Speaker 1intelligence is going to be bigger as a market than oil. I've been in software for 31 years now, and the handful of other moments where I have felt magic, a trillion dollar super cycle followed every single time. And it doesn't happen very often. I absolutely believe capitalism, not being a giant global platform or an incredible specialist who can add differentiated value. I think it's a hard world to make money.
Speaker 25.75 billion dollars. That is how much Bessemer Venture Partners just raised across their two new funds, a four billion dollar fund and a 1.75 billion dollar seed fund. My word, they really took it literally when I said you need a billion dollars to do seed. Well, I saw this and I thought we've got to have Samir on the show. Samir is one of the leaders at Bessemer today. He led investments in Lagora and Fireworks, 220 VC companies as well, which is awesome to work with them on. And he's one of the best growth investors in the market today. It's a spicy show. It's kind of what we're calling the UK. A bread and butter show in the way that this is right down my fairway. So unlike the AI, deep tech, infra stuff, where I'm learning as I go, this is really in my zone of comfort. And we had a great discussion. And I love doing shows like this. These shows are why I still do 20 VC with such passion. Samir was patient. He put up with me and hell did we have a discussion. But before we dive into the show today, Blitzy, the autonomous software development platform that's built for enterprise scale, is proud to sponsor today's show. Enterprise codebases have grown beyond human comprehension. Tens of millions of lines, decades of tech debt, complexity existing tools cannot fathom. Blitzy starts by understanding. Thousands of agents reverse engineer your codebase into a proprietary knowledge graph that maps architecture dependencies and business logic. That graph surfaces every CVE and zero day hiding in your code before anyone hands you a ticket. Grounded in that context, Blitzy then executes entire epics autonomously. Modernize off legacy systems, ship new features 5x faster, or batch remediate CVEs at scale surfaced by the platform. Blitzy not only generates code, it validates and end-to-end tests every single line. And that's why Fortune 500 Enterprises are shipping enterprise grade code five times faster. Go to blitzy.com forward slash 20 VC to learn more. While Blitzy helps you build faster, Flex helps you run your finances smarter. Business owners run their whole financial life on Flex. One platform from business revenue to their personal spend. Float every purchase for 60 days, tap capital that grows with your revenue, and pay vendors in 170 countries across 32 currencies. Plus the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place. So you spend less time reconciling and more time growing. That's why thousands of owners use Flex. Named, one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2026. Visit flex.one, that's F-L-E-X dot O-N-E, and use the code 20VC. While Flex runs your finances, Vanta keeps your compliance covered. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign these days without proof of your security. Here's what happens if you're not prepared. A prospect asks for proof of compliance. The deal stools when, you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the roadmap to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into this horrible fire drill. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR, but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. So your deals keep moving and your engineers really keep building. Now, access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, even if your team lives in Claude or Kirsten. That's why Vanta is trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey, and Writer. So prove you're ready for business and get $1,000 off Vanta. When you go to vanta.com forward slash 20VC, that's vanta.com slash 20VC. You have now arrived at your destination. Sammy, last time that we did a show, I was about 12 years old. You put up with some very, very poor questions then. So I'm hoping that this will be an improvement. So thank you for joining me, dude. I'm so fired up to see you.
Speaker 1As they always say, long-time listener, now second-time caller. I'm fired up to be here, man. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2So we were just chatting beforehand and we said, ah, USV and like 900 million. And you know, you guys just raised, you know, size of the US treasury, it would seem. I think it was $1.75 billion seed fund. We'll get into that.
Speaker 1Seed and early. I'll talk about that later. Go ahead. Seed and early.
Speaker 2And I think like five more and, you know, growth. And so we'll get into that. But for those that have seen it before, this is that time.
Speaker 1Man, when you're in one of these, I refer to it as like magic, right? Like I've been in software for 31 years now. And the handful of other moments where I have felt magic, a trillion dollar super cycle followed every single time. But like, I mean, talk about lucky. I graduated college in 1995, back in the dark ages. But it was at the birth of the internet. And I was graduating in the heart of Silicon Valley. And it was magic. You could just see how people could create content and share it with everybody on the planet. And you're like, this is magical. And oh my gosh, we could actually do commerce on this thing. And I don't have to go somewhere to go get something like that was magical, right? And then, and then later in my career, I can still remember. So VMware created this layer of software that disintermediated the hardware from the from the OS and said, I can spin up virtual machines, I can put 10 of them on that one box. And by the way, we're there on machine number two, to machine number eight, and shut the other one down whenever I want, and it won't interrupt the workload. Dude, that is magic. And I looked at that. And I was like, holy cow, I didn't appreciate that the super cycle it would create was called cloud, right? Because there is no hyperscaler, there's no public cloud, without the ability to do virtualization and motion VMs around up and spin them up and spin them down the elasticity of the cloud. And so every time I felt magic, I was like, holy cow, this is cool. I got to go jump. And then this one, I remember I started, I was actually on my sabbatical, I wasn't I was in between Twilio, I thought I might be retiring, got bored. But anyways, I was I was doing some advisory work. And this young guy, Dave Roben, was there over at Jasper said, Hey, can you spend some time with me and what we're building here? It's growing really fast. And I was like, yeah, let's I'd love to learn more about it. And he shows me a demo of Jasper that's this AI marketing app sitting on top of GPT three, right? And this is like in the winter of 2021. And I was like, magic. It's again, this is magic. And sure enough, well, you know, like, here we are now, five years later, and it's been magical, you just see these transformational technologies. And this one is bigger than the last two combined, in my humble opinion. Why do you say that? The analogy I often try to draw is intelligence is going to be bigger as a market than oil, because oil powers all the machines. Intelligence powers all the humans, not some of the humans, all the humans, consumers, prosumers, SMB, maybe even mid market enterprise government, I don't care who you are, or what you're doing, you need more intelligence. And when you think about a market of that scale and scope, you understand, this is magic, and it's going to be really big.
Speaker 2So if we actually go through the stack, then you did anthropic, let's start at the heartbeat of intelligence that you mentioned there. Can you talk to me about the rationale, the underwriting, what you saw, what you didn't see, when you look back now?
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, the most important bit, I'm really proud that we did it, the Series D. What price was that, dude? I think it was 15 billion pre, 18 billion post. It was early, it was the round that Menlo led and Lightspeed and Bessemer joined. And this is, by the way, we were talking about my legendary partner, Byron Dieter, thank God for him, because he and Matt Murphy go back a long ways. And Matt called up his buddy Byron and said, "Hey, we're looking to build the syndicate here for this startup named Anthropic, you should check it out." And Byron said, "Hey, Smear, you want to come look at this thing with me?" And I was like, "Yeah, in the AI market. And I'll tell you, I think, you know, Byron and I grew up during the, our careers probably centered during those cloud days. And so, you know, of course we all pattern match. Like you just kind of, you use these mental frameworks. So for us, I'll say for myself, maybe I won't speak for Byron. When I looked at it, I looked at it as, look, I think this market is going to be a cloud redux was my, was my analogy that in the cloud era, you had a handful of hyperscalers that you have, you have AWS and Azure and GCP. And the reason is because it's massively capital intensive to build a cloud infrastructure. Well, it turns out that in the market we were looking at here, it was going to be the same thing. It was massively compute intensive and therefore capital intensive. And so it was going to consolidate to a handful of players, but just like in the cloud era, we believe then, I still believe now there would be hundreds of apps built on top of them. Just like you had hundreds of SaaS apps, you would have hundreds of AI apps that were purpose-built for particular things. And so if you have that mental model, then you say, okay, great. If it's really capital intensive, who are they? Who are the people that have the balance sheet to actually go into the scaling laws that were being talked about? And it's a pretty short list of players who could actually afford it. And you went across them and you're like, okay, Microsoft. Yep. They partnered with open AI Google. Yep. They're going to go build their own called Gemini. And then you got to AWS and AWS at the time had an internal model. I think it was called Nova that was not particularly distinctive. I'll be generous. And, and they had just invested a very sizable amount of money into, into infrastructure. And then by the way, at the time, it was very non-obvious that, you know, entropic at the time was one of, I don't know, there were probably half a dozen or more other labs that were trying to also build intelligence. Was it controversial in Bessemer? Oh, Harry, you have no idea. According to Byron, he said it was the lowest voted deal in the history of the firm, of the time he had been there. But the fact that we were both there and had conviction, and one of the things I love about Bessemer is empowerment is one of the values of the place, and they're like, dude, that's where Alpha comes from. If you guys really believe, go do it. What did you not see that you wish you had seen? I wish I had the ability to convince us all to do a bigger check that round. I feel like we saw it, we knew it, but there are so many risks at that stage of the company. But we knew that the AWS relationship was pivotal, that it would provide both the compute for the training critically, and that was really important, and then distribution at that early stage. And I just wish we had. I wish we had written a bigger check. That's all. That's all. I wish we knew then that we didn't know now.
Speaker 2When we look at concerns today, one concern is the cost of intelligence shifts to open source, because it's simply too expansive in frontier models. And we see that in a lot of data that's being produced by Vercel and Guillermo, who publishes it. We're both big investors in fireworks. And so we both believe in open models too. To what extent do open models not deprecate the business model for the majority of frontier providers?
Speaker 1Look, I'm a genius. of and on this one versus the tyranny of the or. It is and not or here. As I said, I come back to my comments about just the scale of the market for intelligence. We just can't get our heads around it. I mean, you think about this, like, Harry, when we invested, my bullish bull case was that we could get to some massive valuation. And I'll just say that I missed the mark on how big of a business could be created at the frontier by factors. And so when you're in a market that big, predicting with any precision the mix between closed tokens and open tokens is irrelevant. You just it's going to be big. You're in you. Right. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like when it's that large of a market, the ratio is actually not not not a concern. And I really do believe that there are all those different use cases from consumers up through enterprise and government, and they're all going to want intelligence of different types and different flavors. And that is why we're both we're investors in both on anthropic. And and in fireworks and the closed tokens and the open tokens, we'll get we'll have exposure as a as a fund and as a firm to both. But I think both are going to be huge.
Speaker 2Do you think U.S. enterprises are willing to use open source Chinese models?
Speaker 1I think that once that Chinese model is hosted by fireworks is no longer a Chinese model first.
Speaker 2Do you think they see it like that? Me and you both know that to be true. But when you speak to CIOs, they go, I don't want it. If the provenance is China, I don't want it. And you're like, it's downloaded. It's downloaded code on your local drives.
Speaker 1Yeah. Now, listen, I've talked to some CIOs who share that opinion, for sure. There's no question that is out there. And by the way, I do think that we should have a great open weight model that is is U.S. based. And I think that would be awesome. I think there's a big hole in that market. Is that is that a great business? It can be for sure. It can be.
Speaker 2But if you look at like a thinking, you know, if you look at the thinking machines that are $40 billion price today, is there a $500 billion open model U.S. to be built? Or is just open a much harder business model to monetize and therefore it won't be that large?
Speaker 1Oh, no, I believe it absolutely can build a big business, whether it's at that particular scale, I don't know. But you can build a very large business and get venture returns. If you are the leading provider of a open source solution, I mean, just look at history across, you know, all these other categories, whether you're going from Red Hat to, you know, fill in the blank in the database market. I mean, you can build you can build a very you can find ways to monetize it, for sure. And most enterprises don't want to be monetized. Most enterprises don't want to be responsible for the open source. They're going to want some provider with the right talent behind it. All the reasons that open source businesses have been great businesses for decades now.
Speaker 2If you were to present a bear case for frontier models, what would it be?
Speaker 1Do I think there's a bear case for the frontier labs? I really don't, because I believe that the at the frontier intelligence solving problems that were heretofore unsolvable or solving them at a pace that was heretofore unimaginable, I just think there's no shortage. Humans have so many problems to solve, Harry. We got a lot of problems in this world. We have a lot of them. And we're nowhere. It's not like we're at the 90. We're on the night, you know, 99th percentile of problem solved. And we're just trying to get to the last one. We have a lot of problems to go solve. And that's what these things will help us
Speaker 2solve. The majority of people on the pod come on and say we'll see 99% of token traffic flow through open models, but we'll see 99% of dollars flow through closed models. Do you think that's apt? Or do you think that's kind of a bullshit? Throw away comment.
Speaker 1I think that I think that ratio is wrong. I really do. I don't think that's quite the mix. But to my previous comment, I don't think we have to get the mix precise. I think everybody just has to understand that you just have to look at the size of them of the tan.
Speaker 215 billion. It seems now ridiculously cheap. How could you? That's amazing. 15 billion at the time was fricking wild. I got brought open out at 30 billion. And to my stupidity, I said, Oh, my God, if this is 100 billion, I like just 3x it. Not including dilution. Oh, my God. The small mindedness that I had was just unbelievable.
Speaker 1Harry, get out of my mind, man. I went through the exact same thing. So how did you get over it? It was because in the intervening time, right? So you remember that that open AI opportunity that I also passed on, I had the exact same thought pattern that you did. And that was right after the chat GPT moment, right? So the conversation was in December. And then in that intervening time, that little open AI went from 40 million by the to the time that we then looked at that first round of anthropic open AI had gone from like 40 million to about I want to say I'd have to go back and look at the numbers. You could fact check me, but it was something well north of a billion, billion and a half, maybe approximating two. And clearly we got it wrong. And that is one of the both. I think one of the most humbling things about this job is that you will get them wrong. And sometimes you'll get them wrong on really, really important decisions. And you have the opportunity to fix it. It's not a once in a lifetime opportunity. You could go back and fix it. And that was when anthropic came along. The imagination was stretched. To your point, like we were our imaginations were capped at a certain even if it got to 100 billion. And now obviously, you know, you could you could see the growth potential of how big this market could be because of what open I had done in in calendar 23.
Speaker 2In a world of $2 trillion assets, do you care about price anymore? Is LP focus on price misplaced? Entry price always matters.
Speaker 1Every venture capitalist has taught me that. By the way, I mean, you know me, I'm four and a half years into the second career of mine, so I'm still learning. I appreciate that it is a craft like every other. And so I don't pretend to have all the answers by any stretch, but I know how important entry price is. And I will say that what matters most is whether or not you believe it can grow at scale and compounded for a very long time and still make you a venture return. And so I'm just very focused on the on the looking out the as they always say, the windshield as opposed to the rearview mirror. And if I look at some of the investments of which I'm most proud, they were at current ARR multiples that would make most venture capitalists throw up. I mean, and they were difficult conversations in our firm. I see right in the investment committee. I mean, I think like when we invested in a bridge, they were at five million of ARR and we were paying whatever was seven, eight hundred million dollar valuation when we invested in Anthropic in that 15 billion round. I think they were at 100 million like 150 times current ARR. Lagora, 20 million of ARR when we invested and led that one point eight billion dollar round. That's insane. And if you're only looking at present and backwards, you'll say, Samir, do you not understand math like a hundred times? That's what you're paying to get in. But if your view, as was mine in each of those instances, was that, yeah, but on an NTM basis, and that's what I care about, I'm looking at what do I think in the next 12 months this thing can be and do I feel like this is a reasonable multiple in the next 12 months?
Speaker 2So you look at end of year next year, again, this is me trying to learn, you look at end of year next year and then you look at gross profit. Not even end of year.
Speaker 1Not end of year next year. I'll go NTM, next 12 months. And yeah, depending on the business, next 12 months only, because, you know, depending on where you are in the year, that could be more like 18 or 24 months. And I won't pay that far forward because it's really hard to see that far forward in any business. And I've been an operator. I've been a CEO. I know how hard it is to predict that far into the future when you're scaling at these rates. But next 12 months, you should be able to get your arms around, at least get closer.
Speaker 2What is exciting enough in that respect then? When you look at NTM, what is green versus red?
Speaker 1You know, depending on the business, it'll vary. But, you know, something that's in the 10 to 15 times NTM, I don't think is crazy, especially if there are these businesses that are growing at rates that have never been seen in the history of business. And I've certainly never seen in my career of 31 years. I don't feel like paying 10 to 15 times NTM is all that crazy because they're going to blow through it. And I look at, you know, Legora, we invested at $1.8 billion leading that round. And that seemed insane at the time, you know, but the company just went, you know, 20 to 200. And I know where I think we're in that together. I know, you know, Maxwell, you know, they're on fire. And I feel pretty good about that $1.8 billion.
Speaker 2We're going to get to Legora and I completely get that. Does your feeling good about that $1.8 billion change depending on customer makeup, quality of revenue, run rate versus enterprise revenue? We see some quirky ways to calculate revenue today. Does that change?
Speaker 1For sure. Quality of revenue matters. Deeply, you know, I prefer I'm in old school. I've been in enterprise B2B software since 1996. So that is my bias. I prefer the gross dollar retention rates, the net dollar retention rates of highly sticky customers that for whom your thing is super strategic and they're going to keep they're going to keep expanding. So I would pay a much lower multiple for like a prosumery business or a consumer business. You know, churn can can kill you.
Speaker 2So what about margins? You look at someone like Allegora, who we both love, their margins are good. And I think margins.
Speaker 1So this is where, you know, again, having done this for a while, like it depends on your lens. Am I worried about their gross margins in the next 12 months? I am not. I have got a whole period of five to seven years at a growth stage check. And so when I think of it over the next five years, what do I think that's going to grow into and why? You have to be really thoughtful on if the gross profit picture doesn't look pretty and you're envisioning some like, you know, fun with math and a spreadsheet that all of a sudden it's going to be magically hit 60 or 70 percent. And. Five years, you sure as hell better defend that. You better know why you think that that is possible. But in a lot of businesses, you know, economies of scale really matters. Share and position really matters. And, you know, I can remember most of the businesses I invested in gross margins at the time we invested in this world were meaningfully lower than they are at scale today. I mean, meaningfully lower like factors improvement inside of 12 to 24 months.
Speaker 2When we look. At, say, a leg or of the world. I'm an investor. I always hold my hands. I'm a big fan. You did it at one point eight billion. The legal market is 300 billion in the US. If we assume a 20 percent take for software and that is 60 billion dollars and we assume that it's split up between a couple of different players, including your Harvey of the world, you can get to like a five to 10 billion, maybe in revenue. Is that how you thought about it? And how do you get to a 10 20 X? When you enter two billion on a company like LaGuardia, help me.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, that math not terribly off. I would just say we included the whole world because you and I both know Max and he has global ambitions. And when you add in the rest of the world, by the way, you don't grow the tame a little bit. You add another 60 percent. You know, it's the US market is only 40 percent of it. But, yeah, I think that that math is is is not way off. I do believe you can get after the services dollars, I'll say, that go into into the legal market. It is, you know, the cliche that everybody keeps talking about. Devin's paradox. I do believe there's a lot of legal needs that don't get served today because the prices are too high. So I just think there's this market when you just have the way we thought about very simplistically, I'll say, is there's about a trillion dollars of legal services spend in the world. When you're just thinking about this, that size of the tam, I believe that they don't have to take any meaningful share of that to go build a massive business. And by the way, if they build a five to 10 billion dollar revenue business, that thing is going to be worth, you know, you put any multiple on that. Right. That is that is reasonable. And you're going to make you're going to make a very good return.
Speaker 2The thing that's interesting when you look at all markets today is the competitiveness has changed. When you were building, you know, SendGrid, you know, no offense, there weren't that many competitors. There were there were several, but not the depth that we have today. And when we look at like a Lagora and a Harvey, I'm going to be unpopular. I think both will do very well. When we look at a fireworks, I think base 10 and modal do well, too. I think fireworks will win, which is why my money is there. Has the competitiveness changed in your mind? And does that shape how you think about investing and market outcomes?
Speaker 1Well, I actually don't believe that the competitive breadth has changed. What's changed is the capital intensity behind the competition. And therefore, it leads to this competitive intensity. Right. Like if you looked at the the war chest, the amounts of money that take a Lagora and Harvey have both raised, that leads to a competitive intensity. That absolutely. Is different than than what I dealt with in my era. Is capital a moat today? Is that the differentiator? I absolutely believe capital is a moat. I have always said that markets pick winners and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like in our day, you know, SendGrid and Twilio were the API building blocks to to plug into your application to go send communications. And then once developers had decided that it was game over, we had won like that. You were the default that you became the market winner. And that does happen. And we see it in our. In these markets. If we take that one as an example, there are lots of legal tech companies, lots of AI legal providers. But if you ask anybody at a big law firm who are the major legal AI companies, they would they would name those two. And so I do believe that the capital creates the both the ability to scale at an extraordinary pace and therefore a brand for those businesses. Talent then ends up flocking and then you just get this reinforced flywheel, then they win more customers and then that just, you know, the virtuous cycle continues.
Speaker 2Do you believe in king making? I do. To your point that if capital is a moat, excessive amounts in short amounts of time give inherent advantages. Do you agree with king making like I do or not?
Speaker 1Yes, because I believe everything you said, which is the capital is a moat and it is a signal to the market. And having built software companies for a very long time, your product has to be exceptional. Your company leadership has to be accepted. It's I would say in, you know, in math speak, it's necessary, but not sufficient. It is a necessary condition for you to win the market that you have the biggest war chest, that you have the most capital. I really do believe that you are in that kind of a game and it's because the compute is so scarce and therefore the compute is so expensive that if you don't have that, you just can't play. So, yes, I agree with you at the first part of your statement, but it is not sufficient. You have to then deliver an amazing product that your customers rave about, love about, tell their friends about if you want to be the king. Otherwise, you have no chance.
Speaker 2So I agree with you completely. There and I also agree with what you said earlier, which is like, you know, the 10 to 12 X and the growth rates now are very different to what they were. When you look at what you're seeing today, growth rate wise, is the triple, triple, double, double that sasta and me and Jason always talked about. Is that wrong? Is that not enough anymore?
Speaker 1It is not enough to attract capital from venture capitalists who have opportunities to put them into these hyper growth companies that are growing much, much, much faster. You know, all of us as venture capital funds. Your capital, as big as these funds are, we just raised five point seven five billion dollars. It's still scarce capital. There are deals to be done at crazy hyper growth rates. Now, all that said, I do still believe in finding companies that are doing the T2D3 because the entry prices on those in this environment can be dramatically different, very different multiple. And you can still make a great venture return on those.
Speaker 2Do you buy that? Do you remember the kind of, I call it the Excel deal. Remember the Excel growth deals like the one passwords, the Qualtrics, where they found these kind of amazing assets in less obvious locations that will maybe more capital efficient. They then juice them up with some growth capital and then it turns into an even better business. Do you believe those will exist in the next gen or actually not? You have to have that capital to get to the scale.
Speaker 1I think that over time we'll see a bunch of application companies that can look like what you just described. I just don't think that that's where the venture dollars are going to flow in the near term. When you have opportunities to invest in things that are 10x-ing at scale and your opportunity is something that's doubling, of course you're going to go to the 10x-ing. That's just like an intelligence test. We call it cake or death.
Speaker 2You ever seen Eddie Izzard? He goes, "Cake or death?" And you go, "Cake, please." Wow. What a surprise. I wasn't expecting that.
Speaker 1What a tough question. But all that said, do I think we can make money investing in companies that are T2D3? Absolutely, you can. And so then it comes a little bit of a mixed question, like how much do you want to have in one versus the other?
Speaker 2So you mentioned the $5.75 billion. It's quite a lot, to be honest. Let's just start with the $1.75 billion seeding early. Do you need a billion dollars to do seed today? We just saw literally earlier today, USV announced their $900 million funds. Do you need a billion to do seed?
Speaker 1Yeah. I don't have a billion dollars. looked at the venture capital asset class and I said, this looks nothing like what I grew up with in the mid late 90s, where everything was hardware software in Silicon Valley and principally early stage. And now it is global. Every sector you could imagine and everything from a pre-seed check threw up into IPO where you're investing hundreds of millions of dollars. Every one of the vectors that I just mentioned of location, stage and sector are dramatically different and broader. It's just the professionalization of this asset class. And so if you think of it in that context, you're like, OK, well, in most industries, when they professionalize and they get to scale, you either have to be on this end of the spectrum, which is a giant global platform that consolidates a whole bunch over here, or you need to be an extreme specialist over here that is doing fill in the blank. You know, I'm doing AI deals in San Francisco, early stage, right? You got to optimize. Specialty on all three dimensions. You could be one of those two. And if you're in between, good luck. I think that's a rough place to be. I really do. And it's the reason that Bessemer is going, you know, we have, I think Bessemer is a big global platform. But man, I tell you, like not being a giant global platform or an incredible specialist who can add differentiated value and be better at picking because you are a specialist. So what happens to the billion dollar funds? I don't know, but I'm glad I'm not that one of them. I'll tell you that. I think you have to be on either end. I really do. I really do. And look, you can, I mean, I'm sure there's a path to success for everybody. Good luck. I just, I'm just giving you my outside in unvarnished view, just as a business guy, looking at an industry, you know, I'm just analyzing it clinically. And I'm telling you what, that's what I've seen in the history of business is when markets get big, they consolidate and they have special. I mean, you take like automotive, it doesn't matter what industry you pick. There will be, you know, your big three in the U.S. or, you know, the Toyota Hondas in Japan, like you get a handful of giant players on one end. And then you can be like, I am a Porsche or a Ferrari or a specialty player on the other side of the spectrum. But being in the middle is a tough place to be, I think.
Speaker 2It is. I think it's a very tough place to be. Can I ask you, when you look at the two different vehicles today, I had Venky from Manilow on the show, mutual friend of ours.
Speaker 1Yeah, I love Venky.
Speaker 2Yeah, he got some stick for saying that early stage and seed investments were, option bets. And you build a portfolio of option bets. Yeah, it's hard not to have seen that. I think we're at about 5 million views. But he's by definition right. If you have the majority of your dollars at late stage, by nature of doing early stage, unless you said I'm deliberately not going to invest in anything that I do early, which would be utterly moronic and irrational, it by nature has to be an option.
Speaker 1I think having been on both sides of the operator and venture thing, I think being umbrage with was the notion that maybe, maybe this is what they're, I don't know, was that the, I'm an entrepreneur of a small thing. I don't want to just be an option. I know Venky well. I know him personally. He's a great dude. They're a great firm. That is not what he meant. But what he meant intellectually is 100% correct. It is an option. And if it works, then I'm going to put more capital behind it. I mean, anybody in venture capital, I believe that listened to that or thought through that understands that to be a truism. And I think there may have been a little bit of a flack on the, maybe on the, the human entrepreneurs that are doing the hard work of trying to do the right thing. I think that's a great thing. I think that's to build these things and I don't want to just be an option, but I actually, I would, I would challenge those entrepreneurs having been one myself. And I would say, no, man, like understand that your business, you have to earn the right to keep scaling you to earn the right to the next round, to get more capital, to keep building towards your dream. That is the game. And if you're, if you don't think that is true, you're not understanding the game.
Speaker 2Can you help me on totally agree when, when you have the 1.75, does that have reserves baked in or is the idea that you have no reserves there? And then you double down from the 4 billion, which is growth?
Speaker 1Both. We, we absolutely have reserves baked in to the 1.75, but we don't want to just be like doing pro rata checks. Like in the companies that we believe are taken off, we want to back up the truck as we've done. Like we just announced a round with a lease AI where, you know, we were going to be investing nearly $200 million that we just announced. And so like, when we see the winners that we think are in big markets are going to build great companies, like we're like, yep,
Speaker 2let's go. What does that look like then that interplay Do you worry about the signaling risk of like Samir jumping all over one company and not another company? No, I don't.
Speaker 1I just, at the end of the day, I believe the truth will set you free. Just like if the signaling risk is they haven't backed up at the rock of my company yet, the signaling there is simply, yeah, the business hasn't yet demonstrated that it is going to be going like this. That's okay. I led one of those. It takes a while. It's hard to build businesses, man. Like I've been in the seat and I think the entrepreneurs and the CEOs, they know the business they have, they know what they're working on. They know what they have to do to take it to the next level. And if they're not yet at the next level, I don't think they're, most CEO entrepreneurs aren't going to want to try to pretend that they're not.
Speaker 2So you have $4 billion then in growth going to your segment of the market. How does that look? When you look at the portfolio there, how concentrated is that? What does the check size look like? What does the reserves look like? I'm fascinated how you construct a $4 million portfolio.
Speaker 1It's incredible because the numbers are obviously kind of staggering. They're large, but I don't think that the fundamentals are perhaps not all that crazily different in that we still want to have concentrated bets. And so what that means is a concentrated bet means, shoot, we may write $200 to $400 million into a given opportunity, into a given company, if we have that much conviction. And it'll probably be over a couple different rounds, a couple of few rounds, but you're still looking for a relative concentration whatever it is.
Speaker 2What percent of the fund would you be happy to go up to for a single company?
Speaker 15% to 10% is sort of what I think our average check size will be. For late stage growth, to be clear, for our late growth funds, early growth is a little bit different. But late growth, 5% to 10% feels fine. And I'll just tell you, our last growth fund, our century two, I think we had 20% into one name. The name was Anthropic. I feel pretty good about it. So we will flex it up if we believe it is a generational company.
Speaker 2You have an early growth and a late growth. We do. Yeah. Fucking hell.
Speaker 3Early growth is very different than late growth. It's so different. Why? Okay. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Go ahead. They're both growth. No, no, no, no, no. Why don't we do an early growth, a mid growth, a not so late growth, a late growth, a pre IPO?
Speaker 1I will concede, Harry, that there is a arbitrary distinction cutoff line somewhere, but I will tell you qualitatively, there is a. There's a big difference between investing in a company that is in there in the 20 to 40 million of revenue range, or is between, you know, call it, I don't know, half a billion to a billion dollar valuation versus I'm coming into a fireworks at 15 billion. That's a. I mean, you're talking about a very different stage of company. What you know about the business is different. The risk profile is different. The check size is going to be different. All the things are going to be different.
Speaker 2I get all of that. But I think what matters is your multiple and invested cash. And actually, I think if you look at, say, a fireworks, I think the upside is just freaking enormous. And I adore the Agora. But by nature, I think the upside is just less because it's a vertical market. It's not intelligence for the world. I mean, I think Max would agree with that. It is law. And even if it's tax and compliance as well, it is still relatively verticalized. And so I think your multiple and invested cash is what you should be looking at. Which I would argue would be the same, actually.
Speaker 1I agree with you that many of the opportunities that we are investing in, because we are only trying to invest in the very best in both of those stages of early growth and late growth. I do believe that on both sides of those, you can find 10 and 20x companies. We want nothing less than a five. And that's a really high bar in growth.
Speaker 2What did you do from your early growth that's not in your late growth that you rue not putting in your late growth? Oh, that's a good question.
Speaker 1I'm really excited. I'm really excited about another vertical AI company called FieldGuide that is in its AI for auditors, right? So we've done AI for doctors with a bridge and AI for lawyers with EvenUp and Legora and FieldGuide is AI for auditors. And I did that one early. They were, I think they were sub 10 million of ARR at the time we invested is probably a little under a $200 million entry price. And they're just ripping. They're growing really fast. I'm really excited for them and proud of them. And we haven't yet. Been able to back up the truck. Their inflection has been extraordinary. I think like a lot of companies post this January, February magical time when the models took a leap forward, all of a sudden, their solution became wildly more compelling and the uptake is showing it.
Speaker 2I'm going to push you, but is that really a generational company? Like no offense. Yeah, it's fascinating. But no, no, but like fireworks is. Cognition or factory could be. Sure. And again, I mean, it was zero disrespect to FieldGuide. It can be a phenomenal business, a 10, 20 billion business, but to be in the late growth as Excel calls it, like the leader's fund for Excel, is this really the generational?
Speaker 1Well, it depends on your view of where you would define generational. If generational now is you got to get to a hundred billion dollar market cap, then yeah, I agree with you. It's probably not that. And some of those others certainly can be, but I think it's an extraordinary business. And this one, I wish I had
Speaker 2backed up the truck on more. And if the price is right, then to the point that we said earlier, the multiple and invested cash can actually be the same. Exactly right. That's fine. Do you have separate teams for early to late growth?
Speaker 1No. Same group. We've got four great GPs, an amazing team of VPs and associates that are going after this thing. We've been working on it. Man, I'll tell you, Harry, I am so fired up about our growth team and the practice we have built over the last few years. I'd put our growth portfolio up against any growth team in the world. I really do. I think we're going to have one of the best portfolios in all of growth, in all of venture capital.
Speaker 2I spoke to many people on your team beforehand, and they said the real focus you have on culture. And I thought, oh, gosh, how boring. Come on, man. It's the most important topic. Every CEO is like, I want to talk about culture. And then you speak to their team, and it's different. It's just like every marketing team is like, talk about culture, talk about culture. I did hear something, though, that I would like to ask. Talia told me to ask you about teammates. Teammates and friends beat colleagues and co-workers every day and twice on Sunday.
Speaker 1And twice on Sunday. That's right, man. I have used that line repeatedly for a decade now. How does that impact how you build a venture firm today, then? Well, look, first I'll explain the genesis of the line, and then I'll talk about why I think it's so important, even in firm building, as much as it was. It came from when I was leading and serving at SendGrid. And I have just always believed, like, building businesses. The hardest thing. The hardest thing to do is to align masses of humans, so many people, to work in a coordinated and orchestrated way towards a singular goal. That is really effing hard to do, man. And every CEO listening is like, yep, they hear that. They know that. That is the hard bit. And I have found it was a strategic competitive advantage if your team, if your humans actually liked each other, if they actually cared about each other, and they thought of each other as teammates and not colleagues. And the reason, Harry, is that teammates. Work harder for each other. They're not working for themselves. They're working for their teammates, and they're working for their team. And you never want to effing let down your teammates.
Speaker 2I get you. I obviously agree. You can't disagree. But then how do I then put that into practice to turn coworkers and colleagues into teammates? What can be done?
Speaker 1I'm going to start with the most important basics. You have to be aligned on culture and values. Like, how we do our work has to be super clear, and everybody aligns up to it. There's no changing of the stage. You can't have the asshole that's a great performer that doesn't abide by the rules if you say, or whatever it is, whatever your culture and values are, you have to get everybody working in the same way. You've got to protect that. And everybody has to be empowered on the team to be like, nope, I'm going to call that out if you are deviating from our culture and values. So culture and values, I think a good value is something that could be argued for or against. Disagree. The value isolated from the organization, sure, anybody could agree or disagree. But you have to have a set of them. That you're like, this is our way, you know, this was the SendGrid way of doing things. We had our four H's. Happy, hungry, humble, and honest. Four H's. Happy, hungry, humble, honest. And those were our four. And everything we did had to reinforce those four. If you deviate, and so it was great for SendGrid.
Speaker 2You can't argue that you shouldn't be happy, you shouldn't be hungry. We want unhappy, unambitious liars.
Speaker 1No. Okay, I'll push back. I'll push back. Here's the example. I always said that, and I loved SendGrid, our culture. I thought it was amazing. I think our teammates, if you could go track down any gridder out there and say, hey, did you enjoy working at SendGrid? Was it a special team? And no, to my bone, that 100 out of 100 of them will say, yes, it was. And the reason for that, though, is like, take the humble H. It would have been seventh hell as a place to work for a certain group of humans, right? Like our humble H was we, not I. It was about, you know, we would ask people in interviews, Harry, tell me about a professional accomplishment of which you are most proud. And then we would say, well, I don't know. We would sit back and do a pronoun count. How often does Harry say we? How often does Harry say I? I want the people that say we. Now, that was just, that was our value. That was SendGrid's value. That doesn't mean it's the right value, to your point. You could argue either side of that. I don't care. But for our company, our team, the way we work together is this way. And if you're not that way, that's fine. It's a big labor market. Go find another place to work. That's great. No harm, no foul. But man, like it matters that the people you bring in want to work together in a certain way. And that's how you do it. That's how you build a team and not colleagues and coworkers. And by the way, so that's number one. But number two, I guess number two, number two, which is also equally important to get teammates and not just colleagues, is you go spend time together, not doing work. I know it sounds so crazy. Like when I was leading SendGrid, we flew the entire company every January down to Mexico for an annual kickoff. The whole effing company, not like a sales team, you know, president's club. I mean, the whole company. And we'd lock them in a room for a day. We would get lined up on here's the vision. Here's the mission. This is why we're doing what we're doing. Here are the goals for the year. Blah, blah, blah. Like we they would have the whole second day was go find somebody from another office and go kayaking together. Go mountain biking together. Go sit by the pool and have a drink together. I don't care what you do. Just do it together. And the reason this matters, Harry, is that for all the CEOs listening out there, they will understand what I say. This shit goes wrong when you're building businesses. It's hard. And when you have a group of colleagues and coworkers, you know what? You know what they do? First, when shit goes wrong, they either go like this. And for those listening, I'm pointing my fingers as if you're pointing at each other. Right. It's blame placing. Sales isn't responding to the leaves fast enough. Marketing isn't generating enough pipe for me. When things aren't going well, you they point fingers or worse. They just head for the doors because they're just like, well, I go to the next company because I'm just a colleague. This is just a job. But a teammate, teammates and friends in hard moments when you're building a business. And believe me, there are many that group of people in a team. Are going to come together when they don't start pointing fingers. They come together and they go across and be like, Harry, dude, I spent time with you mountain biking or kayaking or sitting by the pool, having a beverage. You're a good dude. We got to figure this out for our team. That's how you solve problems in when times are hard. And I'm just telling you, man, teammates and friends will beat colleagues and coworkers every day and twice on Sunday.
Speaker 2No, I totally get that. I completely agree with that headline. I think I'm very trained and strongly believed in the values being differentiated and arguable. So we believe that hard work, the hardest of work leads to better results. I don't buy the rest days. I don't buy rest days in the gym. You train a different body part. You do cardio, not weights. Phelps won. No, but a lot of people don't agree with that. I'm chastised for it in Europe. I'm the spawn of Satan. Like, seriously, dude, it's not popular. I will get booed on stage by labor conferences.
Speaker 1No kidding. Well, listen, I'll tell you this, man. I couldn't. I couldn't agree with you more. I think, you know, I'm the son of two immigrants. Work ethic is everything. That hungry age. Like, my line was always, I want to work with people who are going to run through effing walls to be successful, who will not relent. Like, we quote the Eminem song, like, success is my only mother effing option. Failure is not. Like, that is, I want people like that.
Speaker 2Number two for us. Feelings are expensive in investment committees. Samit, if me and you are in an investment committee, I want to say you're an idiot for thinking that we should pay that price. For X company. And why is that? I don't want to have to tread around it. Like, Samir, thank you for bringing this. I appreciate the time you spent with the entrepreneur. But I think we should consider. I'm sorry. We're both big enough.
Speaker 1So, yeah, sure. I mean, you know, and again, so that like that can be great for your team and culture and people that are going to opt into that are going to be awesome together. And they're going to appreciate the directness. I would say, you know, the intellectual honesty in the IC is actually what matters most.
Speaker 2But then my point is actually. It's great that you can debate because I'm not right. It's just our way. But what I don't understand is the values like Zoom, which is like, I think, happiness. I know no one's advocating for unhappiness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I hear that.
Speaker 1I hear that. And by the way, I'll just say on the happiness one, by the way, at SendGrid, our happiness, I did find at SendGrid, I had to write down, what do we mean by each of these four H's? And the happy for me was, of course, we want employees to be happy. But that's not what I meant by the happy H at SendGrid. It was, I want people who are going to see the world and our business as half full. The glass is half full, not half empty. And there are just people who are going to be negative, man, who are going to be like, you know, Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh are just going to be downers. I'm like, no, man, I want people who are optimists, who are fired up to go tackle problems. And that's what I meant by happy. Not like I'm, you know, joyful. That's great, too. I hope you're joyful. But I want you to be a positively disposed person who, when things go bad or are hard. Yeah. You're not going to go negative and bring the team down with you.
Speaker 2If we go back to venture, we're seeing some of the most incredible value accumulation from these businesses. We've mentioned Agora. We've mentioned Fireworks. I think you're in Fowl as well. How do you think about when's the right time to sell? And with IPOs being continuously pushed, maybe as many more stripes. How do you think about liquidity events?
Speaker 1Yeah. Look, I joke about being new to the business four and a half years. But I do know that DPI matters. I'm not that new. I know that liquidity matters. DPI matters. Our LPs are not in the business of handing us the money for perpetuity. So we got to get it back to them in multiples. And I get that. Right now, I think because we're still so early in this AI wave, it's not a principal concern. But I would say because I think these businesses are going to keep compounding and keep compounding at scale. But I do think that we should look for opportunities just practically, just being prudent. risk aware business. businesspeople. You should take some chips off the table along the journey to make sure that you're getting some DPI and locking in gains for your LPs and your funds.
Speaker 2You should. Do you find that you're. This is a backhanded compliment. Do you find that you're able to, given the brand of Bessemer, is often a very premium brand in a round?
Speaker 1Yeah. No, I appreciate that. And I do think we have a great brand. I think that when we're looking for a little bit of liquidity to take some chips off the table and bring DPI back, it tends to be at very late stages of the journey. And most people see it for what it is, which is, yeah, they've got an enormous position here. They're going to make lots and lots of money and the whole thing is going to continue to compound. But to take a little bit off the table to get back to LPs, I just find people are more matter of fact about that now. And this is back to the whole professionalization of the asset class. What used to feel like a personal decision and like, do you not believe in me anymore? You don't believe in my business anymore. I just think that at the scale of the businesses that we're building, the size of the checks that we are now writing at the valuations that we're writing them, I think people get it. CEOs are very, I've been on the other side, like they're sophisticated business people.
Speaker 2They understand. I totally agree with you there. And I think people oscillate too much on the, oh, they'd be so upset if you sold. I think founders are actually very rational and smart about it.
Speaker 1Super rational. Look, I mean, you tell me, what percentage of the founders that you're working with that get to crazy late stage don't take any in secondary themselves? As the rounds of financing go through, most of mine are, and they're doing the right thing for their families, right? And I tell them to, I'm like, shoot, you should probably sell a little bit here, bud, to make sure that you're financially secure for your family. And I think that's great.
Speaker 2No problem. I think it makes better founders. I completely agree with you. You think with a much longer time.
Speaker 1And then they're willing to swing for the fences, right?
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. Completely agree with you. Can I ask, do you think we see the number of IPOs drastically reduce as Stripe shows that public markets can be harder than private markets if done well? How do you think about that?
Speaker 1I want to get a few comments here. One, I believe that it is a permanent structural shift that companies will stay private longer. The asset class of private venture capital is just that much bigger. There are that many more dollars in the market and that many more firms, that many, I mean, it's just, so they will stay private longer. And I think that is a given. And I think, you know, see crossovers that are spending more time on the market. And I think that's a given. And I think, you know, that are spending more time here. I think LPs are allocating more to the asset class because they get that they can't reap the rewards of this generational boom. If they're waiting for them in the public markets, most of that run up will have already happened in the private markets. So I absolutely believe that is true. I also believe that we will see an unlock in the IPO markets next year, later next year. And in twenty twenty eight, I think a lot of companies will go public. And I just think we've had this, you know, the window has been shut. For so long. Can I ask you, why will that unlock happen? What will cause it? You know, I'm an economist by training, man. And so supply and demand is the thing. It's just the thing. And so what's going to happen, in my humble opinion, is you'll see a bunch of great businesses go public that will have a lot of success in the market. But there will be an obvious appetite from investors in the public markets to get pure play exposure. And they don't want it from just a few companies. They're going to want it in dozens. Or hundreds of companies that are pure play exposed. And I just think the supply and demand, the demand will be so incredible that they will be willing to pay price and then supply and demand works. Prices move. And I think we'll see a lot of companies that the window will be open. A lot of people will come out. I'll say one last point on the IPO thing, which is having done it myself, I believe it makes for a better company. Deeply believe like you run a tighter ship when you are a public company. I always used to say it's angry. I was I said we need to be IPO worthy before when we were building up to our IPO. I was like, we got to be IPO worthy. And what does that mean? I mean, it is a high bar to withstand the scrutiny of the public eye. That is hard to like quarter in quarter out predictably deliver on what you say you will do is hard. But you build a really rigorous and operationally disciplined machine. And I hope a lot of companies will will take take advantage of that.
Speaker 2I do. Do you still buy that? And what I mean by that is like, you know, when they release their numbers, and when they release their numbers, or the great numbers, you have similar kind of reactions, like the expectations have just shifted. And these companies have those expectations anyway. And I would argue that actually Stripe is able to do a lot of things because of their private nature that Adyen is not able to do, which make them structurally advantaged. I think you are enabled to be better because you're private, rather than
Speaker 1the discipline. Yeah, look, I hear that. I think there's there are pros and cons to anything. I think there's pros and cons to anything. I think there's you're right, you do you have latitude to make, you know, particularly big product investments, you can go, you know, deep in the, in the red for periods of time, if you think you need a shift, I got to take a big hit, whatever, like, but on the flip side, there are things that you can do as a public company, like I have a currency, I can go do M&A, I can, there are lots of there, there are pros and cons on both sides.
Speaker 2I get you, but Stripe do an M&A for open route of $8 billion. I mean, they wanted to buy obviously PayPal for $55 billion. Like you have that now. You have liquidity for employees and investors. I'm just wondering, actually, are we seeing really the winnowing of that IPO attractiveness? Yeah, maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1I just when I talk to our companies that we're invested in, they still want to go public. Yeah, they still it is. And by the way, in certain in certain markets, it's a badge of credibility, right? Like those companies, their customers care, they're like, okay, these guys are legit, they're real, they're at scale, they're public, like that, you know, it connotes.
Speaker 2Ironically, for things like or I think it also totally makes sense. It's a consumer brand, one where retail wants to be part of it. Do you think retail should be a much larger part of the LP base of venture funds? If we have so much more gains now in private markets? Do you think retail should play a large part in the LP base of venture?
Speaker 1Harry, I think it's hard to argue in terms of the, you know, what we would call kind of the democratization of access to that. I think it's hard to argue against.
Speaker 2I do. What do you because I okay, because I could argue against it. Sorry. I mean, really, I'm going to it. Because I do you honestly, Bessemer is a very over funded products. There's so many people that want access to it. If you just had a random people's fund, I don't know if it would beat out the hospitals and pension funds. And so then you have adverse selection. And then retail just goes into ship funds would be an argument.
Speaker 1By the way, I retail should only go into back to our earlier part of the conversation, either giant global platforms with brand and leverage and power, or super, super specialized folks. And you know, you're taking the lead. You're taking risk. And if that doesn't feel comfortable for the retail investor, they shouldn't play, because it is a high risk game. And, you know, there's a lot of argument in this day, especially when the public markets have been ripping like they are. If you're a retail investor, just put it in the public market and don't take the liquidity hit and just let it compound in the public markets. But But yeah, obviously, I believe when I look at our portfolio of companies, I'm like, these things are going to continue to grow and compound and deliver gains that are not accessible in the public markets. And so that's where I would go.
Speaker 2Can you paint? I'm one of my favorite companies. Period is fireworks. I think Lynn is generational. Can you paint the bull case for how this is a $250 billion business?
Speaker 1Look, I think, and by the way, I couldn't agree more. Lynn is extraordinary. And so is George Hu, that just joined our team as president.
Speaker 2On the first call with me, I get on, I've never met him before. Okay, first call, Lynn gives me to him. And this is before it's like to determine whether I'll be able to invest. I go, George, I've heard so much from Mark, and I'm trying to be charming. He goes, yeah, yeah, cool. So tell me, how are you going to increase the value of this business?
Speaker 1That is my man. That is my man, George.
Speaker 3He's going to cut right to it.
Speaker 2No talk about the weather. Sure, George, let's go straight into it. Sorry, I interrupted.
Speaker 1You were saying about you working with George. We worked together at Twilio. He was deeply involved in the diligence to when we were doing the Twilio SendGrid acquisition. We were in the same exec leadership team room with Jeff Lawson, who's extraordinary and a bunch of great people. And in those trenches together for 18 months. And I'll just tell you, I've been in doing this for 31 years. He is absolutely one of the very best software executives in the industry, period, full stop. Why? What makes him so good? First off, George, he's an exceptional thinker. He's super strategic. He's very analytical. He has been doing this for decades. And he knows how to run. He knows how to build a go-to-market engine. Harry, like very few people in technology in the market today know how to build. And so when his joining Lynn and Fireworks, I'll just say, preceded our investment by about a month or two because George joined. And I'm like, dude, these guys are going to crush because you have the brilliance of Lynn, strategic thinker, deep technologist, unbelievable technical team for Meta. And now George building the go-to-market engine. That is the pitch right there. You asked me for the bull case. Those two together at the top of that company leading, they're going to build an enormous business. So I'll leave. I'll leave it there. I will say, though, in terms of the TAM and the market and what they're doing, I think their general pitch of enterprises are not going to want to rent intelligence from somebody else. They're going to want to own their own. I just think it's like the simplest and really compelling tagline for any enterprise CIO buyer. And personally, I think there'll be a healthy amount of both. But man, it's hard to imagine a business saying, yeah, no, I don't want to own any of my intelligence. Every business is going to want to own some of their intelligence, for sure. Do you buy the sovereign model argument? I do. We're invested in two. We're invested in Sarvam in India, and we. are invested in or investing in Mistral right now.
Speaker 2And so you think that, hey, countries in geopolitical regions will, for obvious geopolitical concerns, need to have access to their own. Is that it? And to what extent then do we just go down the stack of we need our own energy providing?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll say in certain markets and for certain use cases, right? So like, and they're different. Like in India, I think, you know, one of the things that makes India such a ripe opportunity for intelligence local to their market is the Indic languages. There are so many different languages and training the models on their own content. And so, and that's multimodal, it's voice, it's text, it's all the things. There's a very particular argument there. And not to mention, of course, they have some of the best technologists at scale in India who can work on the problem. In the case of a Mistral, look at the end of the day, like if you're trying to determine whatever my military strategy is, I'm going to be able to do it. I'm going to be able to fill in the blank. There are certain use cases where if it's a government use case or a regulated industry or whatever, that having it be a sovereign model is probably going to feel more comfortable to that buyer. And again, when you've got a market as big as intelligence, it doesn't have to be all the buyers. Some of the buyers decide that they want to use that sovereign model for some of the use cases in some of the industries, and you're going to build a very large business.
Speaker 2When you're writing a check, how does the upside requirement change depending on the vehicle that it's in? And so for us, I'll put it very simply, from the early fund, we need to see a fund returner, which means a 50x. And from the growth fund for us, we need to see a 10x. It doesn't need to be a fund returner, but a 10x. How does that upside requirement change for you and look?
Speaker 1What you said actually is very consistent with how we think about it. We want 5x plus funds, right? That's just really hard to do at any stage. You can only get to that if at the later stage, you're putting big dollars behind businesses, some of which may be lower than that, but some of which are going to be way higher than that. And in the early stage, man, you know, by definition, your hit rate is going to be so much lower because they are earlier stage. There's just less developed businesses. You're going to need some 50xs to account for and pull up all the ones that don't work out. Obviously, it's de-risked when you get to the growth stage a lot more. So the upper bound doesn't need to be quite that high. You don't need 50xs. And, although some of ours, I think, may approach that, but that's not the same bar. I think the blended gets to the same place. Do you think you can still do a 5x given the fund sizes being as large as they are? 100%. No hesitation, especially in this era because of what is happening in the world right now. When you see businesses scaling at the rates we are scaling them, Harry, the value creation. And so it's not a hypothetical anymore. I sounded like a crazy person three years ago when I would say this stuff. But now everybody just looks at me like, oh, yeah, that's true. I can think of 10 examples. And so there's no debating that we're seeing value creation in this era unlike anything we have ever seen. And so absolutely, I believe we can generate those kinds of returns.
Speaker 2You can only invest in one of those funds, early growth or late growth. Which one do you invest in?
Speaker 1If I can only pick one, yeah. I mean, me personally, obviously, I'm focused on the growth stage. And I really do like the opportunities. But I actually think
Speaker 2we'll do better there. I think outcome scenarios are bigger than they've been. And I think the upside and the multiple invested cash is much bigger. I think we both did fireworks at like a 15 price. I think there's a 20x in there for us.
Speaker 1I agree. 100%. And so when you can get early venture return moiks on late stage de-risk companies, man, I'm with you. That is a great spot. I will say that we have a world class early stage franchise that's been doing pre-seed, seed, early series A's for a very, very long time. If you can buy, 10% and 20% ownership early for small checks, man, that's fantastic too. We're going to continue to keep doing that all day long. But it's definitely an and. That's why I love our model as a giant platform. The synergy of that practice with our early growth practice, with our late practice,
Speaker 2is really, really something. I want to do a quick fire where I pepper you with questions and you give me your immediate answer. Okay. Who's the best picker in all of Bessemer?
Speaker 1The picker. I mean, I think we got a bunch. I think Byron Jeremy, Adam Fisher in Israel, and David Callen out here has been doing it for three decades. But if I had to pick one, I will say Byron Dieter, mostly because when we were going public the morning of the IPO, we're in the New York Stock Exchange. We brought out every SendGridder who had been in the company for more than four or five years. So we have this room full of SendGrid employees. Then president of the New York Stock Exchange comes out to welcome and greet us before the bell ringing ceremony. And he says, I just want to welcome all you SendGrid employees that are here. You should be so proud. SendGrid management, so great to have you all. Esteemed board members, thanks for coming and being part of this special moment. Byron, great to see you again. And he just pauses. He's like, Byron, how many times have I seen you here in the last, mind you, this is a decade ago. And Byron sheepishly, because he's a very humble guy, says, and I can't remember the number at the time, he flashed up like six. And we just laughed that he had been there for multiple of these IPOs in the recent time. And then I was sitting right in front of Byron and I just started to count in my head. And I was like, I'm going to do this. And I was like, I could come up with more than the six. I'm like, no, no, you've done more than six. And I turned back and I was like, no, it's more than that. And he said, six here. NASDAQ was another big number. He has had so many from early stage all the way through IPO. I mean, it's hard not to say Byron
Speaker 2Dieter. Byron is the picker. Who is the winner? And what I mean by that is when you're like, oh, Sequoia around this, founders around this, benchmarking, who is the one person who closes better than anyone else? Oh, that's a good one, too.
Speaker 1Can I revise my answer then? Knowing both of those two, I would go with David Cowan as the picker because he finds stuff that everybody thinks is crazy, like Rocket Lab that then becomes, you know, an enormous business and nobody knows what he's doing. But when it comes to closing, Byron Dieter every time, for sure. One hundred percent. That guy is he is a force of nature. He's charming. He's funny. He's smart as all get out. His experience is ridiculous. He knows how to have a good time. He'll host people. Whether it's at a 49ers football game or up skiing at his house in Montana. I mean, the guy is as he's an amazing, amazing closer.
Speaker 2What company is Basserman not in that universally the firm rues and wishes it wasn't?
Speaker 1So many. I would say Stripe. We were the developer API venture capital firm. We were, you know, led the seed and I think in B and Twilio led the series B and SendGrid. We had Auth0 that David Cowan led. I mean, we were the developer API company and we weren't in Stripe. That hurts. That's probably, I'll use that one.
Speaker 2You can add one person to the venture partnership that is not there currently. It's a dream ad. It's not like a realist. But who would that be?
Speaker 1If I could convince Ravi Matre to come join us, I would love Ravi over here from Lightspeed. Ravi is an incredible deep thinker, goes deep on the technology and the markets. You look at some of the investments that he has led and made. Not the least of which was a billion-dollar check into Anthropic in the $60 billion round. That guy, he's just, he's really good and he's willing. He's not just really good, but he's willing to take these giant risks that seem almost borderline insane. And I have deep, mad respect for both. Billion-dollar check. That is
Speaker 2some serious bulls. The finance director, like typing those zeros must just
Speaker 1be like, wow, this
Speaker 2is wow.
Speaker 1That's a lot of numbers. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? In the last 12, I would say just my deep appreciation for how big the open token economy is going to be. I just didn't see it 12 months ago. I didn't appreciate it. It's a big part of the reason we're investing as much as we are behind Fall and Fireworks, both Fall on the gen media side and the infrastructure side there. And they're going up and down the stack. They're amazing, amazing business, amazing team. And Fireworks, obviously, we talked a lot about. Those two, I just didn't appreciate them at all. I just didn't appreciate them at all. I just didn't appreciate how big that market was going to be 12 months ago. Final one for you. What are you most genuinely excited about moving forwards? I'll say two. One is I'm wildly fired up about all things robotics and embodied AI. We invested nearly $200 million into Waymo. And I just think that autonomy and what that changes and how that changes the way we work and live, I think is awesome.
Speaker 2Is that humanoids or is that not humanoids?
Speaker 1It can be, can be. And certainly an area that we've been looking at. And, I think we're probably in the equivalent in embodied robotics in that sense. I think we're probably at circa 2021 relative to the generative AI era. So I think we're still, we've got a couple few years to go, but it's on one of these curves, man. It's going to go, it's happening fast. So I think we will get there faster than most people think.
Speaker 2Are you in any of the robotic data companies? We saw Mecca just get done by Sequoia yesterday. You've got MicroAGI in Europe. Are you in them? How do you see the data market for robotics?
Speaker 1We are not yet that I know of, or that I can think of offhand, but I know that we have spent a lot of time around robotics. And so I'm sure there's my early stage partners listening, going, Samir, come on, man. We met with like 20 of these. We're going to make this pick. I don't actually know offhand. I think there's a lot of excitement in the firm around that area. I'm personally looking at the autonomy, you know, we did Waymo, but now you're like, okay, what about autonomy in construction? What about autonomy in mining? What about autonomy in agriculture? You know, there's tons of areas.
Speaker 2This is a good quickfire, you do Waymo at 1:15 and Uber a market cap of 120, 125.
Speaker 1Why am I a moron? Because you're looking at the ride-hailing market as the only market. That's not the only market, Harry. I have a 16-year-old son that I just bought a car for. If I could have bought that car with an option to have a Waymo driver on it and pay them a subscription every single month on that car or any car that we bought as a family, it'd be a default purchase. Of course, I would do it. Just like Tesla and Elon's got it for his FSD on his cars. I think Waymo has the opportunity to do that for every other OEM on the planet. Are they doing that today? It's not their near-term focus. They're focused on ride-hailing. They're crushing it. They're rolling out both nationally and globally to every city. They're going to build an enormous business on that side. They're going to unlock use cases in ride-hailing that didn't exist before for folks like your mom or for my teenage daughter coming back from whatever. There's so many more things. That will be a very big business. When you take that same technology and capability and apply it to personal car ownership and then apply it to trucking and then apply it to logistics, Waymo is going to be an extraordinary, I think, a trillion dollar business. Easy. Good. One is that.
Speaker 2What was the second one?
Speaker 1It kind of follows your lead, which is therapeutics, using AI to, as they say, drug the undruggable, like to figure out cures is by far the greatest, I think, potential and impact that we'll see out of this technology. I believe. I mean, you're just seeing the pace of things. We're going to automate. Wet labs are going to become automatable. And you put an AI brain that can see and reason over mass sums of data sets and in ways that a single human simply can't. And I think we're going to have a pace of discovery in biology and therapeutics and drug development over the next decade that we have. I really do believe what Dario says on that and in Machines of Love and Grace. I think we're going to, see in the next decade what would have taken us half a century. I really believe that.
Speaker 2I think you've been so patient with me today. I mean, you have been, I mean, you're like, I came for a nice chat, dude. And then you're just like, I
Speaker 1mean, I love this. Harry, you always do this. You're so frigging entertaining and you're smart and you ask great questions. So it's fun.
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