Harry Stebbings

Like, I become a beast.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

And in the hot seat today we have Matteo Franceschetti.

What a fantastic surname.

Books you've read, podcasts you're listening to, that's the very last question.

But before we get there, do you – so me and AJ and all of us, we listen to Rory and Lemkin and Harry Stebbings talk about how – and I've seen Harry Stebbings say that the market right now is hotter than 2021 – But there's also a bit of pooping on like triple, twice, double, three times in terms of, I almost feel like it's a pooping on non-PLG like virality, like a traditional enterprise sales motion that is gonna grow linearly, not exponentially.

Whereas if you had like some kind of, you know, whereas Cursor or Replit or Bolt are growing exponentially versus linearly.

Does that worry you in any way or are you, I mean, my perspective for what it's worth is good businesses are good businesses.

I will tell you it's a little tough mentally in this current AI environment to be trying to do a bootstrapped kind of sustainable growth business because so much of the energy and the thought leadership you see is, you know, this is the time to grow at all costs, to build a generational business, you know, to avoid the permanent underclass.

And, you know, moving slow, you're dead, right? Like we've seen Harry Stebbings will say things like, you know, he's not going to invest in companies that only grow 30% or something.

And I'm like, hey, That doesn't sound that bad.

Upstairs has been profitable from day one.

It was more like a textbook.

And then I listened to every podcast and the only podcast at the time was Harry Stebbings, 20 Minute VC.

And Harry was at the beginning of the podcast And doing these interviews, like the 20 minutes, and as I would drop my son off at school, I'd walk back home and listen to the podcast.

So I started to understand the vernacular of what it means to speak to an investor.

I think you'll trust your agent to decide what data to share with other people without you intervening in five years.

The speed of the market is insane, Harry.

I've never seen anything like it.

You can build now-

We have passed the point where we will go back to a world where humans are looking at lines of code.

I mean, the run rate's at least 75K per engineer.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

Now, the hottest category in Silicon Valley is AI assistants, consumer and enterprise.

You don't want to be a fat manager who's like a general sitting in the back saying, "Take that hill." You want to be the warrior who runs up with their sword and engages the enemy first.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

Now, I am fed up of the simple question, answer, back and forth podcast.

Today is a real freaking discussion.

That's the job in a nutshell.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings.

Now, this is the must-listen show every single week.

All the biggest pieces of news broken down for you by some of the best investors in the world.

That is the last one.

It's so funny.

That was good, Harry.

In the back of my mind, I was saying maybe demand for compute remains high.