a compound startup, as AI makes code so cheap to produce that teams ship 100 times more software. Lemkin lays out bull cases for Clay at $7 billion and Linear at $2.5 billion, claiming agents will consume 10 to 100 times more GTM resources than humans ever could. They also flag the Hugging Face agent hack as a wake-up call for CISOs and praise Benioff's pragmatism in embracing multi-surface access and outcome-based pricing at Salesforce.

Anthropic's $30T Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service & Robotics are Overinflated

Aug 27, 2026 · 1:26:44

Jason Lemkin, Rory O’Driscoll and Harry Stebbings say the AI boom now depends on Nvidia and hyperscalers financing frontier models, as shown by Nvidia's $6B Poolside purchase and $1B at a $12B pre-money valuation. They dissect OpenAI's promised 2027 IPO, arguing it has no choice as Anthropic outraces it and 'it's all about code'; they call Anthropic's $30T TAM claim delusional and OpenAI's $200 plan a losing consumer business. Also covered: Mercor's $20B round, Hugging Face's $13B sale risk, Citadel unwinding 80% of Leopold's fund, Stripe's 41% growth, agents' data leaks, and why customer support, humanoid robotics and AI services are the dumbest categories. Their verdict: we're less than a third of the way through the cycle and addicted to tokens.