20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

**Lucas Swisher** (0:00)
I think price does matter, but I think it matters least. Margin matters, but early, it can be a misleading indicator. Data is a prerequisite. It is not the answer. One of the places where we don't spend time, these pre-revenue companies are really high valuations. I don't think the king making concept is a real thing. Who's gonna wanna help you and who's gonna wanna hurt you?

**Harry Stebbings** (0:19)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I am bored. I am bored of recycled guests, interviews that have been done over and over again. Today's guest is rarely ever on a podcast, Lucas Swisher. He co-leads the Growth Fund at Coatue and they've backed some of the best companies of the last years like OpenAI, Harvey, Deel, Canva, Anthropic and many more. He also previously worked at Kleiner Perkins with the one and only Mamoon Hamid and this is one of his few appearances where we really delve deep into the investment process at Coatue and what they look for in great, great companies and founders. 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, Deel and 5000 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.
After Metaview captures what was said, Turing helps you build with the people who can deliver after it. Frontier Labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks, but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core block off for agentic models. That's why NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, Gemini and other leading lab partners partner with Turing. Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next generation data quality systems built from real world operational traces and coding datasets that stress models under conditions where failures matter, state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur. To find out how, visit turing.com/20vc.
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**Lucas Swisher** (4:23)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:26)
Lucas, dude, it is so good to have you on the show. We've walked around Hyde Park. I feel like we bonded in my short shorts. I've had so many things. Now, because I stole the shit out of you from David and specifically Jesse at Decagon. So thank you for doing this, man.

**Lucas Swisher** (4:38)
Of course. Thanks for having me.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:39)
We're going to dive right in with super easy question, which is public SaaS companies are getting killed. I'm looking at my book, dude. And I'm like, I thought I was so good at this. And now I'm really starting to question it with the amount of red that I'm seeing. So why is the public private boundary breaking down? And what's the better side to be on?