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

Venky Ganesan (0:00)

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 only ego is to make money for my investors. If there's an opportunity to make money on 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 max 7 participating in everything you're doing. There's no limit to what a person can do as long as they don't care who gets the credit.

Harry Stebbings (0:41)

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I love shows like this. Firstly, because I actually know what I'm talking about when we re-enter the world of venture and move away from deep tech. But second, because it's a real discussion. You know, quite frankly, do you play the game on the field? Even when it's crazy. The music is playing louder than ever. Do you grab a chair or do you keep dancing? In this discussion with Venky, we discuss the craziness that's happening in venture, pricing, when to pay up, when not to, how to think about market sizing, how to think about when to sell, how to think about being collaborative in rounds. This and so much more in a true nerd venture fest that is this episode. But before we dive into the show today, Blitzy, the autonomous software development platform that's built for enterprise scale, is proud to sponsor today's show. Enterprise code bases have grown beyond human comprehension. Tens of millions of lines, decades of tech debt, complexity existing tools cannot fathom. Blitzy starts by understanding. Thousands of agents reverse engineer your code base into a proprietary knowledge graph that maps architecture dependencies and business logic. That graph surfaces every CVE and zero day hiding in your code before anyone hands you a ticket. Grounded in that context, Blitzy then executes entire epics autonomously, modernize off-legacy systems, ship new features 5x faster, or batch remediate CVEs at scale, surfaced by the platform. Blitzy not only generates code, it validates and end-to-end tests every single line. And that's why Fortune 500 Enterprises are shipping enterprise-grade code five times faster. Go to blitzy.com/20vc to learn more. While Blitzy helps you build faster, Flex helps you run your finances smarter. Business owners run their whole financial life on Flex. One platform, from business revenue to their personal spend. Float every purchase for 60 days. Tap capital that grows with your revenue, and pay vendors in 170 countries across 32 currencies. Plus, the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place. So, you spend less time reconciling and more time growing. That's why thousands of owners use Flex, named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2026 Visit flex.one, that's F-L-E-X, dot O-N-E, and use the code 20VC. While Flex runs your finances, Vantor keeps your compliance covered. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign these days without proof of your security. Here's what happens if you're not prepared. A prospect asks for proof of compliance. The deal stools when you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the roadmap to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into this horrible fire drill. That's where Vantor comes in. Vantor is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR, but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. So your deals keep moving and your engineers really keep building. Now access the Vantor agent everywhere you work, even if your team lives in Claude or Cursor. And that's why Vantor is trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey and Writer. So prove you're ready for business and get $1,000 off Vantor. When you go to vantor.com/20vc, that's vantor.com/20vc.

Venky Ganesan (4:15)

You have now arrived at your destination.

Harry Stebbings (4:18)

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 a terrible commentary on it. And I was so looking forward to this. So thank you so much for doing it in person.

Venky Ganesan (4:29)

Oh, I love this. Thank you so much. And I cannot wait to see if I pass your test.

Harry Stebbings (4:34)