20VC Newsletter - 23rd February 2025
Here are the transcripts and top takeaways from 20VC episodes released this last week.
Brought to you by Harmonic — the complete startup database
8 out of the 10 largest VCs use Harmonic to find the best startups 6 months ahead of the competition.
Don’t miss deals
Monday’s episode with Jonathan Ross, Founder & CEO @ Groq:
Download the full transcript:
My 8 key takeaways:
Why NVIDIA Will Be Used for Training and Groq for Inference
They will sell every single GPU they make for training.
40% of their market is inference right now.
If we deploy inference chips at a much lower cost, the same number of GPUs will be sold because more inference = more training.
The Four Biggest Opportunities in AI
Four things:
Hallucination: Solving the hallucination problem in AI.
Subgoals: Agentic AI that is best able to break down subgoals.
Invent stage: AI that creates original ideas, instead of simply predicting the most likely ones.
Proxy stage: Models that will make decisions for you.
Something That Has Never Happened Before in VC Is Happening
We are seeing people raising billions of dollars while their competitors are doing the same.
There is no longer a clear winner in the Keynesian beauty contest.
What Everyone Misunderstands About Data Centres
They are not real estate.
A lot of data centres being built today do not have real infrastructure, i.e. generators and water supply.
People are building an oversupply of data centres that don’t actually work.
China Does Not Have the Efficiency but It Does Have the Scale
They have a more complicated situation yet a simpler one at the same time.
They do not have the technology that we have in terms of chip efficiency.
BUT if they want to build 150 nuclear reactors, they can just do it.
How the Best Founders Approach Market Timing
Your job is not to follow the wave.
Your job is to get positioned for the wave.
It is the hardest thing to do because everyone is trying to talk you into coming on shore again.
The $3BN Company That Almost Ran Out of Money
At some point we were so close to running out of money.
Our employees had to buy “Groq bonds” & traded part of their salary for stock
If we hadn’t raised the $300M round we would have died.
How Big Will NVIDIA Be In 10 Years Time?
A lot of assumptions in NVIDIA today were that they were going to run away with the entire market.
Training will become more important.
They can be 3x bigger but I wouldn’t be surprised if they stayed the same.
Top comments from the show:
“Has to be one of the most informative and interesting interviews with a CEO in the chip space. Great questions and smart follow up questions. I appreciated how Jonathan was given the space to explain his perspective without interruption.” - @kontheodoridis8495 (YT)
“Always refreshing to hear Jonathan Ross speak. He knows his business and has the ability to explain it in simple English. Must not have been easy to have Chamath as your seed investor with no product market fit for 7 yrs. Very happy for him” - @pjramk (YT)
“At last one AI Ceo who sounds/ looks and acts normal” - @rmngall (YT)
Behind the scenes:
Thursday’s episode with Adarsh Hiremath, Co-founder & CTO @ Mercor:
Download the full transcript:
My 6 key takeaways:
Why Recruiting Is the Most Undervalued Function
Recruiters control the inflows and outflows of every company.
You can gather everything you need to know about a company by its inflows and outflows.
World of Many Models or Few Generalist x
We will have many models with different use cases.
Companies will customize their own models for their own purposes.
We are already seeing this with application layer companies today.
How AI Has Changed the Way I Develop
Our team uses Cursor AI.
We can easily generate comprehensive test suites rapidly with simple prompts.
As these coding agents improve software will likely get commoditized.
Is Programming More or Less Important x
It will become more important, but at a different level of abstraction.
The way we define programming will be very different.
In the future, programming could be one person orchestrating thousands of coding agents.
Network Effect Businesses Thrive in AI
Businesses with network effect will succeed with software costs approaching zero.
Meta, Airbnb, etc…
They can give away their entire code base & still survive.
How a Helicopter Ride Won Benchmark a $BN Deal
So, Victor from Benchmark asked Brendan if he had been on a helicopter before after their chat.
He said no, then he went on one with Peter Fenton.
We had a couple more conversations & it was clear we wanted to work with them.
Top comments from the show:
“no way this guy has ‘Hire’ and ‘Math’ in his name while running a recruitment company and having studied computer science” @jb_kc__ (YT)
“i used perplexity for a deep research. saw this video and i asked this can only be recent interview then i checked 15mins ago🤷” @fortunefubara1244 (YT)
"Underrated high quality/value content 🙁” @cristianfigueredo566 (YT)
Let us know what your big takeaways from this week’s shows were in the comments below!
Thank you for reading, and don’t miss the great guests we have next week:
Oscar Pierre, Co-Founder & CEO @ Glovo
Steeve Morin, Founder @ ZML
George Bonaci, VP of Growth and Demand Gen @ Ramp
Thank you for reading 20VC.
This post is public so feel free to share it.
Thanks for reading 20VC! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.