# 20VC: Is Seed Investing Dead Without a $1BN Fund? | Does Ownership and Price Matter When Companies Can Be $1TRN Exits | Are AI Revenue Numbers Real and What to Watch Out For with Venky Ganesan, Menlo Ventures 20VC · 2026-10-05 · 67 min · https://thetwentyminutevc.libsyn.com/20vc-is-seed-investing-dead-without-a-1bn-fund-does-ownership-and-price-matter-when-companies-can-be-1trn-exits-are-ai-revenue-numbers-real-and-what-to-watch-out-for-with-venky-ganesan-menlo-ventures ## Transcript Venky Ganesan At this point in Menlo's history, right, we are going broke. We are going for the grand slam home run. We want to see everything. We want to win everything. Full stop. It is a very disorienting, confusing time. Each seed investment is an option bet. You're buying an option to see if it's an outlier. You never want to let your ego come in the way. My one lead ego is to make money for my investors. If there's an opportunity to make money on an investment, we should do it. The rest of this is all noise. The game has changed. You have to focus on IRR. There's no way for venture to be successful in today's era without the Mag 7 participating in everything you're doing. There's no limit to what a person can do as long as you don't care who gets the credit. Venky Ganesan You have now arrived at your destination. Harry Stebbings Venky, dude, I am so excited to do this. I am such a fan of your tweets. Who would ever call them blowhard, right? That's terrible commentary on them, and I was so looking forward to this. Thank you so much for doing it in person. Venky Ganesan I love this. Thank you so much, and I cannot wait to see if I pass your test. Harry Stebbings Dude, you'll pass my test. I want to use this as a real learning discussion for me because I want to build a firm like Menlo, and I want to learn from the wisdom that you've had now, seeing multiple different cycles. You just told me a story that I loved, and it was from 2 decades ago, holding a certain stock. Can you tell me that story and your takeaway? Venky Ganesan A little bit of the past: a few years ago, I was at a firm called Globespan Capital Partners, and we happened to be investors in a company called Avanex, which is—nobody knows about this company—A-V-A-N-E-X. I remember the stock symbol even now. I was an associate and did not have carry in the fund. Avanex was a big winner and went public. They gave the associates a chance to own shares of the IPO, so I bought some shares. I remember putting in the princely sum of $5,000. At one point, Avanex got up to $200,000. It was such a big portion of my portfolio. My wife, who's much smarter than me—she was my fiancée then, and we were getting married—said, "Hey, why don't you sell some so that we can have something for a down payment on the house?" I was like, "No, no, no. Avanex is going to go up. Optical components are a critical part of the Internet bubble. It's going to go higher. We're going to make $1 million on it." You know how the story ends, right? It drops 90%, and I think I sell it for around $8,000 or $9,000. I call it the most important lesson I learned from a 90% loss: at some point, you should take some chips off the table. Harry Stebbings I'm not sure what to take from that, because I remember having Jake Sapraun from Emergence on, and when he broke down Emergence's returns, you just saw this one meteoric outlier that returned 90 to 90-. Venky Ganesan Viva. Harry Stebbings Well, Veeva, yes, but it was actually Salesforce. Venky Ganesan Wow. Harry Stebbings If they had held it longer and longer, obviously it would've been even more meteoric. I guess my question is: what should we take from that? Because we also see the dangers of selling too early. Venky Ganesan Agreed. A lot of this advice depends on the context of who you are as a person and what your balance sheet is. At this point in Menlo's history, we are going broke. We are going for the grand slam home run because we've had home runs before. We have a history of putting it on the table. As a 24-year-old with very little in your bank account, when you have that kind of, for me, Avanex game-changing money, it just makes economic sense to take some off the table. I do think the advice is that there's no one-size-fits-all for these things. Harry Stebbings Did you say you're going for broke? All hands to the pump. We are going for this. Does anything change with that mindset internally? Is it more aggression, more willingness to pay up, or more willingness to have less ownership? What changes with that? Venky Ganesan What we mean is that we are going to fight and try to be in the defining AI companies of our era. We want to see everything. We want to win everything, full stop. Harry Stebbings I want to start with a concern, which is that I don't know what business we're in anymore. Venture's not venture anymore. I have my team come to me and say, "Hey, we can't find anything under $100 million." I said, "Wow, that's a high price for a pre-seed or seed round." They said, "No, no, no, Harry, that's the size of the round." Thank you. This is not venture. What am I to do in this world, and can you invest without a billion-dollar fund? Venky Ganesan Venture has changed, but I also think that you can't take a snapshot in time and draw a conclusion. A dot is not a line. Right now, you're right: every AI company wants to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm surprised they only said $100 million, because there are some new labs that want to raise billions of dollars. Harry Stebbings Yeah. Venky Ganesan They all have arguments for it. It is a very disorienting, confusing time, I will admit that, but I also think these things change quickly. You don't want to necessarily draw your long-term strategy from a snapshot in time. Harry Stebbings These things change quickly. Do you play the game on the field, as Bill Gurley says, or do you call time out and say, "You know what? I learned from 2021. You know what I wish I'd done in 2021? Less." Venky Ganesan This is a really hard conundrum for professional investors. You're referring to my tweet, right? The Chuck Prince quote is, "When the music is playing, you gotta dance." As a professional investor, the danger of not dancing is that you do not know when this ends. I'll give you a story. There were a bunch of really smart venture firms during the dot-com boom that got in in '93 and '94, made money, and decided to step out of the game in '96 and '97. When they stepped out of the game, they missed out on '97, '98, and '99, and the LPs were like, "What happened? We invested in you because you're going to be at the cutting edge. You stepped out." They stepped back in in 2000. Timing markets is really, really hard. I think you have to play the game, but I think you can play the game differently. You can choose to be more selective, and you can hopefully think about portfolio composition and position sizing as a way of mitigating what happens when the cycle turns. Harry Stebbings Portfolio composition and position sizing: what do we do with both of those in a market like this? How do we change them? Venky Ganesan I think you have to think about the venture portfolio as a bunch of options. Each seed investment is an option bet. You're buying an option to see if it's an outlier, and so you want to have enough of those to make sure you have an outlier. Then, when there is true quantitative evidence based on revenue and other quantifiable metrics that something is going to be an outlier, you position-size up. To me, you have to think, “What is my fund size? How do I have enough at-bats?”—to use a baseball analogy—and make sure that you have enough at-bats. Then you only position-size up on the things that are already proven. Harry Stebbings Do you think seed still really exists today? Venky Ganesan If you want to go into the core AI world with the neo-labs, I think seed is hard. Harry Stebbings But even AI application companies are raising $10 million to $20 million. The old $3 million to $5 million days, which were still quite large seed rounds, are gone. Venky Ganesan Honestly, I think there are 2 things that impact seed investing today. One is the size of the round, and then you have this other sort of externality, which is these large funds—maybe including us—being somewhat indifferent to seed valuations because they're using that as an option check. Harry Stebbings Because you are, aren't you? I didn't mean to put you on the spot, but— Venky Ganesan Yes. We are trying to buy ourselves a seat at the table. At the cost of buying that seat at the table, we are somewhat indifferent to at the seed stage because our real goal is to size up and invest in them if they become outliers. Harry Stebbings Thank you for making my life harder in that respect. You said you place these bets, so to speak, and then, when you see discernible traction, you can double down. I completely agree with that logic. We're seeing strange numbers: contracted annual recurring revenue that's not actually annual revenue and isn't really live. You're seeing revenue run rate that's extrapolated from the best day in history, and then we multiply that by 365 days. There's a murkiness to this revenue that we've never seen before, which makes me feel quite icky in a lot of cases. Do you share that, and how would you advise me? What do internal discussions look like around that? Venky Ganesan If any metric is measured by an investor and they put a lot of weight on it, it's going to be gamed, and that's just the nature of it. Maybe they should coin a law for it. There are 2 elements going on. One, I'm blanking. I don't know if it's Keynes or another famous economist who coined the term “bezzle.” When there's a boom, the bezel is high, which means, like, it's, it's a notion that the embezzlement of things will be... It's not just that people are going to pick metrics. People are also going to have some interesting accounting techniques, which, by the way, will happen every cycle, and it's probably happening in this cycle. We're going to find out in the next few years exactly the accounting creativity of some of our founders and how some people gamed the metrics. One good example of that during the SaaS wave was that a lot of investors put a lot of weight on net revenue retention. One way to game net revenue retention is to get a $100 purchase order—but it's better to get a $10 purchase order and then get a $50 purchase order a week later, because if you just got a $100 purchase order, your net revenue retention was 100%. But if you got the $10 purchase order and the $50 purchase order, it's now 500%, and the net revenue retention looks much better. Once a metric is measured, it can be gamed, and that happens. To me, a lot of this comes down to whether the founders are really focused on building a business. Are they focused on terminal value, or are they focused on markups? I think you want to find founders and investors who are focused on terminal value. Harry Stebbings Do you believe in kingmaking? I know that sounds like a strange question: the theory that multiple successive and quick rounds led by strong investors can really help increase the chances of a company being successful. Venky Ganesan To me, that is a great example of Soros's reflexivity. What I mean by that is you have a company that does well, and because it does well and the revenue is growing really fast, it gets a quick markup. Because of the quick markup, it gets more capital, it gets to come on Harry's show, and then it gets more notoriety that allows it to bring in more human capital along with the financial capital. It grows faster, and that's all because of the markup. These are good things as long as the revenue is happening and the core business is being built. But someone—a copycat—can look at that and say, “The secret is to have a markup.” A copycat investor might look and say, “If it's marked up, it's going to be marked up again.” Then reflexivity kicks in, and everybody starts acting that way. This explains how market cycles work until they stop. One thing we know from Soros is that all reflexivity will eventually stop. We just don't know how or when. Until it stops, a lot of people can look very smart. Harry Stebbings We don't know how or when, but we can play the game of predicting how and when. If you were to predict how, what are the first signs of this cracking? Venky Ganesan I think usually the first sign comes with some major debt default. Generally, equity is never the reason why these things crack, because with equity, you write it down and just take the loss. Debt, on the other hand, comes with the expectation that people are going to get paid back. Most of the cycles I know break because people lever themselves. If you see what happened with Leopold and Core Investor, when you have 4x leverage, it doesn't matter if you're right. You also have to get the timing correct. Harry Stebbings He missed his risk-management class in high school, didn't he? Poor old Lehman. When the music's going, I completely get you there. How do you feel about multiple-tranche rounds happening so quickly? I'm meeting founders very often who say, “We're doing a round this week at a $100 million valuation, but then we'll be opening up the second tranche later next week at $200 million because we've got so much demand.” This gives me the shivers. I feel like I'm in We Buy Any Gold or We Buy Any Car. Venky Ganesan I feel like in every cycle you get the innovators, then you get the imitators, and eventually you get the idiots. I think the innovation of tranche financing was the notion that I can get “build-with-me” money, use that build-with-me money at a lower valuation to get just money at a higher valuation, and then eventually transition to pure dumb money. I don't need all money to be the same. I will bring in some investors who are actually going to build a company with me, then I'll also bring in some capital, and eventually I'll bring in some very low-cost capital. That was the intention. But, like everything else, now everyone's doing it, and it's no longer tied to the quality of the company. It's become another technique for people to use. These things initially start with the core of the idea, which is actually a good one: “I want to raise capital, but I want to distinguish between capital that adds value and capital that doesn't add value.” Harry Stebbings Will you do it as a firm if you come in at the latter tranche? Venky Ganesan It absolutely depends on the situation. We have been on both sides of this situation, and I think if the company is interesting and the founders are special, absolutely. Harry Stebbings Really? Venky Ganesan Yes. At the end of the day, I never care about what other people invest or what they do. I'm looking at this round and saying— Harry Stebbings Are you not hurt by the fact that they're saying you're legitimately less valuable than Peter Fenton, who we're letting in at half the price? Venky Ganesan Peter's amazing. I think the biggest thing I've learned over time is that you never want to let your ego get in the way. My one and only goal is to make money for my investors. If I can make money for my investors, who the hell cares? Harry Stebbings Have you ever let your ego get in the way? I have. Venky Ganesan 100%. Harry Stebbings What happened? Venky Ganesan I think you get caught in ways of negotiating around valuation or being in a syndicate. Sometimes you're offered an opportunity where you think you're being offered a small piece, and you say, “Well, I'm too big for that piece.” I think in this business you have to have a high degree of humility, because every week I get hit and punched in the face by things I don't know. The biggest mistakes are when we get too caught in our ego. Look, the reality is simple. We raise money from institutional investors with one and only one goal, which is to return more money to them. If there's an opportunity to make money on an investment, we should do it. The rest of this is all noise. I think too often, because venture capital tends to be dominated by personalities, people get caught in these things. You probably don't know a lot of people at Goldman. Everybody can say David Solomon, who's the CEO, but the idea is that Goldman makes a ton of money and those people just go do their jobs. Too often in venture capital, because there are so many personalities, it becomes more about who we are and our egos as opposed to just doing the job. Harry Stebbings I think that's forced by the fact that we're fighting for constrained supply there. If you're looking at, say, Goldman's public markets team, you can buy Nvidia, I can buy Nvidia, and they can buy Nvidia. It is a free market. Here, we are both competing for Max at Ligora, and if he takes your check, he won't take mine because there's 1 lead check. So we have to have personality. We have to sell ourselves because there is a constrained supply, no? Venky Ganesan Yes. What you say is absolutely true, which is that you have to have these 2 dualities and manage them. One is you have to have a personality. You have to be able to project a sense of differentiation, right? Because why does someone choose Harry and not me? It's because they like Harry. Harry Stebbings And good looks and charm. Venky Ganesan I see that in person even more so. Harry Stebbings Yeah. Venky Ganesan But I think if you get caught in that and get so immersed in it, then you lose a sense of what the core purpose is, right? The core purpose of having that personality and charm is to make money for your investors. That's why it is, right? If there's a time for you to make money for your investors where you have to let your ego take a backseat, you should do it. That's the right thing to do. I'm not saying it's easy to do. I'm not saying I've done it. But it's the right thing to do. It's kind of like, I know I've got to eat right and exercise. I know that. I don't do it often, but I know it's the right thing to do. Harry Stebbings Yeah, but Gymkhana is so good. Some things in life are worth it, like butter chicken. Venky Ganesan I'm a Dishoom. Harry Stebbings Oh, you are? Venky Ganesan Ah. Harry Stebbings Oh, well done. Don't worry, I like Dishoom, too. We said about price: we're a little less focused on it when it's early. There comes a time when it does matter. With the greatest of respect— Oh, say it. Say it, man. Venky Ganesan Well, men, they kind of pay up. And for all you entrepreneurs out there, we definitely pay up. So definitely call us. Harry Stebbings Yeah, you do, and every time I'm like, “Pff.” Man's paying up. Venky Ganesan Mm-hmm. Harry Stebbings And you proved me right. You're right, and I'm proved wrong when I'm like, “God, they're not disciplined on price.” So I guess I'm questioning: do we just need to completely reshape how we think about terms and market sizing? Venky Ganesan Let's think about when people pay up. People sometimes pay up to be able to win the deal. Sometimes people pay up because they're able to see a bigger tab than the other investor. In those cases, you're not actually paying a higher market price; you're able to see that the opportunity is bigger, and therefore you're willing to see that possibility. Sometimes you're going to be right, and sometimes you're going to be wrong. So to me, I don't necessarily think it's just price. Sometimes you don't see the tab, you're just trying to win the deal, and that's the price it takes. You're just a clear price taker. That happens, too. The problem is, venture is an asymmetric game. You can lose the dollars you invest, but you can make 10X if you're right. That asymmetry means the sins of omission are way higher than the sins of commission. What I mean by that is, you only see the deals we do, right? You don't see the deals we pass. But the most expensive mistakes venture capitalists make are the deals they passed, not the deals they did. Harry Stebbings When you say that, what's the most memorable pass that haunts you? What is it? Venky Ganesan My most memorable pass was that I was a young board member on a company called Plaxo, which had an incredible board: Mike Moritz, Ram Shriram, Tim Koogle from Yahoo, little unknown me, Sean Parker, and Todd Masonis and Cameron Dren, who were the founders. Sean had some challenges on that board and was asked to leave. Because I was the only person within 10 years of his age in that group, he was telling me he was going to Boston and was going to work with this college dropout. He said, “You should get involved.” And I'm like, “Sean, you just got booted off this board, and I have no idea what I'm doing.” I didn't even take that meeting. I probably had the opportunity to write a $50,000 check. Those seed rounds were different. They were $1 million seed rounds. Harry Stebbings That's a tough one. What was Sean like back then? Venky Ganesan The way he described Plaxo, his vision worked out. He understood virality and network effects, and his thought process around what happened with Napster. My rule of thumb is I'm always looking for people who are incredibly good at communicating very complex concepts in a simple manner and just have insight. Sean had insight around human behavior and complex concepts, and could boil it down in a simple way. He was a very good communicator. Harry Stebbings What a character. Venky Ganesan And he gets to have Justin Timberlake play him, so it must be all right. Harry Stebbings I mean, it's a pretty cool one. Drops the “the.” Venky Ganesan Yeah. Harry Stebbings Love it. And we actually did that. We were the 20 Minute VC— Venky Ganesan Oh, good. There you go. Harry Stebbings —now it's just 20VC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks, dude. I was talking to Amy beforehand, speaking of the founders you backed there. Venky Ganesan Amazing partner of mine. Harry Stebbings Amazing partner of yours. She said that you care a lot about understanding what brought founders together. Hearing you talk about Sean there made me think of this. Why do you care about what brings founders together? And are there any patterns or signals that excite you? Venky Ganesan I think the company you build is the team you build. So much of the DNA of a company is set by its founding team. What brought them together, why they thought, in a world of 6 billion people, they should be the people to do this, and how they think about each other's strengths and weaknesses—I think these things are like a precog from Minority Report that tells you how they're going to make decisions and how they're going to build the rest of their team. I think it gives you a clue about who these people are. Ultimately, I think a company's culture and DNA are going to be shaped by the founders. Harry Stebbings You can ask 1 question that you find most revealing of a founder's qualities. Doug Leone's, to me, was the one I remember most, and he always says, “What's your worst reference?” Venky Ganesan That's a great question. I generally ask: imagine your 5 best friends are in a room, and if I had to ask them for 3 words to describe you, what would those be? That's a question I normally ask people. I'll tell you, I listened to Mike Moritz in an interview, and he asked a question—his favorite question is, “If you could go back in your life and change 1 thing, what would that be?” I think that's a pretty interesting question. If I were to ask you what you think about yourself, it's harder. But when you think about your friends, you can externalize it, and that gives you a clue about how the people around you think about you. It also tells you your self-awareness, because usually after I do that, I also do references, and I'm going to try to see if the references match someone's self-awareness. It's actually okay if you know your weaknesses, because then you have a much better chance of managing them. It's the people who are blind to their weaknesses who usually have challenges. Harry Stebbings Don't worry, my weaknesses are revealed in the comments section of every interview, so I see them glaringly. One thing that's been uniform across the industry is that we've seen ownerships go down. Even the vaunted Benchmark now takes less than 10%, and— Venky Ganesan I thought they said 20%, 20% or bust. Harry Stebbings Maybe they still stick to that message. I love the Benchmark guys, absolutely. But does ownership matter as much anymore? Venky Ganesan Of course it does. Ownership always matters, but I think you have to think of that relative to the opportunity, right? What I mean by that is, would I love to have 20% of a company? Sure. But I'd rather take 2% of a trillion-dollar company than 20% of a $100 million company, right? Harry Stebbings So you'll do deals now for 2% or 3%? Venky Ganesan Well, we do. Anthropic—we own less than 2%. My point is that when you think about ownership, you can't think of that in isolation. Harry Stebbings But I think you're either in the ownership game or you're in the money movement game. Venky Ganesan I disagree a little bit. I think when you're making your option bet, you want to have ownership, because then it's not clear. Let's say you know it's an outlier. If it's an outlier company, then you're in the capital-invested game. Prior to it being an outlier company, you have to be in the ownership game. Your best situation is that you are in the ownership game in an outlier company, and then, because it's an outlier, you go into the money-movement game. Harry Stebbings No, I thought you said the ownership doesn't matter before it becomes an outlier, because you're there for the information. When it does become known, it becomes a money-concentration game. Venky Ganesan You want to have enough ownership, though. I mean, you look at Higgsfield with my partner Amy. She killed it. She got 15% of the company for a $5 million check. You had Alex on your podcast—an incredible entrepreneur and an incredible business. So in that case, we got the ownership. And then we also had the opportunity to size up. Harry Stebbings Did you? Venky Ganesan Yeah. We invested. Harry Stebbings Do you get my rationale, though, that it doesn't matter if you have ownership in the first place? What you're buying is the information to size up. Venky Ganesan I get that. If you're asking me whether it's better to be in the company regardless of ownership or not be in the company, yeah, it's better to be in the company. But it's even better to be in the company with ownership because now you've actually gotten your ownership that's gonna drive real returns. The problem is, once it's an outlier, everybody knows about it. It's no longer a selection game. It's just, okay, can you get access, and can you—it's a position-sizing game. There's no alpha there, and that's the truth. In the AI greatest hits, everybody knows these companies. Harry Stebbings How much of your fund will you put in a single company? Venky Ganesan I don't think we would put more than 20% of— Harry Stebbings Have you gone up to 20% before? Venky Ganesan We have hit 20% on one company. Harry Stebbings Whoa. What company? Venky Ganesan Anthropic. Harry Stebbings I mean— Venky Ganesan But it— Harry Stebbings Fair enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Venky Ganesan It's gotta be an exception, right? Harry Stebbings Yeah. I bet that was a hard conversation: “We 10x'd this year. We 10x'd last year.” “Okay, Venky, let's do it.” Venky Ganesan But I do feel that you have to think about the question of ownership and concentration as one. What I mean is, where was the company? What information do you have? How much conviction can you have as an outlier company? The thing about position sizing is you want to position size when the data is there. If you position size it ahead of the data, then you're taking a lot more risk. So the question is not, did you put 20% of the fund into a company in one check at the beginning of the fund, or did you ladder up to 20% on the basis of new data? Obviously, it's much better to ladder up on the basis of new data. I think in an era where venture capitalists are gonna have ownership come down—I mean, I wish we could get 10%. Even 10% is hard, right? The way you're gonna win is you're gonna establish a position and then size up as a company does well, so that you have sized it commensurate to the outlier opportunity. Harry Stebbings Totally get you, and I get that. Everyone says that ownership doesn't matter so much because outcome sizes are so much larger than they've ever been. They are. That is a valid answer. My question is, are they on the whole? Do we just have a breadth of companies that will be much larger, or is it really just a handful of Anthropics and SpaceX and cursor on the small end at 60 billion, which is still enormous and amazing? But is that a good enough justification for ownership going down? Venky Ganesan I think the problem comes down to your portfolio composition, right? If you are in one of those outliers, I think you can survive with low ownership. But what happens if you are not in these big outliers? Essentially, you're playing a game, to use baseball analogies, where there's only grand-slam home runs or strikeouts. There's no singles, doubles, or triples, right? In cricket terms, it's like only scoring sixes and not having ones and twos. The problem with that is that if you don't score a six and you don't have the ones and twos, that's gonna be a tough fund. Part of getting ownership is giving yourself some insurance that if you missed out on the outlier, the mid-sized outcomes can still move the needle for you. Harry Stebbings But will you do singles and doubles? Venky Ganesan No. The goal is always to score home runs, right? Harry Stebbings Yeah. Venky Ganesan But sometimes you strike out. If you strike out all the time, that's gonna be a tough fund. So the idea is that you wanna at least say, “Okay, I went for the home run and I got a triple.” Harry Stebbings But I just don't think founders are aware, and I say this and people always get at me. I think they kind of miss the point because I say it lovingly, for awareness, for founders: the game has changed. Going from $1 million to $4 million, then $4 million to $8 million, then $8 million to $16 million, and then, Venky, in 5 years' time, we're gonna hit $30 million—that's an amazing achievement. But it is just not enough to get venture excited today. Do you agree with that? Venky Ganesan Yes, I agree with that. Again, it's a snapshot in time because you're seeing companies— Harry Stebbings But do you think venture will ever go back to being excited about that? Venky Ganesan Well, they're not excited about it today because they're seeing companies go from $1 million to $10 million to $50 million to $100 million. They're getting to $100 million in 3 years, or in some cases they're going from $0 to $1 billion in 18 months, right? When you see those kinds of companies, of course you wanna do those. But that's because we are in a moment in time where there are certain trends allowing you to do it. I don't think this continues forever. This is where I think you have to take the long, long-horizon look at this. There were companies who grew fast, but there's a combination of things that make these companies grow fast today that may or may not continue. Harry Stebbings When they grow as fast as they are, the rounds come thick and fast and the prices are high. Venky Ganesan Yeah. I mean, you look at Instinct. God bless. I wish we were in. They've gone from, I don't know, $250 million to $10 billion in 10 weeks. Harry Stebbings Would you have done that round at $10 billion? Venky Ganesan Smart people have done it. We are in Town, which we love and think very highly of, and we're excited about that. I think there's something going on there. There's a true phenomenon. What I don't know is their data, what it costs for them to keep growing their user base, and how the Muse launch affects their growth. Harry Stebbings Can I ask you, everyone kind of goes into a lot of investing now with the idea that there's downside protection? No is incredible. It's in a very strategic space for the incumbents. Worst case, one and a half billion McPRAF. It's a no-brainer for Microsoft to do it as an addendum to Copilot, or for Apple to do it. Jesus, Apple, please do it. Do us all a favor and save us from Siri. Do you think that downside protection—“Ah, don't worry, the incumbents will buy it”—is okay to have, or quite a dangerous mindset to have? Venky Ganesan I think you can easily rationalize a lot of things if you take that mindset. The problem is that, again, you threw out this $1.5 billion number casually because we are in this environment where AMD is buying a company for $8.5 billion, Nvidia bought Hugging Face for $14 billion, and Stripe bought OpenRouter, allegedly, for around $8 billion. Harry Stebbings Allegedly. Venky Ganesan Allegedly. Harry Stebbings Allegedly. Venky Ganesan Allegedly. Harry Stebbings Yeah. Venky Ganesan I think we have to say these are points in time where companies are doing it. It may not be that way. Today, it feels like $1.5 billion is, “Oh, no big deal. If I'm right, it's gonna be worth $100 billion or $200 billion. If I'm wrong, someone's gonna pick it up for $3 billion or $4 billion.” By the way, that's what you're referring to with my tweets. I wrote this thing about how, if you go back and look at the dot-com era, Nortel bought Kairos for $3.5 billion. Lucent bought Chromatis for $4.5 billion. These were companies with no product and no revenue, just teams, and they bought them with their stock. It felt very similar. In fact, I believe Jeff Yang from Redpoint, a legendary investor, had this quote in The Industry Standard, which is a magazine that's no longer in existence. He said, “You know, there's no risk in venture capital. If the company's successful, it'll be sold for billions. If not, it'll be bought for the talent stack.” It didn't quite work out that way on the other end of the cycle, after March 2000. So I go with trepidation, but I just wouldn't take the mindset that some large strategic is gonna buy my company for the talent stack because they don't care about the investors. They care about the founders. Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they just hire the founders for the same package? Harry Stebbings Well, in a lot of cases, they kind of are in these structured deals— Venky Ganesan Right. Harry Stebbings Let's be honest, and screwing the investors. Venky Ganesan So you've seen that, and you can't take that—there's no reason for them to take care of the cap table. Harry Stebbings Do you think about the dilutive nature of businesses today? What I mean by that is that we are suffering more and more dilution as an investor class than ever before, and it's a better time than ever to be an employee, given the levels of stock-based compensation, or SBC, for people. Do you worry about that? Do you think about that? Should I worry about that and think about that? Venky Ganesan For sure. We look at whatever we invest in at the seed round, and we assume that by the time we sell or exit the company, if we own 10%, we would have 3.5% to 4%. We expect 60% dilution from the point of our first check, right? That's a combination of dilution from financing, but it's also dilution from option-pool expansions. You have to really think of yourself as, whatever ownership you bought in your first check, it'll only be 50% by then, at the end. Harry Stebbings The interesting thing is that it's very common in a lot of companies we're seeing today. The other interesting thing is that companies are sometimes scaling so fast, à la OpenRouter—Alex, a friend of both of ours—that they actually don't take that much dilution because they scale so fast and so efficiently. You suffer much less dilution. So it's almost a tale of 2 dilution worlds. Do you know what I mean? Venky Ganesan Yeah. It's a function of time. Harry Stebbings Yeah. Venky Ganesan So the way to think about it is that—and I don't think we spend enough time in venture capital thinking about that. We should say, “What is the time horizon you’re going to hold the company for?” Because the time horizon will determine your dilution. Part of the reason your dilution is lower in some situations is that companies have quick exits. They grew their value quickly, and they have quick exits. That’s a double win. When your time horizon is long, there are 2 hits: your IRR gets hit, and you’re going to have meaningful dilution. Harry Stebbings Did you think of that when investing? What really is the ramp? There are businesses in the ERP space where they’re like, “Ah, but the revenue’s such high quality, Harry. I get you. It’s not as fast as your Higgs Field or your Ligora, but it’s so high quality.” And I’m like, “Yeah, fuck, it’s slow.” Am I wrong to think that? Venky Ganesan No. I think the velocity of the business is very important for venture capitalists, right? The velocity will determine a bunch of things. The other reason why your dilution goes down is that if you have a fast uptick in valuation, the amount of ownership you have to give for your next set of human capital is a lot lower, right? You’re a $200 million company, and you’re giving 2% of the company to hire a senior executive—that’s pretty meaningful. You quickly become a $2 billion company. You don’t need to give that much; you’re going to give RSUs, and you give the same person $20 million, which is 0.1%. Harry Stebbings DPI or IRR? Venky Ganesan Both. Maybe, if you can. I do think, actually, that you can’t have IRR without DPI. I think what you’re trying to ask is, “Hey, will you settle for a larger DPI over a longer horizon, or do you want quicker DPI with a faster IRR?” I think the reality of venture when I joined—this is now dating myself—28 years ago, people didn’t focus on IRR. People focused on cash-on-cash return because IRR took care of itself. I think in today’s venture, the game has changed. You have to focus on IRR. You know why? Because there’s no way for venture to be successful in today’s era without the Magnificent 7 participating in everything you’re doing. Every venture company is writing a tax to Nvidia in some way, shape, or form, writing the tax to a hyperscaler in some way, shape, or form, and possibly writing a tax to the foundational model in some way, tax or form. So if you’re going to be successful, you're gonna be writing a tax to all of them. All of them are available in the public markets, or they will be soon, for someone to invest in a no-fee, no-carry index fund. You have to think about your IRR as, “I’ve got to beat that by 1,000 basis points to justify anyone giving you capital in the private markets.” Harry Stebbings You mentioned Town. I had JD on the show. I really like him. I’ve known him since the cloud days. I’m pissed off about that one because he started the company when he left. I remember talking to him about it when he started, and he was doing something in some terrible space. No offense—he’ll agree with me. And then he obviously pivoted. Venky Ganesan In tax. I think they were doing something in tax, and then— Harry Stebbings Thank you. I’m too old for this shit. Venky Ganesan If you’re too old, what am I? I’m ancient. Harry Stebbings You’re a spring chicken. And for anyone watching, they’ll see that you look much younger than me. But my question to you is, we obviously know what happened with the Town round in terms of the competitive nature and dynamics there. I don’t want to go into that. What I want to go into is: does competition matter for VCs to invest against now? It seems like Andreessen has 3 companies all doing the same thing, and many big platforms do. Does it matter if there are many players in the same space anymore? Venky Ganesan I mean, this is a personal preference, right? Culturally, for Matt, Shawn, and me, we like to be committed to the entrepreneur. The situation has to be specific. If we take a board seat and write a big check, then we want to be committed. If you’re investing in the seed round and you have a small check and you’re a passive investor, that’s a different issue, right? But when we make a commitment to the entrepreneur, we want that to feel like a 2-way commitment. We expect them to put the interests of their shareholders first and commit to it, and we as shareholders need to commit to them as well. That’s why we didn’t invest in OpenAI. We only stayed with Anthropic. There’s no shade. Again, venture is changing in a way that multiple people are doing different things. I think you just have to figure out what is authentic to us and our values and live by those. For us, when we make a big commitment to the founder, we think of it as a 2-way street. They commit to us; we commit to them. Harry Stebbings One thing that we see a lot today is the compression in deployment timelines. In other words, people are investing much faster. All the LPs that I speak to are just saying, “God, Harry, Jesus. Everyone is coming back to market so much quicker. They’re bigger.” Is that okay, or is that a sign of a peak bubble? Venky Ganesan Yeah, you know, it’s very interesting. LPs want smaller funds, and then they want you not to come back quicker. The problem is that 1 of those 2 things can’t be true. If the opportunity we have is real, and AI is the biggest economic platform shift of our lifetime, and you want smaller funds, they’re going to come back quicker. There are also large funds that are coming back quicker, so that’s a different issue. But I think the time we are in is 1 in which you’re seeing companies grow so fast and they need capital to grow. This is not a situation where you can grow without capital. This is not Google. Google, if you go back, probably raised less than $50 million in the private markets. You can’t do that today in AI. You need compute; you need to scale. To me, because you’re seeing them grow so fast, the capital needs are growing. If a venture firm doesn’t provide it, they’re going to get it from their competitor. Harry Stebbings So, actually, if managers are deploying a fund in 18 months, LPs should forgive them. Venky Ganesan I think the LPs should ask questions and say, “How have you thought about it? How are you managing it? What’s going to happen if things go wrong?” Vintage diversification does matter. People have to be conscious about that. When I look at Menlo’s history, the 1 fund that wasn’t successful in Menlo’s history—we have a 50-year history—we only had 1 fund that didn’t return capital, which was Menlo 8, invested in a 10-month period between 2000 and 2001. That was not quite the outcome we wanted. Harry Stebbings Menlo 8. Venky Ganesan Menlo 8. But I bring that up because I do think time diversification matters. By the way, Menlo 7 was 1 of the best funds in Menlo’s history. Harry Stebbings Yeah, but do you remember Accel 2005, just before the Facebook fund? They had massive LP churn because they went and did a load of cleantech and biotech, and it was not good. And then came the Facebook fund. Venky Ganesan So to me, I just bring it up as, look, as GPs, you’ve got to take the fiduciary duty you have to your LPs very seriously, and you’ve got to balance that decision. What I do know is that you can’t have dogmatic rules. You have to play the game on the field. Then you’ve got to communicate what you’re doing in a transparent way to your LPs and tell them what’s happening. Some LPs are going to be like, “Okay, I agree with you. I want to play.” Some people are not, and you’ve got to respect that. But the point is that you might have no choice but to play the game this way. Harry Stebbings Did you ever scale out of an LP class? What I mean by that is, the funds now are reasonably sized. They’re not egregiously sized. You’re not David George asking for the U.S. Treasury, but you’re $3 billion. It’s a lot of money. For some LPs, they’re like, “It’s a lot.” Was there a time when you scaled out of endowments, say, and suddenly you had to be pension-fund invested? Venky Ganesan Our anchor tenant has historically been the Washington State Investment Board, which is the public-sector pension fund of the State of Washington, from an SLP, by the way. I highly recommend them to anybody. They’ve been our anchor tenant since 1981, so we have never had a reason to scale out because public-sector pension funds have been a part of our LP base. It’s a little bit of a cultural dynamic. I think the founders of Menlo came from very humble beginnings. They both grew up in a house with no running water or toilets. I think John was orphaned very early. He was a scholarship student at MIT. They love the idea of working for public-sector employees because that felt like working for their parents, and these people look more like their parents than their children. Harry Stebbings Love that. So there wasn’t a fund where LPs went, “Oh, Venky, you’re getting pretty big now. I think you’re just scaling out of our sweet spot”? Venky Ganesan No, that wasn’t the case. We raised our first billion-dollar fund in venture capital. Menlo raised Menlo 9 in 2001. It was a $1.5 billion fund. Menlo 10, which was raised in 2004, was a $1.2 billion fund. Those funds did not perform as well as we would have liked, and many LPs did leave us. Harry Stebbings You manage a lot of the LP conversations today, correct? Venky Ganesan I do. Matt and I do a lot of them, yes. Harry Stebbings What do you hear from them? As I said, I hear deployment time is down: people are investing much faster, and the funds are just getting bigger. And then I also just see mimicry, which is—I’m calling this out because it’s a compliment to her. I never shit on people other than LPs. Venky Ganesan That’s okay. Harry Stebbings But every LP just wants Sarah Guo’s fund. Venky Ganesan Yeah. Harry Stebbings I completely agree: Sarah Guo is incredible, and you should want her fund. But there’s this complete herd mentality. Venky Ganesan Sarah and Mike are amazing— Harry Stebbings Amazing. Venky Ganesan —and there’s no question about that. I spend a lot of time with them and with LPs, and I think, first of all, a lot of LPs have 2 complaints. One, they’re like, “Enough TVPI. I need to get some DPI.” So I think if you deliver DPI, you’re already on the right side of the table. I think it’s easier to come back to them to ask for more capital when you deliver DPI, right? Second, I don’t think people can afford not to be in the AI economy, and I’ll tell you why. Most of them have much bigger private equity portfolios than they have venture portfolios. In many cases, they have 3–4x exposure to private equity. A lot of private equity over the last few years has been software, and those positions are directly impacted by AI. If you want to hedge against your private equity portfolio, you’ve got to be in the AI economy. That’s the piece that forces them to come back. If you are someone who has given people DPI, and you can credibly make the case that you’re going to be a player in the AI economy, I think you can raise money from LPs. Harry Stebbings You’ve got to have given DPI. We see companies scale faster than ever, as we’ve said. We see prices that are very high. How do you think about the internal conversation of, “Whoa, X company is now valued at $10 billion. Can we take some chips off the table?” What does that discussion look like, and what are the lessons on how to sell successfully? Venky Ganesan I think you have to step back and look at any situation in which you have a 30, 40, or 50x return on your dollar and ask yourself, “Should I take some off the table?” I think the right time to do that is when the entrepreneur is thinking about taking some right off the table. If you were to work in conjunction with them— Harry Stebbings What if it’s not material? I’m using this as a consulting lesson. You can invoice me later. I have a company where we’re 40x up. Venky Ganesan Yeah. Harry Stebbings You’re like, “Wow, fantastic.” You’ve got $100,000 in there. Return $4 million back to the $100 million fund that it’s in. Venky Ganesan I don’t think it’s a size issue. To me, it’s just, look, lock in the gains. If you go back to the SaaS portfolio in 2021, there were valuations done at, let’s say, pretty high prices. If people had taken 10–15% off the table, even if it’s small, it locks in gains and allows you to go long. The other thing I tell entrepreneurs is that, just like when you take some chips off the table, you’re more likely to go long, so are we, right? We can now afford to go long with you, and so it aligns. To me— Harry Stebbings Will you ever sell all of your position? Venky Ganesan Generally, no. Not unless the company is being sold. I’m not interested. I think that’s a different situation. The only time I think it’s different is if you do not have a relationship with the founder. But as long as you’re in, you’re going to ride. We ride and die with our founders. Harry Stebbings Jason Lemkin says on the show, “Whenever a founder leaves, I ride it to zero. When a founder’s gone, zero, zero, zero.” Do you find that to be the same when the founder leaves? You’re like, “We’re supportive, of course, and we’re still here,” but mentally you’re like, “That’s a zero.” Venky Ganesan My friend and your friend, Nikesh Arora, would disagree with you and say he goes on founder mode. Look, there are people like Nikesh and Jeetu Patel at Cisco. They go into founder mode as executives. It’s sort of an insult to people like that when you say, “The founder leaves.” Look at the situation. Who replaced them? Founder mode is a mode of working. It’s not tied to anyone personally. I think anyone can be a founder in terms of working in a founder mode, and I think some people do. Frank Slootman joined Data Domain, Snowflake, and ServiceNow. In each of those places, he acted like a founder. He didn’t act like an executive. Harry Stebbings By the way, Nikesh, please don’t kill me. I love you more than ever, and I’ve always loved you, and it was Venky who said it. It wasn’t me who said it. I’ll give you Venky’s address later. I’m going to go get a brick through my window. Venky Ganesan You’re definitely getting it from Nikesh. Harry Stebbings I’m terrified of Nikesh. Are you kidding me? Can I ask you, then? We see so many sales now. Fei Fei Li sells for $8.2 billion. It’s amazing—a phenomenal exit. Well done to everyone involved. Yesterday’s news. I mean, OpenAI is so yesterday’s news we’ve all forgotten about it. I don’t mean this glibly or anything. I know that sounds so much like a child of this ecosystem, which I’m not, sadly. Are we just going to see a load more exits now? Venky Ganesan Yeah, I think you’re going to see more because I think there’s competitive pressure. There’s also this notion that we have a regulatory regime that will let you do M&A, right? There’s been a backlog of M&A that was supposed to happen. It didn’t happen because we had a different regulatory regime. There’s a notion that this may not continue forever, so, one, you have a window of time. You also have competitive pressure. When AMD buys a real-world model, does Nvidia need to do something? Do other people need to react? I think every acquisition forces a bunch of competitive dynamics that we have to consider. Then people have equity prices, right? AMD is now a trillion-dollar company. $8.5 billion is still, I think, less than point one percent of the company, right? So you can do stuff because of this combination of things. There’s also the notion that anything that lets you catch up in the AI wave is very highly valued. Did Meta do a good job paying up for scale? I think they would say yeah. If you look at the market cap add of Muse to Meta, maybe that fifteen billion seems cheap now. Harry Stebbings I’m also so happy for Zuck. It feels like he’s almost got a co-founder in Alex Wang who he can delegate some of the shit to. Do you know what I mean? Venky Ganesan Zuck is a great capital allocator. Go back and look at the history of his capital allocation; it has been phenomenal. Harry Stebbings Best of CEOs. Venky Ganesan He bought Instagram for $1 billion. He has executed. Harry Stebbings He bought Navo for four hundred million, which allowed him to see everything that went. So smart. Venky Ganesan I think they’re incredible technologists, but I think there are very few people who are incredible technologists and good capital allocators. Zuck is right up there. Harry Stebbings If you could choose 1 skill for a founder at scale between capital allocation and product visionary, what would you choose? Venky Ganesan I’d choose capital allocation. By the way, capital allocation by itself also captures product vision, because you’re allocating the capital to the things that matter. In some ways, part of the dynamics of deciding on capital allocation is which product direction you need to go. But the other way is not true. There are some people who can be great product visionaries but who might not think about what the return on that is going to be. Harry Stebbings Evan Spiegel, love the dude. I mean, free candy every year. SBC through the roof. Are you a shareholder of Snap? Venky Ganesan We are not a shareholder of Snap, but Ev is a product genius. There’s no question about that. Harry Stebbings Genius. Venky Ganesan Right? His vision for Snapchat and what he executed—I think it would be fair to say you have not been rewarded for being a shareholder of Snap, at least for the last 7 or 8 years. Harry Stebbings Not been rewarded? Venky Ganesan I was trying to be polite here. Harry Stebbings That’s like giving Titanic an 8 out of 10 in the holiday review book. That’s incredible. Venky Ganesan Not being rewarded. Harry Stebbings Not been rewarded. Blowhard. Yeah, no, that’s a good way to put it. Are you worried by how much money is being made by people? I’m seeing researchers at OpenAI walk out with $30–40 million. Venky Ganesan Here’s the thing: I’ll always believe this—money doesn’t change people; it reveals them. People think money and power change people. No, they only reveal them. If you’re an asshole before, when you have money and power, you reveal that. What I have found is that the people who are really motivated are going to be motivated even if they have lots of money. The people who are not motivated, who are acting like they are, will opt out when the money shows up. To me, it won’t change for the A players, because for the A players, money is just a way of keeping score. What they love is the game. Harry Stebbings So you’re not worried about house prices in the Bay Area and the inflation that we’re going to see with IPOs from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI? That worries you, or not? Venky Ganesan Of course it does. It changes the character of the place. But the real issue we have—and this is an issue in California, hopefully not in London—is a question of supply. It’s not a question of demand. At the end of the day, we have tremendously increased the cost of, and the process for, building a house. There’s no supply coming in, so any uptick in demand results in prices going up. The way to address that is not to worry about the demand, but to increase the supply of housing stock. We just do not have the collective willpower, and this… For a progressive state, there's more NIMBYism in California than I expected, and the NIMBYism prevents you from building more housing stock. Harry Stebbings I saw a tweet where you said something. You responded to Brian Armstrong: “I do my work.” Venky Ganesan Okay. All right. This is dangerous. Harry Stebbings Yeah, it is dangerous, but I'm joining you on this side if this is where you're going. You said, “I appreciate your leadership through the woke times.” Venky Ganesan I think what I particularly appreciated about Brian is that he laid out his principles of what he believed, and he told people, “Hey, if you really want to engage in political activism, then Coinbase is not the place for you because we do not want to have political dialogue here. If that's important for you, you should go and find a place in which you can do it.” I think that takes courage to say, but it's being true to what he wanted to do. To me, that's the most important thing: try to be authentic to who you are. I appreciated him being authentic when I think it came at a cost. He was castigated in the press and maybe on Twitter, and he had people leave. But I think he ultimately said, “We want people who are authentic to Coinbase values articulated by me, the founder.” Harry Stebbings Have you ever been inauthentic to yourself? Venky Ganesan I think there are times when you say certain things to founders because you want them to like you or you want to win a deal that may not be truly authentic. What I'll tell you is that I have dealt with my own insecurities and feeling like an imposter, and I've gotten more comfortable in my skin now. I just don't do it. If it means I have to say something inauthentic to me to win the deal, I'd rather not win it. But that's easy to say because I'm at the point in my life where that win doesn't matter. Of course I like to win, but it's not going to change my life. I always say it's very different when you're 25 years old and you're trying to build your career. You do whatever it takes to win. In some way, morality is a privilege of the people who already succeeded. It's easy to be moral now when you already have the things you have. The question is, will I be a moral person if I were to go back 20 years ago and start there? That's the real test, and I don't think I lived up to that test as much as I would like. Harry Stebbings Are you a better investor now that you're richer? Venky Ganesan Yes. You're not as afraid. You're not afraid of failure. You're willing to go all in and go to the hilt, so you can go for broke more easily. Think about it on a poker table. The guy with the big amount of chips has so much leverage to win, right? They see more cards. Ironically, this is why I think the way our capitalist system is set up, the rich are going to get richer, because they have more opportunities to be the bully at the poker table. Harry Stebbings Does that mean emerging managers are just in the old starvation game? Forgive me for this, but I don't like binaries. I'm fucking media, so you kind of have to do binaries. “It depends” doesn't sell. The $30 million to $100 million funds are just the worst place to be. Venky Ganesan Yes, they are today. That's a tough place to be because you're playing at a poker table where people have such high chip stacks. Harry Stebbings I think they were five years ago, dude. Venky Ganesan I think what happens is, if you're lucky enough—and I don't know if this is true, but I'm sure if you were to go and look at the cap table—there was some small investor who wrote a check. Anjan wrote a check into Anthropic. Maybe he didn't have a fund then, but he wrote a check. You wrote a 30 to $50 million check. You wrote a check into the Anthropic round—not the $4 billion round we did, but much earlier. You're doing fine. Harry Stebbings Yeah, but he was an angel, not competing for rounds. What I'm saying is that the $30 million to $100 million funds, where they need to move $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million, are kind of a pain to fit into rounds. Anjan putting in $100,000 or $200,000 is sure in. Venky Ganesan Yes. Your principle is right, but I'm just trying to think about counting. Think about conviction. How big was Sarah's fund? I want to say it was a $200 million fund, and she found a way to be in some of the most interesting companies out there. It can be done. Harry Stebbings And then you've got Dave Tisch, who I think would be a really good example as well, with BoxGroup. It goes against the portfolio construction that all LPs love: high ownership and a concentrated portfolio. Venky Ganesan There are always people who figure out how to play against the odds, right? But they are the best of the best, so you don't want to extrapolate. In general, those are tough places to be unless you're exceptional. I was reading a tweet between Sarah and Patrick Grady, and Sarah was telling LPs, “My strategy is I'm just going to work harder.” That's probably the truth. Everybody wants to have some magic strategy that nobody else is going to do. There's no magic strategy. Everybody in the venture industry is smart. You have to out-hustle and have grit to make it through, and Sarah definitely has that. Harry Stebbings Final one before we do a quick-fire. We mentioned private equity being challenged in a lot of ways by a lot of AI companies. We're seeing the keys being handed back at companies like Medallia. You're seeing a lot of struggling companies in the books of these private equity providers. Is private equity structurally fucked? Venky Ganesan Look, they're smart guys, and they know how to figure out and operate these companies. They also have majority control. In some ways, the venture-backed companies—the SaaS companies where people paid high multiples—add tables and mirrors, and they got spooned, as I say. I think those are in a tougher situation. Don't get me wrong; I think private equity is a challenge too. But the reason I say the venture-backed companies are in an even tougher situation is that, at least with private equity, you have a majority owner who controls the company and can do things. You have a lot of zombie SaaS companies where nobody owns enough to be able to do anything. Nobody cares. How do you actually land that ship? At least with private equity, they can do something with it. Landing that ship is going to be hard for everybody, but I think in that class of 2021 SaaS companies, the best outcome is getting spooned, which really means getting your capital back. The worst outcome is going to be zero. Harry Stebbings Good old Bending Spoons. European. Just going to put it out there. The quick-fire is a combination of mine and Joff's questions—he's on your team. Venky Ganesan Joff. My partner. Harry Stebbings Yeah, he came back with some bangers. Why do you love pocket squares? Venky Ganesan When I was growing up, I didn't care about how I dressed, and I didn't put any effort into it until I had this one conversation with my dad, when he said, “Listen, when you dress, you're not dressing for yourself; you're dressing for others. You're showing them that this is an important meeting, that you're expressing the importance of what you're doing to them.” I know my partners make fun of this, but I dress up for partner meetings because it's a self-message to me that the people I'm meeting are very important, and what I'm going to do is important. I need to take that very seriously. Harry Stebbings Now I feel guilty. Oh, Christ. Way to make me go. Yeah, Joff teed me up for that one, didn't he? I like that. It's really nice. I should probably think about that more. You can invest in 1 seed fund and 1 growth fund that's not Menlo. Which funds do you invest in? Venky Ganesan I have tremendous respect for the Bessemer folks. I was a co-founder with Byron, and I've known David Kahan. I think they are super disciplined. If I could invest outside of Menlo, I would invest in Bessemer. Harry Stebbings That's for the growth fund. Venky Ganesan Yeah. Harry Stebbings What about the seed fund? Venky Ganesan I'm looking for people who are going to be in interesting AI companies. There's this group of guys called E14 out of MIT, and I find them to be in interesting AI companies. They seem to really understand the MIT ecosystem. Harry Stebbings Who, when you hear you're competing against them, are you like, “Oh, fuck”? Venky Ganesan I think of more people than firms, but I would say Benchmark is super hard to beat. Harry Stebbings Is Benchmark harder to beat than Sequoia? Venky Ganesan I think so. Obviously, they're both great firms, but Benchmark is super hard to beat. Whatever they do—the combination of Eric, Chaitan, Avereh, and Jack—they are just a beast. Harry Stebbings What would be your single biggest piece of advice to an LP allocating into venture at this time? Venky Ganesan Look at the windshield, not the rear-view mirror. The results and financial performance are rear-view-mirror calculations, and they're good at telling you what they did in the past. They don't tell you how a firm is going to do. Performance is a lagging indicator, and it's actually a 5- to 7-year lagging indicator. My advice would be to call a bunch of entrepreneurs from successful AI companies and ask them who the partners they respect are. My aim is they didn't take the money. And if the firm you're talking to doesn't have a few of those partners in the mix, then that's your windshield. Harry Stebbings How do you stop your team getting arrogant? You guys have got the winning hand. Venky Ganesan You're only as good as your last investment. It doesn't matter if you're the lion or the antelope in the savanna. You wake up in the morning: if you're the lion and you don't run, you don't eat; if you're the antelope and you don't run, you don't live. You just have to run. I feel like you have to think about the most important meeting being the next one. The most important investment is the next one. The most important board meeting is the next one. If you don't spend time in the present thinking about it, I think you lose in this game. Harry Stebbings What's the secret to marriage when you scale wealth over time together? Venky Ganesan Oh, wow. Well, you gotta marry someone better than you, which I did. Thank you. And you gotta convince her to stay with you—or him, whatever your preference might be. Finding a life partner who inspires you to be the best version of yourself and supports you in being that is, I think, critical. If you can do that for each other, I think that'll work, because I think at the core of a long-term marriage is real respect. It's love and real respect, but I think respect is super important. That comes from inspiring each other to be the best version you can be. Harry Stebbings What's the best advice you've ever been given? You mentioned Mr. Steve Sloan and his father-in-law. His father-in-law is one of my closest friends, and he once said to me, “You're never wrong to do the right thing, but the right thing is very often the hard thing.” Venky Ganesan Yeah. I think the best advice I've gotten has really centered around being around people. I think Ronald Reagan has a quote that Tom Reilly, who's a CEO of Trigger, told me once: “There's no limit to what a person can do as long as they don't care who gets the credit.” When I was early in my career, I was very focused on getting credit. I really thought, “Am I gonna get credit?” Then I let go of that and focused on just doing what's right and not worrying about whether I'm gonna get credit. That's actually been pretty freeing, and I think that's made me a better teammate. Harry Stebbings I love that. I don't think there's a better way to end it than that. Your humility is astonishing. It's really just—one, you're very calming. I almost feel like you should be on Headspace or Calm. And two, it's a wonderful humility that I rarely see in a venture investor. But thank you so much for doing this, Venky. Venky Ganesan You have too many successful people on your show. I'm trying to lower the bar for you. Harry Stebbings I've so enjoyed this. Thank you for doing it. And you see with shows like this why it's so much better in person. You can't have this virtually, so thank you for doing it. Venky Ganesan Thank you, Harry. I have to say, my colleague Claire was coming with me, and she said, “I watch Harry all the time. He has become my favorite show.” Especially the one you do with Rory and Jason. She said, “Oh, this has trumped the All-In podcast as my number one show.” So I have to say, you're getting fans all over the place.