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

Scott Wilson is the CIO of WashU, one of the best-performing endowment funds in the world. Under his leadership, Scott has grown the endowment from $8BN to $19BN today. At one point, SpaceX was over 20% of the entire value of the endowment. 
AGENDA: 
00:00 – How WashU Built One of the Best-Performing Endowment Portfolios in the World
04:00 – Scott Wilson's Investment Playbook: Concentration, Conviction and Compounding
05:20 – Why Scott Sold Over 75% of WashU's Portfolio When He Joined
07:15 – How Should You Allocate a $20 Billion Endowment Between Publics and Privates?
10:00 – How WashU Finds Direct Investments That Other LPs Miss
12:15 – How WashU Made Billions From SpaceX and Kept Holding
13:25 – Why Concentration Limits Are Killing Venture Returns
16:15 – Scott's Biggest Investing Mistake 
17:10 – How Much Diversification Does a $20 Billion Endowment Really Need?
19:40 – Why Mega Funds Don't Work for WashU's Investment Strategy
23:15 – How WashU Gets Into the Best Companies Before Everyone Else
25:35 – Are Private Market Valuations Now Completely Detached From Reality?
28:10 – Why Half of Today's AI Companies Could Disappear in 10 Years
30:10 – When Should LPs Sell Their Biggest Winners After an IPO?
32:00 – Why Scott Wilson Walked Away From Sequoia Capital
34:15 – The Number One Reason WashU Fires Venture Managers
35:45 – Should LPs Forgive VCs for Deploying Their Funds in Just 18 Months?
38:30 – Is the AI Boom Heading for a Massive Shakeout?
45:15 – Why European Companies Are So Much Cheaper Than US Companies
47:30 – Why WashU Still Believes China Is a Great Place to Invest
48:30 – Is Government Overreach Actually Worse in the UK Than China?
50:10 – Quickfire: The Venture Funds Scott Wishes He Had Backed
53:00 – The Best Career Advice From a $20 Billion Endowment CIO

AGENDA: 
04:00 OpenAI Cuts Valuation to $1.25 Trillion as Fundraise Shrinks
08:00 Google Loses $500 Billion as AI Stocks Sell Off
10:00 Anthropic's Growth Slows as AI Price War Intensifies
27:00 DoorDash Buys Instacart for $17 Billion
33:00 Kalshi Raises $1 Billion at $40 Billion Despite Legal Threats
41:00 Cognition Eyes $80 Billion as Baseten Hits $30 Billion and Serval $3 Billion
51:00 AI Law Firm Crosby Bids for Collapsed Legal Giant Weil
57:00 Physical Intelligence Targets $20 Billion Valuation
01:00:00 Hugging Face Deal Faces Scrutiny as Salesforce Buys Cresta for $2.7 Billion

Erik Bernhardsson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modal, the AI infrastructure platform for training models, running inference and powering AI agents. Modal has raised over $1.2 billion, including a recent $750 million Series D led by Accel at a $15.75BN valuation. The company has surpassed $1BN in ARR, growing more than 15x year-on-year. Previously, Erik built Spotify's original music recommendation system.
AGENDA: 
05:30 - Why wait until your mid-30s to start a company?
06:40 - Is founding a startup really like "eating glass"?
08:00 - How to Raise $1BN with No Pitch Deck
08:45 - The danger of raising too much venture capital
09:40 - How much cash is Modal burning on GPUs?
10:30 - Do early-stage startups actually have moats?
13:30 - Who wins the inference market in the next 5 years?
15:30 - Are 90% software gross margins dead in AI?
17:45 - The "open-air drug market" for GPUs
21:30 - Will GPU hardware prices ever collapse?
22:15 - Are we about to overbuild data centers?
23:45 - Can custom silicon dethrone NVIDIA's monopoly?
24:30 - Is CUDA really the moat everyone claims it is?
25:20 - Are Neo Cloud providers partners or mortal enemies?
26:35 - Nebius vs. CoreWeave: who built the better business?
27:25 - Open-source vs. frontier models: which takes the lead?
28:20 - Can Europe ever build a competitive frontier model?
30:20 - The bull case for a $100B verticalized model company
37:15 - Modal's biggest resource allocation mistake
38:00 - Has open-source LLM inference already peaked?
41:30 - The real limits of post-training and RL
44:20 - How much does Modal spend every month on coding agents?
45:50 - The massive gold rush in selling data environments to labs
47:20 - Should enterprises own their own intelligence?
49:50 - Is model routing a defensible standalone business?
53:20 - $20M+ compensation packages for exceptional new grads
54:20 - The #1 portfolio company Erik would bet on
55:10 - What Erik changed his mind on most this year

David Tisch is the Founder of Box Group, one of the best seed funds of the last decade with early investments in Cursor, Baseten and Clay to name a few. Today the fund invests from two funds, a $275M seed fund and a $275M opportunity fund.
AGENDA: 
10:40 Why we have less dilution now than ever before
12:50 Why I don't want to compete with the best VCs, and why it's a trap
16:15 What concentrated funds know but do not admit to
17:25 Why multiple tranched rounds can be good for founders
18:45 Why the Lean Startup was a total fake
28:55 Why LPs are frustrated by a market that we can't change
31:50 What is the single best-returning investment in the history of BoxGroup?
33:15 Why fund returners are not always obvious in the early years
40:05 Why funding consumer brands at seed no longer makes sense for venture
42:00 Rogo, the now $2B company, got passed on by 39 out of 40 investors
45:40 Why the marketing message that pro rata is not a right is BS
1:01:50 Why we do not allow negativity in the investment decision-making process
1:03:00 The true magic of early-stage venture capital
1:04:35 Why YC has the best business model in all of venture

AGENDA: 
04:00 Anthropic Files S-1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO
14:50 Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees
20:45 Zuckerberg Taps Equity Markets for $95 Billion AI Spending Spree
23:00 DeepSeek Raises $15 Billion as Chinese AI Faces US Backlash
34:45 OpenAI and Wiz Uncover Decade-Old Security Flaws
37:05 Instinct's Rumoured $30 Billion Valuation Divides the Panel
45:30 Invest Committee: Put 20% of the Fund Into OpenAI at $1.25 Trillion
49:40 Palmer Luckey's War Dog Startup Hits $1.5 Billion Valuation
55:00 Zuckerberg Threatens California Exit Over Billionaire Tax