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

Alex Atallah is the Founder and CEO @ OpenRouter, the unified interface for LLMs. The company has raised over $153M in funding, with the latest valuation pricing the company at $1.3BN. OpenRouter is reportedly in an acquisition process with Stripe for $10BN. 
AGENDA:
00:00 Is OpenRouter Selling to Stripe for $10 Billion? 04:05 What Did Alex Learn From Scaling OpenSea? 06:38 What Did OpenRouter's Founding Thesis Get Wrong? 14:47 Is AI Model Routing Already Being Commoditized? 19:12 Do Falling Token Prices Help or Hurt OpenRouter? 27:16 Should America Be Alarmed by Chinese Open Models? 32:43 Will US Open-Source Models Compete With Chinese Models in the Next 12 Months? 39:26 Will the Router Be Swallowed by the Agent Framework? 48:56 Is Distillation Wrong—and How Should We Look at It? 50:01 Is the Reported $10 Billion Stripe Deal Actually Happening?

David Frankel is one of the great seed investors of our time. As the Co-Founder of Founder Collective he has backed the likes of Uber, Coupang, Suno, PillPack, Airtable, Whoop, Shield AI and many more. In a world of expanding fund sizes, David and Founder Collective are one of the only successful franchises to truly stick to small, boutique funds. 
AGENDA:
00:00 The Bubbles Are Getting Bigger—and There Will Be a Lot of Roadkill
05:21 The Worst-Performing Funds Will Be the $50M–$100M Seed Funds
25:06 "We're Greedy for Returns, Not Management Fees"
30:10 "Pro Rata Is the Original Sin"
32:59 "A $1BN Valuation Is the New Series A"
46:39 "I Have Never Seen Secondary Markets This Liquid"
58:03 Microsoft Has Done a Crappy Job of AI—and Another Dot-Com Crash Is Inevitable
01:08:25 OpenAI and Anthropic Will Be Disrupted—and China Could Do It
01:16:12 "Anyone Who Claims They Knew Is Full of Shit"
01:19:56 Our Children Won't Need to Drive—and Chemotherapy Will Look Prehistoric

Special Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO @ Palo Alto Networks. 
AGENDA:
04:50 Airtable Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.285B  17:00 Leo Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Blows Up as Citadel Buys His $16BN Book 22:30 Anthropic's AI Models Breach Three Companies as Cyber Threat Accelerates 33:35 Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B as Chinese Models Crush AI Prices 38:05 Valar Atomics Triples to $6B as Sequoia Bets on Nuclear Power for AI 42:50 OpenAI and Anthropic Could Trigger a Massive Public-Market Dislocation 52:55 Big Tech and Palantir Earnings Ignite the Next Phase of the AI Gold Rush 1:04:30 Procore Buys DroneDeploy for $900M in a High-Stakes 12x Revenue Bet 1:10:55 Scale AI Hits $1.5B ARR After the Meta Deal Left It for Dead

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users.
AGENDA:
00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit…
05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now?
07:30 – Do Chinese open source models cannibalize the closed frontier labs?
10:30 – Why has America's open source community lagged so badly behind China?
17:20 – Will Chinese models be banned in the US — and does hosting locally really kill the backdoor risk?
23:20 – Are enterprises really terrified of working with the frontier labs?
27:20 – Why hasn't inference got cheaper — and what happens when Anthropic's "disgustingly high" margins go public?
30:20 – Who should decide if a model is safe to release: the government, a neutral body, or nobody?
33:10 – Are we about to see cyberattacks like we've never seen before? (The fake candidate who passed every interview)
37:00 – 75 Neo labs: what separates the winners from the two-thirds worth nothing?
40:45 – Is data actually a commodity — and can data providers be $100BN companies?
48:00 – Can you be the referee when the players are paying you? (And Arena's real revenue)
50:45 – Will the model providers eat the application layer? Are Harvey, Lagora and Figma in trouble?
54:10 – Quickfire: Why hasn't NVIDIA bounced on the rise of open source, who hits $10 trillion first, and does the compute debt cycle end in insolvency?

Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before making a decision in the real world. Simile has now raised $300 million in total, including a $200 million Series B announced last week at a $2 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures.
AGENDA:
00:00 We Will Pay $100M for a Single Query on Some Models
10:00 Why Stock Markets May Not Exist in 5 Years Time
15:00 The Best Companies All Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies
19:00 The Best AI Companies Have Clear and Fast Reward Functions
24:00 How We Sign Fortune 500 Companies for $10M Contracts in Weeks
32:00 Does Similie Kill Kalshi and Polymarket? Prediction vs Changing the Future
42:00 Inside Similie's $300M Raise; What Every Founder Needs to Know