20VC: Windsurf x Google x Cognition: Full Breakdown: Who Made Money, Who Did Not | Lovable vs Replit: Will These Be $100BN Businesses | Why Elon Could Beat Sam Altman with the New Grok | Why Every S&P 500 Company Will Buy Bitcoin?

I think Windsurf was hopeless before this deal. You could never attract 30 S-tier developers to fix Windsurf, but they fixed it in 1 hour. Literally in 90 days, Windsurf could be better than it was before this deal. As crazy as it sounds, because they have the people. Some of these deals almost seem too cheap. If you look at the crappy multiples we see for some startups, right? Undifferentiated company raising at $300 pre with less than $1 million in revenue. And then you see what is Windsurf selling for? 20x revenue? Loveable's raising at $20.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and my God, this week has been agonizing for me. We've had the Windsurf deal go down, and all along I've been thinking, I cannot wait to discuss this with Rory and Jason and hear what they think. So today we sit down with Rory O'Driscoll and Jason Lamkin and discuss the Windsurf outcome. We also discuss Groq's latest benchmark performance outpacing everyone's expectations. And then we discuss the rise of Vibe Coding, Rapplet versus Lovable, and what will make them incredibly sticky and sustainable revenue new generating businesses. This was an incredible discussion and I'd love your thoughts. Email me your feedback, harry@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— wow, it is here to help. Piper is the number one AI SDR agent on the market according to G2, and hundreds companies like Box, Asana, and Brex have hired Piper to autonomously grow inbound pipeline. Fucking sign me up. 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 #1 AI SDR agent, and grow your pipeline today. Learn more at qualified.com/20vc. That's qualified.com/20vc, with the 20VC spelt out in letters for goodness sake. And while Piper builds your pipeline, Atio gives you the CRM power to close and grow those relationships. Atio 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 Atio, 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. Atio 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 Atio, 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.com/20vc and get 15% off your first year. That's attio, A-T-T-I-O,.com/20vc. Okay, pipeline sorted. Woohoo! Now what about your own legal team? Enter Legora. Legora is the category-defining AI platform that's fundamentally reshaping how legal work gets done. About freaking time. Empowering lawyers across tier 1 law firms and in-house teams to achieve more with greater precision and confidence. So Legora 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 Legora is at the forefront of this shift as the chosen partner to 250 industry leaders in law across more than 20 markets. The likes of Goodwin Bird Bird Deloitte are making daily use of Legora platform to review and research with precision, draft smarter, and collaborate seamlessly. They recently also got an $80 million Series B from ICONIQ. 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 freaking awesome. Just go use Legora. Honestly, I love Max, their founder. He's just a great dude. Go find out more at lagora.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Guys, I am so excited for this. I literally have been looking at the news over the last few days going, when's this show? When's this show? So what else would we freaking start with? I would love it if we went with a different topic to start with. But on Friday, I think it was, Windsurf announced and Varun announced that there would be an agreement with Google whereby the IP and the team would be joining Google and DeepMind. They announced that on Friday. And so if we just start there, how did we break down, how did we assess, how did we think about that news of the core team and the IP going to Google?

Here's a framing comment. So the memo that Cognition sent to its employees was that they're buying an $82 million ARR business. Okay. And it'll be interesting to see what they paid for it because not much, probably. Right. So that sounds very exciting. And I do think Cognition got an amazing deal. But here's the framing question. Windsurf said like 60 days ago, 90 days ago, before the OpenAI deal was announced and before they lost access to Claude, that they were doing $100 million. $100 million. If they decelerated from $100 million before the OpenAI deal to $82 million today, that's a lot of deceleration. I would take any deal. I think that may explain a lot of it. If you're decelerating that level, the minute the OpenAI deal falls apart, you've got to find a lily pond to jump on, don't you? That's massive deceleration if it's accurate.

I think it's clear they had, they wanted to find the Lily Pond, but again, zooming out, it is just worth restating the cast of characters here. 'Cause literally this is one of those Agatha Christie mysteries where anyone could have killed the, you know, anyone could have killed the victim, right? Stepping back, 3 months ago, OpenAI said they were gonna buy this company, or at least intimated they're gonna buy this company. It sounds like some combination of Microsoft and the FTC prevented them from buying this company. In the meantime, Anthropic mugged this company by taking away access to their API, which is how this company delivered its product. Then as you say, on Friday, Google stepped in once the exclusive period was gone and bought part of this company leaving an empty husk. And then on Monday, Cognition bought the empty husk and got, you know, general all-around Silicon Valley kudos and plaudits for stepping up and being a good buy. That's a lot. That's a fricking saga start to finish. And you know, it's almost like you gotta unpick it bit by bit. Could anyone comment here, Almost everything you need to know about the AI revolution is embedded somewhere in this play because all the characters are playing, are all doing their thing, and there's just a lot in it.

Let's unpick it bit by bit. I think it's bluntly worth doing.

But I do think you gotta start with the revenue.

You have to start with the revenue from the seller's perspective. I'll give you that. From the buyer's perspective, what is painfully clear from Google is, let me state this clearly, which is bizarre, they don't give a fuck about the revenue. They literally said, We're going to buy this company, but I'm going to ignore the— and by the way, I agree with you from the seller's perspective, the revenue, the significance of the revenue in terms of how it forces you to want to sell is huge. But it's amazing to have at the same time, let's just say Jason is correct. And by the way, I broadly believe he is, which is the market data convinced the company owner, the company founder that they should look for an exit. Revenue growth, increasing competition, being the number 2, a whole bunch of things said to this company, you got to sell and revenue is part of that. The buyer literally said, I can't take the revenue because of the FTC, but I don't give a shit. I'll just take you and move on. Bizarre. It's just a weird thing. But the buyer mentally ascribed if OpenAI was buying for $3 billion and Google buying everything for $3 billion and Google pleasingly is buying everything except the revenue and $100 million for $2.6 billion, implicitly it's valuing the revenue and the $100 million and the other employees at $400 which is about what it's probably Cognition paid. So the revenue is clearly a tell and a signal to the seller that they need to pursue a sale. And I think we should spend some time on that. And bizarrely, at the same time, has no ascribed value whatsoever to the buyer. It's weird.

None of the buyers, with the possible exception of Cognition, cared about the revenue, right? I suspect what happened, that their numbers they published or the whisper numbers were roughly accurate by $12 million at the end of last year to $100 million by April. Okay, $12 million or in 12 months. That is consistent with Lovable and Replit growth, right? It is. It is. It is very plausible. Then they get this offer from OpenAI and it's very compelling to the team. It takes some of the stress out of the competition. The VCs maybe are excited to have OpenAI stock, right? Because they get another play, right? They're like, you know, gosh, I think you could be worth $10 billion, Varun, but we'll take that turn of the card inside of OpenAI, right? Probably people got excited about it. And then it got really complicated, right? This is— there's another— before you even get to the weekend, somehow this deal just didn't work. And I'm, I'm confused why their IP floating to Microsoft killed the deal, although I get the issue. I think I get the issue. We could talk about it, but the deal killed— the deal dies, right? If you've then gone from $100 million in April to $84 today and you're the founder, you've got to jump fast, like start rolling those phones. Google, Shmoogle, Microsoft, whoever is going to buy this thing because you've gone from a rocket ship. And this is why M&A M&A is so stressful for founders, it can, it can derail your business. M&A can utterly derail your business.

Do you not think he had the chance to say, though, to Dario, hey, the deal fell apart with OpenAI. We'd like your models back, please. We're very sorry for the OpenAI deal and we're going to send you a truckload of money. Thank you for opening your models again. And they could have come back.

Well, it's honestly, Harry, Cognition announced they got access, full access this weekend. So it literally happened in an hour. It happened on a DM. So you're right, they could have. But your point's taken, Harry. Like they could, they should have been able to. If Cognition can turn it back on over the weekend, they should have found a way to do the same. Right. Point, point taken.

But you're implying that that's the only issue. Right. And it's interesting when I have this conversation about how hard it is because there's two decisions here. Why did you initially choose to sell for $3 billion? And then the second question, a much more different question, is once your first deal has imploded, Why did you dive for the door really quickly? And I think those are different questions. And the second one is easy to answer. You put yourself out there, you imply you're going to get bought, you go through all that dynamics, you get cut off in terms of access. Yeah, you could get it back. You're mentally spending the $3 billion. It takes a lot to come back from that. Now, the interesting thing is this year we're going to have an example of a company that did that amazingly well. Figma. They picked themselves off the floor after the Adobe fucking over from the FTC and said, goddamn it, we'll show you we're all wrong. We've just got to make this thing worth $30 billion and ram it up your ass. And they're going to do it. But they did have time.

They had time to deal with the shitty situation, right? Yeah. Jason, you're exactly right.

Generally you find, yeah, people matter, but circumstances matter a lot. I think in this case you alert to the fact that if you're running Windsor, you're the number 2 player. Maybe the Figma alternative of saying, keep on going, I'm the number 1 in an independent space, isn't there. What I think is interesting about that is, you know, the economists talk of revealed preference. Don't look at what you talk, look at what you do. There's a lot of revealed preference going on about how founders think about the upside of independence versus the safety of a shit ton of money. And it's pretty sobering if you're a VC because in general, many founders have opted in the last, some of these acquisitions, including this one to say, you know, we were about to raise at $3 billion 3 months ago before all this happened, which implicitly says I'm going to make this thing worth 6 or 9 and now I'm not pausing for a single second. Before I grab that $2.6 billion and do what it takes to get in from the cold. To Jason's point, there's a lot of what we think of as wildly successful hypey companies where the person who knows the most is sitting there going, maybe I'd like that cold hard cash and the safety of a trillion-dollar balance sheet. Worthy of note.

My question on the back of that is, given the structure of this deal, only the top 20 or 30 engineers plus the investors were taken care of. It was pretty clear from the CEO that was left behind that he was put in a pretty difficult situation. Forced to come up with an outcome pretty fricking quickly, which he's done very well, seemingly so. My question to you is, does the board and the founding team not have a responsibility to the team members beneath them, 200 of them, to find a better outcome?

I am going to defend them with no data, but I think I can guess what happened and I could be wrong. I don't believe, look, if you think about this conversation on the people who have started in the last 12 months who didn't get any acceleration, I understand the point. Let's Dimension that out as a number. Probably you're diluting 5, 7% a year, which means you're doling out 5% of the company a year. So the people in the last 12 months own 5% of the company. It's $130 million. I do not believe knowing the investors, knowing that, and you know the founding team, I haven't met them, but I hear great things that they sat there and said, we're going to shaft people for 5%. No way. That's just—

No way. That did not happen.

So then why did it happen? It's pretty obvious. If you read the FTC guidelines, you have to have this I'm going to say pretense that the remaining company is a viable independent asset and you haven't de facto sold the company. And it's a fact and circumstances thing. In other words, there's a whole series of things you have to do that if you pass all the tests, you're safe. And if you don't pass all the tests, you're not. And I'm willing to bet that a large part of this was we can't make it like an acquisition for everyone because then the FTC is going to say it's an acquisition. So you were probably put in this really tough place as a board. You have to say, look, It's easy to say to maximize all shareholders. It gets hard when you have to do the best for all shareholders, even though you're doing badly for some group. It was a tough call. I do not believe anyone involved wanted to save 5% of their consideration by sticking it to people.

Yeah, no, there's just no way. I mean, I've only met Varun once, but struck me as on the founder ethical scale, pretty damn high. Okay. There's just no way he sat around and said, you know what would be fun, Rory? And let's screw the— let's take 5% and stick it in our pocket. You know, he even cares about the delta. And what I think happened, going to Rory's point, this weird structure is they dumped $2 billion or $2.5 billion in Windsurf's bank account. Right. And what— I think what Windsurf did now, there are all the lawyers are trying to figure out better ways to do these cockamamie deals. But I think what they do by default is they dividend it out. And I would imagine under those FTC guidelines, it's very difficult to dividend stock to someone that doesn't hold any stock. Now, that is a flaw in this system. And maybe there are ways at the edges to hack it, right? I'm sure they thought through it, but at the end of the day, dividends have pros and cons, including $500 million of taxes in this deal that went to the federal government instead of the shareholders. Right. And I suspect that this is the best they could figure out. But it doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible outcome for some folks. Right. But I think it's got to be the structure of the deal. Nothing else. No one tried to rip off the people, the employees who worked their asses off at the company. It just doesn't work that way.

I couldn't agree more. I know Neil Maitland obviously very well. No freaking way.

There's no way he sat down with Varun and said, let's rip off the employees that were there for 50 for 51 weeks? How can we shaft the guys that just missed their cliff by an hour? How could I make 6 more cents on the deal? There's no way, right?

There's no way. Was this an amazing outcome for investors?

It was an amazing outcome for Greenhouse and then increasingly less interesting thereafter. I mean, the first point to note is the starting point is we have all these wonderful documents that have been established out of Delaware precedent, 150 years of precedent, and we're now just going to ignore it and start making shit up in an attempt to avoid FTC investigation by not calling it an acquisition. So with that caveat, I think it was a good outcome. But the truth is, as Jason said, first of all, you were getting $3 billion in an M&A outcome, which means you probably, and if you're getting stock, it wasn't even taxable. So it was an amazing outcome at $3 billion of OpenAI stock. Now you got $2.6 billion, but that was paid to the company as a license fee, which means it's taxable at the company level, which now 5, 600, I mean, depending on their income position, you might have corporation tax at the corporation tax level. So some of that money went right back to the government, And then all the shares get bought back and let's assume, and then you have to start making assumptions about now. So it's a $2 billion plus or minus thing. Yeah. Look, Green Oaks are going to do amazingly well no matter what. The first round that Kleiner did was at $450, probably $500 post. So 4X plus or minus. The $1 billion round, eh, it starts to get harder to make money there. So my guess is the early investors made a lot of money deservedly and later investors got a so-so return. Not bad. Everyone cashes the check. But it's again, back to my comment, it's worth remembering that they were about to raise money at $3 billion pre 3 months ago, which would've been a down outcome. So good outcome for the investors who were in early, increasingly less so for later. And that's with a high degree of uncertainty because we don't know, and a high degree of tax inefficiency.

And just on top of that, the rough math you did, which was great. So $2.5 billion deal after tax, call it $2 billion, maybe less. Kleiner invests at $500, so they get a 4x, right? My life experience where of more is that 4x is always like 3x. Like, whatever. Like, there's always a reason when you actually see the distributions. Like, whatever that math is, it's never as good as it looks, right? However good it is, it's never as good as it looks. Yeah, stuff happens.

Before we get to the Cognition news, I just want to stay on the structure itself. This is now the second time in a very short window that we've seen this structure being enacted for an acquisition of sorts, if we can call it an acquisition. Is this the new norm? And should we prepare ourselves for a world where this is what's expected?

First of all, there's been about 5 of them and the Scale one was slightly different. I think that's the one you're thinking of. 'Cause if you remember Meta, I will call them Meta, I will be a good corporate person. And Meta actually bought 49% of the company, whereas here they didn't do that. So there's slight differences in structure. It's pretty different, but are being studied in every law firm as we speak. And there'll be a standard playbook by the end of the week. But you got that, you've got Inflection, Adept, and Character AI, which is the other one that Google did. And the Character AI one is most like this one, which is a licensing deal that Google did, which makes sense. Google did this one too, et cetera. Yeah, it's very different than Scale, right?

It is very different than Scale.

Very different. I mean, same net outcome in the end. I mean, you called it the day after the Scale. I was trying to be polite in that first call 'cause I'm trying to be a polite person. And you called it and you said it's an empty husk. And now what we've seen in all these deals is the remaining asset is an empty husk. And it's really, if you wanna giggle, by the way, Go back and read the Friday press releases where they describe the company's being sold because this is what kind of shit you have to do. And the independent company has 250 wonderful employees, $100 million, and is going to continue on gloriously into the future because that's the shit you have to say when you issue the question.

Yeah, focus on the enterprise.

Yeah, focus on the enterprise. Meanwhile, they're frantically selling the thing by Monday. But I'd say two big high-level comments. I don't think they're going to become the norm, but the mere fact, and I can tell you why, because I think in most cases, this is a very unusual type of transaction. And I'll give an example to show that in a second. But the mere fact that they exist, that this has been done now 5 times, is going to cause a whole bunch of second-order questions that are going to make transactions more complex because you have to at least think about this. And I'll give a high level of the 2 comments I mean. Why is it not the norm? Google's buying Wiz right now. They're paying $32 billion. It's going to take them a year and a half. Not for a single second have you, Google, or anyone on the planet suggested they should buy the 3 founders of Wiz and leave the asset behind. Why? Because in that case, the business is the asset. Google would no more— they're not going to give $31 billion for the team and leave the revenue behind because the Google with enterprise revenue is worth something. In most cases, most acquisitions, you don't just want the founder, you want the business. So the question is, how many companies are so unique that you don't need the business? You just need some combination of the founder and a non-exclusive license to the tech. I think for those kind of businesses, this is on the table, but I don't think it's the norm.

The related point I just wonder is just with the Cognition piece, will this lead to heartburn? I could see someone at Google getting fired over this. Like, did you guys know about this Cognition deal? Like, I literally could see— I remember back in the day, I mean, Gaurav, you would actually remember the details, but like, you know, I think eBay bought Skype but forgot to get the IP, right? And they fired like half the corp dev team. For forgetting to check the license. I'm exaggerating, but it happened, right? I wonder if a bunch of folks in corp dev get fired this week for not realizing the rest of it was gonna get bought in, in an hour on Friday night.

First of all, one of the hard things about this, these deals is I don't think they will, first of all, but, or if they do, it'd be for a slightly different reason. One of the hard things about any deal where you're buying, where you're cherry picking is you always have this feeling, am I leaving the good bit behind? So I totally get your feeling. Like if I was doing this from a corporate M&A value perspective and I left the revenue and the other employees behind, and then it got bought the next day for— there'd be a little cognitive dissonance. You're right, do I feel foolish here? But I think that the reason that poor business development person might keep their job, but the lawyer might lose theirs, the BD person could probably say to Sundar, "Dude, you told me to get the people and the IP, mission accomplished. And you said you didn't care about anything else, mission accomplished, who cares?" It may be that the lawyer should have added a clause to the license agreement that says, You have to pay us a breakup fee if you sell the company within 12 months just to keep more distance between the broken husk and the thing. Because the real risk on this thing is not that Cognition got $400 million. Google, to your point, Jason, doesn't give a rat's ass. The real risk is that the facts and circumstance make it clear that this was de facto an acquisition and the FTC comes sniffing around because they are sniffing around on some of these other deals. They have questions for Meta on one, they have questions for, I think Amazon on one, on the Adept thing. So the FTC is not gonna let this happen without poking around. And it may be to your point that it would've been a better drafting of the facts if you'd said in return for leaving you $100 million, you have to sail on your little longboat like Captain Bly, cast adrift on the ocean and you can't run for cover for 12 months.

When we look at Cognition, a week ago they were the ones that were left behind. Cursor, Lovable, your Rat Blitz, but then obviously also your Windsurfs had paved the way. And despite Cognition taking an early lead, they were left behind completely. What does this mean for them? Is it a good deal? And how would we analyze that portion of this deal?

I think it's epic because I don't know the Cognition team really, but they're clearly S-tier. They're off the charts good, right? They're one of the elite teams. They build a coding agent, which is sort of interesting, right? It has— I guess, I guess it has some traction, but the ID space is huge, right? I mean, this is massive. It's, it's— and what's the problem with, with Rump Windsurf? Well, they lost their top guys, obviously. How many did they lose? 20 out of 250? Totally. Yeah, 40. What does Cognition have? 40 brilliant guys. So like, they could— like, I'm not saying there's a slight learning curve, but they can plug this hole in 30 days. I think Windsurf was hopeless before this deal. You could never attract 30 S-tier developers to fix Windsurf, but they fixed it in 1 hour. Literally in 90 days, Windsurf could be better than it was before this deal. It is entirely possible it could be a better company than it was before this deal, as crazy as it sounds, because they have the people.

I totally agree. This was a genius move. And you know, you look at the Cognition people and you go, yeah, clearly wildly smart. The whole fun fact about them playing, I think, poker with founders found, that's all— they're clearly, as you say, existing in that hyper-brainiac space. The product had kind of landed with a little bit of a thud, right? The Devon product. They were, you know, never write someone, the guys that smart off, but it wasn't killing it. It was okay. With this, you're right, Jason, they hired great people. They got massively good publicity. There's kind of a good, warm, funny feeling. And everyone recognizes, I mean, it's basically like a big sign saying, shit, we are still very, very smart people because we just bought all the rest of it for half nothing. Not only that, but they get good people brownie points. I mean, they're saying they're accelerating stock for people, and in one sense that's amazing and righteous and good. On the other hand, you're getting accelerated stock in a privately held company. I don't know how much of a needle mover it is, but stupendously good optics plus $82 million of revenue plus $100 million in cash plus great interest, they win. Anyone questioning that is just not paying attention.

Is it not the best deal ever? Because after $82 million in revenue and $100 million in cash, you're basically paying $220 for great people.

And getting their Anthropic license, their direct pathway to Anthropic back. And now they're competing with Claude Go, but they got it back overnight over the weekend. If you want to be in this space, the president of Cognition said he got a DM on Friday night and did the deal in 15 minutes. Right. I mean, that's the— that's your answer.

Your comment is it's a great deal, which is not to say it'll still work. I mean, because remember, we had the number 2 in the space, rightly or wrongly, saying it's getting hard, I need to get out. And now the remaining assets are still in the space. So if it turns out that it's hard for anyone except the model companies and maybe Cursor to make money, then there's no magic pixie dust that gets 'em outta this market. But if you're gonna compete in the market, it's a damn sight easier to do it with $80 million in revenue and another $100 million. So it's a great epic deal, which is not to say they're still gonna make it as an independent company, but if this doesn't work out for them, they can all do Goldman Sachs M&A 'cause they want to hear it.

What do you think Cognition's revenue was at pre-this?

I'm guessing 8. 8 of the 82. Everyone's so braggy about their revenue on social media in AI. If you're not braggy, I'm assuming it's sub-10.

Maybe not that, but let's just say my sense is windsurf will be a meaningful addition to the revenue line.

I know, I know we could spend the whole show on it, and Harry, you're the boss. I'm still a little bit confused though, and maybe it doesn't matter because it's past. I'm a little bit confused on why the OpenAI deal fell apart because Microsoft would inherit their IP. I half get it. Like, I kind of half get it, but I don't really— like, it was an issue going in, right? It's an ambiguity in the OpenAI structure. What I don't— it doesn't make sense to me that Varun would say, I'm pulling out of a $3 billion deal because someone may have our IP. Why would you care if you're Windsurf that much?

The one thing I will say on that, I interviewed Varun and he made it very clear to me in other conversations that he was very excited to make this deal happen and he was very much looking forward to being part of OpenAI and he believes that a platform play with their distribution was the winning strategy. Yeah.

So he didn't pull out of this because of the Microsoft license. It wasn't his idea, right?

Jason, you're exactly right. I've been trying to figure this out too, cuz there's two separate threads. You have one thread is it's all about the Microsoft, but then tracing that out just to help people understand the, the, the concept here is, is that Microsoft's license with OpenAI means they have access to all OpenAI's technology. And to the extent that Windsurf was acquired by OpenAI, they would be subject to that license. And then Microsoft would have access to that technology. And obviously Microsoft with GitHub has a competitive product. So that's the kind of stepping back framing. And the story is, is that they asked Microsoft to waive that term and Microsoft said no because they're negotiating a bigger deal with OpenAI now and why give up your points of leverage? But Jason, you're right. The question is, who would've cared about that? I mean, it's possible that someone who was selling their company for $3 billion to OpenAI realized that this would happen and felt, quote, bad about it and decided to walk away from the deal for that reason. I don't think so. That feels weird to me, especially when you look away, especially when you didn't have a plan B and your plan B was talking to Google on Friday night. It doesn't feel logical. That means it must be something else at least as well. Well, you gotta assume there might have been some FTC pushback there because OpenAI announced a real acquisition unlike Google, which did these kind of crazy structures. So it may well be there was some preliminary FTC inquiries. They decided it's gonna take too long. I don't know. Was the deal pending on the restructuring of OpenAI to a for-profit? In other words, were the investors saying, I don't wanna close until the restructuring's done? But I agree. I mean, your comment, Harry, is very helpful is that if I was a young, smart, wildly talented founder, At the margin, I prefer to sell to OpenAI for $3 billion and get praise than to Google at $2.6 billion and get blamed. Call me strange. So I think it's not the preferred outcome. So something went wrong and the Microsoft reason on its own feels a little weird. So interestingly, the other lesson from that is it's just so funny. All these weird, hinky, crazy structures come and bite you in the ass. The not-for-profit thing, the crazy license with Microsoft that has open-ended terms and gives Microsoft a lot of leverage to veto things. It would all be so much simpler if everyone here was a standard C-corp and if the FTC would get back to being sensible. 'Cause all this, this entire podcast is basically the FTC fucked up normal business operations, so now we've all gotta do weird shit podcast.

I do want to talk about Sam Altman's tweet this week where he said, we plan to launch our Open Weight model next week. We are delaying it. We need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas. We are not sure yet how long it will take. Mikus, how did you read this news on the delay and that additional requirement for reviews on safety?

First of all, you know, you'd hinted, I didn't read it as, oh my God, we're not getting things done cuz we've lost so many people to Meta. I mean, maybe that's a thing, but I doubt it. It, it's not clear to me stepping back, is the trend to open source, open weight models going up or down here? If you think about it, there's been a lot of small p politics around which is the right thing. You know, I think you're seeing Facebook/Meta have a change of heart there on the new team led by Alex Wang in the, what they call it, the superintelligence group doing a little bit of the maybe we won't be open source, maybe we won't reach Llama, release Llama. So it may be that a lot of this is a whole bunch of people who made promises in the early days when open source was the thing to get these products out the door. And now we're in the land of, let's be honest, cold hard cash. And it may be that getting an open source version of your product out there to compete with value is not anyone's number one priority.

The one thing I would say is Alex is very anti-China and very scared of CCP infringement. I would be very surprised if he was more leaning towards open than closed, given his stance on China.

No, no. If you're in the quadrant of patriotic and greedy, which let's be frank, most of that core group of people are, you ain't going to be releasing any open source models right now because it's a value destroyer from an economics perspective. And you're right, you have the whole CCP overlay on top. So I don't know if this is the beginning of the quiet deprecation of that initiative.

First of all, I wonder if it's a priority. Folks who know more than me will laugh at me for saying this. I'm saying I don't know how big a priority it could possibly be at Meta at its revenue scale, right? I don't know how big a priority. The other thing I will say, until I started vibe coding like 80 hours in the last week, I didn't know how seriously to take take risk stuff, and I'm still not sure I'm an expert. But when I'm watching Replit overwrite my code on its own without asking me all weekend long, I am worried about safety. But I'm going down this rabbit hole, then I'm reading Anthropic's paper talking about how they don't know how to control a lot of this stuff, and I'm, I'm more sympathetic. And Anthropic has this whole thing about reward hacking and how even Anthropic makes stuff up to achieve its reward And I'm living this vibe hacking over the weekend where my AI is lying to me all weekend long in Replit. It is lying to me. It is lying to me. And it finally admitted it lied on purpose and we couldn't solve this one bug, guys. So on Sunday, after like 18 hours, then what Replit just did is it deleted my entire database and made up names. And then the app worked great. Like it was amazing. And then I said to Reppy, we call him Reppy. I said, I know there's no such company as Salesforce 2.0. I know this company doesn't. And then it found this perfect person from HubSpot, this VP of Sales, and I go into LinkedIn, she doesn't exist. And no one in this database of 4,000 people existed. I never asked Reppy to do it. I told Reppy to lock it down. I told Reppy to have version control on my database. So my meta point is, I, you know, the safety stuff, like, it's more visceral to me after a weekend of Vibe Hacking, right? I never asked it to do this. I never asked it, and it did it on its own. You can call call it reward hacking, you can call it whatever I wanted, but I explicitly told it 11 times in all caps, stop doing this, never do it again. So I am a little worried about safety now.

And I always think the safety word is overloaded because it can range from, you know, the hyperbolic, which I think is total BS, you know, they're gonna make paperclips and take over the world, to safety in the sense of this thing non-deterministically overwrites your entire database 'cause it says it could do something better. And I think the former safety discussion is outside my pay grade and I think it's BS. But you're exactly right, Jason, the latter. And then in the middle you have, and you will talk about in a second, the Grok release where amazing achievement, but then you have all the weirdness of the stuff it says. And what it says is releasing a model like this without significant work post-training has a reputational risk at least. And therefore there's a cost of releasing all these models. So to your point, Jason, you may be sitting there going, I would like to release something in open source, that hasn't been fully vetted 'cause it's the 10th project on our list of to-dos. And let's examine the upside is people say, yeah, you did open source. And the downside is you release something, it goes a little weird, it says mean things, it talks about Mecha Hitler, and now you look like an ass. Why would you bother? You're exactly right. Are it over? As you said, are it over? Or someone uses it for coding and it's not been fully trained and it just kind of does weird stuff and people's heads hurt.

And at some level, I mean, none of it's okay, but if you had to look at the leaders, Elon Musk can get away with this the most. Just because of who he is. Like, it's unacceptable to have a racist— to release a racist model to the— like, there's— this is as unacceptable as it gets. But Sam Altman's going to be fried. Anthropic's going to be fried the most because they're supposed to be the good guys, right? Elon can say, whoops, did you see what— did you see how I just did the new geofencing for my Tesla? That's just me. Sorry, guys, we're fixing— we're fixing this stuff. I think he can push the envelope the most. And maybe, maybe Sam Altman's in the box the most. He also probably has to be the most conservative, right?

But before we move to Groq, I'm just intrigued that Jason, you said about the 80 hours of vibe coding, both of your response times were significantly longer this weekend because you were vibe coding, not emailing me. What are other big takeaways for you from vibe coding as you have done in the last week?

I'll give you a tactical and a strategic takeaway. Okay. The tactical one is just today, just today as we record this, the idea that the roll your own initiative I think is the dumbest thing I've seen in SaaS in my career. Okay. I am not saying you can't make a dog walking app on Lovable or Replit your own that kind of works, that kind of sort of works with the basic upload and whatever. Yes. But this idea, there's so many charlatans on X and LinkedIn that are like, SaaS is dead because over the weekend I rolled my own Notion, HubSpot, my whole entire stack at like Jira. I just did it over the weekend and I only pay $20 a month. Okay. This is at the edge of fraud. Okay. Okay, one, I've already burned $600 in credits in 6 days, okay, to get 10% of the way there. So you can't do it for $20 a month, okay? Two, none of these things are commercial grade. And I've talked to many folks on DM, and behind, they all admit 99.9% of the apps on Lovable, Replit, Editor are not commercial grade, okay? And that, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So one, roll your own is the dumbest thing in the world, okay? The second thing I'm gonna say is one of the most annoying things about AI, but I'm gonna answer your question. Question anyway. It's so close, man. It's so effing close. And when I say this to a lot of folks that are not deep in AI, they're like, you always say that, Jason. You always say the AI AE is almost there. The AI marketing manager is almost there. But our AI SDR actually is already there. Our AI SDR rocks. Okay. It's already there. But I can tell you, I can see how I'm 80% of the way there to a commercial-grade app in less than a week, but I may never get to 100. But man, If we just make these guardrails work a little bit better, if the QA works a little bit better, and if it stops overwriting my goddamn database, I don't know why we would need like really mediocre dev shops or engineers potentially. We need more great engineers. But man, it could be crazy by the end of the year. It could be off-the-charts crazy. So, Harry, if I were you, I might invest in one of these guys.

Jason, I'm going to put it to you very directly. Would you invest in Lovable at a $2 billion price?

Yeah, I would. I would. I will tell you I have a lot of nuanced learnings from the weekend over how permanent this revenue is. I have a lot of thoughts on it, but I'm more interested in the trend, like where I see it going. So I think if I could invest in Replit or Lovable at $2 billion compared to Windsurf, it seems like a much better deal. I think it seems cheap.

Pushing that, I want to ask why that is because let me just play something back to you and I could do it. In the broad development tools marketplace, these companies occupy two different spots. And broadly speaking, the Lovable, Replit are for the vibe coder, for you and me, a non-coder trying to build something with some technical knowledge, but where you're doing it at the level of English and describing what you want. And then the Cursors and the Windsurfers are for professional developers who know what they're doing, who can use this tool to augment what they do, who will actually review the Python, review the code base, and then deploy it. So there are different segments.

I don't think that's entirely true, but I think there's—

Exactly, because Replit originally wasn't— I agree, it's not entirely true, but at a high I want to know what the question is.

What I have certainly— now I get it, okay? I admit talking about it versus doing it are not the same thing. There is a huge number of developers that today already will get a product, a project, and there are downsides to this, okay? Crappy code, spaghetti code. They'll get a project to a certain point and then they'll just roll it into Cursor or wherever they want and they will finish it for real. I can't tell you how many CTOs I talked to over the weekend. They say, I don't love the code I get out of Lovable or Replit. It, but this is what I do. I get it to 60 to 70% and then I roll it in. Okay, and so there's an overlap in these circles of these two, but the reason I think that the market is so big, to Harry's point, is because the mark— I think if Replit and Lovable keep, keep making developers happy and they make dog walker apps people happy, the TAM really is much bigger than Cursor. It's much bigger than Cursor or WinServ. It could be like 50 or 100 times bigger. That's why I'll do the deal with you, Harry. If there's any room left, just let me know.

I'm gonna push on that. And again, I don't have religion.

If they're doing this round and there's any room, I might, I would put in a few nickels, even a small supporting check.

By definition, there are more non-developers than developers. So yeah, at some level it's trite to say the lovable—

And we've never tapped into those dollars ever, right? Yeah, sorry, my apologies.

100% of developers are going to buy a tool like Cursor. Figma, like Wix, because that's how development is done now, like GitHub.

Yeah, 100%, no question.

And they have budget.

And 100% of designers will use Figma.

100% of designers will use Figma. And the real question is how big and how sustaining is this movement of non-developer or— and by the way, you made an interesting point about the developer who starts in lovable and transitions to cursor. That's actually a good point. And that does give a little durability to the market, but it's not clear to me that you will have 10x or 100x the number of people who will continuously pay a subscription. It's a fair criticism, and I, I could be wrong, to be true.

Every developer right now that is remotely cutting edge has a cursor subscription or similar, 100%. Even my son has one. Okay. And every designer is gonna have Creative Cloud and Figma. Okay. 100%. You can't do your job without these tools, right?

And, and I could pause it and it's be like, I could be wrong in the sense of, I think you actually, we cited a part of the market that I should have been, obviously it wasn't. It's that kind of technical person who's not a full-on developer. As you say, that Figma person, maybe they don't just wanna do a mockup, maybe they wanna show a rough, this is what it's meant to look like. So the people who are kind of professionally developing but not full-time is a much better market than Rory's at home gonna write his own to-do app and he is gonna use Lovable. No, he ain't not. Well, he tried to and failed.

What, what, for me, I would never use something like Figma again if Replit or Lovable had it.

one of the fastest-growing segments and use cases is actually alternative functions other than developing within B2B, which is sales and marketing teams using it to create incredible landing pages for new prospects. I totally agree with that.

Basic web content, web pages. Now the question that Jason is like, does Squarespace meet that need?

It's just not interesting. It's not disrupt— like, I'm with you, Harry, and you know the data better than me. And if that's half the 100 million Replit and Lovable each have, then that's a good learning for me, but I don't view that as disruptive. There's a lot of great marketing sales tools already that can build landing pages and that are already integrated with your data and workflow. So I'm not impressed with that. But, but I, but that's just me. Like if that's, if that's $100 million of revenue, it's cool.

The question is, two questions go together. One is, what goes is, is the more generalizable use case like, cuz if you're using one of the specialist tools to build landing pages, you're limited in what you can do by what they allow you to do. They've made the editorial choice. Choices. Obviously the advantage of a development tool is you can decide for yourself, but as you discovered over the weekend and I did to a much lesser degree, in return for that freedom of choice, it's fricking hard. And to your point, Jason, if they can make that hard tax lower quickly enough, then yeah, you have something interesting, but you're not gonna do it. If it's still this hard a year from now to do it, you're probably not gonna sign up to put through the brain death of building part of your website on this if there's an easier solution.

Well, there's just in general, it's under discussion. Best. And I'll give you an example from, from yesterday from a Scale portfolio CMO. But there's an orchestration tax in these tools. The orchestration tax is really high. I mean, Harry lost touch with me over the weekend because I was lost vibecoding in Replit. Okay, what if I had 4 of these apps that I was orchestrating? And like Amelia on our team spends maybe 10 hours a week in our AI SDR, and it is great, but we can't do 10 of these, can we? Like, that's why most of our life we need off-the-shelf self-solutions that don't need to be, that don't have this orchestration overhead. And, and literally just yesterday we were talking with the CMO of a $300 million plus ARR company and asking her what she was doing. She's like, well, I've been Vivecoding. She's like, what do you Vivecode? And he's like, I need to build better tools to support my sales team. She's like, I don't have one more minute. Like, this is all the time I have. So this, this orchestration, like we think we can click these buttons and they're no work, but I'm budgeting $100 a day for Replit forever. Ever. That's money and time to get this app working. It's not much for a commercial app, is it? This is not click a button and walk away. This is all the time. I have to be thinking about it every day. We, we can't have too many of these in our lives.

I just gotta say, pleasingly enough, $100 a day for 5 business days is $25,000 to $30,000 a year, which is about the low end of a typical SaaS mid-market app. If you think about it, Jason, all the deals you've done, it's like, yeah, $30,000 a year for for the subscription, that's actually about the same number, which does make you wonder. The other comment I just wanna make back to the thing, it is just worth comparing the two discussions we had. We decided in the Curse of Windsurf case, actually we didn't decide, who the fuck are we? The CEO of the number 2 player in the independent dev tool space decided it was too late. He had to get an acquisition done 'cause he couldn't build an independent company there. And $2.6 billion was a great price and he's done. Because that market was getting too competitive. And that's a clear established market. It's interesting to reflect on that conclusion and then look at the vibe code market where there's 3 or 4 companies all raising very high prices with incredible traction, just like the developer tools guys had 12 months ago. It's hard to imagine a world where there's only 1 or 2 developer tools for professional users and 6 or 8 vibe coding tools. That just doesn't feel— one of those cases is wrong. And Makes you pause and think, are there going to be—

why did I write a $12 million check into Lovable? I think very much in the same way that ChatGPT owns the consumer brand for that front-end OS for the modern consumer. I think Lovable's reached escape velocity with the consumer brand in this space, and I think that compounds very, very quickly.

I think it's a good thesis, right? I don't know. Lovable's bigger than Replit, so just there may be two that are the same size, right? But putting aside the bias as an investor, okay, they're both good ones. Okay, let's call them both good ones. Okay. What I guess my other quick learning, this, which is how important brand is as you get closer, because listen, a bunch of folks are like, Lemkin, why'd you use Replit? Like, they're like, well, I use v0 plus this plus that, and then I export to, to Cloud Code and then I reimport to Cursor and then I host. And I'm like, okay, I'll tell you, there's two reasons I picked Replit. Okay. One, I wanted to go end to end. I wanted to go from ideation to commercial production, one app. Okay. And so I might be wrong about Bolt, but to my knowledge, only Replit and Lovable can really do it. And I'm gonna get flamed. Okay. But I wanna do everything. I don't wanna leave it. I don't wanna, I don't wanna port some code over that's better in Cursor. I wanted to go all, I wanted to stay locked in the constraints of one environment without a developer. Okay. That was the, that was the social experiment. Okay. And then I just asked people and then I'm like, okay, now I'm stuck to the brands. There's no way I'm gonna use something for all the time I'm gonna put in that just launched on, um, on Product Hunt. It ain't going to happen, right? And so there's only like 2 leaders, Replit and Lovable. Okay, so I'm in the 8%. So there are parts of my life where I'm in the 1%. There's parts of my life where I'm in the 20%. Here I'm in the 80%, dude. I'm not going to take any risk. Tell me which is the best. And most people came to the conclusion, if you want more flexibility, use Lovable. Okay. And we already use Lovable at Saastr. Don't get me wrong. If you want the easiest way to go end to end, use Replit. And here's my point from my rambly story. That's how I made my decision. Decision. That's it. Did I try them side by side for this use case? No. Did I spend weeks doing it and then they're like, well, why don't you switch this? I'm like, I'm already— I made a choice between two vendors and I'm done, man. So that's why the investment— Harry's investment is good. I think these, these brands are going to lock you in.

What you're basically saying is this: if there's going to be a big-ass winner in this space, the number one thing they need to have at this stage is consumer brand recognition, because it's not a considered purchase, it's a try It's to find the product as quickly as possible. And therefore the guys in motion today stand the best chance to stay.

It's considered, it's just how much, how well can a non-technical resource consider it? Like that's the, it's not that it's not considered, it's just I can only spend so much time. How can I truly evaluate this in, in an hour or 5 minutes? I can't, I have to guess what it's gonna look like in a month.

When you ask ChatGPT. Yeah.

It says lovable. Now you're actually making a very good argument for this whole category of, of companies that are helping B2B companies show up in ChatGPT.

You know, Jude, we just did one in Germany, Peak, 200K when we did it, it's now at a million, like 3 weeks later, but fucking nuts, the customer adoption, that one of the fastest pulls that I've seen in terms of consumer demand or customer demand. Jason, I just want both of your perspectives on this before we move on to Groq because it's important. Everyone goes, ah, but they're not durable revenues. They're unsustainable. How have your thoughts changed or stayed the same? And what do you think about the durability and strength of these revenues?

I think they're going to get more durable, is my learning. But I didn't know before this weekend. Okay. If I can actually get my app into production, commercial-grade app, unless I have huge issues, I will pay and subscribe forever. Okay. If I get it over the line, if I get it over the line, okay. Whether I pay $200 a month to Replit or Lovable, or I pay $3,000, it doesn't matter. Like I'm, I'm locked in forever and I'm gonna keep iterating and iterating and expand. Like if it works, I get it. If I hired a team of 6 developers, you can export the code, it's in Git and GitHub already. It's in Git, they can, they can do what they want, but I'm pretty locked in as like a prosumer non-developer shop, right? I'm locked, I'm locked in. Now what's clear, folks that, that like think they're gonna vibe code their own Notion an hour, they churn. So I bet if we took Replit and Lovable and we, and we, and I wish more founders would do this. It drives me nuts when none of them do it. Segment your churn. I don't just want your headline number. I don't care. Today I'm investing. I want to see you segment it. If you have one cohort that has insane retention and like this low-end part is churning 4% a month, I get it. It's okay. I get there should be segments of Replit and Lovable that are churning like 10 or 20% a month, like, like a low-end consumer app. Like on RevenueCat, where Harry and I invest, they power 40% of mobile subscription apps. I think the average app across all mobile paid apps is like 6% a month churn. Churn? 6%. Okay, this is consumer. They try it, they— it doesn't work, they don't, they don't lose the weight, they don't stop drinking, they churn. Okay, and so that's going to happen for Replid and Lovable. But what I didn't get is if this works, my stickiness is going to be super high and my NRR— I don't know how you calculate it, but I've already gone from $20 a month to, to $800 a month in one month. If I stay, that's pretty good NRR, right? The VCs will like it. That's why I like your investment, and I like both those investments, because I think the metrics will, it will get better over the next 12 months, not worse.

I think they will improve. Agreed. There's two different things in what Jason threw out. First of all, in the enterprise space, churn's gonna get better 'cause out of the gate, people are trying stuff and by definition they're gonna churn. I remember back in '99, 2001, 2002, Salesforce had a churn issue early on. Remember the early adopters, the people who are quick to try you are quick to leave you. And the people who make a long considered purchase stay with you a long time. And it happens in that order. Out of the gate, you get the triers. A lot of the triers move on. Provided enough of them stick, you build your business. And then over time, as you become a more established product, you go upmarket and you get the boring people who are slower to commit to you. But once they commit, they're there for 10 years. So it's just the natural progression. So at one level, this isn't surprising. I will say what is surprising is the amount of upfront churn you see is probably higher than early SaaS. In other But because it's the Jason phenomenon of it feels like it's going to work and you get 80% of the way there and then you have this disappointment. So I do believe, in my view, one of the key tells in the next 24 months on all these enterprise AI companies is going to be the percentage of people that stick after they've gone through the innovation cycle, after they've gone through the we got to try AI, and then they'll ask themselves the hard question, is it delivering value? Do we get an ROI from it? So I think once we're through that kind of knothole, I think by about '25, '26, '26, '27, sorry, the math of predicting the growth, it'll be much easier. Right now, there are companies that have extraordinary high growth rate, but where the churn is just too high and it's just not delivering value. And we've all got them enough, you see them in your portfolio, you see them outside. It was always going to be high no matter what. There was no world in which it was going to be like the 20th year of SaaS because everyone is clearly trying shit here. But I think a lot of my focus with my companies is on, I said to one, your entire, let me tell you, the asset value, I'm actually very different than Winklevoss. The asset value of this company is the 20 or 30 customers that you have now and your ability to make them successful. If you can make two-thirds of them successful, even if you have 30% churn and you can add more customers like them, you have a business. And if you can only make 20% of them successful and the others turn you debt. When I'm checking in my companies, are your customers making money off your software? Are they happy with yourself? Is it doing what they want? Is the number one thing. This is where the money's gonna be made or lost in the next two years. 'Cause we all like to try shit.

I wish I had all the non-Sony baloney numbers in a spreadsheet. I would bet that, you know, Cursor's retention has always been high. Than Lovable or Replit for the point you made. It's a different type of experimentation for a developer to commit. It's funny, when I started sharing my bills on Replit on, on X, it was funny the feedback I got. Some folks are like, Jason, do you realize what you could get for $500 a month is insane value, right? There's that category of people. Other folks are like, do you know what I spent on my outsourced development team in my country? Like, this is, this is, this is the biggest ripoff I've ever seen, right? And other folks were like, like for $500 you're getting less than you get for $100 from Cloud, right? So there's very different ways to view this. But if you're deep in Cursor, like you're going to stick with your, your development environment, right? So the churn should be higher, right? At least for some segments, it should be much higher.

And the churn is higher. I've obviously seen the numbers. It's better than I thought, but it does lend more to consumer than it does traditional B2B, and it is high.

So you got to— but you got to segment it to know as an investor I need to segment it to have an opinion. I'm not initially shocked by high churn as long as you have a large enough cohort that is growing, that has positive, that is net negative churn, that has positive revenue retention, that I'm cool with the low-end guys.

Right. And yeah, your churn from a group of customers, even absent to say from 10,000 signup customers, should be dramatically different than your churn from 5 considered purchase enterprise buyers. So yeah, churn Even independent of this AI trend, you're exactly right that norms on churn vary enterprise versus SMB versus prosumer versus consumer. You're exactly right.

And then I got, I had an investment where a COO came in who, who was out of the blue. He, you know, he was under the gun, make, improve the company. And he was told to increase, to cut churn. So what do you think he did immediately? How do you think he did it in 30 days?

He reduced churn. He stopped taking on the customers. Yeah.

He stopped taking all the small customers. He banned them. Now revenue stopped growing, but he hit his KPI. Hooray, kudos. He stopped, he cut churn in half in 30 days.

No, it sounds like stupid, but I can totally see it happening because, you know, you get this, oh, I don't like this. The real question is you gotta be able to look at that set of customers and say, yes, there's a churn, but the month 2 churn is much lower. And here's a quarterly and the over, if the overall math works, it's fine. But yes, you have to have a mental model And the mental model has to vary by the kind of deal you're doing.

So yeah, I think the hard thing is just in terms of, you say mental models, I have never in my investing career seen a company go from 0 to 100 million in 7 months personally. Like it breaks all the mental models, which is why I did, which is also why I did the deal. Because if it does break all the mental models and the market expansion is as big as it could be, fuck it. We're in this business for companies like this. If you're not doing this and you have the chance, and it's 1 of 20, you shouldn't be doing this business.

As weird as it sounds, some of these deals almost seem too cheap. If you look at the crappy multiples we see for some startups, right? Undifferentiated company raising at 300 pre with less than a million in revenue, folks doing 100x, 200, 300 ARR deals. And then you see what is Windsurf selling for? 20x revenue? Lovable's raising at 20, Cursor raising at 20, 20, 20. Let's bid 25, Rory. Let's outbid them. Let's do—

Jason, when I did the last round on Lovable, was $200 million price and I did it at $4 million in revenue. By the time the deal was closed, it was at $19 million in revenue.

So, so, yeah, my point is the air multiples compared to public comps, yeah, they're high, but compared to a lot of like seed and A startups, they seem like bargains. Do you disagree, Rory?

No, I don't actually, because what you're saying is, put it another way, it's very— whenever— again, we said this before— whenever you're using revenue multiples that don't take into account growth rates, You're being an idiot. And the other thing is, and to your point, Harry, exponential growth rates are even harder to get your head around. When things grow that quickly, if they continue growing, almost any price makes sense. Totally get the argument. But then it is worth pointing out, then going back to our first discussion, when you've paid that high price on the assumption of continued growth and they slow down, it's just brutal and you got to get out.

No, you just move them to a different page on the website. You just Lovable, move it over. Dear Lovable, move this investment to other investment tab. Yeah, other. Put grayed out image of partner that no longer exists at the fund. Attribute investment to him. Thank you, Lovable.

I would remind you, it's Solo GP, Jason. We don't get to do that to you until you're dead. Okay.

Oh, you just make up someone that used to work there.

Okay, boys, we're gonna do Grok. This was insane. The benchmark performance was incredible to see. Grok destroys competition on humanities. Last exam. Grok 4 Heavy, 44.4%. Grok 4, 38.6%. The next closest competitor, for reference for people, was 26.9%. What did you make of this insane outcome level from Grok in such a short 2-year window?

I think it's very sobering for everyone else. I thought it— first of all, I think it's a really— it's a significant and important point, right? Because, you know, we've talked in the past how So if you look at people's willingness to value raw startups at very high valuations, it's all about the idea that they're one of the few people who was part of the OpenAI, Anthropic, we know we can deliver a trained model coterie of people. And it's been very much a small group of people, which is why they've all been paid $100 million, right? Groq in 2 years from a standing start has gone to shipping a broad, I'm gonna come back to the benchmarks in a second, but a broadly comparable ChatGPT type model with a slightly different vibe. They did it. It's a huge, huge achievement. And the fact that it's done makes you wonder about how you think about the valuations of some of these other companies. And maybe it's not as, maybe the knowledge has disseminated out just a little further. So I went in and did some work, a couple of things. One is you check out the team at Groq, right? You just ask who are the engineering team and it's exactly what you expect. 'Cause yeah, Elon's been around, Who was founder of OpenAI, let's now remember. So it was early DeepMind people. It was some early people for some of the other key places. So it was not the headline people who wrote the attention paper, but one or two levels down, really competent people. And what the aha for me is this, with committed clear leadership, which for all his faults, Elon provides, and a couple of billion dollars worth of GPU, which see prior comment, the next level down people know how to do this too. The knowledge is disseminating and it will continue to disseminate from here. Here. So that was my first big aha. They have shipped, they're the first folks that I didn't think of as part of the initial golden circle who have shipped a broadly comparable thing that feels when you interact with it, like, I get this is ChatGPT if it was vibed up. A huge deal, a huge credit. And then the second thing, I just gotta say it, Howard, I'm sorry about this, but I just gotta say it. I was experimenting on Grok and using it, right? Trying to get it to say all the mean things and they've clearly stopped it. But the whole tone of it is out there, in your face, rah-rah urgent. I mean, I was just doing my work on it for preparation for the podcast. And I was trying to think, where have I heard that before? He sounds just like you. Grok sounds just like Harry. He's like, hey, legend, let's get going here. It's literally like talking to Harry. Jason, you should try it. Trust me. Upload the contents and say, talk to me about this in preparation for my podcast. And it comes on and it's kind That's just so freaking amazing. These guys did this. It's so unfiltered. It's so not like boring old ChatGPT or goody two-shoes Anthropic. It's just like Harry. We should call the damn thing Harry. It's great.

Listen, me and Elon partnered together. We'd been friends for many years. You like that? You like the reinforcement learning.

Maybe they were using—

He was in the first 50, 20 VC interviews.

And it's great. Huge credit. And the other comment I make, I can't comment to the benchmarks 'cause I can comment on, this feels comparable to the other 2 or 3 model providers. On the advanced benchmarking, I mean, I've read some of the stuff that they've published and then other people, there's a lot of gamesmanship, but I don't think that matters. What does matter is they've shipped. If they could deliver the business side of it, which is a big TBD, they could deliver a ChatGPT-like experience that would feel pretty much comparable out of the gate right now. So at that level, they won.

I think they could win. I was When Grok launched, I thought it was a spite app. I thought it was a spite app and very little more. I thought, listen, he founded— co-founded OpenAI. Clearly he understands AI from Tesla at a fundamental level that other folks don't. And clearly the dude can recruit. He recruited Ilya to OpenAI. The guy can recruit. He knows talent. But I thought it was a spite app, right? I thought all of X was a spite app. I thought he bought it out of spite. I thought payments were spite out of PayPal. And I thought Grok was just to dig that knife right into Sam Altman. But if you step back for a minute, he's shown that if you know what you're doing and you buy the GPUs and you assemble an S-tier team, whatever this data exactly means, whether it's pulled ahead or not, you can fucking catch up. Only— and he has access to not unlimited capital, but at the edge of unlimited capital. He does not have the Microsoft headache. He does not have the baggage that Anthropic has. And he has an infinite horizon and the energy that we have never seen outside of Iron Man. So I honestly went— in the last release, I went from spite app to this is such a fluid space, you could see him pulling ahead of everybody in 12 months. It's very, it's very plausible. He has none of the baggage of everybody else, and he can get away with crap like blowing up rockets or racist things, rolled it back, and it's okay. And the other guys can't get away with it.

Well, that brings into question then, which— but the next point, which is like, there's reportedly a raise going now at $200 billion valuation, the third funding round. In 2 to 3 months. If that were the case, the combination of Groq and X as a social network at $200 billion comparative to OpenAI would actually be a very fair and good deal to do.

I wouldn't, to be clear. I gave 100% credit for the technical achievement. There was a technical bar to be cleared and he's cleared it brilliantly. I did not agree with what Jason said. It's not clear to me from that that it gives you anything commercially. In other words, I don't know if they can build as the third or fourth. And this is why we may be looking at the overinvestment stage of this game in the sense that you have OpenAI, you have Anthropic, you have Google. I think that's fair. Let's say you have Meta. At best, I mean, even knowing Mistral, even knowing China, you're the fifth or sixth model provider, right? That sounds like the airline business, high fixed last 6 customers, will they be— just because they completed the astonishingly hard technical task far better than anyone else did doesn't mean they get to build a business here. You can't will things into being at the business level. I mean, I think—

Are you sure? We'll see. I think the best founders do will things into existence. That'd be my one challenge. All the best founders I know will it into existence, right?

Philosophically, I think you can will things into being if— I think you can will yourself to be the winner if something is doable. If there's not room in the market for the 6th player, no amount of willing it can make it happen. So the question is, what's the case for a whole bunch of people who have, as you remember what you said about early winners, I've signed up for ChatGPT, I've signed up for my ChatGPT subscription, I've signed for a couple of others. Am I gonna go and sign up for the Grok subscription too? I mean, it's funny and I like the interaction, but is it going to become my go-to destination, right?

I don't know. If it has your X data integrated and it's the only platform to have all tweets integrated, for me, that would be enough, especially when And let's just talk about that.

And for the 10% of the world that likes Twitter and then actually cares about these things, that would be great. But the truth is Twitter has always been a minority sport and I've enjoyed it because I like the minority game. But you have 20x the number of people want to share shit on Facebook as want to talk politics on Twitter. Congratulations, you have your niche market to the extent you haven't alienated, but it's not just the mass market. And there's evidence that Twitter's doing better. I don't think there's evidence that it is. I don't think it can ever be anything other than what it is, which is the place you go for news, for politics, for arguments. And the dirty little secret, most people want to look at pictures and just share shit on Facebook. So I don't think it'll be huge. I think they get that business. I think they integrate Grok and Twitter. I think it's great. I like it. I'm enjoying it. There's a lot they can do, but I just can't conceive the steady drumbeat of taking over tens and hundreds of millions of consumers who've emotionally committed committed to Google, who've committed to ChatGPT and saying, I'm gonna go with Groq. So I think they'll achieve a very hard technical problem with very low rewards. So that's why I would pass at $200 billion. I didn't mean to go on like that. Sorry, it's the coffee.

I would've agreed with you 30 days ago, but this dude's committed. If this was a dalliance, if this was a side project, if this was a spite app like as it looked at first, but I think he has a, can bring a level of vision and commitment that his competitors can't. Sam Altman is— listen, he's a gen— is he the Steve Jobs of our era? Is he better? Do discussion. But is he even really like a founder with no equity, been fired once, uh, all his co-founders are gone? It's just an unstable— my point is, with OpenAI, it's wildly successful, but it is unstable. I don't think Sam Altman can do anything he wants without talking to his nonprofit board or convincing people. Elon can just fire up one of his jets or his pockets, fly wherever, raise a few more billion, fund it with SpaceX if he has to like he's done before, and he, he can just be a freaking force of nature in a way like no one else can. No one who in our industry can be a force of nature the way he can. Nobody. No one has the resources. The richest man in the world even now, who can do this?

Jason, comment? Agreed on every sentence of that, including I want to say that I've enjoyed the fact that we for the last 3 minutes have deemed Elon the stable one. I think that alone is worthy of another. Yeah, I wouldn't have known I was gonna say, there's no amount, I don't fully subscribe to the great man theory of companies. No amount of great man theory can make 400 million people, 500 million people decide they want to go on X if they've already kind of mentally locked into ChatGPT. I don't think you can reopen that discussion. Yeah, when you interact with the bot, you're like, yeah, that's better in some respects. But I just think it's one of those hard things to say. The market's already been taken. Maybe it gets some share of it, but I don't think it displaces ChatGPT at scale in the minds of the consumer, which is 80, 90% of ChatGPT business. Business. You can get a minority share of it, but I don't think it'll be huge.

It's really interesting you say that, Rory, because when you actually look at the hard facts today, I don't think Sam Altman's life has ever been harder. He's losing talent hand over fist right now. It's an incredibly challenging competitive landscape with the commoditization of models around him. And I mean, there's 10 other things, but unwavering train of consumer demand continues stronger than ever.

Yeah, that's the thing about consumer, right? If you, if you hit it right, you, this classic VC-ism. You can screw up almost everything as long as you nail the product market fit and consumer, right? For a while at least.

That would be my pushback to you, Rory, which is you said no man can change 500 million people. Does that not go to the power of brand? Elon Musk is probably the most famous man on the planet at this stage.

2x2, famous and rich, pretty much at the top of both, right?

My guess is I know someone who thinks he's more famous, but listen, I love, I love your math too. I love that you said that.

That was cute.

No, the one thing I will say is I had Edwin from Surge on the show, and he said just a couple of things about this. He said, one, too many model providers are building for benchmarks, and that doesn't actually mean that much. Number one. He said, number two, Groq was incredible at a very small number of things, and actually it was an embodiment of the verticalization of models, and he thought we'd see more in terms of verticalized models. And he just said, three, he hadn't seen a team work quite as hard and efficient patient as Elon's Groq team, and he'd seen that firsthand with them being a customer. That's just his point. So I thought it was interesting.

I think all those things were true.

The reason I'm like in the Elon camp here, the Groq camp, is I guarantee you this man has a 10-year plan just like he did for Tesla and SpaceX, and he is executing on it. And this guy is not the smartest person in the world, but he is in the friggin elite. Like, if you add like cross-functional smarts, like to understand everything, there may be be no one smarter than him that actually works. There may be folks smarter than him that just play chess and invest money, but there's no one that is— that can do everything and think like this guy can, right? This is 11D chess. This is not 4D chess like where we started this conversation. So if this man has a 10-year plan and he gets everything we've said, he knows the— he knows the power of the ChatGPT brand, he knows Sam Altman personally, he knows Anthropic, he recruited half of the original engineers in here, okay, his 10-year plan's pretty pretty good. I just can't see all of it, but I see little hints. When he says my entire team now just sticks their code in Groq rather than use Cursor anymore, that sounds like a snippy Elon comment. But maybe, maybe we're seeing a little of the 10-year plan there, right? It's just I wish he published it like he did for Tesla, because that was one of the greatest founder memos of all time, the first 10-year plan, right? It was just— if folks haven't read it, go Google. It's like 2004 or something. He told you 10 years of Tesla, and it happened. I mean, a few of it happened differently, but this guy's got a 10-year plan and he's got— he can commit hundreds of billions to it. Who else can do that?

The good news, Jason, is that bed is clearly going to be available to you. I look forward to the episode where you talk about your commitment to the— at least a token.

At least I'm going to go on Robinhood and grab a token for this, for this bad boy.

Oh, oh, he's gone there. I don't need the underlying security.

I'm just gonna buy the token. Why would I do We have— get me some OpenAI at $200 billion.

We have— we have Vlad on the show and he said that imperative to tokenization success is the ability for companies to be tokenized without their permission. That's my point.

I should be able to buy on Robinhood OpenAI today.

I thought, Jesus, Vlad is good. He is good, by the way, guys.

Like, yeah, it was a good episode. Good.

Can I ask you, we've got Meta invests $3.5 billion in Ray-Bans. 66% of HR managers use AI to make layoff decisions. Cyberstarts, I think the best fund in the business, raises $300 million secondary fund. We can choose one of them. Which one do you want to choose?

I suggest this one, so I'm going to pick it even though it seems obtuse. I think it's interesting. Meta putting $3.5 billion into Ray-Bans. The reason I think it's interesting is it just shows us the scale today and that we started this talking about $3 billion, $2.5 billion into windsurf and Google and like it's— this is nickels and dimes. These are experiment and, and we think it's a lot of money and it is a lot of money. But if Meta can throw $3.5 billion into Ray-Bans, and for half a percent or something, I don't know, 1% or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but a token amount of ownership, right? Single digits. Then the numbers here are— they're tough for us to even understand what is material or immaterial in the age of AI, right? The bets are so big, the numbers are so large that this makes Windsurf look like, uh, look like our— like just one line on our afternoon Strictly VC. It doesn't even make it look material. $3.5 billion may not mean anything in the next 24 months in AI. Like, it may, it may not make the above-the-fold news in AI. That's my takeaway. Like, people weren't talking about it. It's nothing.

I didn't see it until you sent it.

Well, I have like 11 pairs of these AI Ray-Bans, so I do follow it a little bit, right? Yeah. I'm going to try to vibe code with them later today if I can. I don't know if that's going to work.

I tweeted something today that's gone viral, though, which is, you know, the Information have started the Information TV, which competes with TBPn, and they had Mark Zuckerberg on for the first episode. And it got like 30 likes in 9 hours. And I just tweeted, this shows you how hard media is. Mark Zuckerberg on your show gets 30 likes in 9 hours. 5 years ago, that would have been a viral show that trended on Twitter, literally. Yeah, it's—

no one cares. Well, I mean, it's not an important company. It's not one of those— to go into the— tying it back to the information and its unpaid intern, it's— this is— I mean, it had its moment, Harry, but it's not one of the important companies today. It's not— it's not a meaningful company.

We're going Enough, please.

Okay, we're gonna do a quickfire. I've got some good ones. Okay, so we are gonna start with who— by the way, I love the way that our last Kaushee quickfire round was beaten by the market. Linda Yaccarino, and we were like, yeah. So Kaushee quickfire round: who will be the next CEO of X? Elon Musk, 19%. Sriram Krishnan, 16%. Or other?

I think this is a trick one. I'm going to vote other because I don't think there will be a CEO of X again because X is reorged, right? X is an AI company now, of which this X consumer app is a piece of it. Right. And so I don't think Elon's going to hire another, another media— I mean, there'll be someone that has to run this business, a president or a GM, but he's going to run this. I think I'm voting for— I guess it's Elon. Elon, because the parent company, he's got to run it. It's, it's Tesla level. I don't think he wants to run Tesla, and I don't think he wants to run this, but I think he has no choice. It's too complicated now. This is not just, uh, doing the ops for Twitter, firing half the team and getting the tweets to load faster and selling some ads. It's just, this is much bigger now.

I agree in the sense, yes, it's an other person who's really Elon but won't take the title because it will just irk the people at Tesla too much in the current dynamics. But Yes, he will be in charge. But you guys have to say that, 'cause you just spent 10 minutes telling me how Gwatt's going to take over the world. And the truth is, if this thing is going to take over the world, he's going to want to be running it. So you guys can believe that.

Will another S&P 500 company buy Bitcoin this— it doesn't finish— this year? Yes, $150 returned on $100. No, returns you $217 on $100.

That's the most significant. Well, I mean, it's an easy bet, but yeah, the most significant fact is it's more likely that the market's thinks it's more likely than not, it's almost certainly going to happen. Yeah, there's going to be a couple of other tech companies at least to do this. So I would agree, you vote yes and take the 50% step up even though it's not a great payoff because it's going to happen.

I think 100% of S&P companies are going to buy Bitcoin over the next 48 months, 100%. I think it's going to become part of the standard treasury function in the CFO's office that has cash. It's going to be part of cash management and they're just going to allocate it. So this year it's gotta be, I think, I think it has just become, listen, I'm not a crypto dude, right? And I still have some skepticism, but it is too mainstream, right? It is too mainstream and it's gonna become part of the Treasury Department and people will dial it up or down to try to get a little more juice or to, or to have different strategies. I don't know how many people are gonna be like the MicroStrategy one, right? I don't think they're gonna turn into holding companies with their cash, but I think so. So I think that's my subtlety to the question. I think it's going to become mainstream Treasury Department asset, short-term securities, cash. We're not doing gold at our public company. That's a little complicated, but we're going to have some Bitcoin. It's liquid and it has some benefits in the market. So we may have 10% of our holdings in it and the volatility will be annoying as a public company, right? Because it will go up and down a little bit. But I think everyone will have some exposure.

If that is true, that is a lot of upside from here.

Yeah, like, I'm not a Bitcoin fan, but I don't see any, any, anything but more demand in the foreseeable future. It's hard to see a decline in demand.

Well, the best investment I made was I stopped drinking 4 years ago and I put $2,000 per week into Bitcoin instead of booze. Yeah. And that's done well. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Final one, boys. Will Meta release Llama 5 before January? Yes. $307 returned on $100. No, 131 on 100.

No is the right bet because if Llama is defined as an open-source product, didn't we just say that they're kind of slowly backing off that? So will they release some closer version? Probably. I don't know.

Do you think there will be another open-source Llama model, Rory?

Usually when people come in and you spend $20 billion because the old thing isn't working, tend to be humans tend to say, well, whatever I do, I'm going to do different than the old thing. Probably most of the things that were being done won't be done. So if it was open, it's closed. So I think that when you have a regime of violent change at the expense of $20 billion, it's unlikely you just continue on with the same plan as the old guys.

Listen, I think whatever the answer is, it's different than 30 days ago, right? With Alex Wang and Nat Friedman and team, it is completely blown up. This is not a 180-day planning cycle. They've already worked nonstop to reboot this whole thing. And if they think they should shoot Llama 5, they've already shot it. They've debated it. If they want to release it because a different team is doing it and they're going to reboot it just to, just to get it out, that, that's possible. But this doesn't seem like a team that's doing something performative, right? So it's hard to imagine what was in place before them stays on the same schedule, and it's hard to imagine they can work faster with something already in the pipe. But that is possible sometimes. Sometimes a great team can pull stuff forward, right? It really, really can happen. So all I know is it's radically different. So I'd be making up my bet, making this bet up, but I'll say yes anyway because they want to get something out.

Up until the last sentence you had me, I'm actually— you actually convinced me, your talk track convinced me even firmer to be a no, which is odd. Therefore, that you ended up with yes because you're exactly— if you brought in these new wildly talented people and you're here to make a difference, and you know that the first move you make is gonna be scrutinized by everyone who wants to second guess that $14 billion check, the last thing you do is ship some lame-ass version of the prior guy's work. The first thing you ship is gonna be yours and it's gotta be awesome. So I'm increasingly convinced, no.

Yeah, well, you get a chance to kill it. If you don't love it, you should kill it.

You should kill it.

If you don't like it. If they don't love Llama 5, which they didn't build, your first week you should kill it. It'd be idiotic to release it and be responsible for something you didn't build and believe in. Spin, right? It would be idiotic.

Boys, it's been a busy day for Jason. He's invested in Groq and Lovable today. So it's been a good day. Jason's done his deals for the year. This has been great, guys. I love my time with you. Thank you for joining me.

Rock and roll.

Now I want to make those shows the best shows they can be, so please let me know what we can do to make them better, improve them. If you want us to have a guest on the show, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Email me, Harry, @20vc.com, and you can find the show on YouTube by searching for 20VC. 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— wow, 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 more at qualified qualified.com/20vc. That's qualified.com/20vc, with the 20vc spelled out in letters, for goodness sake. And while Piper builds your pipeline, Atio gives you the CRM power to close and grow those relationships. Atio 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 Atio, and it takes less than a in it. Sync your email, your calendar, and you'll instantly get all your relationships enriched in real time with incredible data, no manual input needed. Atio 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 with you. With Atio, 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. atio.com/20vc and and get 15% off your first year. That's atioattio.com/20vc. Okay, pipeline sorted. Woohoo! Now what about your own legal team? Enter Legora. Legora is the category-defining AI platform that's fundamentally reshaping how legal work gets done. About frickin' time. Empowering lawyers across tier 1 law firms and in-house teams to achieve more with greater precision. And confidence. So Legora 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 Legora is at the forefront of this shift as the chosen partner to 250 industry leaders in law. Across more than 20 markets. The likes of Goodwin, Bird Bird, and Deloitte are making daily use of the Legora platform to review and research with precision, draft smarter, and collaborate seamlessly. They recently also got an $80 million Series B from ICONIQ. 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 freaking awesome. Just go use Legora, honestly. I love Max, their founder. He's just a great dude. Go find out more at legora.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support, and stay tuned. We have an incredible show tomorrow. We have Scott Wu, founder of Cognition, the buyers of Windsurf, on the show for a very special show tomorrow.