20VC with Harry Stebbings
Showing 481–495 of 691 transcripts.
- 1h 8m
Adam Besnivick: How to Invest in Pre-Seed & Seed Stage Companies; Looking Glass Capital | E1020
Adam Besnivick, Harry Stebbings, Chris Sacca
Looking Glass Fund's General Partner deploys capital from a $20 million second fund into 27 to 30 mission-driven companies across secondary U.S. hubs, prioritizing pre-seed rounds capped at $11 million post-money. The strategy emphasizes acting as a catalyst "lead investor" rather than a large check writer, aiming to secure 5.25% ownership while building a reputation that compels higher-quality deal flow. By targeting sectors like healthcare and climate, the fund seeks to generate strong returns despite a volatile market that has left later-stage venture capital in a "death zone."
- 1h 36m
Tomer Cohen: Why LinkedIn Stories Failed; How LinkedIn's Feed Was Born; AI Startups | E1019
Tomer Cohen, former Chief Product Officer of LinkedIn, discusses the transition of AI from reconstructing existing information to generating entirely new scientific knowledge, a shift he views as transformative for the global economy. Drawing on his background in semiconductors and his tenure leading product strategy at LinkedIn, Cohen outlines how organizations must evolve by prioritizing quality over growth, redefining user "jobs-to-be-done," and integrating AI as a core leadership skill rather than a delegated function. He concludes that future success depends on fostering a growth mindset to navigate rapid skill obsolescence and leveraging bundled AI workflows to solve complex professional challenges.
- 11 min
Mark Carney's Expert Analysis: Assessing Climate Action - USA vs China
Mark Evans identifies the United States as the premier ten-year investment destination over China and Europe, citing superior skills pipelines, financial ecosystems, and accelerating climate policies. While European banking systems remain resilient and Australia is making decisive climate shifts, significant risks persist in China due to inconsistent property rights, and major Western governments like the UK still lag behind corporate leaders such as Walmart in implementing concrete decarbonization strategies. The analysis concludes that despite the "innovator's dilemma" preventing most incumbents from cannibalizing their own cash flows for new technologies, value will ultimately accrue to disruptors capable of leveraging distribution channels faster than established players can adapt.
- 1h 19m
Guy Podjarney: $7.4B Startup Founder; How to Analyse Market Size; Good vs Great Messaging | E1018
Guy Podjarney, Harry Stebbings
Guy Shapira, the founder of Snyk and former CTO of Akamai, leverages his background in Israeli cyber defense and serial entrepreneurship to apply first-principles thinking to application security and product-market fit. He outlines a strategic framework for founders that prioritizes iterative speed over traditional market definitions, emphasizing the critical distinction between developer adoption and commercial monetization. Shapira further advises caution against premature fundraising and "obvious" investment plays, advocating instead for structural moats and a team-oriented leadership culture that transcends emotional family dynamics.
- 1h 30m
Nico Wittenborn: Consumer Subscription Apps; Using Evolutionary Biology to Invest; Solo GP's | E1017
Adjacent Capital, a solo-general-partner-led fund founded by an alumnus of Point 9 and Insight Partners, deploys $20–25 million across 20–25 early-stage consumer subscription companies by targeting the "adjacent possible" where existing technologies converge into new breakthroughs. The firm prioritizes mobile-first businesses with high-margin software-like economics, aiming for multi-billion dollar exits by accepting initial high churn that stabilizes into habitual usage patterns. While operating as a solo GP to maintain speed and conviction, the fund constructs a portfolio of Seed to late-Seed investments to capitalize on a market environment increasingly shifting toward smaller, thesis-driven vehicles rather than traditional mega-funds.
- 50 min
Ryan Wiggins: Scaling WhatsApp from 0-100M; How to Build a Growth Team; Mercury Neobank | E1016
Ryan, a former Growth Marketing lead at Facebook and WhatsApp who now scales Mercury, outlines a holistic growth philosophy that prioritizes fixing retention leaks and identifying a single high-impact lever over executing numerous minor hacks. He advises founders to delay hiring growth teams until product-market fit is established, emphasizing that the first leader must be a strategic architect capable of building systems rather than a tactical executioner. Drawing from WhatsApp's experience of reaching 1.5 billion users without early A/B testing, Ryan argues that sustainable scaling relies on native product experiences and direct customer empathy rather than expensive ad formats or vanity metrics.
- 1h 11m
Emad Mostaque: These 5 Companies Will Win the AI War & Why We Need National Data Sets
Emad Mostaque, Harry Stebbings
Emad Asimolowo, CEO of Stability AI, forecasts a turbulent near-term future for generative AI driven by capital misalignment and data toxicity, predicting a consolidation where only five to six foundation model companies will dominate the market. He advocates for a pivot toward curated national datasets and open-source infrastructure to enable personalized healthcare, ensure regulatory compliance, and prevent the stagnation caused by proprietary "black box" systems. Looking ahead, Asimolowo envisions a deflationary economic shift where AI agents transform traditional industries and social dynamics, provided that leaders prioritize high-quality data curation and psychological safety over rapid, unchecked deployment.
- 1h 6m
Yann LeCun: Meta’s New AI Model LLaMA; Why Elon is Wrong about AI; Open-source AI Models | E1014
Yann LeCun, Elon, David Marcus, Harry Stebbings
Yann LeCun traces the historical resurgence of deep learning from his 1980s postdoctoral work with Jeff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio to his prediction that current autoregressive large language models will soon become obsolete due to their lack of planning capabilities and persistent memory. He advocates for a shift toward open-source ecosystems that enforce hardwired safety constraints and hierarchical objectives, arguing that such architectures will replace text prediction with systems capable of genuine world modeling and common sense. LeCun concludes by dismissing doomer narratives and mass unemployment fears, asserting that the AI revolution will ultimately generate a new renaissance of creative roles while requiring societal adjustments to wealth distribution rather than technological restriction.
- 59 min
Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013
Clem Delangue, Elon, Harry Stebbings
Hugging Face, founded by Clem, Thomas, and Julia, evolved from an initial consumer chatbot experiment into a global AI infrastructure platform by leveraging open-source collaboration and a decentralized talent strategy across Paris, New York, and San Francisco. The company currently serves approximately 15,000 organizations through a freemium model that prioritizes massive adoption and network effects over immediate revenue, while advising startups to build custom models rather than relying on external APIs to ensure long-term differentiation. By maintaining strict investor communication protocols and focusing on community-driven scientific progress, Hugging Face aims to navigate regulatory hurdles and talent shortages as it transitions the industry from niche usage to mainstream scale.
- 1h 11m
20Sales: How to Scale a Career While Scaling a Family; Work-Life Balance; Parental Leave | E1012
Maggie Hott, Stevie Case, Renu Gupta, Lauren Schwartz, Julie Maresca, Jessica Arnold, Harry Stebbings
Six sales leaders, including Jessica Arnold, Stevie Case, and Maggie Hott, convened to discuss the dual challenges and unique advantages of balancing motherhood with high-level sales careers. The panel detailed how integrating family responsibilities fosters leadership superpowers like time efficiency and empathy while highlighting systemic barriers such as career pauses and the lack of equitable parental leave policies. By advocating for structural changes like protected quotas during leave and cultural shifts that normalize vulnerability, the group emphasized that organizational support is essential to transforming perceived work-life conflicts into competitive advantages.
- 26 min
How Dire is the Startup Funding Market Today? | AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli
AngelList analyzed its data from managing over 13,000 startups to reveal a rapid market contraction where Series B and C deal volumes and valuations have plummeted by more than 50%, shifting the industry into its most severe "bad times" historically. While early-stage valuations remain artificially stable due to capital from later-stage investors, the firm warns that adverse selection, extended fundraising timelines, and a lack of credible traction are shutting down capital access for most startups. Simultaneously, secondary market discounts on fund positions range from 20% to 50% as liquidity pressures mount, and the firm anticipates an acceleration of down rounds and M&A slowdowns over the next 18 months unless macro conditions improve.
- 1h 48m
Chris Paik: How I Raised $400M; Substack's Broken Business Model; Music on TikTok vs IG | E1011
Chris Day founded Pace to address the early-stage investing gap left by Thrive Capital's growth, deploying a concentrated strategy that targets 10–20 companies with deep, one-on-one founder relationships rather than broad portfolio support. The firm operates as an equal partnership of five to six general partners to incentivize long-term ownership, utilizing unique analytical frameworks like the "Atomic Value Swap" and the "Seven Deadly Sins" to evaluate market timing and structural defensibility. Through this model, Pace aims to generate significant enterprise value by avoiding industry misalignments regarding fees and carried interest while maintaining strict discipline on market risk and deliberate moat engineering.
- 6 min
How I'm Investing My $230M Fund - AI Investor Tom Tunguz Breaks It Down
Tom Tunguz, Tomasz Tunguz, Harry Stebbings
A solo general partner is launching a $230 million fund targeting 12 to 15 portfolio companies with a high-conviction strategy where the top three holdings may represent up to 50% of the total assets. Leveraging a "decade of data" framework and Fermi estimation models from *Super Forecasters*, the GP focuses on realistic forward multiples near 5.5x rather than hyper-growth projections while reserving initial checks between $8 million and $12 million per company. This thesis-driven approach prioritizes six to twelve months of sector research and continuous probability monitoring to deepen convictions in data-centric ventures despite the inability to lead $50 million Series A rounds.
- 6 min
AI Investing 101: Tom Tunguz Breaks Down His Investment Thesis and How To Get Started
Tom Tunguz, Tomasz Tunguz, Harry Stebbings
The AI ecosystem is projected to bifurcate into a hybrid structure combining closed, capital-intensive foundational systems with a decentralized open-source layer, while consumer interfaces will increasingly mediate across multiple specialized models. Enterprise adoption will initially favor bundled, end-to-end solutions for Global 2000 firms lacking technical sophistication, driven by the need for secure data planes that remain isolated from cloud-hosted applications. As organizations mature, they are expected to transition toward modular stacks, fostering new business ventures focused on legal and operational risks such as copyright infringement and PII leakage.
- 39 min
Alex Rodriguez: From MVP to CEO; Business Lessons from Warren Buffett & Magic Johnson | E1010
Alex Rodriguez, Warren Buffett, Magic Johnson, Harry Stebbings
Alex Rodriguez leverages his transformation from a performance-enhanced suspension to a disciplined investor to guide A-Rod Corp through strategic ventures in real estate and sports, including the twelve-fold return on Petro's Pace. Drawing on mentors like Magic Johnson and Warren Buffett, Rodriguez prioritizes deep expertise and "hire slow, fire fast" principles to build teams that balance aggressive deal-making with a renewed focus on fan affordability and leadership accountability. His current operations concentrate exclusively on sports and real estate sectors, aiming to lead the Minnesota Timberwolves to a championship while maintaining a corporate culture rooted in empathy and present fatherhood.