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

Jean-Denis "JD" Grèze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $1BN valuation. Before founding Town, JD spent seven years as CTO of Plaid. Before Plaid, he was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. He is also a prolific angel investor backing companies including Modal, BaseTen, Merge and NexHealth.
AGENDA:
00:00 Why AI Assistants Are Silicon Valley's Hottest Market 07:00 How Does Town Compete With Grokbot, Instinct and Big Tech? 11:00 Will We Have One AI Agent or Different Agents for Every Part of Our Lives? 17:00 How Many Mistakes Can AI Agents Make Before We Stop Trusting Them? 20:00 How Does Town Choose the Best Models Without Destroying Its Margins? 29:00 Is the AI Assistant Market Already Too Crowded? 37:00 Can Apple Win the Agent Race—and Are We Entering a Cybersecurity Nightmare? 41:00 What Does a Successful Town User Look Like—and Which Pricing Tier Makes Money? 47:00 What Will AI Agents Be Able to Do in Three Years That They Cannot Do Today? 54:00 Is the Skepticism Around Billion-Dollar AI Assistant Companies Justified? 58:00 What Needs to Happen for Town to Become a $100BN Company? 1:02:00 How Has AI Changed Hiring—and Why Does Town Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools? 1:06:00 What Is JD Most Excited About Over the Next Decade?

Cliff Weitzman is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify, the world's leading AI voice and text-to-speech platform, used by more than 60 million people globally. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, Cliff first built Speechify at Brown University to help him consume written material through audio. 
AGENDA: 
00:00 Cliff Weitzman Reveals His Biggest-Ever Strategic Mistake
03:08 Why Speechify Is Paying Millions to Build Their Own Data Centres
09:59 What No One Knows About Buying Chips That Everyone Should Know?
20:19 The AI Data Gold Rush Has a Brutal Business-Model Problem
23:42 How ElevenLabs Leapfrogged Speechify—and Why It Was Cliff's Fault
31:00 The $15M AI Talent War: Can Startups Still Compete for the Best Talent?
36:57 The New 10X Engineer: Ten Killer Decisions Every Day
46:12 The Voice-AI Bloodbath: Who Survives Commoditisation?
53:21 The Screen Is Dying—and Voice Will Replace It
57:58 How Cliff Plans to Use AI to Cure His Brother's Disease

AGENDA: 
00:00 Nvidia crushes $96.2B quarter and nears $12.9B Hugging Face deal 13:52 OpenAI cuts off Cursor as the Altman–Musk feud escalates 17:40 OpenAI's 1,000-agent cyberattack triggers an industry wake-up call 22:58 Instinct hits $2.5B valuation as AI assistants gain spending power 36:39 Cognition targets $1.6B ARR as the coding-agent market explodes 40:31 AI forces every startup to become a compound company—or get left behind 52:42 Salesforce embraces Claude and outcome-based pricing in major AI reset 1:00:52 Stripe–PayPal deal collapses as both sides clash over price 1:02:31 Clay hits $7B and Linear reaches $100M ARR as agents choose their tools 1:11:52 Texas pauses Flock cameras as police-surveillance backlash grows

Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the real-time analytics database powering companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Microsoft. ClickHouse just surpassed $350M in ARR and raised over $1B from investors including Dragoneer, Khosla Ventures, Coatue, 20VC and Benchmark. Previously, Aaron was CRO at Elastic, where he helped scale revenue from approximately $5M to $500M and led the company through its IPO. Before Elastic, he spent 12 years at Salesforce, working alongside Marc Benioff and helping transform it from a 200-person startup into a global software giant.
AGENDA:
4:05 Are we in an AI bubble? 13:40 How does software change when agents—not humans—make buying decisions? 22:28 Will 90% of tokens flow through open models; can enterprises trust them? 31:09 Why did ClickHouse sponsor Fulham; and could sports teams become $20B assets? 35:49 When will ClickHouse hit $1B ARR?  38:31 Can startups still win elite talent from OpenAI? Biggest remote work mistake? 44:54 Is zero-to-$100M ARR now table stakes; or is durable growth what matters? 48:51 Is college still worth it;  which jobs will survive AI? 57:58 When will ClickHouse go public; and why not next year?

Eno Reyes is the co-founder and CTO of Factory, the agent-native software development platform building autonomous "Droids" for enterprise engineering teams. Factory has raised $220 million, most recently a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, from investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, 20VC, NEA, Blackstone, Insight Partners and Nvidia. Before founding Factory, Eno worked as a machine-learning engineer at Hugging Face, training, optimizing and deploying large language models for enterprise customers.
AGENDA:
00:00 Are We Underestimating AI by an Order of Magnitude? 
06:35 Why Can the Smartest AI Model Be the Cheapest? 
18:51 Is Anthropic's Coding Business Really Worth $2 Trillion? 
33:41 Will Continuous-Learning Models Help or Hurt Factory? 
40:43 Will 80–90% of Neo-Labs Die in the Next 18 Months? 
44:33 Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? 
55:42 Must AI Founders Radically Rethink What a Great Outcome Looks Like? 
1:04:30 Do Pedigree and Credentials Still Matter in AI Hiring? 
1:19:17 Which Is the Biggest Threat: Claude Code, Codex, Cognition or Cursor? 
1:24:20 What Seems Crazy Today but Will Be Obvious in Five Years?