20VC: Scale, Surge, Turing, Mercor: Who Wins & Who Loses in Data Labelling | Is Revenue in Data Labelling Real or GMV? | Why 99% of Knowledge Work Will Go and What Happens Then? | Why SaaS is Dead in a World of AI with Jonathan Siddharth @ Turing

**Jonathan Siddharth** (0:00)
I think the era of data labeling companies is over, and it's now the era of research accelerators. All knowledge work is going to be automated. It's only a matter of time. I don't see an AI bubble. These models are incredibly powerful today. SaaS as we know it, I think is over. I think it's completely over.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:18)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for the show today. So I'm fascinated by the data labeling market. McCool, Surge, Turing, Invisible. There are seven players that I know of that do over 100 million in annual recurring revenue. All of them have more than 50% of their revenue from two customers. The way they use the term revenue is also sometimes super unclear versus GMV. There are bluntly just a lot of questions. Today I do not pull any punches with the man leading one of these companies, Jonathan Siddharth, founder and CEO of Turing, a company that he has scaled to over $350 million in annual recurring revenue, raising $225 million in the process and now being a profitable company. This is an amazing discussion. And as I said, the tough questions get answered. But before we dive into the show today, are you drowning in AI tools? Chat GPT for writing, Notion for docs, Gmail for email, Slack for comms, and you're constantly copy pasting between them all, losing context and losing time. This is the AI productivity tax and it's killing your output. At 20VC, we're all about speed of execution. And Superhuman is the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With the intelligence of Grammarly, Mail and Coda built in, you can get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly. Finally, AI that works where you work, however you work. Superhuman gets you from day one with zero learning curve, and it's personalized to sound like you at your best, not like everyone else using generic AI. Get AI that works where you work, unlock your superhuman potential. Learn more at superhuman.com/podcast, that's superhuman.com/podcast.
And just like Superhuman gives you superpowers in your inbox, Vantig gives your company superpowers in security and compliance. Customer trust can make or break your business, and the more your business grows, the more complex your security and compliance tools get. It can turn into chaos, and chaos isn't a security strategy. That's where Vanta comes in. Think of Vanta as your always on AI-powered security expert who scales with you. Vanta automates compliance, continuously monitors your controls, and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and risk. So, whether you're a fast growing startup like Cursor or an enterprise like Snowflake, Vanta fits easily into your existing workflows, so you can keep growing a company your customers can trust. My listeners can get $1,000 off Vanta by going to vanta.com/20vc.
That's vanta.com/20vc, 20VC for $1,000 off Vanta. And like Vanta builds trust with automated security, AngelList drives momentum by helping you find and fund breakout startups. If you're listening to 20VC, you know we have a really fricking high bar. Well, AngelList is the modern platform used by the best in class venture funds, where over 40% of top endowments and banks are LPs. Their customers include a top five venture firm, 20VC, and they now have, check this out, $171 billion of assets on the platform. They combine an all-in-one software platform with a dedicated service team that moves as fast as you do. One manager said this awesome quote, AngelList feels like an extension of my fund. Another said AngelList gives me total peace of mind, the attention to detail, lightning fast response time, and just real sense of ownership from the team are exactly what I need to stop worrying about back office ops. So if you're starting a new fund, don't be a moron. Just use AngelList. They're incredible. Head over to angellist.com/20vc to learn more. You have now arrived at your destination. Jonathan, I've been so looking forward to this. Thank you so much for joining me in person. It's such a treat to do it in person while you're in London.

**Jonathan Siddharth** (4:18)
Thank you for having me, Harry.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:19)
Now, I want to start with a little bit of definitions because everyone thinks that talent marketplaces and then everyone pushes back on talent marketplaces. How do you describe it and why are we not dealing with talent marketplaces anymore?

**Jonathan Siddharth** (4:33)
I think of a talent marketplace as something that's basically matching talent to something. Maybe it's an opportunity. So Turing is not a talent marketplace. What we do at Turing is we're training superintelligence. We work with seven out of the eight frontier labs. To get to superintelligence, you need research, compute, and data. Research, the labs do in-house with OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc. For compute, we have Jensen to thank and maybe NVIDIA as well. On the data side, Turing powers the data pillar. On the data side, there's been a significant shift in the last couple of years. So a few years back, the models weren't quite smart enough. As the models have gotten increasingly smarter, the data needed to improve them has become harder to generate.