Luke Harries is Head of Growth at ElevenLabs, where he leads marketing, product, engineering, and developer experience. ElevenLabs has raised $281M with the latest round pricing the company at $3.3B valuation. Previously, Luke held roles at PostHog and Microsoft, and is also an angel investor supporting startups like Lovable and Runna.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
00:00 – The $3.3B Growth Engine Behind ElevenLabs
04:55 – Why Luke Said “No” to Investing in ElevenLabs (and Why He Was Wrong)
15:40 – How ElevenLabs Makes a Horizontal Product Strategy Work
20:15 – How to Build Sharded Growth Teams That Actually Scale
26:30 – The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product
33:00 – The Truth About CAC, Payback, and Performance Marketing in AI
39:05 – SEO Isn’t Dead: The Mini-Tool Strategy You Should Steal
44:10 – Kill Your Inbound SDRs—The Case for Voice AI in Sales
48:40 – Why You Don’t Need PMs and the Rise of Growth-Led Product Teams
Agenda:
06:28 The Lopphole That Means Chime Has a Better Business than JP Morgan
10:51 Why Investors Who Invested at $25BN Will Make Money When it IPOs at $12BN
18:59 Are IPOs Dead & The Future of the Late Stage Private Market
27:32 Exits are Larger Than Ever: So What? What Happens? Who Wins? Who Loses?
40:51 Is Europe Totally F*******
43:48 Challenges of Going Public & What Needs to Change?
46:12 OpenAI's Future and Predictions
49:45 Rippling vs. Deel Lawsuit: Is Deel Screwed?
59:28 Why So Many Companies Are About To Become Database Companies
01:08:07 The Future of Salesforce: Buy or Sell?
01:13:28 Quickfire Round
Severin Hacker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Duolingo, the world’s most downloaded education app with over 100 million monthly users. Since its 2021 IPO, Duolingo has reached a market cap of $20BN. The company has raised over $183M from top-tier investors including CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures, NEA, Ashton Kutcher, and Tim Ferriss. Severin is also an active angel investor, with standout bets including Decagon, one of the fastest-growing AI-native dev shops globally.
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
00:00 – Why It's Harder to Raise $3M Than $100M
02:10 – The Real Reason Duolingo Couldn't Have Started in Europe
04:40 – Duolingo’s AI Pivot: What “AI-First” Actually Means
07:00 – The 12-Year Bottleneck Duolingo Crushed with AI
11:40 – How Duolingo Uses AI Internally (and Why They Love Cursor)
13:30 – Where AI Still Sucks (Especially in Engineering)
16:00 – Will AI Kill the CS Degree? Severin’s Surprising Take
18:00 – The End of Work? UBI, Purpose, and the Future of Labor
25:20 – OpenAI vs Duolingo: Are They Coming for Language Learning?
29:20 – Duolingo’s Biggest Mistake: “We Waited Too Long on This…”
39:30 – Duolingo’s Secret Sauce: What Investors Always Get Wrong
45:00 – Would You Go Public Today? Severin’s Surprising Answer
49:00 – Best and Worst Parts of Going Public—A Rare Honest Take
51:00 – Should Europe Give Up? Severin's Unfiltered Opinion
56:00 – Harsh Truth: “Europe Can’t Win Unless the U.S. Screws Up”
59:10 – Why Founders Have to Move to the US to Optimise Their Chance of Success
1:01:00 – Why Union Square Was the Only VC to Say Yes
1:03:00 – The Real Value of Tier 1 VCs (Even at Worse Terms)
1:05:00 – From PhD Student to Billionaire: Does Money Buy Happiness?
1:09:00 – Why Severin Sometimes Lies About His Job
1:10:20 – Founder Marriage Advice: “Write a Contract”
1:11:50 – How to Pick a Life Partner – Severin’s Tuesday Night Test
20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on The Doomed Future of Europe, Reflections on Money, Marriage and the Future of AI
Yuhki Yamashita is the Chief Product Officer at Figma, where he leads the development of one of the world’s most beloved design platforms. Previously, he was Head of Product at Uber, overseeing the core rider experience used by millions globally. A master of product storytelling and team-building, Yuhki has redefined how world-class digital products are built and scaled.
Items Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
04:30 – "Simple is Lazy?" — Yuhki Challenges Product Dogma
07:45 – The Secret Behind Figma’s New Product Ideas (Hint: Users Hack It First)
09:00 – From Hack Week to Roadmap: How New Figma Products Are Born
10:00 – Are PRDs Dead? Yuhki's Spicy Take on the Death of Specs
12:30 – The ‘Screenshot Test’: Can Your Product Explain Itself in 1 Frame?
14:15 – Code Layers and ‘Living Designs’—This Demo Blew Everyone’s Mind
15:30 – Designers vs Coders: Who Really Owns the Future of Product?
17:45 – The Most Controversial Product Decision Inside Figma
19:00 – Why Figma’s Org Structure Could Kill the PM Role (For Real)
21:00 – Should Everyone Be a Designer and a Builder Now?
23:15 – Will Figma Have Fewer Engineers in 5 Years?
24:00 – Cursor, Windsurf & AI Coding Tools—What Figma Engineers Really Use
25:30 – AI’s Dual Power: Lowering the Floor, Raising the Ceiling
27:00 – Figma’s Biggest Product Flop? Yuhki Owns It
29:30 – The Magic of Product Storytelling—Even for Boring Compliance Tools
31:00 – Why Joy Must Be in the Product (and How Figma Bakes It In)
33:00 – Does Product Market Fit Even Mean Anything in 2025?
35:30 – Is Great Design Enough? Or Is It ALL About Distribution?
37:15 – Dylan’s Secret to Early Growth: Hacking Design Twitter
39:00 – Community Mistakes Startups Keep Making
41:00 – The One Thing Yuhki Wishes He Could Change at Figma
43:00 – Should They Have Launched 4 Products at Once? Time Will Tell
45:00 – When Do You Know a New Product Is Doomed?
46:30 – Why Designers Still Don’t Ship What They Design (and How to Fix It)
48:00 – From Uber to Figma: Yuhki’s Playbook for Massive Product Swings
53:00 – The Adobe Deal Breakup—How Figma Rallied
56:00 – What Yuhki Needs to Improve as a Leader (His Own Feedback Review)
58:00 – The Product Leader He Admires Most—and Why
59:30 – What Figma Still Gets Wrong About Product Culture
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
Items Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
04:11 Owner’s New $120M Round at $1BN
06:05 Why Series A is F****** Today
14:55 Could Tiger Global Be Saved by OpenAI and Scale
22:43 Why SBF is the Greatest Investor of the Last Decade
31:34 Why No Individuals Should Invest in Venture Funds
36:27 Why Microsoft Laying 3% of Their Workforce Off is not Enough
41:38 OpenAI’s New CEO: Non-Technical CEOs Running OpenAI
44:48 Why Big Funds are Investing in Perplexity
54:43 Why Clay Should Raise a Warchest and Go to War
01:00:05 The Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales
Immad Akhund is the CEO of Mercury. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $500M in funding from Sequoia, Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz and others. He is a former part-time partner at Y Combinator and is an active angel investor, with more than 350 investments in startups including Rippling, AirTable, Rappi, Applied Intuition, and Substack.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:38 Exclusive News: New Fund Announcement
05:15 Lessons from 350 Angel Investments
12:27 Why Founders Should Always Push for the Highest Price
14:40 Biggest Wins and Misses in Angel Investing
22:56 How Sequoia Came to Lead the Series C for Mercury
31:32 Why Move From Angel to VC
33:41 Is It Wrong For Founders to Also Have Funds with LP Capital?
36:28 AI Investments: Overhyped or Worthwhile?
41:14 Raising a First Time Fund: Challenges & Surprises
49:47 The Future of Venture Capital
54:36 Quickfire Questions and Reflections
Eléonore Crespo is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Pigment, one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. With Pigment, Eleonore has raised over $397M from the best in the world including ICONIQ, Greenoaks and IVP to name a few. Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was on the other side of the table as an investor with Index Ventures.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
[04:10] “I had 3 surgeries. That’s when I knew I had to become a founder.”
[06:50] Why Index Ventures isn’t on her cap table
[08:40] Eleonore’s CIA-style co-founder hunt (she literally made a target list)
[11:50] Co-CEOs: “We talk 3x a day. That’s our superpower.”
[13:30] The boutique coffee metaphor for product excellence
[15:40] Yuri Milner’s 4 traits of legendary founders (one is shocking)
[17:30] “Hiring is everything. I hunt talent like a football scout.”
[19:00] Wild Olympic Games story → led to hiring a top CFO
[24:50] How she filters out title-chasers and political hires
[29:30] “Too much process? I make teams list the dumbest ones.”
[33:00] Her blunt answer on whether Europe can produce scale execs
[35:00] Why she raised so much money… even when they didn’t need it
[38:50] Board power is real: “They can fire you. I’ve seen it.”
[43:30] Rob Ward’s counter-cyclical advice: double down during a downturn
[44:50] “We closed a massive US deal… at 2am… while drenched in rain.”
[47:10] Selling into the US as a European founder—her full playbook
[50:20] The hardest part of being a CEO no one talks about
[54:00] “Children remind you what happiness is.”
[56:30] “I don’t fast. That would make me unhappy.” On longevity culture
[59:20] Why her husband knows nothing about Pigment
[01:04:20] “Forget $50B. I want to build a $200B company.”
LinkedIn: Eleonore Crespo
Pigment: pigment.com
Subscribe to 20VC for more conversations with the world’s best founders and investors.
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com
Today’s Topics:
04:44 Analysis of $3 Billion Windsurf Acquisition
12:39 Will Mega Funds Win the Future of Venture Capital
18:39 Does Every Fund Have to do Pre-Seed to Win Series A and B Today
27:53 Why AI Will Create Massive Unemployment
31:06 The $100,000 Bet on the Future of Work
35:52 Why Venture Has Become a Bundled Good
37:52 Why Stage Specific Firms Will Win: a16z vs Benchmark
40:16 What Does Harvard Losing It’s For Profit Status Mean for Venture
42:57 Why AI is Maiming and Not Killing Growth Companies on the Path to IPO
45:41 Decagon Raises 100x ARR: The Breakdown
52:50 Why VCs Are Upside Junkies and What That Means Today
01:03:37 Olo Looking to Sell: What Happens When Public Companies Want to Sell
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com
Bucky Moore is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, announced exclusively in the show today on 20VC. Prior to Lightspeed, Bucky spent an incredibly successful 7 years at Kleiner Perkins working with Mamoon Hamid to build one of the most successful early stage firms of the last decade. Bucky has made investments in the likes of Prisma, Netlify, Browserbase and more.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:07 Big News: Joining Lightspeed Venture Partners
04:09 Why Mega Platforms Will Win the Next 10 Years of VC
09:33 Are Foundation Model Companies Good Venture Investments
16:04 What Applications Will Model Providers Buy/Build? What Will They Not?
22:03 How to Approach Price Sensitivity in a World of AI
28:25 Why is it BS to do Market Sizing When Making Investments in AI
34:03 Is the Future of VC Domain Specialization
38:38 How to Know What Company Wins in Super Competitive Markets
41:06 Why Every Firm Has to do Pre-Seed To Win in VC Today?
44:43 The Risks of Multi-Stage Investing: Is Signalling Risk Real?
48:53 Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Glean and Windsurf
56:54 Quick Fire Round: Lessons from Mamoon, Fave CEO, Next 10 Years
Reggie Marable is the Head of Global Sales at Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. Sierra enables companies like ADT, Sonos, SiriusXM, and WeightWatchers to build AI agents that transform customer experiences. The company has rapidly become a hypergrowth leader in Silicon Valley, recently securing a funding round that values it at $4.5 billion. Before joining Sierra, Reggie was the Head of Sales in North America at Slack and the Area Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Salesforce.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
02:50 “What I Learned from Failing Early as a CRO”
06:06 The Most Effective Sales Strategy and the BS Sales Methodology
06:55 How to Build Sales Processes from Scratch
12:28 When and How to do Verticalised Sales Teams
14:15 How to Become World Class as Sales Prospecting and Outbound
17:21 How to Use Proof of Concepts to Win Enterprise Deals
22:04 Enterprise vs. Self-Serve: Both or One and How
30:09 Building a Sales Team from Scratch
37:39 Structuring the Hiring Process
41:14 How Founders F*** Up Hiring in Sales
46:25 Handling Salary and Title Expectations
51:36 How to Run Effective Deal Cycles
57:06:07 How to do Onboarding for New Sales Hires
59:07:48 How to do Post Mortems in Sales Processes
01:04:24 Negotiating Enterprise Deals
01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Sales Tactics and Strategies
This episode is brought to you by Capchase, helping software and hardware companies close deals while accessing TCV upfront. Learn more at capchase.com/20vc.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:56 Why The Risk Lever Has Been Turned Higher than Ever in VC
06:04 Why IRR is the Hardest Thing to Control
09:36 Is Lack of Liquidity Short Term Temporary or Long Term Structural
12:17 Why Fund Returners Are Not Good Enough Anymore
16:03 Sequoia: The Best Strategy at the Worst Time
26:30 What it Takes to be Good at Series A and B Today
34:14 Only Three Company Types Survive AI
41:35 ServiceNow: 25% Pop, WTF Happened
45:29 Palantir and SAP Ripping: Do Incumbents Win AI
49:43 Are Benchmark Wrong to Invest in Chinese Made Manus
01:00:52 Geopolitical Risks in Investments
01:11:36 European vs. US Tech Culture
Taavet Hinrikus is a Partner at Plural, the early-stage fund that backs the most ambitious founders on a mission to change the world through technology. He co-founded Wise in 2010, where he was CEO and later Chairman, which went public in the first-ever direct listing in Europe in 2021. Prior to that, Taavet was Skype’s Director of Strategy until 2008, having joined as its first employee. He’s been an active investor for more than a decade,with personal investments in the likes of Bolt and Synthesia.
In Today’s Show We Discuss:
04:08 VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys
05:41 Why Banker European VCs Suck More Than The Others
11:20 Why Serial Entrepreneurs Are Better
14:48 Why the 2:20 Fee and Carry Model in VC is Broken
18:01 What are the Biggest Ways VC Investment Decision-Making is Broken
28:26 Why is it BS when VC Firms Need Every Partner to Meet the Founder
31:24 When and Why Will Founders Realise Multi-Stage Firms are Bad Early Investors
34:35 Why Does Europe Need to Build it’s Own Tech Now More Than Ever
37:24 Will Putin Invade More European Countries
39:29 What are the Dangers of Having US Made Tech in Europe
47:12 How Does the Change in Relationship Between the US and Europe Impact How We Build Our Tech Ecosystem?
52:36 Quick Fire Questions and Reflections
Mayur Gupta is currently the CMO at Kraken, one of the largest crypto platforms in the world. Prior to that, he lead Marketing, Business Transformation and Growth at Gannett - USA Today Network, led Growth at Spotify and was the CMO at Freshly which eventually got acquired by Nestle. He was the first ever Chief Marketing Technologist at Kimberly Clark.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
03:25 Biggest Growth Lessons from Spotify
08:21 Role of Marketing in Product-Led Companies
13:35 How to Build a Growth Engine
20:40 Organic vs. Paid Growth Strategies
27:36 The Branding Dilemma: Performance vs. Brand Marketing
28:37 Creating Demand: The Role of Upper Funnel Marketing
29:35 Balancing Investment: Immediate vs Long Term Bets
30:03 Channel Saturation and Experimentation
31:42 Growth Strategies and Performance Metrics
34:54 Growth: Big Swings or Moving % Points
40:04 Successful Growth Experiments and Tactics
44:56 Quick Fire Questions and Final Thoughts
In Today’s Show We Discuss:
04:49 Breaking Down the $3BN Windsurf Acquisition
06:18 Why Sam Altman is Playing a Master Game
12:40 Why Multi-Stage Funds are Destroying Seed Managers
21:52 Are Endowment Funds F******
27:38 What Would Rory Do If He Was CFO of an Ivy League Endowment Fund
43:38 The Denominator Effect and It’s Impact on Venture Allocations
49:36 Why Revenue Multiple is BS & What You Need to Know
51:34 The Rise of AI Rollup Plays & Are They Good Businesses
55:29 Competitive Markets: How to Make Money in Them?
01:02:58 Why If You Can Guarantee 5x, You Should Always Do the Deal
01:11:56 Is SF The Only Place to Be Building Today
Jason Wilk is the Founder and CEO of Dave, the greatest turnaround in the public markets of the last 12 months. Dave went public with a market cap of $4BN, just months later the company had a market cap of $50M. Today, they are back with a market cap of $1.1BN. In 2024, CNBC named Dave the best-performing financial stock in the country, achieving 900% growth.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:09 Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders
07:45 The Best Performing Fund Would Only Invest in YC Founders on Their Second Time
11:25 “We Went Public Too Late, It Was a Big Mistake”
17:53 Why Did Jason Choose to SPAC?
24:21 Why Does Jason Believe SPACs are Unfairly Demonised and Will Comeback?
29:47 How Does AI Change the Margin Structure of the Next Generation of Companies
33:14 Is Trump Better for Business than a Biden Administration?
38:35 Are We Heading into a Recession? Predictions for Next 12 Months?
46:26 Why Have No Neobanks Reached the Heights of Revolut in the US?
48:08 Why is the Opportunity in Low Income Banking Not High Income in the US?
50:07 Why Short Sellers Should Be Stopped and How Immoral They Are
Rich Socher is the Founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of the AI startup MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. He is widely recognised as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Winners & Losers: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude
08:59 How Partnerships Could Decide the Winners in AI
12:42 China vs US: Who Wins the War for AI
25:50 How Society and Economics Needs to Change in a World of AI
34:04 What Jobs Will Be Replaced, What Will Not
36:04 How Europe Needs to Change It’s Approach to AI
41:06 How AI Will Change Health and Longevity
43:10 AI in Consumer and Enterprise Markets
49:30 Quantum Computing and AI Misconceptions
56:57 Longevity, Personal Reflections, and Future Outlook
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com
Jason Lemkin is one of the leading SaaS investors of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat, Saleloft and more.
Rory O’Driscoll is a General Partner @ Scale where he has led investments in category leaders such as Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), and WalkMe (WKME), among others.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:23 What is Wrong with Billionaires on Twitter: Are They Depressed?
08:49 Why Does product Market Fit Mean Less Than Ever
11:50 Why is Venture Capital More Risky Than Ever and No One is Discussing It
16:17 Will Private Equity Save a Generation of SaaS Companies and VCs
23:53 a16z’s $20BN Fund: Seriously?
31:29 Why Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital are Masters of the World
38:21 Why is Seed Investing for Suckers
45:49 Why Are $50 Million Seed Funds Useless
46:21 Founders Fund Raises $4.6BN: Analysis
52:00 How WIll LPs Change Their Approach to Venture in the Next Five Years
59:53 When Will IPOs Comeback?
01:09:15 Why Does it Not Make Sense for the Best Companies to IPO
01:09:51 Lost Ethics and Morals in Founder Secondaries and Term Sheets
01:22:58 Quickfire: OpenAI, Cursor, Deel vs Rippling
Victor Lazarte is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the mot renowned venture firms in the world. At Benchmark, Victor has led deals into the likes of HeyGen and Mercor. As an angel, he was the first investor and board member of Brex, and as a Founder he scaled Wildlife Studios, bootstrapping into the largest gaming company in LatAm, with about 4 billion downloads.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Lessons Scaling Wildlife Studios to 4BN Downloads
04:49 Why Predicting the Future is Wrong When Starting a Company
07:11 Three Different Categories of Company in an AI World: Who Wins & Loses?
09:25 Why You Should Always Ask What a Founder Does in Their Free Time?
17:30 Two Traits That All the Best Founders Have?
23:17 Why If You Start a Company in SF You are 1,000x More Likely to be Successful?
35:30 Why Spreadsheet SaaS Investing is Dead
36:10 Why Replacing Humans is the Most Exciting Opportunity in AI
37:02 Why Knowledge Work Will Be Destroyed and What Happens Then?
37:30 Why China is a Stabilising Force for the US
38:59 China vs. US: The AI Race
42:33 Why All Students Today Should Study Computer Science
44:38 Why Portfolio Construction is BS
47:04 What Makes Peter Fenton One of the Best Ever
51:31 Why Duolingo Will Be One of the Most Valuable Companies in the World
01:00:17 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions
Aatish Nayak is the Head of Product at Harvey where he oversees product vision, strategy, design, analytics, marketing, and support. This is his third hypergrowth AI unicorn having previously held product leadership roles at Scale AI from 40 to 800 people, and Shield AI from 20 to 100 people.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:21 Biggest Product Lessons from Scale AI
7:18 Why Product Managers Are Wrong: They are not the CEO of the Product
12:28 Why Market Selection is More Important than Anything Else
16:40 If Distribution is King then Product is President
22:06 Effective Product Strategy and Execution
26:24 How to Write the Best PRDs
31:01 Balancing New Features and Technical Debt
33:17 Analysing Retrospectives and Postmortems
33:55 Introduction to Pre-mortems
38:25 Biggest Product Mistakes and Lessons Learned
41:40 Evaluating AI Models and Lessons Learned
45:03 The Future of AI in Product Management
55:21 What Should Product People Learn to Win in a World of AI
59:37 The AI Talent War in San Francisco
01:01:26 Quickfire Round
Tom Hulme is a General Partner @ GV and leads GV’s European investing. He has led rounds in Monzo, Nothing, GoCardless, Lemonade, Snyk and is widely considered one of the best investors in Europe.
Stan Boland is one of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the UK. In 1999, he co-founded Element 14 which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000 for $640 million. Following this, Boland co-founded Icera Inc. in 2002, a fabless semiconductor company which he sold to Nvidia for $367 million.
In Today’s Discussion We Cover:
04:26 Is The UK’s Biggest Problem a Talent Problem
09:50 Why We Need to Flood the UK With Venture Capital
10:38 What Europe Can Learn from Stripe and the Collisons
15:21 How the UK Can Use Visas to Retain the Best Talent
16:46 Why the Government Needs to Put 10x More Cash Into Fund of Funds
24:32 Is the London Stock Exchange F****** and Does it Matter?
34:38 What The UK Can Learn From Sequoia and the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund
40:42 What is a “National Goal for Wealth Creation” & How Do We Implement It?
48:10 What are the Most Broken Elements of the UK Tax Regime
52:11 Is It Stupid to Remove the Non-Dom Tax Status
53:15 Why is Now the Time to Be Bullish on China
01:00:19 Biggest Lessons from Working with Jensen Huang
01:08:04 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Predictions
Ernest Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Carvana. Under Ernie’s leadership, Carvana went from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a $50+ billion public company, became the fastest-growing online used car retailer in U.S. history, and landed on the Fortune 500 in under 10 years. However, it was not all up and to the right, in 2022, the stock plummeted 99% to a market cap of just $400M. Today they are back with a market cap of $35BN, that is a 100x in the public markets and selling 400,000 cars sold annually, with a logistics network that rivals Amazon.
In Today’s Episode with Ernie Garcia We Discuss:
04:12 Are all great founders just “stubborn egomaniacs”?
06:55 How Carvana Almost Died on Several Occasions
08:46 Is Carvana’s Inability to get VC Funding a Sign the VC Model is Broken?
11:58 Operators vs. Strategists: What Hires Can Make or Break a Company?
21:46 Billionaire’s Biggest Lessons on Parenting
26:52 Is Life About Happiness or Achieving
32:21 The Reality of Being a Public Company CEO
39:07 Why Companies Should Go Public
43:55 Why You Should Price Your IPO to Perfection with No Pop
50:50 “What I Wish I Had Known About Debt in Building Carvana”
52:32 Quick Fire Round: Favourite CEO, Marriage Advice, Carvana in 10 Years
Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner @ Spark Capital, one of the leading firms of the last decade with portfolio companies including Twitter, Anthropic, Coinbase, Affirm, Discord, Deel and more.
In Todays Show with Nabeel Hyatt We Discuss:
1. The Rules of Investing:
What have been Nabeel’s biggest lessons on price sensitivity? When did he not pay up and with the benefit of hindsight, wish he had of paid up?
How important is ownership to Nabeel and Spark? How does Nabeel think about reserve investing and doubling down?
Why does Nabeel not engage in secondary markets? How does Nabeel think about when is the right time to sell?
Why does Nabeel think the majority of market sizing is total BS?
2. The Venture Landscape: Run by Principles and Broken:
Why does Nabeel believe this generation of AI investing will require a different mindset to the one that made VCs successful over the last decade?
Why does Nabeel believe that venture is currently run by principals and associates? Why is that such a problem?
Why does Nabeel believe that the majority of venture firms today are dead but do not know it yet?
What does Nabeel believe happens to the mega multi-stage firms who have raised billions and billions?
3. How to Win the VC Game in a World of AI:
Infrastructure, models, apps: where does Nabeel believe the most value will accrue in the next decade of AI investing?
What does Nabeel mean when he says there are three categories of AI apps today? Where does Nabeel believe the most valuable will be built?
Does Nabeel believe Deepseek hurt or helped the future for Anthropic? How could Anthropic be a $100BN company from this point?
What does no one see about the next 10 years of AI that everyone should see?
Ishan Mukherjee is the Co-Founder/CEO of Rox, a Sequoia-backed AI-powered sales productivity platform. Before Rox, he was the Chief Growth Officer at New Relic where he scaled the self-serve business from $0-$100M in ARR. Prior to New Relic, Ishan founded Pixie Labs (acq by New Relic). Before that he led product at Siri Knowledge Graph at Apple, Lattice Data (acquired by Apple), Premise Data, and Amazon Robotics. Ishan was also an early engineer in Kiva (acquired by Amazon) where he joined after graduating from MIT.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:50 Biggest Lessons Scaling New Relic’s PLG to $100M in ARR
05:59 How to Do PLG and Enterprise at the Same Time
07:00 How to do Content in a PLG World
08:50 Performance Marketing or Organic Content: What Works for PLG
10:27 Why You Should Stop Marketing at Events
11:47 Why SEM is a Cartel
14:15 Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS
17:17 How AI Changes the World of Enterprise Sales: Commit-Based vs. Usage-Based
20:49 How to do Sales Compensation Plans
24:44 How to Ramp New Sales Reps
25:03 The Impact of AI on Sales Research
29:18 How to do Deep Customer Research in an AI World
35:56 Changing Spending Patterns in SaaS
41:41 Retention and Churn in Enterprise AI
43:31 The Future of Sales Teams with AI
44:45 Hiring and Scaling Sales Teams
54:28 Quickfire
Welcome to The Daily Deal — the new show with Harry Stebbings and Jason Lemkin, where we break down the biggest stories in tech, venture, and B2B. From market meltdowns to billion-dollar raises, wild valuations, and the drama behind the deals. We’re covering it all! Plus, we’ll be joined by some incredible guests to go deeper on the moves shaping the future of our industry.
Today we discuss:
Discussion with Bhavin Shah @ Moveworks:
Discussion with Andrew Feldman @ Cerebras:
Kevin Scott is the CTO of Microsoft, where he leads the company’s AI and technology strategy at global scale and played a pivotal role in Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Prior to Microsoft, Kevin spent six years at Linkedin as SVP of Engineering. Kevin has also enjoyed advisory positions with Pinterest, Box, Code.org and more.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
04:10 Where is Enduring Value in a World of AI
10:53 Why Scaling Laws are BS
12:26 What is the Bottleneck Today: Data, Compute or Algorithms
15:38: In 10 Years Time: What % of Data Usage will be Synthetic
20:04 How Will AI Agents Evolve Over the Next Five Years
23:34: Deepseek Evalution: Do We Underestimate China
28:34 The Future of Software Development
31:53 The Thing That Most Excites Me in AI is Tech Debt
35:01 Leadership Lessons from Satya Nadella
41:13 Quickfire Round