20VC: Groq's $20BN NVIDIA Acquisition | Manus Acquired by Meta for $2BN | Why Sam Altman Does Not Care About Dilution | Navan Trading at 4x ARR & Why Going Public Does Not Make Sense Anymore | The Rise of Invisible Unemployment and Labour Markets in 202

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
Everyone's coming for Nvidia now. Nvidia's numbers are going to crush this year, but we're going to see all the daggers really coming out.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:06)
In the end, words are words, and half a billion dollars is life changing, right?

**Harry Stebbings** (0:11)
No, no, no.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:11)
I just think for venture, this is the era of the spite startup.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:15)
No one ever said to Winston Churchill, congratulations, you won World War II on budget. They just said, congratulations, you won World War II.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:21)
Honestly, I think the most important thing that's going to happen this year is when we are in AI 24-7. I do genuinely think you can identify a top 0.1% founder without talking to them. I've done multiple billion dollar exits from cold inbound.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:37)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. It is back. Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll. I have missed this over the holidays. And my word, what a schedule we have for you today. Groq acquired for $20 billion by Nvidia. Manus acquired for $2 billion by Meta.
Then we have Navan trading at 4x ARR. And what that means for companies, considering going public and so much more. But before we dive into the show today, I run the 20VC fund and I get this question from founders all the time. Oh, Harry, I can't find a good.com. Do you have a good hookup? Well, let me tell you now, the answer is always going to be no. I don't have a guy or a gal for that. I do have a recommendation though. If you're building a tech startup, get a.tech domain. Tech startup, .tech domain. It could not be more obvious. As an investor, I appreciate founders who put thought into their branding. When I see.tech in your name, it tells me right away that tech is at the core of your build. It'll say that to your customers too. A clean and sharp domain like.tech pays off in the long run. You know, Nothing, .tech, One X, .tech, Aurora, .tech. All of these great tech companies, they all use.tech as their domain. These are my two cents. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. Get a.tech domain. After.tech establishes your digital presence, checkout powers the payments experience your customers see. Digital commerce is exploding, but payments are still where revenue leaks. checkout.com launched in 2012 to fix that. They don't try and be everything to everyone. No, they just do one thing better than anyone. Digital payments, cloud native, sub 500 millisecond latency and 99.999% uptime. Today, that bet has paid off. With a $12 billion valuation and 65 plus merchants each processing over a billion dollars annually, 65 doing over a billion annually is insane. Checkout powers $300 billion in e-commerce for brands like Uber, Klarna, eBay, Vinted and more. Now, they're building for agentic commerce where AI agents buy on behalf of your customers in real-time, partnering with Visa, MasterCard, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Now, if you want payments built for what's next, talk to the team at checkout.com. That's checkout.com. Once Checkout gets customers through the paywall, Invisible helps you scale your operations with on-demand talent and processes. Why don't we hear more real AI success stories from big companies? The models are insanely good, but implementation is the problem. It's really, really hard. There's data all over the place. There's legacy tech and manual workarounds. It's a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart. Meet Invisible. Invisible trains 80% of the top models and then adapts them to the messy reality of your business. Take the Charlotte Hornets' NBA team. Invisible took years of game tape and analog scouting notes to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and summer league championship win in weeks, not seasons. Get the data in order first and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise. If you want AI that hits the P&L, go to invisibletech.ai/20vc.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (3:59)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:02)
Guys, it is so good to be back. Now, so much happened while we were away. I want to start with one of the most prescient, Groq being acquired for 20 billion in cash. It happened just before Christmas. Chamath obviously coming out as one of the big winners. Price is 3x more than the last round price. How did we analyze this?

**Jason Lemkin** (4:22)
I just had two thoughts. One is I was thinking a lot about both OpenAI buying up basically all the world's global RAM supply. And Greg Brockman this week in the New Year talking about how we will all be running 24 hours of inference by the end of the year. Not all of us, but a subset of us, of tech workers, of knowledge workers, will be running AI 24 hours. I'm already up to a couple hours a day, I'm running AI myself. And so it's a world of inference, I think. And when we started this podcast, we talked about building models and LLMs and all of this, but JFC, if enough of us by the end of the year are running AI, maybe even 48 hours a day, 72 hours a day, multiple agents running 24 hours a day, inference is all of the growth. And if Groq is even part of the answer, right, part of the existential answer for Nvidia, it's worth it. And everyone's coming for Nvidia now, whether it's AMD, whether it's partnering with Broadcom, building your own chips. Nvidia's numbers are going to crush this year, but we're going to see all the daggers really coming out. We just saw the deckchairs being rearranged in 2025 So I don't even know how great Groq is, but if it can possibly address this, it's worth taking out.