The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

David Schneider is a General Partner @ Coatue and one of the great operators of the last 20 years. Prior to Coatue, David was instrumental in ServiceNow’s growth to over $100B+ public market value. David led the growth of the company from $100M to $5BN in revenue. Before joining ServiceNow, David held senior positions at Data Domain, the company he joined at $0 in revenue and scaled to $1BN in revenue and an IPO and acquisition.

In Today's Episode with David Schneider We Discuss:

ServiceNow: Secrets to Scaling to $5BN in ARR:

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Sean Rad is the Founder and former CEO of Tinder. Sean has made more romantic connections between humans than anyone in history with Tinder having matched 50BN different people. Sean is also the Founder of Rad Fund which has made over 100 investments in companies and funds.

In Today's Episode with Sean Rad We Discuss:

1. Lessons Scaling Tinder to the Fastest Consumer Social App:

Starting: How did the idea for Tinder come to Sean in a restaurant in LA? Scaling: What are Sean's biggest lessons for consumer...

Nick Chirls is the Founder of Asylum Ventures, a new venture firm dedicated to the creative act of building companies; treating founders like artists, not assets. Asylum raised $55 million to invest $1-2 million in early-stage founders practising the art of making startups. Prior to Asylum, Nick co-founded Notation Capital, one of NYC's most successful pre-seed firms.

In Today's Episode with Nick Chirls We Discuss:

1. Why Venture Capital is Broken Today:

Why is VC a ponzi scheme today? Why are most VCs sheep and have lost all...

Zico Colter is a Professor and the Director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.  His research spans several topics in AI and machine learning, including work in AI safety and robustness, LLM security, the impact of data on models, implicit models, and more.  He also serves on the Board of OpenAI, as a Chief Expert for Bosch, and as Chief Technical Advisor to Gray Swan, a startup in the AI safety space.

In Today's Episode with Zico Colter We Discuss:

1. Model Performance: What are the Bottlenecks:

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Scott Gorlick was employee #99 at Uber. Over 6 years, Scott built Uber in Atlanta and helped the company scale from 10 cities to $10B in revenue. Scott is also a prolific angel investor having written early checks into Lime and Standard Cognition to name a few.

In Today's Episode with Scott Gorlick We Discuss:

1. The Driver Acquisition Playbook: Scaling to 1M Drivers

How did Uber acquire 1M drivers? What was the playbook? What worked? What did not work? How much of a role did driver-to-driver referral payments have...

Arvind Narayanan is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a co-author of the book AI Snake Oil and a big proponent of the AI scaling myths around the importance of just adding more compute. He is also the lead author of a textbook on the computer science of cryptocurrencies which has been used in over 150 courses around the world, and an accompanying Coursera course that has had over 700,000 learners.

In Today's Episode with Arvind Narayanan We Discuss:

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Imran Khan is the OG of IPOs having taken some of the biggest companies public including Alibaba, Snap, Box, Weibo and more. Today, Imran is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Proem Asset Management. Prior to co-founding Proem, Imran served as Snap Inc.’s Chief Strategy Officer. Under his leadership, Snap’s annual revenue run rate increased to $1.6 billion from zero in less than four years. Previously, Imran was a Managing Director and Head of Global Internet Investment Banking at Credit Suisse where he advised on more than $45 billion-worth of Internet M&A and financing transactions.

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Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on the boards of Clumio and Sigma Computing. He previously served as a board member for Astronomer, Transposit, and others. He was an early-stage investor at Snowflake, Sigma, Observe, Lacework, and Clumio.

In Today's Discussion with...

Aman Narang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Toast, one of the best-in-class vertical SaaS companies of our time with a market cap today of $13.5BN. Five astonishing stats that show the quality of the Toast business today:

$1.2bn in ARR with 48.4% from payments.

Toast Capital has reached $1bn in annualised loans originated.

875k restaurants in the US (Toast has 112k: 13% market share)

75% of locations are coming from inbound channels

The first investor in the company invested $500K at a $3M price

In Today's Episode...

Aidan Gomez is the Co-founder & CEO at Cohere, the leading AI platform for enterprise, having raised over $1BN from some of the best with their last round pricing the company at a whopping $5.5BN. Prior to Cohere, Aidan co-authored the paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced the groundbreaking Transformer architecture. He also collaborated with a number of AI luminaries, including Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean, during his time at Google Brain, where the team focused their efforts on large-scale machine learning.

In Today's Episode with Aidan Gomez We Discuss:

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