20VC: Sam Altman vs Elon Musk: The $100BN Battle | The Implosion of Thinking Machines | Can VC Survive Public Market Pricing Today? | ClickHouse and Replit's New Rounds: Analysed

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
If Figma isn't good enough, what hope is there for the rest of us in software? I look at my portfolio. What the hell am I gonna say at board meetings this week, Rory?

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:07)
It's gonna be the gift that keeps on giving. If you're the kind of person who slows down at a traffic accident, in other words, if you're like 90% of humanity, you're gonna be slowing down every time the depots come out. It's gonna be great.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:18)
If I just stayed at Stripe and just played Minesweeper, I could be worth 10 billion.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:23)
Elon's in an asymmetric win-win situation, and OpenAI is not.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:27)
Advertising is not valueless to consumers when it's perfectly executed.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:31)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it is my favorite show of the week, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, discussing the biggest news in tech. This week, my word, we have a lot to discuss. We have Can Venture Survive When Public Markets Price Assets The Way They Are Today, Sam Altman vs Elon Musk, The $100 Billion Dollar Fight That Is About To Ensue, The Implosion Of Thinking Machines, Replet and ClickHouse's New Multi-Billion Dollar Rounds, this and so much more. I always want your feedback. Let me know what you think of these shows, harry at 20vc.com. But before we dive into the show today, I run the 20 VC fund and I get this question from founders all the time.
Oh, Harry, I can't find a good.com. Do you have a good hookup? Well, let me tell you now. The answer is always going to be no. I don't have a guy or a gal for that. I do have a recommendation though. If you're building a tech startup, get a.tech domain. Tech startup, .tech domain. It could not be more obvious. As an investor, I appreciate founders who put thought into their branding. When I see.tech in your name, it tells me right away that tech is at the core of your build. It will say that to your customers too. A clean and sharp domain like.tech pays off in the long run. You know, nothing.tech, 1x.tech, aurora.tech, all of these great tech companies, they all use.tech as their domain. These are my two cents. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. Get a.tech domain. After.tech establishes your digital presence, checkout powers the payments experience your customers see. Digital commerce is exploding, but payments are still where revenue leaks. checkout.com launched in 2012 to fix that. They don't try and be everything to everyone. No, they just do one thing better than anyone. Digital payments, cloud native, sub 500 millisecond latency and 99.999% uptime. Today, that bet has paid off. With a 12 billion dollar valuation and 65 plus merchants each processing over a billion dollars annually. 65 doing over a billion annually is insane. Checkout powers 300 billion dollars in e-commerce for brands like Uber, Klarna, eBay, Vinted and more. Now, they're building for agentic commerce where AI agents buy on behalf of your customers in real time. Partnering with Visa, Mastercard, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Now, if you want payments built for what's next, talk to the team at checkout.com. That's checkout.com. Once Checkout gets customers through the paywall, Invisible helps you scale your operations with on-demand talent and processes. Why don't we hear more real AI success stories from big companies? The models are insanely good, but implementation is the problem. It's really, really hard. There's data all over the place. There's legacy tech and manual workarounds. It's a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart. Meet Invisible. Invisible trains 80% of the top models and then adapts them to the messy reality of your business. Take the Charlotte Hornets' NBA team. Invisible took years of game tape and analog scouting notes to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and summer league championship win in weeks, not seasons. Get the data in order first, and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise. If you want AI that hits the P&L, go to invisibletech.ai/20vc.

**Rory O'Driscoll** (4:06)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:09)
Team, I am excited to be back. I'm excited to be back. We've got a lot of stuff to go through this week, and I wanted to start with a really optimistic view of public markets, which makes me question whether venture today as a model can still make money. Because when we look at Figma down to pre-IPO levels, when we look at DataDog now 20% down, even co-attached, Monday killed. We talked before about PagerJuicy consistently, which is in the dumps of public markets. How do we analyze this? And do public market multiples today make the venture model increasingly challenging?