The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:49:32 · Harry Stebbings, Parag Agrawal
[00:49:32] S1: One of the providers that's going full stack is is Elon. I am fascinated. The world has a perception of him from social media, from everything. You've seen him behind the scenes. What did you see that the... Maybe the world doesn't know about him? [00:49:47] S0: The thing I'll share here, which isn't all of it, I have lots of disagreements with him, but I'll share what I think is for founders here, what is I think the thing you can admire about him, the urgency and the ability to compress time. I think having unreasonable expectations of people is mostly a good thing. Most people don't understand what they're capable of and kind of implicitly sandbag themselves and implicitly set lower expectations themselves than they're capable of. So when simultaneously inspired and pushed with urgency, people can do more than they thought. And I think he can sometimes extract that from people. And when that works, it's powerful. [00:50:29] S1: What do you think of the Twitter product and direction today? [00:50:33] S0: Listen, I always liked what we call Birdwatch, which is now Community Notes rebranded. It's a good idea. I'm glad people keep... People have continued working on it, launched up. Right. [00:50:44] S1: We're gonna do a quick fire round. Okay? Let's go. Would you invest in Instinct at 10,000,000,000? [00:50:49] S0: I don't invest because my wife is a VC, and we have a compliance process that is more trouble than it's worth. [00:50:57] S1: Wow. That's costly with the greatest of respect.
00:50:57 · Harry Stebbings, Parag Agrawal
[00:50:57] S1: Wow. That's costly with the greatest of respect. [00:51:00] S0: No. It's it's a decision. Listen. Like, I... If I invested, I would invest based on meeting a founder for thirty minutes. I think we have enough exposure to the venture. I have no reason for believing I'm a better investor than... I have some perhaps network advantages, and I run into a lot of great founders all the time. Many of them are my customers. [00:51:23] S1: Vinod Khosla. [00:51:24] S0: Yeah. [00:51:24] S1: One of your first investors on your board. Biggest lesson from working with Vinod? [00:51:29] S0: Technical intuition, centering a lot of what you do towards a longer term technical aspiration. And as soon as you solve one problem, trying to place bets on the next two or three, preempting technical bets. [00:51:43] S1: What have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months? [00:51:48] S0: I started with a very pure technical and product focus. Only thing that matters is building the best technology and the best product. Product. Nothing else matters. And now I see week on week value of having highly competent sales and being good at marketing. Yeah, I think I discounted those things. It's not that I thought they weren't valuable, but I didn't fully appreciate the the week on week visceral delta you could perceive by being good at those things. Like a naive tech person thing to say, but it's true. [00:52:21] S1: You feel that way. Perplexity or axe, sir? Which one's a bigger threat?
00:52:21 · Harry Stebbings, Parag Agrawal
[00:52:21] S1: You feel that way. Perplexity or axe, sir? Which one's a bigger threat? [00:52:26] S0: I don't think perplexity is in our business. Perplexity is perhaps more of a vertically integrated product, which competes with the Instinct or a Clockbaud or a Clockwork and all those. So I don't think of them as in our A web search business. Yeah. Like web search is like... [00:52:44] S1: Web search to perplexity is like web search to a lab. So AXA? [00:52:48] S0: Yeah. AXA is straight up in our business. Yeah. [00:52:51] S1: Single best VC meeting you've ever had? Not that your favorite person, it's just like the best one, most fun, most thoughtful, most insightful. [00:53:01] S0: Josh and Todd. When Josh and Todd made the decision to invest, they flew out to spend time with me. They're the best single best. [00:53:09] S1: When you look forward to the next ten years, what are you most excited for? [00:53:14] S0: Chaos. By that, mean change. In the next ten years, a lot is going to change. There are people who can build things to have in a world that's going to change fast, make a material dent on where it ends up. So I feel that me, my company is in a place where we have a role to play in that. [00:53:33] S1: What happens to the open web? What happens to content owners?
00:53:33 · Harry Stebbings, Parag Agrawal
[00:53:33] S1: What happens to the open web? What happens to content owners? [00:53:37] S0: If we get things right, we will get to a better place. And so that possibility is exciting that it can be a true obsession. And even if that day to day is hard and it's... Things don't work for some amount of time and totally worth it if you can see that you bend reality in some way that you care about. [00:53:58] S1: Final one. What belief do you have that sitting around your San Franciscan dinner table, your friends would go, no, paragon. I don't agree with that one, dude. Not that one. [00:54:10] S0: I think, again, it depends on which dinner table because the variance in the world is increasing. I don't think people buy this notion that there'll be this agents which are always running all the time for all of us. I think it's gonna happen, but most people don't agree with that yet. You and I are in a bubble, but, like, even a San Francisco dinner table isn't always in full agreement there. [00:54:37] S1: Alright. Listen. As I said, I stalked the shit out of you. I've so enjoyed this discussion. Thank you so much for putting [00:54:43] S0: up with me meandering, and you've been amazing. This was fun.
00:54:49 · Harry Stebbings
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