20VC: Inside Accel's $4BN Growth Investing Machine | Cursor is Dead is Total BS: Here is Why | What Missing Rippling and ElevenLabs Taught Us | Are $2BN-$10BN IPOs Dead | Why Now is a Great Time to be Thoma Bravo with Miles Clements

**Miles Clements** (0:00)
Sometimes getting overly fixated on the financial metrics in this environment can leave you just like with an unsatisfying taste in your mouth. Growth can obscure and blind you to a lot of underlying ill in the business. I think you can actually be successful in this market investing in consensus. Investing is an art and a science. The science is understanding how to properly value a company, and the art is understanding when to break the rules. Focus on hitting singles and doubles and let the home runs take care of themselves.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:26)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, stay, I'm thrilled to welcome a dear friend to the show, Miles Clements. Miles helps lead Accel's growth investing practice, where he's banished some of the best in the business, including Atlassian, Linear, Cursor, and many more incredible companies. Now, Mars is an old friend, and so this was a very, how do I put it? No holds barred discussion. I think he put up with a lot of very pressing and prying questions, and I don't think you've ever heard an Accel partner be quite as open and honest as this, which was just fantastic. Mars really was very special to have on. But before we dive into the show today, over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable. Airtable combines AI with the scale of an award-winning, infinitely flexible no-code system, a platform where you can see all of your data in one place, and use it to make really big picture decisions. Think of it like mission control for your company. Airtable goes beyond organization and automating repetitive tasks. It lets you use your data to inform strategy, monitor progress and take action. Every cell is capable of performing hundreds of AI-powered tasks, like web research or localization, and using those results to inform and update hundreds or thousands of other cells and workflows in real time. Unlock the true scale of your workflows at www.airtable.com/20vc, Airtable, the infrastructure of innovation. And just like Airtable organizes your workflow data, Metaview organizes your conversation insights. This episode is brought to you by Metaview. Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder, VC and exec I speak with knows this. Your ability to hire is the biggest constraint on your company's growth, but recruiting is slow. It's subjective and only getting more competitive. And that's why teams like Eleven Labs, Brex, Replit, Deal and 5,000 other organizations use Metaview. The AI company giving high-performance teams a real unfair advantage in hiring. Metaview's built a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. They proactively find candidates. They take interview notes automatically and they help you surface the best candidates in process. For the first time, AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a single source of truth. That means hours saved per hire and a team focused on what matters most, winning the right candidates as fast as possible. Don't let your competitors out hire you. Metaview customers close roles 30% faster. Try Metaview today and get a free month of sourcing at metaview.ai/20vc.
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You have now arrived at your destination. Miles, we are in person. I love it when you're in town. It's so lovely to see you, man. And it makes it so much more special doing it in person. So thank you for joining me.

**Miles Clements** (4:38)
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's always fun being here.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:40)
Now, I want to start with the core question that I think every investor is thinking about, which is how do we ascertain true value in an AI world where technology seems so transient and revenue seems so endurable?