Latest Interviews
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Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs18 min
Winning the Right to Invest: 20VC’s Harry Stebbings
Harry Cassell reframes media distribution as a critical weapon for securing investment rights, leveraging a data-driven content strategy that generated $6.1 million in 36 hours to differentiate his platform from traditional venture capital models. Critiquing the current market's saturation by large multi-stage funds, he emphasizes founder empathy, specific personality traits, and a robust LP network to navigate an environment where capital is commoditized and growth expectations have shifted. Looking toward Europe, Cassell predicts a decade of massive company creation driven by lower barriers to entry and increased founder resilience, citing early successes like Lovable as evidence of a reinvigorated ecosystem ready to compete globally.
AppLovin CEO: Why Founders Shouldn't Angel Invest & Why the Best Don't Need Mentorship
Adam Foroughi, Harry Stebbings
In 2024, AppLovin CEO Adam Faroge received $83 million in compensation contingent on stock performance while executing a radical strategic pivot that slashed the workforce by 50% and eliminated C-level roles to prioritize AI-driven efficiency. This restructuring transformed the company into a lean operation with a 400-person engineering core generating $10 million in EBITDA per employee, enabling triple-digit revenue growth and an 84% EBITDA margin through aggressive share buybacks and a shift to performance-based advertising. Faroge's approach, which integrates AI into 80–90% of code production and merges product management with engineering, aims to secure a potential $1 trillion valuation driven by Connected TV expansion rather than traditional social networking models.
Replit CEO: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified & Why Coding Models are Plateauing | Amjad Masad
In March 2025, Replit CEO Amjad Massad declared a strategic pivot from traditional coding instruction to agentic creation, leveraging Opus 4.6 to embed autonomy directly into foundation models while maintaining a multi-provider architecture that balances Anthropic's session length with Google Gemini's cost efficiency. The company now targets enterprise operations to displace vertical SaaS through maintainable, self-correcting AI agents, prioritizing market dominance over immediate margin optimization despite significant infrastructure costs. This approach acknowledges the obsolescence of legacy IDEs while navigating regulatory hurdles, such as App Store delays, to capture value in an expanding total addressable market for automated software generation.
Cursor Acquired for $60BN | Anthropic Hits $1TRN in Secondary Markets & Figma, Adobe, Canva Dead?
Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
XAI and SpaceX have structured a complex $60 billion option-based acquisition of Cursor that combines SpaceX's massive GPU infrastructure with Cursor's revenue to resolve XAI's lack of earnings while offering early investors significant potential returns. Simultaneously, the technology sector is undergoing a massive leadership and strategic shift as Apple CEO Tim Cook steps down after a 15-year tenure to be succeeded by John Ternus, while Anthropic rejects an $800 billion funding offer to pursue a $1 trillion valuation via an imminent IPO. These high-stakes moves coincide with a broader market trend where capital is aggressively flowing into AI infrastructure and "Agent Fabric" solutions, signaling a transition where traditional software moats are rapidly eroding in favor of autonomous, AI-native ecosystems.
Are SaaS Companies Cooked: Which Thrive & Which Die | Aaron Levie
Aaron Levy argues that the current AI shift represents a commercial race requiring fundamental business process redesign rather than simple tool layering, predicting that human capacity will become the primary constraint in regulated sectors like law and healthcare. As enterprise technology spending is projected to rise from 10-12% to 20% of revenue, this transformation will generate 500,000 to 1 million new "Agent Operator" roles while driving a 100x to 1,000x increase in API calls to handle the headless consumption of unstructured data. Ultimately, success will depend on professional services firms managing complex data curation and workflow integration over a 20-year diffusion cycle, as enterprises adopt multi-vendor strategies to avoid lock-in and leverage agentic security for liability management.
Jake Paul: Traditional VC is Toast & Attention is More Valuable than Cash
Jake Paul, Geoffrey Woo, Harry Stebbings
Jake Paul and Jeffrey Wu launched Antifund, a venture capital firm leveraging their massive influencer distribution networks to target late-stage acquisitions and achieve a growth trajectory from $30 million to $20 billion in assets. Their investment thesis prioritizes attention over capital, citing specific successes such as a 300x return on Ramp and a 10x gain on Aerodrome within eighteen months. Beyond finance, Paul integrates his boxing career and political views into a broader strategy where he aims to secure world titles, support Donald Trump, and eventually align himself with the hundred individuals who will fundamentally alter human history.
SpaceX's Financials Leaked: Is it Worth $2TN | Meta Debuts Muse Spark: Are They Back in the AI Race?
Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
Anthropic recently unveiled the autonomous vulnerability-discovery model Mythos while market analysts project a significant downturn for legacy SaaS stocks struggling to monetize inferior AI agents. Concurrently, private equity firms face value traps in traditional software assets as the industry shifts toward an agent-first workforce that prioritizes extreme operational efficiency over human labor. Despite these disruptions, major players like Meta and OpenAI are securing enterprise dominance through proprietary stacks and direct sales motions, even as compute scarcity drives a global race for custom silicon and infrastructure capacity.
The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Rejected It | The Four Bottlenecks in AI | Anj Midha
Anj Midha, Anjney Midha, Harry Stebbings
Anj Midha outlines a strategic framework for advancing frontier AI by identifying compute supply, capital availability, and cultural alignment as critical bottlenecks requiring infrastructure standardization akin to the 1885 electricity grid. He proposes a coordinated "Iron Dome" for Western model inference and advocates for a consolidated market of three to four dominant teams to prevent resource fragmentation while fostering sovereign, mission-driven projects like Periodic Labs' physical data loops. This approach necessitates a shift in venture capital toward active operational partnership and the deployment of a 1.3 gigawatt compute grid financed through a hybrid equity-debt structure to sustain long-term innovation.
ElevenLabs: Building an AI Sales Machine & Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota
Eleven Labs' Chief Revenue Officer Carlos Reina describes the company's rapid growth to over $350M ARR as driven by a radical shift toward AI-embedded sales strategies that prioritize distribution over traditional transactional deals. The organization deploys custom AI agents for sales and customer success roles to achieve a 50% productivity boost while compensating these digital workers on par with human employees to maximize revenue generation. This approach, coupled with parallel global market entry and strategic corporate venture capital partnerships, positions the firm to outpace competitors in a foundational model landscape where forecasting relies on high-velocity experimentation rather than historical precision.
OpenAI Buys TBPN & Their Management Team Reboot | Mercor Hack & Why Now is the Time for Cyber
Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
Anthropic reports $30 billion in annual revenue with superior efficiency compared to OpenAI, which simultaneously undergoes management restructuring and faces skepticism over its TBPN acquisition strategy. Meanwhile, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO targeting a $2 trillion valuation that would dwarf the combined market value of all other IPOs from the past two decades. These developments occur alongside shifting venture capital dynamics, including Sequoia's leadership transition, the expulsion of fraudsters from Y Combinator, and rising cybersecurity threats driven by AI-enabled attacks.
Demis Hassabis: Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution & Where Are The Bottlenecks in AI
Demis Hassabis, Harry Stebbings
Demis Hassabis predicts that Artificial General Intelligence will emerge within five years, marking a technological shift ten times more impactful than the Industrial Revolution. DeepMind aims to solve critical bottlenecks in continual learning and hierarchical planning to accelerate AGI's application in curing diseases and resolving global energy crises. To manage the resulting societal and economic disruptions, Hassabis calls for international regulatory standards and financial mechanisms that ensure productivity gains are broadly shared while preventing dangerous dual-use risks.
How Hims & Hers Reached a $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue | Andrew Dudum
HIMS CEO Andrew Dudham discusses the company's strategy of utilizing public market pressures to accelerate innovation across ten clinical categories, achieving $2.3 billion in annual revenue despite a recent 66% stock decline. By deploying AI to enhance operational efficiency and leveraging a diversified portfolio to disrupt pricing models like those for GLP-1 treatments, the firm aims to standardize care while funding international expansion through the acquisition of Eucalyptus. The organization prioritizes physical fulfillment infrastructure and patient outcome alignment over speed, hiring high-grit talent to execute a long-term vision of making advanced healthcare accessible at significantly lower costs.
OpenAI Kills Sora & Hits $100M ARR on Ads | Oura Going Public & Whoop Raises at $10BN
Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
Anthropic's accidental leak of its "Mythos" model triggered a market-wide cybersecurity stock decline by highlighting the emerging risks of autonomous AI agents, while OpenAI simultaneously pivoted from consumer video products to high-revenue enterprise applications amid severe leadership instability. This strategic realignment is driven by intense compute scarcity and a shift toward ad-supported monetization, even as SoftBank's high-leverage position creates systemic vulnerability in the sector's valuation. Concurrently, geopolitical friction regarding talent movement and aggressive revenue reporting practices are reshaping investor expectations, forcing the industry to prioritize defensive security spending and efficient resource allocation over speculative growth.
Marc Andreessen on The Future of VC: Will a16z Go Public & Why Introspection is Dangerous?
Marc Andreessen, Harry Stebbings
Marc Andreessen articulates a venture capital philosophy centered on "extreme ownership" and the prioritization of a founder's primal drive over credentials, while cautioning against the "scalded stove" effect of avoiding sectors due to past failures. He argues that artificial intelligence will democratize economic value by creating massive consumer surplus rather than causing mass unemployment, attributing current tech layoffs to prior pandemic-era overstaffing rather than automation. Reflecting on a16z's strategies, Andreessen emphasizes maintaining early-stage focus and Silicon Valley centrality for AI breakthroughs, admitting that geopolitical biases previously caused the firm to miss high-growth opportunities in defense technology like Anduril.
Why Margins Don't Matter for Early-Stage Startups | Gili Raanan
Gadi Reinman of CyberStarts warns that the venture capital sector faces a structural catastrophe due to inflated entry prices and unrealistic unicorn expectations, which he believes will lead to significant capital waste for many investors. To counter these dynamics, Reinman advocates for strict price discipline and a focus on high-velocity growth while introducing employee liquidity funds to solve retention issues in private markets. He further argues that successful investing requires prioritizing founders' chemistry over rigid financial metrics, urging a shift from fear-based decision-making toward a "greedy" approach that seeks genuine alpha in a volatile landscape.