20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridg

**Shiv Rao** (0:00)
You have to taste good things to have good taste. It is critical in Vertical AI, being one of the first. When you saw the announcements from OpenAI and Anthropic about forward deployed engineers and these partnerships with big private equity groups to go help their portfolios, if that wasn't a sign that there is absolutely an incredible opportunity for the foreseeable future for Vertical AI, I don't know what is. We're in for a tsunami of health care needs and the system is not prepared to deliver it. They did the seed and the A.
USV was our business model initially. The more you can feel inevitable, the more you will be.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:41)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now joining me in the hot seat stay, we have Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of Abridg. What I love about Abridg is, yes, it is a $5.3 billion company stay.
Yes, they have the best investors in the world in the company today, but they went through a five, six year wilderness period where they were founded in 2018 They did a seed round of five on fifteen. That level of dilution, wow, those were the days. But now they are one of the hottest companies in AI, going to show that persistence and consistency in the face of people not always believing in you is the key to success. As I said, $300 million Series E last round at a $5.3 billion valuation. This is an incredible story and I'm so happy to welcome Shiv at Abridg. But before we dive into the show today, here's a question for any founder listening. What would your marketing team do with an extra 30 hours a week? That's roughly what teams get back when they stop manually building every campaign, every workflow, every email. Right now, your best marketing people are spending their days cloning templates, configuring audience segments, and chasing data across systems. That's not what you hired them for. Conversion is the first marketing automation platform where AI agents handle the execution. Your team focuses on strategy, on messaging and pipeline. The agents handle the rest, building campaigns, personalizing every touchpoint per account, and deciding the next best action automatically. Whether that's pinging your AE, launching a retargeting sequence, or dropping someone into a nurture, the agents figure it out. And that's why over 4,000 B2B companies have already made the switch, including People Data Labs and Adaptive Security. So head on over to conversion.ai/20vc and get $10,000 off. That's conversion.ai/20vc for $10,000 off conversion. After Granola captures the conversation, Artisan helps start the next one. Meet Ava, the first autonomous AI BDR built by Artisan to run your entire outbound on autopilot.

**Jason Lemkin** (2:45)
Hey, Jason Lemkin from Saster here. Artisan is S tier. We've replaced our entire outbound sales team with Artisan. I believe we've sent over 50,000 highly customized emails to Artisan. The open rate is twice what it was with humans and they close 100k deals day after day.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:59)
Ava sources leads from over 250 million contacts, enriches every prospect with intent signals, then writes and sends personalized multi-channel outreach, self optimizing over time. When a lead replies, she handles objections and books meetings straight into your AE's calendars without any human input. Artisan is backed by Y Combinator and has raised 36 million dollars to build the first truly autonomous AIBDR. Hire Ava, the AIBDR and put your outbound on autopilot at artisan.co.uk/20vc That's A-R-T-I-S-A-N And speaking of great companies, we have to talk about Monaco. For years I've watched some of the best founders and early go to market teams struggle with sales. Too many CRMs, too many point solutions, too much manual work. Well that changes with Monaco. Monaco replaces your legacy CRM and fragmented sales stack with a single AI native platform. Monaco's agents automatically build and score your entire TAM, lay it in real time signals, create and run outbound sequences, schedule calls and record and transcribe meetings. Your pipeline practically manages itself. Monaco creates reminders, drafts, follow up emails for you and keeps deals moving forward. So that means more meetings, higher conversion rates and faster revenue growth. If you're an early stage startup, tired of duct taping sales tools together and looking to grow revenue faster, check out Monaco at monaco.com. You have now arrived at your destination.
Shiv, I am so excited for this. Now people don't know but we actually met because I used you for a reference on a company and you were phenomenally helpful to the extent that my partner was like, can we just invest in him instead?
Which really would have been a much better idea and I should have gone, yes, 100 percent and broken all the rules for it. But thank you so much for joining me.