20VC: Anthropic's $10BN Round | Klarna's IPO Broken Down | Inside a16z's 72 Deal Seed Investment Machine | Martin Casado: Is Consensus Investing the Only Game | Why Satya is Chatting S*** on SaaS Apps Disappearing featuring Marc Benioff

Summary

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Episode Summary

Episode Title: Anthropic's $10BN Round | Klarna's IPO Broken Down | Inside a16z's 72 Deal Seed Investment Machine | Martin Casado: Is Consensus Investing the Only Game | Why Satya is Chatting S*** on SaaS Apps Disappearing featuring Marc Benioff
Date: August 28, 2025
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guests: Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll

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Overview

This lively roundtable episode brings together some of SaaS and venture’s biggest names to unpack the shifting tectonics of the tech ecosystem in 2025. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff joins Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll for a high-caliber, candid conversation about AI’s hard realities versus hype, the viability and future of SaaS apps in an agentic era, eye-popping VC rounds for Anthropic and others, Klarna’s turbulent IPO, and whether consensus investing is the only winning strategy left for venture capitalists.

The episode is peppered with hot-takes, real-world numbers, and genuine disagreements on what the next few years hold for founders, investors, and the broader SaaS world. If you want to understand the future of enterprise software, how AI is remaking go-to-market and organizational design, and what it really takes to build or invest in the next generational tech company, this is a must-listen.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The AGI/AI Hype: Grounded Reality vs. Irrational Exuberance

• Marc Benioff’s Cynicism on AGI:

  • Benioff is skeptical about the "AGI is here" narrative, emphasizing that modern LLMs are fundamentally sophisticated pattern matchers, not conscious entities.
    • “It was like, oh, this is like a person, but it's not a person and it's not intelligent and it's not conscious and it doesn't have a childhood and it hasn't suffered, it doesn't have compassion, like it's not a being.” – Marc Benioff (06:37)
  • Draws analogies to Eliza chatbot of his youth: progress is stunning, but not a leap into true artificial intelligence.

• AI’s Real-World Business Impact:

  • Benioff refutes the claim that AI hasn’t generated business value at scale, noting Salesforce’s Agent Force as the fastest-growing $1B+ product in company history.

    • “This is a product that a year ago we hadn't even announced. This is a product that wasn't even shipped until November of last year and that customers are still getting their head around. What software in the history of enterprise software has ever grown at that level of scale?” – Marc Benioff (10:42)

  • Salesforce has reduced support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000, redeployed talent, and closed a customer interaction gap via agentic automation.

2. The “Agents Will Replace SaaS Apps” Debate

• Pushing Back on "CRUD Apps Are Dead":

  • Benioff passionately disputes the idea (attributed obliquely to Satya Nadella) that all SaaS apps become mere back-end databases as users interact only with agents/LLMs.
    • “That is crazy talk. That is not how it works... right now, in 2025, I need apps and I need agents and I need them to work together.” – Marc Benioff (17:59)
  • Predicts a persistent need for application functionality “in the flow of work,” with agents interoperating with apps and data layers.

• Application Ecosystem and Openness:

  • Sees Salesforce’s app exchange, Slack integrations, and the emerging “agentic layer” as massive opportunities for entrepreneurs, not a death sentence for software.
    • “The agentic layer is a huge investment opportunity, you know, for the whole SaaS ecosystem. And I hope that it's going to be built on Salesforce.” – Marc Benioff (20:29)

3. AI and Labor: Automation, Upskilling, and Organizational Shift

• SDRs, Support, and Headcount:

  • Salesforce’s AI agents have allowed for massive headcount redeployment, but not simply “firing everyone”—more roles are shifted up the value curve.
    • “That gives me the ability now to rebalance my headcount and to really say, hey, I want to take all these folks and make them sales folks.” – Marc Benioff (22:30)
  • Co-hosts debate whether this redeployment is “optimistic spin” or a rare case study from a scale leader.

• Organizational Changes:

  • “The fundamental architecture of an enterprise software company in the future is not exactly as it was in the past.” – Marc Benioff (23:35)
  • Lemkin and O’Driscoll agree that the premise of company structure, not just products, is being rewritten.

4. Salesforce vs. Palantir & Data Cloud Competition

• Data Cloud Arms Race:
  • Benioff views Databricks, Snowflake, and Palantir as competitive threats, but underscores Salesforce’s operating scale and focus on useability/pricing.
    • “Even when you look at other data clouds...they're all in the 3 to 4 billion dollars revenue level. They're in my sights. So, you know, I'm on it... Stay on target.” – Marc Benioff (12:42)
  • Palantir’s “forward deployed engineers” are seen as innovating on enterprise selling, inspiring Salesforce to be bolder on customer immersion.

5. Funding Mania: Anthropic’s $10BN Round and Consensus Bets

• Infinity Appetite for AI Money:

  • The group dissects Anthropic’s $10B raise (4x oversubscribed), public vs. private market dynamics, and what it takes to justify 100x revenue multiples.

    • “Appetite for the AI story is extraordinarily strong and most of the public comps aren't a pure AI story... If you're a fidelity type manager, you're like, how do I get me some AI action?” – Rory O’Driscoll (33:01)

  • There’s skepticism about the market size required to justify current AI startup valuations (“Do you need a $50B or a $500B market?”).

• Andreessen’s Seed Machine vs. Consensus Investing:

  • Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is playing a “different game,” doing 72 seed deals while others do 27.

    • “The seed program, it's basically like cheap milk in the supermarket. It brings in the crowds. It's the loss leader.” – Rory O'Driscoll (55:30)

  • Martin Casado’s tweet on the dangers of glorifying non-consensus investing sparks debate. The suggestion: in today’s world, capital gets concentrated in consensus deals (mostly AI) and follow-on funding is uncertain for out-of-trend bets.

6. SaaS IPOs & Public Market Sentiment

• Klarna’s IPO – A Reality Check:

  • Klarna’s roller-coaster valuation (from $45B to $6B and now relisting at $13–15B) and growth deceleration (24% to 20% YoY) is dissected as emblematic of the new fintech reality.
    • “If you're doing $10 billion in revenue, they'll happily take you public with a 7% growth rate because you're just big enough to matter. But for the typical venture deal, somewhere around 20%, you're starting to get to the multiples don't get there.” – Rory O’Driscoll (48:10)
  • SoftBank’s record on timing and term sheets; Sequoia’s long-term staying power (“In the end, Sequoia wins.” – 49:35)

• Mongo, Okta, and AI-Driven Reacceleration:

  • Public SaaS stalwarts are finally seeing AI-driven reacceleration, offering hope after two years of brutal compression.
    • “It's heartening at a meta level to see Mongo benefiting from AI deployments. It means maybe the revenue is a little more durable. Maybe Harry's replit investment level will go 10x rather than crash and burn next year.” – Jason Lemkin (45:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI Hype vs. Reality:

  • “We've all been sold a lot of hypnosis around what's about to happen with AI and not that it couldn't happen one day... But just realize that isn't the state of technology today.”
    — Marc Benioff (05:17)

• On SaaS Apps Still Matter:

  • “To say that all of a sudden all of those apps are no longer relevant and that humans don't need apps, like that's what we just said, humans don't need apps. That's not true for any of us on this call and it's not true for anyone on planet earth.”
    — Marc Benioff (17:59)

• On Consensus Investing:

  • “When you apply the 20% ratio and you get back down to how much revenue it is for the LLM, you struggle to add it all up...I'm not going to make the argument against myself.”
    — Rory O'Driscoll (39:33)

• On Team Redeployment:

  • “You're saying so important, Jason, because what you're saying is that the fundamental architecture of an enterprise software company in the future is not exactly as it was in the past...that is different.”
    — Marc Benioff (23:35)

• On Mega-Scale VC:

  • “If everybody else is doing 27 or less, and you're doing 72, then by definition it's a different game.”
    — Rory O’Driscoll on a16z (54:51)

• On the "Sequoia always wins" truism:

  • “Soccer is a game played by 22 people. In the end, the Germans win in the same way. Venture is a game played by 6,000 people. And in the end, Sequoia wins. They won.”
    — Rory O'Driscoll (14:14 & 49:35)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

| Time | Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:53 | Introduction of Marc Benioff, beginning of AI/AGI discussion | | 05:17 | Benioff on AGI skepticism and LLM limitations | | 08:08 | AI agentic automation in Salesforce, workforce redeployment | | 10:07 | Agentic AI as universal in Salesforce’s future products | | 12:42 | Data cloud competition: Salesforce, Palantir, Databricks, Snowflake | | 15:22 | Palantir’s forward-deployed engineers and Salesforce’s customer-centricity | | 17:59 | Debate on SaaS apps disappearing—Benioff’s pushback | | 22:30 | AI automation, SDR role evolution, and workforce upskilling | | 33:01 | Anthropic’s $10B round: is AI funding truly inexhaustible? | | 39:10 | Can AI upgrades justify mega-valuations in public SaaS? | | 47:23 | Klarna’s IPO breakdown and VC risk realities | | 54:51 | a16z’s outsized seed strategy—does this scale? | | 57:19 | Martin Casado’s “consensus investing” tweet and early-stage realities | | 61:36 | Risk of non-consensus bets and funding concentration |

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Tone, Language, and Style

• The tone is frank, lively, and unguarded—industry insiders riffing with deep technical and business knowledge (“three great mates shooting the shit about tech news”).
• Marc Benioff brings direct, slightly combative energy, setting the record straight on state-of-the-art AI and business reality.
• Riffing off each other, the hosts oscillate between sharp skepticism and cautious optimism on AI, venture cycles, public SaaS, and the future of org design.
• Conversation is peppered with memorable metaphors (“soccer and Germans,” “stay on target, like Star Wars,” “cheap milk in the supermarket”), signposting both insight and personality.

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Key Takeaways

• AI/agent “hype” is real but the business effects are now material at scale for leaders like Salesforce.
• SaaS apps are not dead; agents complement, rather than supplant, core business application functionality.
• AI-induced job displacement is exaggerated; redeployment and upskilling are happening inside large orgs.
• Venture capital is hyper-concentrated in consensus AI bets, but the outlier payoffs still come from both consensus and the rare, perfectly timed non-consensus bets.
• IPO markets are open, but growth premium is thin unless you’re a market leader; fintech gets valued like fintech, not SaaS.
• Andreessen’s “spray and pray” at seed is sustainable only if it delivers access to megatrend outliers.
• No matter the cycle, Sequoia always seems to find a way to win.

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Final Reflections:
A must-listen for founders, investors, and SaaS operators seeking to contextualize the agentic AI wave, understand the shifting boundaries between apps, agents, and data, and to get inside the minds of tech's top builders and backers.

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For full show notes, head to 20vc.com.

Transcript

[Marc Benioff]

And even when you look at other data clouds, you know, like a snowflake or a databricks or even a Palantir foundry, they're all in the 3 to 4 billion dollars revenue level. They're in my sights. So you know I'm on it.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Soccer is a game played by 22 people. In the end, the Germans win in the same way. Venture is a game played by 6,000 people. And in the end, Sequoia wins. They won.

[Harry Stebbings]

Here Again, this is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, it is my favorite show of the week. I am joined by Jason Lemkin and Rory o', Driscoll, now out as three friends sitting down to discuss the latest and greatest tech news without the politics. We were bored of hearing politics interspersed in tech news, and we thought that we could provide some interesting commentary and analysis alongside it, since we've now been hitting millions of downloads with every episode. And today we're joined by one of the greatest founders of the last 20 years, Marc Benioff from Salesforce. Next week we have Cliff, the founder of Canva. And the week after that we have Jim Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio. This show is going from strength to strength. The show today is better than ever and I want your feedback. What can I do to make it better? Let me know, Harry, at 20vc.com. But before we dive into the show today, let's talk about agents. Specifically Piper, the AI SDR agent brought to you by Qualified. The agentic marketing era has arrived. And if you're a B2B marketing leader looking to scale a pipeline generation, Piper, the AI SDR agent.

[Jason Lemkin]

Wow.

[Harry Stebbings]

It is here to help. Piper is the number one AI SDR agent on the market according to G2. And hundreds of companies like Box, Asana and Brex have hired Piper to autonomously grow inbound pipeline. Fucking sign me up. Anyway, qualified customers see massive business impact with Piper. 3x increase in meetings booked and 2x increase in pipeline. Wow, that is some results. Hire Piper, the number one AI SDR agent and grow your pipeline today. Learn [e-mail] 20vc that's qualified.com 20vc.vc with the 20vc spelled out in letters, for goodness sake. And while Piper builds your pipeline, Attio gives you the CRM power to close and grow those relationships. Attio is the next generation of CRM built for the AI era. Fast, flexible and powerful. No, it's not a sports car. It's a CRM system, baby. It is Attio. And it takes less than a minute. Sync Your email, your calendar and you'll instantly get all your relationships enriched in real time with incredible data, no manual input needed. AIO also integrates with your existing tools and syncs with your product data to deliver an AI native platform that's tailored to how your team actually works. You can model your CRM around your business, automate complex tasks and surface real time insights all in a platform designed to scale with you. With Attio, AI isn't just a feature. No no, it is the foundation. It's powerful. It's AI automations, it's research agents that transform your go to market motion. It's a data driven engine. From intelligent pipeline tracking to smarter product led. Fast growing startups like Flatfile, Replicate and Modle are all experiencing what's next. So get ready to build without limits and start now. Attio.com20VC and get 15% off your first year. That's attioattio.com20VC. Okay, pipeline sorted.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Woohoo.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now what about your own legal team? Enter Logora. Logora is the category defining AI platform that's fundamentally reshaping how legal work gets done about frickin time. Empowering lawyers across tier one law firms and in house teams to achieve more with greater precision and confidence. Ligura does this by solving really concrete tasks such as document extraction, reviews against a firm playbook and suggesting well crafted markups directly in Microsoft Word based on your preferences. My word, that is a topic list of conversation that will not get a second date. But anyway, the adoption of legal AI is surging across the world and Lagora is at the forefront of this shift as the chosen partner to 250 industry leaders in law across more than 20 markets. Markets the likes of Goodwin, Bird and Bird and Deloitte are making daily use of Ligura platform to review and research with precision, draft Smarter and collaborate seamlessly. They recently also got an $80 million Series B from Iconic. They're backed by General Catalyst, Redpoint, Benchmark and yc. Also they operate out of New York, London, Stockholm. Yes, they're Swedes. Always a wonderful race. With over 100 employees from some of the world's leading global law firms and tech companies, the team is growing super rapidly. They're just frickin awesome. Just go use Legora hon. Honestly I love Max, their founder. He's just a great dude. Go find out more. Ligora.com you have now arrived at your destination.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Guys, I am so excited for this.

[Harry Stebbings]

And we have a special guest Today, the SASS OGs are joined by the OG of SaaS, Mr. Mart Benioff. So I'm so thrilled that we could make this happen. And I want to start with a really interesting one I thought, which was Amazon's AGI head said there are just a thousand AI engineers that matter.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

And Mark, I wanted to start with you on that one and say, when.

[Marc Benioff]

You think about that sounds like an oxymoron. So you're talking to somebody who is extremely suspect of anybody uses those initials AGI. And, you know, I think that we have all been sold a lot of hypnosis around what's about to happen with AI and not that it couldn't happen one day. We've all seen those movies. You know, Peter Schwartz, who wrote Minority Report in War Games, works for me as our chief futurist. But just realize that isn't the state of technology today. So how about that?

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

What made you realize that? What was the penny dropping there?

[Marc Benioff]

Well, I mean, I think that when you look at large language models, which is kind of the state of the art of AI today, prompt engineering, which came out of our Salesforce AI research team, large language models are two things. They are a finite set of algorithms which have gotten a lot better, for sure, incrementally better over the last five years, and to a relatively finite set of data that has come off the Internet. And those two things together really have provide kind of the state of the art large language models today. And when you work with these LLMs, it's very cool because you're like going, oh, my gosh, it feels like very intelligent. Well, it kind of felt that way when I was using Eliza when I was like 16 years old on my TRS 80 Model 1. Also, you know, it was like, oh.

[Jason Lemkin]

Yeah, this is pretty accurate.

[Marc Benioff]

Yeah, it was like, oh, this is like a person, but it's not a person and it's not intelligent and it's not conscious and it doesn't have a childhood and it hasn't suffered, it doesn't have compassion, like it's not a being. And I think that there is some, you know, hypnosis around kind of the state of the art around AI and what is currently possible or what is about to happen. And I'm extremely suspect around that. And I try to bring people back to the reality of here's the current state of the art of AI, which is amazing, but let's actually use it for what it can be used for and also realize the major issues with it. And I thought I tweeted about this where I Read these two articles about doctors who are using AI and they're so over reliant on an AI that's inaccurate that all of a sudden they are giving their patients bad advice and becoming intellectually lazy at the same time. And I think that is a huge warning sign for all of us around.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

AI if we separate the finite from the infinite.

[Marc Benioff]

The thing that the AGI had at Amazon.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

The thing that everyone feels is finite, is talent. And Zuck is paying up the talent like no one's seen before. You're seeing your mirrors getting offers at $1 billion with bluntly very little to show for it. No disrespect to her than the team. Do you feel the pressure to enter this talent buying frenzy in a way that we're seeing other large incumbents?

[Marc Benioff]

No, and we're not. And I'll say that, you know, we're very focused on really defining what is the next generation of the enterprise tactics must dictate strategy over time in enterprise software. I'll just say, like, the first thing that we've been talking about now for only about eight or nine months is that we have help.salesforce.com and help.salesforce.com is our agentic layer around our support. And this agentic service means that there is an omnichannel supervisor that is paying attention between my human support agents and my digital agents. And to that point, I've been able to reduce the number of human agents I have in support from about 9,000 to about 5,000. Why that's important is I've been able to take that headcount and then rebalance it into other parts of my company where I need more help and need more support because we're still growing. So it's a huge change in how our company is structured, how our technology is built and delivered to our customers. And we're customer zero. And let me give you one other crazy story to that point, and you'll be the first ones to hear this story. Over the last 26 years, Salesforce has had more than 100 million people contact us that we've not been able to call back. They're just leads. We've not been able to call back. We just have not had the people. That's just all there is to it. And it's kind of this funny thing. And, you know, we have these people, we call them SDRs, you know, sales development representatives. And we just don't have that many of them. You know, we have like 15,000 salespeople, but we don't have that many SDRs? Well, we have this Agentix Sales now and not only are we doing support, but this Agentix sales is calling everyone back and having conversations and then deeply integrating it through the Omnichannel supervisor into our new Agentix sales product, which you're going to see at Dreamforce.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

In your body language, you're saying you think you're going to sell a lot of software powered by agentic AI in the next one to five years. Is that the summary message here?

[Marc Benioff]

Well, I don't think that there will be a piece of software that we sell that will not be agentic.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

You're willing to say just as it was never on Prem Again in 2000, you're pretty much saying it's never non AI agentic. In 2025 when you get to Dreamforce.

[Marc Benioff]

You'Ll see that our promise that humans and agents will work together, it's not just in our sales cloud, it's not just in our service cloud, it's not just in Slack.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

If we look at the impact of AI today on the business, it hasn't maybe led to the lift that one would think so far. Do you think that's fair and how do you think that changes over the next year?

[Marc Benioff]

It's so untrue. And that's the funny thing. Number one, our AI is part and parcel with our data cloud. So our data cloud, love it or hate it, the idea that you need a data cloud that's federated to all of the data sources in your company and why that is so important so that you can get all your data harmonized in one place. Which is why we bought Informatica also, so that everything is together and now the AI can be more accurate. Go to the front of my website and you'll see Agent Force now in the front of our website. It has done as many customer interactions as our support agent. Why is that? Because we put our whole website into our data cloud and now people are just using this agent at the front of our website instead of clicking all the way through the website. It makes total sense. Right? So that idea, this is really important. The data cloud and AI together now is more than a billion in revenue. We talked about that on our last earnings call. It's our fastest growing cloud product, whatever ever, you know, in 26 years. And we've talked about that, we have thousands. I won't go through the exact numbers of customers now on Agent Force and the number of deployments and all of these pieces. This is a product that a year ago we hadn't even announced. This is a product that wasn't even shipped until November of last year and that customers are still getting their head around. What software in the history of enterprise software has ever grown at that level of scale? I would cite to you. Okay, Harry? None. And I will say that this is incredible. Now, you can talk about any other new company, whatever, or existing. We can go through whatever it is, but this is a product that's breached a billion. And even when you look at other data clouds, you know, like a snowflake or a databricks or even a Palantir foundry, they're all in the 3 to 4 billion dollars revenue level. They're in my sights. So, you know, I'm on it. You know, I am like the guy in Star wars, you know, my favorite movie in my TIE Fighter, Stay on target, I see where I'm going. And data and AI, this is like a huge focus of the entire company and our products and the fundamental aspect of humans and agents working together. That's how I look at that. So thank you for letting me address that directly.

[Jason Lemkin]

When you're looking from the TIE Fighter, what do you think of Palantir's growth? Like, what do you think? Just how do you think about it from the salesforce perspective? We can all look at the numbers. The numbers are great. Right? We can talk about defense and who knows who's spending these contracts, but how do you process that? Because it was growing 15% or something in 2013. Right. It's crazy.

[Marc Benioff]

Oh, it's very cool and amazing. Very inspiring to me that this idea that a data cloud, which is called foundry, integrated with analytics, can be very exciting for a company. So I will say that our data cloud, plus Newt Agentic Tableau, plus Informatica, plus looking at a product like mulesoft together is our data foundation. And that idea, we need to have all of the government certifications and they sell into parts of the market we don't sell into. So we really have reassessed. Hey, where are we selling? Because the US Federal government is already my largest customer. Right? That's our. You know, we run Veterans Administration, the gsa, and we just won a huge US army contract. We beat Palantir, but in some of the areas that they sell to and some of the people that they sell to. And I won't go through all the details because it's not appropriate. You know, we have not traditionally sold into those groups. So it got our attention. Whether they're closing these deals and their products are so expensive. Have you Seen their price list.

[Jason Lemkin]

They're good at getting the deals.

[Marc Benioff]

I'm like, whoa, my prices are too low. I'm actually delivering. Like. Like, I'm automating the whole VA at this price? Like, what would they be charging? I mean, my prices are low compared to theirs. And MUD products are much easier to use. Yeah, that's how I think about it.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Yeah. So no. So no, he's not ignoring that $300 billion.

[Marc Benioff]

How do you think about it? No. Yeah, that got my attention. I'm like, how do I get that hundred times revenue multiple?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I don't know.

[Marc Benioff]

It's 4 billion in revenue. Let's keep it into perspective. It's an order of magnitude smaller than we are. But I just realized that it is a. As someone who was 4 billion in revenue once and is now 41 billion, it's two different companies.

[Jason Lemkin]

Can I ask one related question? I don't mean to go. Harry, you take the agenda. But related to pal, one of the things Palantir's gotten everyone's attention with is forward deploy engineers. Do you think that's a new concept? Are these the same people at Salesforce deploying software for the last 20 years, and is it different? How do you think about this FD concept?

[Marc Benioff]

Oh, what a great question. I think that it's both. I think at one level, you know, we've always had and always gone to the customer and trying to solve their problem and listen to them and do our best. And we have a large sales organization and we have a large systems engineer organization. You know what that means? And we're out there talking to them and working and building the prototype. And then we also have professional services and then we have partners also. And all of us are in there, but we don't have that kind of branding of. These are our four deployed engineers, where now we're gonna start building your product now before we've really signed a deal. And I think that idea is very cool that all of a sudden you're like in there kind of saying, yeah, we're gonna make a bet that we're gonna start doing business together. So we're gonna start building now. And I think that that is something that we can all embrace and adopt and say, yeah, well, let's have more of that engineering resource. Start right at the beginning in the customer. Fantastic. Let's do that.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Come back to Palantir in a minute. But just going back to the first comment, because truth is, mathematically, Harry's right on the growth showing up thing, which is. But I Think it's the law of large numbers. I mean, what you're saying, look, when you're doing 40 billion, you said, Harry, it's, quote, not showing up in the growth numbers. When you're doing 40 billion, 10% is 4 billion, which is the entire revenue of Palantir. The problem with this poor guy.

[Marc Benioff]

I didn't miss that last part. Rory, I'm very hard hearing in my left ear. Can you repeat it again?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I speak quickly with an Irish accent. My comment is, when you're doing 40 billion, Harry's giving you grief for growing at 10%, but I'm making the point. When you're doing 40 billion, 10% growth is adding 4 billion, which is an entire Palantir every year. The common growth, which is mathematically true. Harry, you're right. The 10% growth is what these guys are. Now you're just dealing with scale. I think it speaks to one interesting thing, which is you added nine figures of revenue on the AI deals in the last quarter. I mean, I mean, it's a $400 million AI only startup, which would be fricking amazing if we all owned it. You're just up against the law of scale here, which speaks to. Even if AI is amazing, it's what I liked about where you started being grounded. Even if AI is amazing. I think some of these people who think it's going to transform $100 billion market caps in a week are just way overestimating what it takes.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Can I ask another one, which is.

[Harry Stebbings]

That when we think about MCP and.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

We think about how it changes how we engage with, with different products, do you think we'll want to log into SaaS apps in the future? Or we just want our data inside of ChatGPT?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Gotta keep coming at you.

[Marc Benioff]

I'll open my heart here and just say, I think this is like one of the greatest disservices that has been done to our whole industry and to all CIOs and all CEOs of software companies in the last 12 months, is that certain executives who will not be named have said that, you know, oh, SaaS apps are just going to be CRUD databases and CRUD means create, read, update, delete. And it's like, really? Do you really think that? Because if you really think that, wow, you are really wrong. And that is crazy talk. That is not how it works. And I don't know what software we're talking about or what applications or if you use computers anymore or if you use a phone, but right now, in the current world, the world that I'm in here in 2025, I'm just saying that I need apps and I need agents and I need them to work together. And yes, if you can make my job easier and better through AI, then give it to me. But to say that all of a sudden all of those apps are no longer relevant and that humans don't need apps, like that's what we just said, humans don't need apps. That's not true for any of us on this call and it's not true for anyone on planet earth. And so that is why I think it was a huge disservice to the industry and got everyone anxious. Because certain people, they'll remain nameless, have a lot of credibility because they are great people actually and great executives. But to say these things is nonsensical. Why? Microsoft has 3% CRM market share because of nonsensical.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

But I do want to disaggregate two things because it's worth it. One, it's going to be a crud app and we're going to vibe code it. Take it apart. We agree no one's going to build a big sophisticated app vibe coding. Let's just discard that discussion entirely. I think the interesting question is how much of the real estate on top of Salesforce do you guys own? How much do you allow other people to own? As Jason said, does a bunch of startups, we've all funded one. God forgive us. Assuming Salesforce as a given, you are the infrastructure, not this bullshit comment of you're going to be replaced. Ignore that entirely. But assume Salesforce is the infrastructure. But maybe the sales rep in their daily toil can have a better tool than Salesforce to do some of the work. Or maybe even an agent that's not owned by Salesforce can be doing the work and coordinating with Salesforce on the back end. And to me that world is much more realistic. Do you want all that front facing real estate on top of the Salesforce data? Do you allow other people in the ecosystem? How do you make those choices?

[Marc Benioff]

There is going to be a level of application functionality that is going to be required and there's no question that these apps that our users are on today are still going to be very much a part of how they do get their work done and that they operate in the flow of work in sales and service and marketing and all the examples. And then at the third level that there is going to be an agentic layer that's going to interoperate with those applications. And that data. And yes, there will also be an ecosystem that is going to fuel all of these things as well and that the connectivity is going to happen and that it's going to be open and that you look at like the Slack ecosystem or the Salesforce app exchange. The agentic layer is a huge investment opportunity, you know, for the whole SaaS ecosystem. And I hope that it's going to be built on Salesforce.

[Jason Lemkin]

Now we have several agents that give daily updates in Slack.

[Marc Benioff]

I need a demo of everything you're doing because the first time we were talking about you're like, yeah, I have this agent is with me on the sales call, listening, it's coaching me, you know, and that was very inspiring to me. And now you're like, and I have a dozen agents. There is going to be a radical explosion of small and medium businesses like yours because entrepreneurs like you can do more than ever. So while the enterprises are kind of trying to figure out are they going to DIY it and are they going to do this or are they going to do that, look at you and look at all the entrepreneurs like you who can boom, boom, boom, go right into the future and like we're going to see an order of magnitude more SMBs because SMBs can do more than ever.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Every week we hear From Jason that SDRs are screwed. That if you're 23 to 35 a la Pobel in European terms to the trash, you know, you don't have a future. You have said before in this conversation.

[Harry Stebbings]

Oh, human and agent and very much.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Suggested a pairing between the two. Jason has presented an idea that in the next 12 to 24 months actually we'll see this mass exodus of the SDR class. Do you think Jason's wrong?

[Marc Benioff]

Well, like I said, I think that we have all these leads that we just systemically have not called back and now we are. That gives me the ability now to rebalance my headcount and to really say, hey, I want to take all these folks and make them sales folks. And I think that in all of the segments of the business that we do business in, not just government, that was one segment, not just the enterprise, the high end enterprise, the 5000 Plus World, but the mid market and the small business, we're a company that's going after all of those segments, right? We don't.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

So you're saying that the SDRs will remain and it'll just allow you to cater to the ones that you couldn't cater with before? Because Jason, just to be annoying and British, but It's midnight.

[Jason Lemkin]

No, I think Mark might be saying. Mark said his support team went from 8,000 to 3,000 and he redeployed him into other areas. I think about that number. I think the same thing.

[Marc Benioff]

That's exactly right.

[Jason Lemkin]

Yeah. I think we'll redeploy. I think Salesforce, I don't know how many like entry level SDR Salesforce has, but I bet you redeploy 70% of that headcount into enterprise reps or forward deployed engineers. That headcount just becomes more valued with, with agent for sales. I bet you. I bet you don't.

[Marc Benioff]

You're saying so important, Jason, because what you're saying is that the fundamental architecture of an enterprise software company in the future is not exactly as it was in the past. That the fundamental architecture of the company will be different. And all of us grew up in SaaS and the applications and all this over the last 25 years. And so we saw how the applications have changed and evolved. But now we're saying is it's not just that, it's also the companies as well. And that is different.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

So Harry, did you get the answer to your question?

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Yeah. Redeployment. Yeah.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

No, I don't think it's bullshit though. I mean it's because we have this discussion every week, Mark. It's that Jason is basically the grim reaper and thinks not a single 25 year old will ever work in this town again.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

And you know, I think it's grossly overly optimistic to think that you can redeploy 25 year olds who aren't that passionate, don't have that many skills off of this one.

[Harry Stebbings]

Again, entry level.

[Jason Lemkin]

But when you're at Salesforce's scale, it's about headcount. Mark's budget's fixed. He's got 80,000 heads on a spreadsheet. I don't know, when I was at Adobe it was 20,000. Right. If you can move those heads up the value chain, Salesforce can be a much more efficient company.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Yes, it's a more optimistic.

[Marc Benioff]

That is exactly right, Jason.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

It's a more optimistic view a than Jason's taken in the past, which is why he's contradicting. But it's a good view because I actually notice time and time again Mark's I won't say spin, but approach on it is when Jason did his thing about he only has three people in his company. Mark's take on that was there'll be lots more entrepreneurs because of that. It's super additive which is entirely the only way you're going to sell this AI revolution. Otherwise there'll be another fricking revolution if we keep pushing on this. So I like the kind of upside related focus. As we've discussed over and over again, if they're not any damn good, they're on their own. But it's at least a vaguely upside y approach. Harry versus Armageddon here.

[Marc Benioff]

You can go to our website and see who we're hiring. And also this narrative around that we're not gonna hire any more kids out of college. This is also bull.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

I'm aware that you're going to have to run. I do want to ask one final thing which is just in terms of unfair questions. Rory loves me for this.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

You have such a dick about this.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

No, I'm not. You just, you just always comment. You have open AI at 300 and you have anthropic at 170. Which would you prefer to buy?

[Marc Benioff]

Well, I think both are actually great companies. Salesforce owns 1% of Anthropic. So I'll just, you know, it's obviously a great company, very focused on the enterprise. OpenAI also is a great company. I'm a big fan of their leadership and what they've done.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I don't know what you're paying your media training person, but you should pay them more. That was a master class in how to handle Harry being annoying, basically. Harry, thank you for your question. I've complimented every. I love it. He just won. You should just fold, Harry. I'll be practicing that next time. It's the nice nice about everyone and shut up, Harry. Good job. Mark.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

You are a hero. Thank you so much for this and thank you for putting up with my pressing questions. Jason's free to present at Dreamforce about how he's changed.

[Jason Lemkin]

I'll be there. I'm even going to Metallica this time.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Mark, thank you so much.

[Marc Benioff]

You're great to see you. Bye bye now.

[Harry Stebbings]

All right, we ready Now I'm excited.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Because these I want to dive into.

[Harry Stebbings]

Nat Friedman reporting to Alex Wang after not a huge amount of time. How did we analyze interpret this news.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Of the new structure that's come to be in masses AI division?

[Jason Lemkin]

I thought the consensus when we talked about this deal at least 10 days ago, 14 days ago, was it was it's fine to give up billions of potential carry and funds to be in the game to be a player rather than to be on the sidelines. I don't want to be critical but man then essentially getting undermoted in A reorg. Like maybe it doesn't feel that way, but hiring freeze and a total reorg within 30 days. It's a lot to process. I might rather be running my own fund.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

At least it seems like a vaguely sensible org structure where you have one person in charge and then the four divisions. You have pure science. You have LLM foundation models, you have AI applications, which I think is where nat's running, and you have infrastructure. You read the org structure and go, yeah, that's probably how you should run it. And you got one guy in charge. It's the same thing. Stupid examples. When you get these soccer teams where they just have have so much money, you hire all these people in on the transfer market and then you got a bunch of drama and then someone's got to be the manager and figure out who's going to play what position. I don't know what promises are made. I don't know who's bent out of shape, but it seemed like a sensible thing to do. You spent $20 billion on talent. You now need to tell them what position to play and who's going to play forward, who's going to play striker, and who's going to play fullback.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

I just don't get it. I feel naive here. I don't understand. If you're nat, why you do it? I understand you want to be in the room, I get that. But then reporting to someone else who's not Zuck. For anyone that knew NAT and knew Microsoft, he was really in the grooming position to be the next CEO of Microsoft. Many understood. And now it's like to then report to someone who's not Zuck. In this structure, you've got, you know, Yann Lecun also reporting to Alex Wang as well. Daniel is reportedly not really there day to day. I'm just confused by the whole structure and it just feels like, wow, you gave up on probably one of the.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Best funds I gotta push. Just be logical, Howard. You're not confused on the structure. You're actually. The structure is pretty well understood. You're confused on why he'd do it, which is a different thing. You're confused on why someone who was highly autonomous would sign up to report to someone who reports to the CEO. That's what you're confused about.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

And the rationale around that for me would be like, well, actually, you know, guess what? Elon goes to Zuck when he wants to buy OpenAI and Sam Altman. It's pretty cool being in that room, which Nat would be with Alex to have that discussion and you're not. If you're just another fund, that would be the reason why you did.

[Jason Lemkin]

I think being in the room for that a couple times is fun. And then, then I'd rather run my own shop. You know, there's only so many rooms I need to be in. Like, it's pretty fun. It's like the first IPO you're a part of. Like, it's great, but I'm not sure what it's like as a VC to have 20 IPOs. I might rather have more carry than show up to ringing the bell. I don't know.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Honest comment is, I totally get why someone who's a great operator would choose not to be a vc. Because I think if you're, if you are a good operator, I always tell great operators who talk about coming into venture, don't be crazy. Your highest and best use is operating. If you had the ability to be the next CEO of Microsoft or be a vc, my strong advice is go be the next CEO of Microsoft. I get the transition from venture to operator. The question you're raising is the level at which you make the transition. It's giving up autonomy. But again, as I say, I don't know what was promised.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

How did you think about matter more broadly being hit hard? They were down 6%. They've had a pretty meteoric continuous rise. This was a blip.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

The big picture here is their core business is doing extraordinarily well. They have a very tenuous link between their core business and their AI initiative. They talk about how AI is optimizing their core business, but even I think from the discussions they said that's much more old school AI than any of the LLM stuff. So you've got this core business that's kicking off cash and then you got the CEO with entrance power decided to invest all this cash in this new business. So if you're trying to value the stock, your entire day is spent thinking, wtf is this new business worked? And is it going to eat all the cash flow? It's like criminology when you're looking at who lines up in Red Square and trying to figure out who's in charge. You just looked at this announcement and said, I don't know what this means, but maybe it means bad, so maybe I should sell the stock off. There's just no data and there's no way of knowing. At some point someone's going to have to explain what they're doing with this 60, $70 billion and how it's going to change their business. And if Zuckerberg is right, like he was About Instagram and WhatsApp, everyone will go, yay. And if he's wrong, like he was about the Metaverse, everyone will go, oh my God, what were we thinking?

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

So you don't think this is the beginning of a cooling of the excitement of the AI market and a dampening of market caps and a dampening of public markets in a way like some people are worried about?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

How the hell would I know? I mean, I don't think implies I'm a no. It's just not knowable, let me tell you. You'll know when it's happened, because it'll hurt. All you know now is things are pretty lofty. When things are trading at 15 times earnings, you don't have to agonize all that much because you if earnings blip 10%, the stock blips 5% and no one cares. When things are trading at a very pricey level, then everything that goes wrong, no matter how tiny, gets magnified through the stock price. Things are trading at a high price now. You don't know. Is that going to change in a week, a month, a year? It's going to be an angsty time. And either the growth comes to fill the earnings gap, or the stocks go down to reflect that. And when that happens, who the hell knows?

[Jason Lemkin]

Listen, I'm not an expert, but Meta has a 1.59 beta. It's a volatile stock, so I don't think we can read anything into these ups and downs because the beta is so high. I mean, Nvidia 2.3? These are insane numbers. Abstract away from that. When you look at the amount of volatility figma's had since the ipo, it hasn't even had a quarter. Hasn't even gone out. These high beta stocks, I don't know. You got to be smarter than me to figure out what even a 7%, 8% movement means. The beta is too high aligned to.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

What I just said. Which is the cooling or the lack of cooling? Anthropic goes from a 5 to a $10 billion raise. Is demand just completely inexhaustible for this? I heard it was forex oversubscribed. How did you guys react to the 5 to 10 and the 4x oversubscribed?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Reportedly good for them. Demand appears to be pretty damn high. It looks like you can raise 10 billion plus in a single financing in the private markets. Your OpenAI risk 40. Yeah, I mean, as you say, appetite for story The AI story is extraordinarily strong and most of the public comps aren't a pure AI story. They've got AI blended into something else. Facebook, Google, Microsoft have at least something there. Apple has nothing there. Amazon has little there. So there's got to be. If you're a fidelity type manager, you're like, how do I get me some AI action? There's two obvious AT scale candidates. And yeah, you probably can sell a lot of that stock right now. And they're going to sell it. And the good news is they know what to do with the money. They can buy GPUs.

[Jason Lemkin]

But is this. And Harry, you would know this better than me. Maybe Rory knows it. Iconic is a lead for this round and Lightspeed led the last round. Yeah, I mean Maybe the underlying LPs in money is from sovereign wealth funds or other. These are the standard cast of characters who can tap into vast amount of money. Right. And charge keep a vast amount of economics on top of it. Of course they're going to go from 5 to 10 if I can deploy. Why don't I deploy another 5 if I'm lightspeed or iconic, Right. Why wouldn't. Instead of LightSpeed putting 2 billion in, if it's LPs, we'll give them 6, why not at a GP level, it's the same amount of risk, isn't it? I lose 2 billion, 6 billion, what's the difference? But I can make so much more money.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

And they could also be right in that call that it is going to work from here. It's an interesting exercise to try and take the entropic numbers and say, what do you have to believe to believe in a 3x from here? It's frankly not impossible. A lot has to go right, but a lot is going right. I kind of did the thought experiment a while back. The growth rate over the last year or two is so fast that one of two unprecedented things is going to happen in the next year. Either a decelerates at quite normal rate relative to its current growth rate. It's going to hit $50 billion in revenue plus because things that go from 1 to 9 or 10 probably go next year. I don't know. That's a 10x growth. Do they go 5x? Did it go 3x?

[Jason Lemkin]

Yeah, it could end next year at 40 billion in revenue. It's possible if it ends this year at 9. From 1 to 9. You're much better than me. Rory, what if you just do your trailing velocity? What does that end up?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

That's Exactly. You end up with an enormous number and you go, wow, that's not crazy. And then so either that happens, which would be unprecedented because the amount of revenue would just be so big, or they slow down faster than anything slowed down ever. If you grow from 10x growth to 2x growth, in one sense, 2x growth, it's amazing at that scale, but it would be such a de acceleration. So when you look at the stock and you look at the price they're paying, as I say, it's not crazy to say if the growth only slows even 50%, it's still got a kind of a trajectory and a throat path to tens of billions of dollars in revenue. And that gets you into the valuation. So processing through that, you say to yourself, at some point, it's a market size question. If there's enough revenue out there, these two guys are going to get it. And thus, in the end, as highly priced stocks do, that are really leaning into growth. It boils down to your assessment of is there $50 billion of demand for foundation model APIs or $500 billion of demand for foundation model APIs? And if it's the latter, they're probably going to get 40% of it and it gets them 200 million. And if it's the former, they're going to get 20 million. And a lot of these people are going to be sad.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

What do you think it is, Rory?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Because it's a really hard question. I think it slows down more than people are. I mean, it's something Jason said three or four shows ago, where if you start running out the numbers on what I mean, let's talk about 100 billion of revenue. Salesforce is doing 40 billion. So at 100 billion, you're saying it's kind of two and a half times the size of Salesforce, which effectively has dominant market share in the CRM space. Coders have to get what Jason said a couple of weeks ago, these agents have to worth 10 or 20 grand ahead for that market size to get to that scale. If all it is is $2,000, an engineer, I don't know if you get there. That was my big aha. When I did the math. You actually need these things to take vast chunks out of the labor budget and be worth 20, 30, $40,000 almost ahead to the enterprise for the math to work. And Jason said in some cases it will. There will be some use cases where an enterprise will part with 20 grand, but there'll be lots where it don't. So. So you can tell My lack of certainty here, I don't know if I get to that 100 billion plus in revenue because I just run the math and I can't find the tam. But I could be wrong in underestimating it. My guess is no. And it slows more than you think. But it's not a crazy call.

[Jason Lemkin]

I can't shoot from the hip and do the math right, because it's so much money. It is so much money. I mean, listen, we just had Marc Benioff here who's saying in Dreamforce they're going to launch an AI SGR that I guarantee you it's going to take six to nine months to scale up, but it's going to be bonkers. Everyone's going to turn it on. That will tap into a vast amount of budget, a vast amount of cycles, a vast amount. Now, maybe some of it will be their own LLMs, but it doesn't really matter for purposes of this. I mean, we're just starting this cycle, right? And it's hard to predict how much human replacement, how much new applications.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

But let's do that exercise, though you're exaggerated. Salesforce is doing 40 billion a year. I think 12 billion of that is sales cloud. Let's say they turn this on and it's a 30% uplift AI SDR on top of the core sales cloud, which is 12 billion. So it's $3.6 billion of extra revenue, which, as you point out, only gives the poor man another year of 10% growth. But $3.6 billion in revenue. Let's just say LLM costs as a percent of revenue are expensive. 20%. So that's $720 million. So you've just had the second largest software company on the planet turn on the most labor saving device for their core marquee product. And when it filters down to LLM revenue at $720 million, round it up to a billion. That's when you kind of go, you have to sell a lot of labor replacement to get to 100 billion. Now, maybe I'm underestimating. Maybe the 30% is wrong. Could you see yourself, Jason, paying four times what you pay for Salesforce for an AI SDR on top of that, Salesforce.

[Jason Lemkin]

Listen, we're a tiny group, right, but we have four seats of Salesforce. So what do we pay? 300 bucks a month, 12 grand a year for Salesforce? Nominally we're paying $500,000 for 11 AI agents. So what's the ratio? I don't know whether that makes sense. Long term, I don't know if it scales. If a portion of that ratio were to hold, then it's a pretty cheap round.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Well, again, again. Push again.

[Jason Lemkin]

But it's a crazy ratio, isn't it?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Because let's just even do 2 to 1. Let's just say for every dollar you spend in Salesforce, you spend another dollar on top. That's 12 billion. Let's assume 20% to the LLM. That's 2.4 billion. It's real money. But it's only 2.4 billion. I just.

[Jason Lemkin]

Yeah, but I'm spending 500k. Ver is more than 20x more. Right.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

To be clear, if 20x is the ratio, then you're right.

[Jason Lemkin]

I think the problem, and Harry was teasing at this, but we have to go gently with the CEO of a $40 billion run rate company. The tough part just is that, I mean, you're doing the right thing. Rory. Salesforce may not Capture that incremental 120 billion. That's the challenge. Workday may not capture it. Palantir appears to be capturing it. That was why Mark was impressed with them. If the big guys mostly don't seem to be capturing this agent dollar, if they do, great. But today when we're recording this, it hasn't happened yet. Right? They're not capturing much.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

And I'm saying, and even if they do, and I think they will, I think they're well poised to capture some of it. I think, as I say, when you apply the 20% ratio and you get back down to how much revenue it is for the LLM, you struggle to add it all up. And then I'm going to make the argument against myself. And then you look at the explosion in revenue in the last year. I've never seen something grow 9x from a billion in one year. I always joke that Newton's law of motion applies to companies. Things in motion stay in motion. I can never remember anything going even 1 million to 9 million and then flattening out to 12, let alone 1 billion to 9 billion. Just a trajectory alone it implies 30 something the following year, which would be a significant slowdown. You'd have gone from a 9x year to a 3x year.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

I'm just worried that the Max 7 today have so much concentration of value in the public markets driven by AI hype and excitement. It's very valid as we see with anthropic revenue growth like you're talking about there. But I don't feel like we've ever had the concentration of value Tied to AI in seven companies as we have today. And I am looking at it now going like, ooh, I really hope there's not a blip here. Dear Lord.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

So basically you've done all your analysis just like everyone else. And then the last sentence says it all. I don't have the stomach to sell, crystallize my gains and move it all to value stocks. Instead, I'm just going to let it ride and pray a little. Nice, Harry. I'm not going to argue with it. It's what I'm doing too. Yeah. And ask you where the rubber hits the road is when you do that analysis, you have to say to yourself, it's unprecedented. Do you want to make a trade? Do you want to sell down? Do you believe that it's going to revert to the norm?

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

And you don't now?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I do. I do believe it's going to revert to norm. I'm more pessimistic than some. I do believe it's going to revert to the norm.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

So you're crystallizing your gains now?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I'm actually looking at it right now. In fact, I had a long conversation with someone about just given all the other dynamics about what's the best ETF for core commodities, which are the only things that survive the 70s, but it's a 5% play. I'm not going to go down that rat hole. But I think something can be amazing and still overpriced. That's perhaps the sentiment. So I'm looking at this going, all these companies and these opportunities are amazing. I don't want to down on them because any growth from here will be just astonishing. I mean, I didn't plan to come here and talk about stock prices, but you asked about the Mag 7. Eventually you get reversion to the mean. And we're at the highest point we've ever been in terms of concentration.

[Jason Lemkin]

I mean, it hit us hard in 2022. Right. Reverting to the mean hit everyone hard. Hit everyone hard. Right. 2023 was worse. But the precipitous drop in 2022, we've already half forgotten. I mean, not everyone's. I mean, it was brutal. And 2022 was even worse because the revenue growth was still there. Like the cloud companies were still growing at a decent percent of 2021, but the valuations fell 66%. It was brutal.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Okay, so we have this realization. We understand that actually good times sometimes end. And then when you look at Mongo, up 27% today on Amazing numbers, we have Box up. We have Octa up. Jason, can you turn up the volume where the party's going? Like this is. I'm ready to put on my DJ set here.

[Jason Lemkin]

I need a little time to process it, but I think thank God, because we were just talking. You were just asking Marc Benioff why they weren't getting to lift right from AI. I'm glad to see that. Just literally this week we were seeing Mongo, even Okta, which had been struggling box the other day, Zoom. Which is not exactly a rocket ship anymore. But seeing growth re accelerate because of AI, it's like, thank God the cavalry's coming just in time to help the public. Guys need it. So I think it's heartening. But to your point, this is not anthropic growth. It is re acceleration, like re acceleration at scale, to Rory's point, is always epic. We owe everyone kudos when they re accelerate at scale because it's so rare now. We're seeing it at a multiple. It's just not like Palantir reacceleration.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

You're exactly right. And maybe actually the thing that two things have in common is just to remind yourself is changes in stock prices are when you get a difference between the expectation of what actually happened and what you're seeing on some of these, like Mongo bounces, when people have the SaaS is dead story and the markets buy into it and these things start trading at five and a half times revenue. And suddenly it's not like you grow 9x, but you beat expectations by a couple of percentage points. And suddenly you can get a nice bounce in your stock because you're trading at a value where once the upside shift, stock's only going in one way. And it's almost like the mirror opposite of what happens to these super high points price things when all the good news is priced in. When even one piece of good news goes out of the deal, you fall fast. If Salesforce had a 13% Q1Q GAAP revenue quarter, you would see that stock bounce like you haven't seen it because it would be, oh, we priced in 10, we're suddenly getting 13. We're getting 13 at scale. Oh my God.

[Jason Lemkin]

I'm not a total Mongo expert, but when you look at companies like Lovable Replit that we over discuss. Right? But this 3, let's call it 3 or 400 million of ARR already this year, plus everybody else, Right, right. But the level of unrepables every time someone's using the app, they're spooling up multiple NEON or Supabase databases. Okay. The load on both of them is massive. They've never seen demand like this. Like it's massive. That's great for them. I mean, Neon got bought by databricks for a billion, right? I. I didn't even understand why at the time. Now I get it, right? Supabase is probably worth much more, right? It's kind of a bummer. And air quotes if Mongo doesn't benefit from that. Like if it's all the, all the Harveys and the Supabases and like, like I guess it's good for vc, but it's also a terrible stability point if none of the incumbents benefit. Right. Where is Atlassian benefiting from this AI wave? Right? Where is Monday benefiting? So it's heartening at a meta level to see Mongo benefiting from AI deployments. It's heartening because it means maybe the revenue is a little more durable. Maybe Harry's replit investment level will go 10x rather than crash and burn next year. Because all this stuff's enduring right now. It still feels so fragile, doesn't it? All this revenue feels fragile.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

No, it feels very durable, thank you very much.

[Jason Lemkin]

It does. Well, if you can go from 0 to 106. I mean, did you see what Wick said? With what did they buy? Base 44, what's it called? The one they bought?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

For 80 million bucks.

[Jason Lemkin]

Yeah, yeah. Now they did 1.2 million last week.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Probably a good deal then.

[Jason Lemkin]

Oh, my deal of the century. And I tried it. I tried it. I actually took my site and had it rebuild it. It looks like Claude, but not as good. I get it. But they're working on all the issues. But it's just interesting if Wix can buy a eight person and startup and then achieve that revenue velocity, it's impressive. But it also makes you think about durability.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Totally does. Roy, you said if Salesforce grew 13%, not 10%, it bounced like never before. You know we had Klarna filed say to go public between a 30 and a $15 billion range. It was lower than people thought and it was lower, I think largely because of the 20% year on year growth, which isn't great. It's good, but it's not great. Jason, how did you interpret Klarna finally going out? We know that it had a 45 billion doll round before SoftBank led, then a repricing to six and a half and now going public at 13 to 15.

[Jason Lemkin]

If they were growing 24% last year and now they're filing and they're growing 20. What's the inverse of the Mendoza Line, Rory? The opposite. When you fall below, you can't file. Did the Mendoza Line of triple, triple, double, double or better. But there's also this hard. It's the hard deck. You can't fall below the hard deck for IPO and it's 20% growth. And I could be wrong. Like, I, I don't know, it might be that Klarna's filing just in time in the midst of this IPO wave because 24 to 4:20 is not the RE acceleration that we're seeing in some of the folks. I mean, Even, you know, Netscope just filed modest re acceleration from 30 to 33%. 30 to 33% may sound modest, but it's a lot of work. 24 to 20, you know, Mav's hitting the hard deck again. Like, you bet you pull up, pull.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Up, pull up.

[Jason Lemkin]

File, file, pull up, pull up.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

There is a level of growth below which it's hard to find. But just to be clear, the bigger you are, the lower that growth threshold. It's simply there's a transaction level below which the Wall street math doesn't work. So silly. Example, if you're doing $10 billion in revenue, they'll happily take you public with a 7% growth rate because you're just big enough to matter. But you're right for the typical venture deal, somewhere around 20%, you're starting to get to the multiples don't get there. But clearly at 14 billion, it's a perfectly doable deal. So I don't think it's a question of you're going too low to matter. I think at 14 billion it's a valid transaction. They're just a very different business than netscope. It's very much a financial business. If you recollect that had that whole issue on interesting. They did that little bit of overstatement on AI and they're going to automate everything and then backed off of that. But that was interesting but not important. I think the more interesting fact was some of the early comments on lending losses. I think it was earlier on this year. It's a financial services business and it lives on dies and financial services metrics. And once you start to lend, you got to be good at lending. I mean, we talked about nubank last week, which appears to be bloody good at lending. Klarten will be just fine. It'll trade, it'll go public, whatever. It'll be valued Like a relatively mature financial services business. I haven't studied the S1 yet, but the guys who priced it at 6 billion were right. And the guys, which is Sequoia and the guys who priced it at 45 billion were wrong, which is Softbank. You'll recognize this. Harry does a saying. Gary Lineker used to say that soccer is a game played by 22 people. In the end, the Germans win. Well, in the same way venture is a game played by 6,000 people. And in the end, Sequoia wins. They won.

[Jason Lemkin]

Here again, still 24 to 20% growth at less than 4 billion in revenue. Still incredible, right? But deceleration hyping, as they're going public, they're million in revenue per employee. That's implicitly saying we're finding our rule of 40 in the bottom line, not in the top line, isn't it? I mean, that coded message of a million per employee as growth decelerates is fairly clear to Wall street, right? We're mature.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Yeah, we're mature. But also you're a financial services company. It's not the same metric. I mean, I shudder to think what Jane street or Citadel's revenue per employee would be. It's in the tens of millions, right? This is the classic fintech company trying to make software. But let me give you a clue. You're a fintech company, it's all fine. It's totally wordy thing. You're a fintech company at huge scale. Well done, you built the category. You'll get the medium growth fintech valuation and everyone with the last round will make money.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Does Softbank just get washed?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

First of all, no. And it boils down to the details in the documents. So, two comments. One is at the time of the last round, I remember thinking people are going, oh my God, you paid 45 and now you're raising money at 6. Yeah, you look like an idiot. But you only took 10% dilution if you were an investor at 45. Yeah, it sucks to take that dilution. But a down round at 6 billion didn't kill the economic value of their investment. In fact, it preserved it by keeping the company alive. Now, fast forward to today. You're still overpaid. As we've discussed before, it boils down to what's in the docks. My guess is they don't have a block because Sequoia are not dumb people and wouldn't have left it in. So yeah, they just overpaid and they're going to get converted and they're going to trade at 3040 cents on what they originally paid. And they just hope is that it bounces up from there so they don't get washed, they just do what's called losing money. It turns out when you buy a stock at 45 and it trades at 15, you're down.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

I totally get you. I love that. Also, in terms of the 6,000 players and in the end, Sequoia win. That's a. That's the intro for sure. And I mean, they're going to pay you for that one, Rory, I mean, I know the head of marketing there, she's gonna be like, rory, go.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Look. I mean, I started here 31 years ago and they were doing great. And you fast forward 31 years, they're still doing great. There's something in there. You gotta hand it to them. I remember thinking when the Klarna round went down, and obviously there was a bunch of drama after that with Sequoia that we'll just leave out for now, I remember thinking that was a shrewd call. You just let them raise money at 45 billion a year and a half ago and now you're stepping in at 6, remember thinking good investment and it's going to turn out to be that.

[Jason Lemkin]

Not that it helped them. SoftBank did have a ratchet and wework. This deal was not that far off at a similar valuation. They could have a ratchet here. I just don't. I need one more day to find out, right?

[Marc Benioff]

You don't think so?

[Jason Lemkin]

I mean, if they got one in another deal at about the same price at about the same time, at least it was discussed. At least it was discussed.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

You're exactly right. It is knowable. And when I get off here and we will feed the S1 into ChatGPT and we'll know in an hour, what.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Will Netscope go out at? 700 million. ARR. Growing 33% loss. Valuation was.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

It was around 7.4 billion in 2021. And after that they raised some kind of weird convert that's harder to track. It's a good company. It's not making money like Figma, it's losing money, but it'll be at or close to it, is my guess. Or maybe even up from it. So, yeah, I think the 2021 round can exhale. Not quite out of the woods yet, but if you got a company at 700 million growing north of 30% with a little bit of re acceleration, it doesn't take more than a squint to see a $7 billion flat round to 21 as being doable and good for them. Great company around since 2012. All congrats to Lightspeed, who own a big chunk of this along with Excel. And yeah, I'm not going to tell you where it's going to trade day one, because as we've proven with Figna, that's not knowable. What we were right about on Figma was the step up in the process. The process of they'll file at 5 or 6, they'll get demand, they'll walk it up. My gut would be 7,8ish. Where it trades on the first day, who the hell knows?

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Do you think it could be a bounce at Figma?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

The answer, of course is no, because I believe, as I said earlier in reversion to the mean, and Figma had the largest bounce of any large cap IPO since I think 2000. So I sincerely doubt they'll copy that. It was funny, actually. I got an email from one of the many millions of bankers. You know those marketing emails? Next day they all send out saying, we priced XYZ ipo and the headline was we successfully priced the Figma ipo. And I just so wanted to email back and say, you priced it, but it's not clear you priced it right, my friend. Successfully might be a reach here.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Going to the other end of the spectrum, guys, I don't know if you saw this, but it was astonishing. For me, it was a mapping of seed rounds segmented between mega funds and boutique funds. Number one mega fund seed investor was Andreessen with 72 seed deals, compared to number two was 27, which is Sequoia. Exactly. Rory, how did you analyze that as Andreessen just playing a totally different game.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I mean, you have to say they're playing a different game. I mean, the words. Ipso facto, the words speak for themselves. If everybody else is doing 27 or less, less and you're doing 72, then by definition it's a different game. Yeah, I mean, we saw it again in the other interesting analysis that someone did on the Series A rounds. They are the successful quantity provider at every stage in the thing. They're the largest capital raiser, I think, other than Insight. But Insight, obviously it's slightly more later stage. In their pure Silicon Valley universe, they're the largest capital raiser at every stage. So by definition they're doing the most deals and being the most aggressive.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Do you think it will work out? When you look at some of that we've mentioned the databricks of the world and how much that will return?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

The truth is this if it does or it doesn't work out, it won't be because of their seed program. And that's the big aha. The seed program could get lost in the noise. It will work out if by virtue of their seed and a program they get the small number of absolute outliers. And they stated this right back in 2009. So give them credit for wild consistency. As long as they get those few number of companies that are absolutely outrageous upside performers and they stuff a billion dollars into them like they did at Databricks and they do it at the right price, it'll work out fine. Everything else is a loss leader. The seed program, it's basically like cheap milk in the supermarket. It brings in the crowds. Right? It's the loss leader.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Seed is for suckers, apparently.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

No, no, we said that. Jason said that last time and then we all got.

[Jason Lemkin]

No, I mean, yes, it's consistent. I think it's consistent.

[Harry Stebbings]

I've got a friend who's a complete.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Dipshit and he's going to make a huge amount of money from $100 million SPV into open AI at 200 million.

[Jason Lemkin]

Well, he, he may be a dipshit, but he's got good sales skills because he got in. There's different ways to win in this business and sales is, you know, sales is part of it.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

There you go.

[Jason Lemkin]

Yeah, sometimes you just got to sit on their steps to sit outside of Open AI's office all day long. Grab Sam 11 times. A classic Sequoia Place Playbooks. Sit on your steps until you get the meeting. Don't leave without the term sheet.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Now guys, do we have any other news items before I do a tweet of the week where I just want to talk about one tweet thought was particularly interesting. Grab the zeitgeist and I want to hear your thoughts on what's the tweet. Martin Casado. The idea that non consensus investing is where the alpha is is actually quite dangerous in the early stage. Follow on Capital tends to be more and more more consensus aligned.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I thought it was a better tweet than he got credit for in the Twitterverse. I saw that tweet and I'm gonna work in. He also did a really good piece on gross margins and the way people are misunderstanding that that if we had more time we'd talk about and I thought that that tweet wasn't crazy and I think people then cited the cons. And yes, there are always outliers that are not consensus. Like in 2016 the non consensus bet would have been to do OpenAI.

[Marc Benioff]

True.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

But it's also probably true that 90% of non consensus bets would have failed entirely. And at that stage SaaS was probably consensus and only about 50% of SaaS bets would have failed entirely. When you're on this mega trend of an architectural replatforming, a goodly amount of the correct investments to do are fairly consensus in terms of the broad macro themes. And I remember, I think it was IVP years ago, I mean 20 years ago they had this concept of 70% of the bets being very much on track, faster, better, cheaper. And then I remember 30% kind of brave new world bets. I don't think you could build your entire business on waiting for OpenAI. So I actually think his comment was more spot on than people give credit for. I think if you look honestly about what you're doing, you don't want to be 100% consensus. You don't want to be just doing AI. You want to be looking at new stuff. But it's like the explore thing. You are betting the megatrend. That's probably going to last 20 years. It could be AI. 20 years ago it was SaaS. 15 years ago it was public cloud. And that's a consensus bet that paid off for 15 years. I'm rambling a little, but I think his comment was more correct than the 140 or 280 character comments made out. You don't want to just be consensus, but consensus is a bad word for on point with where the industry is going.

[Jason Lemkin]

My reaction, he responded back to my reaction too, which was that I thought one of the implicit points and we've talked about this entire series of the show has been putting money into consensus bets, right? I mean, half this AI stuff is. I thought one of the points he was making and he agreed was that today 10 deals are consuming 40% of venture capital. Everyone we knew that used to B2B deals only does AI. My point back back, which he agreed was like, if you're going to do bets outside of that, you better not count how much follow on capital Agree. Because they're not interested. They're not interested. And so I've done several B2B plus AI deals in the last 18 months that I love. That will do great. And the advice I give to all those founders is don't expect any money. 80% of the folks I can refer you to are not going to take your meeting. And it's a reality. And so I don't know that. I mean, he was like, that's exactly part of the issue. Right. And so it. So there may be several layers, but if the whole industry is consensus, the capital's concentrated. It's not just your buddy that put 100 million in the SPV. Everything's concentrating here. Right.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

We had an IC today for a fintech business and they scaled 5 million ARR in a year and the founder was great. And I said guys, why is this not moving fast? Like what's wrong with it? And one of my team were like, oh, it's not AI.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

And that's an example of where I think Jason, you were spot on. It's not that you shouldn't do non consensus bets, there's a couple of different things. But that's a classic example where you should do it, you should buy it at the right price because you're not going to get the magic pixie dust next round and you should run it capital efficiently because you're not going to get people throwing $4 billion at you.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

So Roy, what you're saying is the price should reflect that it's not AI.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

It will and should be valued on fundamentals.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

That's different to what it was in the last years.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Yeah. If it's non consensus only because it's doing something different, then by all means do it provide you understand what's different than you understand. We're getting into, I think the really true thing, for example, that didn't quite come out. We talk about this, we think about our Megatrend trends. It's one thing to say I'm going to do a deal that's not the ultimate consensus about AI, but it's really something kind of. You got to question if you're doing something that effectively is a bet against the Megatrend. Knowing what the consensus is has quite a lot of value because it also speaks to where the industry as a whole is going. Technically, let's call it the technical consensus as distinct from the financial valuation consensus. Going back to what Benioff said, the technical consensus is that most software is going to be agentic for the next 20 years. Do you really want to take a bet against that? Because that's probably where the industry is going. That's again where I think Martin was right about that.

[Jason Lemkin]

But valuation aside, I think the bigger issue for venture, when times are good, we take follow on capital for granted. No one's worried about the follow on round for anthropic that they're throwing 10 billion and there's not a single investor that's worried about the next round is there. It's just greed. But most of our careers years, we've worried about follow on capital. I worried as a founder, Capital in B2B was scarce until as late as 2018. It was very, very scarce. It was very, very scarce. So that's just doing Harry's bet might be great, but not burning 2 million. A million bucks a month. Then it's like, who the hell's going to like? I mean, Harry's fund isn't big enough. He doesn't have billions yet. Yet. And he doesn't like to carry his investments through three or four rounds. So you got to pass on that one. Unless the burn rate is zero, then.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I would do it because I'm having this experience right now. When I look back at my mistakes in the last three or four years in terms of investing, I have actually both kinds. I wish I made more consensus bets. Consensus is such a negative one. I wish I made more on trend AI bets. We made a lot. I wish we'd made more because the megatrend was bigger and more dominant. But then equally, I have three or four utterly non consensus deals that I looked at, was intrigued by and should have pulled the trigger on and regret. And I just saw one of them today and I'm like, wow, I really missed that one. But I'll say it. What you don't Remember is the 90 non consensus bets that you didn't do that just haven't worked out. I mean, both statements are true. It's a lot more forgiving in the consensus marketplace because as you say, you get washed away by. You get buoyed up by other people's capital and it's easier in the short term to survive long enough to get the feedback.

[Jason Lemkin]

I've done two of my best investments I have today and I'm a seed investor, right. I have the smallest amount of money of these three people. Right? Two of my best investments today, I had to create a round out of nothing when no one, when there was no capital, I had to create a round. I didn't have enough money. I had to create it. I don't want to do that too many times. It's like, this isn't as hard as creating Snowflake from scratch, man. But it's hard, okay?

[Rory O'Driscoll]

It's hard going back to the consensus comment. It's okay. I'm trying to formulate here. Maybe it was, it's okay to do the consensus bet, but you don't want to do the consensus bet where the odds on the consensus are lower than the accuracy of the consensus. In other words, you want to be an AI because that's what. Because we've wrestled with this a lot of these consensus AI and we're not doing them and we can't make the prices work. You still have to be paid for. You have to assess the risk accurately. And all the quote consensus statement says is it's more likely than not that this is the direction the technology is moving. So therefore you probably don't have that oh my God, are you totally wrong dimension to your business. Which is why you can lean in a little bit into this AI consensus bet versus some of the others, but you still have to get all the other shit right. And on top of that, if you overpay beyond the dreams of man, then there's nothing you can do to save yourself. So like everything in investing, it ends up being way more nuanced than consensus. Non consensus. The consensus bet risk, you're probably right on direction. You might ludicrously overpay the non consensus bet. You could be way ass wrong on is it even going to work? You probably won't have any follow on capital, but if you get it right, you will have a beautiful thing. You'll have a high ownership, low capital n of one outcome. Again, as always, it turns out investing is hard and you can't just paint the numbers and collect 100 million bucks.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Final one. What consensus shit? Do you wish you'd done more of Rory or do you wish you'd done.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

I think I underestimated the impact of A the scaling laws in AI and B the ability of primarily Altman and some other folks to inspire belief in those scaling laws and unlock 600 billion of capex spend a year. Anything that was attached to that making AI trend has just had a wall of money for the last five years. It includes the foundation models, it includes Nvidia and the public markets. It includes the inference companies, literally anything. My mental model is we have 600 billion of people, $600 billion being spent making AI, and right now we have 28 or so. Whatever it is. The recent survey of apps using AI, most of which is OpenAI and Entropic. I did not think that we would be able to find $600 billion a year to spend in this space. And if you knew that was going to happen, I think you'd have looked at the inference companies, I think you'd have looked at the model companies at prices you thought were super high. I think you'd have broken glass on your financial model to Try and get some of what is now the scaling law consensus. So I suppose you could argue at the time it wasn't consensus, which maybe is the actual counter argument as I process in real time. But yeah, that's the trend that you just almost could not have had too much on in the last year.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Boys.

[Harry Stebbings]

Jason, anything to add, my man?

[Jason Lemkin]

No. We can edit in Mark's AI and be tougher on him if you'd like. We can build one together. We'll build his clone for him and we'll be tougher. Sorry if we weren't tough enough.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Tell me Mark, why are you so brilliant? How did Rory. My favorite question. How are you so prescient to think about this agentic.

[Jason Lemkin]

Okay, listen, let me be clear. I think Rory was a suck up. I don't think I was. I think you're going to look back at mine and you're going to say I had some pretty good stuff. I honestly think this, I think Rory was a suck up. But he doesn't know Mark. I barely know him. But he doesn't know him. So he, he and Rory was a little tough on the, on the growth. He was just nice about it. But I think you're going to like me better.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Do you know what I find so funny, guys? It's like, you know, who the fuck am I? I'm a kid from London.

[Harry Stebbings]

He's like done a podcast.

[Jason Lemkin]

You've got to try harder. Most of the companies I've advised at 41 billion in revenue have committed a little earlier to the AI trends.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Mark, I'm kind of embracing your advice. You know, we're not trying to make people feel, you know, you want your guests to come back and actually I genuine, I'm say it again. I actually thought he was more on point and balanced than the other AI gurus who are saying it's AGI. I mean he was just like, we're going to sell some of this shit to our customers and they're going to buy it and it'll be good.

[Harry Stebbings]

You know what I frickin love about those shows? This is three great mates shooting the shit about tech news. And today we have one of the OGs of SaaS, Marc Benioff. Joining next week we have Cliff, the co founder of Canva, on the show. And the week after that we have Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio. This show is going from strength to strength and I want you to help me make it better. Let me know what we can do. Harry0vc.com but before we leave, you Today let's talk about agents. Specifically Piper, the AI SDR agent brought to you by Qualified. The agentic marketing era has arrived. And if you're a B2B marketing leader looking to scale a pipeline generation, Piper, the AI SDR agent.

[Rory O'Driscoll]

Wow.

[Harry Stebbings]

It is here to help. Piper is the number one AI SDR agent on the market according to G2. And hundreds of companies like Box, Asana and Brex have hired Piper to autonomously grow inbound pipeline. Fucking sign me up. Anyway, Qualified customers see massive business impact with Piper. 3x increase in meetings booked and 2x increase in pipeline. Wow, that is some results. Hire Piper, the number one AI SDR agent and grow your pipeline today. Learn [e-mail] 20VC that's qualified.com 20VC with the 20VC spelled out in letters for goodness sake. And while Piper builds your pipeline, attio gives you the CRM power to close and grow those relationships. Attio is the next generation of CRM built for the AI era. Fast, flexible and powerful. No, it's not a sports car, it's a CRM system baby. It is Attio and it takes less than a minute. So sync your email your calendar and you'll instantly get all your relationships enriched in real time with incredible data, no manual input needed. Attio also integrates with your existing tools and syncs with your product data to deliver an AI native platform that's tailored to how your team actually works. You can model your CRM around your business, automate complex tasks and surface real time insights all in a platform designed to scale with you. With Attio, AI isn't just a feature. No, no. It is the foundation. It's powerful. It's AI automations, it's research agents that transform your go to market motion. It's a data driven engine. From intelligent pipeline tracking to smarter product LED growth, fast growing startups like Flatfile, Replicate and Modal are all experiencing what's next. So get ready to build without limits and start now. Attio.com20VC and get 15% off your first year. That's attioattio.com20VC. Okay, pipeline sorted.

[Host/Interviewer (possibly Harry Stebbings or another host)]

Woohoo.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now what about your own legal team? Enter Logora. Logora is the category defining AI platform that's fundamentally reshaping how legal work gets done about frickin time. Empowering lawyers across tier one law firms and in house teams to achieve more with greater precision and confidence. So Ligura does this by software involving really concrete tasks such as document extraction, reviews against a firm playbook and suggesting well crafted markups directly in Microsoft Word based on your preferences. My word, that is a topic list of conversation that will not get a second date. But anyway the adoption of legal AI is surging across the world and Lagora is at the forefront of this shift as the chosen partner to 250 industry leaders in law across more than 20 markets. The life mix of Goodwin, Bird and Bird and Deloitte are making daily use of Ligura platform to review and research with precision, Draft Smarter and collaborate seamlessly. They recently also got an $80 million Series B from Iconic. They're backed by General Catalyst, Redpoint, Benchmark and yc. They operate out of New York, London, Stockholm. Yes, they're Swedes. Always a wonderful race. With over 100 employees from some of the world's leading global law firms and tech companies, the team is growing super rapidly. They're just freaking awesome. Just go use Legora. Honestly, I love Max, their founder. He's just a great dude. Go find out more legora.com as always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for a fantastic 20 product episode tomorrow on Spotify.