The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:00:00 · Arthur Mensch
[00:00:00] S0: Sovereign AI is going to be the most important category. So the cost of energy, at the end of the day, is not the one thing that matters in the economic of a project. It's pretty clear that there is not enough compute. I mean, the inference market behaves very much like a commodity market, which is pretty high margin today.
00:00:15 · Harry Stebbings
[00:00:15] S1: He's our last hope. He is the last hope in Europe for us to build a Frontier AI lab. Yep. You guessed it. I have Arthur Mensch, cofounder and CEO of Mistral, on the show today. It is now a $21,000,000,000 company. It is the company that is keeping Europe relevant in the race for frontier models. This is Arthur like you've never seen him before. He's unleashed. He's funny, and he says some incredible things that I have to say I was not expecting. This was such a joy to do, and I'm so excited to welcome Arthur to the show. But before we dive into the show today, base 44 is one of those products I used, and I just thought straight away, man, I wish I'd had this when I started 20 VC with $50 and no contacts in venture. I wanted to see what it could do, so I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsored contacts, follow ups, all in one amazing location. I described it in plain English. A few minutes later, I had the product open in front of me. Database, login, back end, and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy, and that's what I love. I didn't write a long spec. I didn't stitch five different tools together. I built the thing, and I started using it. For any founder listening, that's the point. The faster you turn an idea into something real, the faster you launch. Apps, dashboards, internal systems, AI agents, whatever you need to build, Base forty four gets you there. Go to base44.com/20vc. That's base44.com/20vc. While Base forty four helps you build faster, Larridin helps you measure AI impact. Every company now runs two workforces, humans and AI agents. Larridin is the first unified dashboard across both workforces that measures their work and optimizes their impact. Larridin answers four questions. Who's using AI? Which tools? What is it costing? And was it actually being produced for every team across every vendor? AI ROI stops being a guess and becomes a number that you can consistently and confidently measure. Gainsight, Vertiv, SurveyMonkey, and many other enterprise organizations run their AI programs on Larridin. Thousands of AI tools and millions of dollars of AI spend are measured. You bet on AI. Larridin proves that it's working. Visit larridin.com to learn more. That's l a r r I d I n dot com.
00:02:36 · Harry Stebbings, Arthur Mensch
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00:04:06 · Arthur Mensch, Harry Stebbings
[00:04:06] S0: Thank you, Harry, for having me today. [00:04:07] S1: Now I was doing some research, and I say some quite opinionated things, Arthur. But it seems I'm not the only one. Because you the other day said that leaving Frontier AI to The US and China will end up costing Europe what remains of its place in the world. [00:04:25] S0: I did say that. And I truly believe that this is such an important technology that it needs to be distributed in the world. We're talking about a technology that is comparable to electricity, a technology that is falling more and more under export control. And so AI is going to be a big enabler of economic growth. And if there's no AI being produced in Europe in particular, Europe will struggle to actually produce the growth it needs to produce. [00:04:51] S1: I'm going direct. To what extent does the success of Mistral depend on US overreach? Obviously, when we have a Trump administration, we see things like Fable being banned, and it it causes a lot of questions and the need for sovereignty. In a world where there's not US overreach, does that threaten sovereign providers?
00:05:08 · Arthur Mensch
[00:05:08] S0: I'd say this is structural. This is not really linked to any way of operating or of showing power. It's more linked to the nature of the technology itself. If you start as an enterprise or as a state to use AI in all of your core processes, it means that you want to make sure that the money you're spending on those processes actually accrues pretty close to you. If you don't, it means you have a trade balance problem. It means you have enormous flows of cash that are going from one place in the world, can be Europe, to another place in Europe, in the world, which can be The U. S. And so there is a macroeconomic problem to not being able to produce artificial intelligence, to do R and D in your territory. That is not linked to a certain way of saying that Europe is falling behind or a certain way of using soft power, let's say. So it's structural. I won't say that some people are not making it a little bit emotional. But when we started Mistral in 2023, we started with this conviction that this was a sovereign technology in that as a company, as a state, wherever you are, whether in The U. S, in Europe or in Asia, you need to own the technology. You need to be able to customize the systems to run them very close to your data. You need to be able to control the cost. You need to work in true partnerships with companies that understand how to build AI systems. And sovereignty precedes twenty twenty five election. So it turned out to be true, what we said in 2023. It turned out to become quite emotional when we start to speak with Greenland, but it's mostly an economic problem. It's not really a political problem. It's just too important a technology.
00:06:40 · Harry Stebbings
[00:06:40] S1: When I hear you speak, I think of Lin at Fireworks, who came on the show and said, actually, very similar things. We need companies to have their own models to train them very close to their own data. How do you feel when you hear me say that? And is that the evolution of the company, allowing companies to own their own models and work with their own data?