20VC: Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100,000 Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need | Why Forward-Deployed Engineers Are the Future of Enterprise AI with Clay Bavor, Co-Founder of Sierra

**Clay Bavor** (0:00)
We have not yet appreciated the unbounded demand for, call it frontier levels of intelligence. Part of the driver of the difference is probably the willingness of Chinese companies to do scale distillation of the frontier models. If you can't build frontier models yourself, okay, maybe the next best approach is to distill them and offer them up. Every one of our rounds, we actually guided to and took a lower price than we could have. Some of our most effective employees at the entire company are 22 or 23 years old and have been completely AI-pilled. We completely changed our engineering interview process.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:37)
When Pat Grady at Sequoia and Neil Matar at Greenoaks tell you someone is special, well, it kind of means something. Clay Bavor, joining me in the hot seat, co-founder of Sierra, one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world. Sierra has raised more than 1.5 billion. They work with some of the biggest companies in the world and they're valued at almost 16 billion dollars and they work with 40% of the Fortune 50 But before Sierra, Clay spent an incredible 18 years at Google where he worked on some pretty cool projects. Google Labs, naming one, Google Workspace, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Jesus is there anything Clay didn't work on at Google? On top of that, he's just an awesome dude. Luckily, we had a chance to do it in person in London. This was so much fun and I can't wait to hear your thoughts and feedback on this episode. But before we dive into the show today, a quick shout out to a company I've been genuinely blown away by and have been tracking closely, Rox. I've been watching this team closely and the speed they're operating at and the level of applied AI talent they've assembled, it's honestly remarkable. Rox is pioneering revenue agents for the global 2000, plugged into your data warehouse and CRM and delivering board level ROI in just 90 days. These sales and revenue agents handle the end to end sales process for large enterprises from research prep to deal risk, outreach and opportunity management. So sellers spend more time with customers and less time in tools. This isn't another productivity app. Christ, we've all had enough of those. Rox gives reps a single interface on top of their GTM stack, powered by a knowledge graph across your internal and external data. So if you want to boost AE productivity, increase revenue per rep and consolidate your stack, try Rox at rocks.com/sign up. While Rox runs your sales pipeline, Framer runs your website. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. If updates to your.com feel harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool, and is used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, so you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off. 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/20vc for 30% off.
framer.com/20vcrules and restrictions may apply. While Framer helps your website convert, Superhuman Go helps your inbox move faster. I do this show three times a week. That means three sets of research, three sets of prep, three sets of follow up and about 400 other things in between. My inbox doesn't sleep and neither do I really which shows in my wrinkled face, but I was juggling a dozen tabs just to keep up. Another window, copy this, paste that, lose your place entirely. That is why I started using Superhuman Go. It's an AI chat that's always there when you need it. Already up to speed on what I am doing. Last Tuesday, two minutes before I went live, I had a 40 message thread I hadn't read. I asked Go to summarize it. Right there in my inbox, no new tab, no switching apps. From the makers of Grammarly, Superhuman Go works inside the tools and sites you already use. Your browser, your inbox, your docs. It handles the repetitive stuff, so you can focus on the work only you can do. AI that works with you, not on top of you. Superhuman Go keeps up, so you can move forward. Find out more at superhuman.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Clay, I am so excited for this, dude. I said to you downstairs, we do a lot of shows. I often speak to people before a show. When I speak to Neil Mater, Ravi Gupta, and Sangin at GV, and I hear what I hear, honestly, they were some of the most astounding references I have had. So thank you for joining me.