20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough

**David Frankel** (0:00)
The bubbles get bigger. This is the wave of our lives. Will there be roadkill from this wave? Oh my God, there's going to be a lot. Well, the problem is the mega platforms are taking call options. Pro Rata is almost like the Original Sin. I have never seen secondary markets as liquid. Are we headed for another .com crash? Definitely. If is not a question, when, nobody knows.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:24)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I do the show because I want to learn from the best investors in the world. David Frankel is one of the best from Founder Collective. Why? Well, when everyone else scales funds, gets bigger and bigger and bluntly loses discipline, lose the core craftsman-like attributes of venture investing, David has stuck true to what he does best, early stage boutique investing. But you know what? It takes a great investor to do really well in one cycle. Yep, he's in Coupang, he's in Uber, he's in PillPack, and SeatGeek and Olo and many great names. It's incredibly hard to move to a second wave, the wave of AI. The dude is in the seeds for Shield AI, for Suno, which is now worth $5 billion. He has moved so seamlessly from a pre to a post AI world in a way that very few seed investors have been able to. This was an incredible discussion with one of the true craftsmen of seed investing today. But before we dive into the show today, what do Uber, Cursor and Harvey have in common? Well, they made the really wise decision to build on fireworks. Fireworks is the specialized intelligence platform behind many of the world's leading AI products. Companies use fireworks to deploy the latest open models, specialize them with their own data and run them in production with the speed and reliability modern AI applications demand. But getting models into production is only the beginning. As AI usage scales, the best model for one request isn't always the best model for the next. Well, that's where fireworks Nexus comes in. Nexus connects to the AI coding tools and harnesses your engineers already use and intelligently routes each request to the best model for the job, helping you optimize for quality, latency, and cost without changing how your engineers work. To see intelligent model routing in practice, visit fireworks.ai/20vc to create a free account and use the promo code 20VC50, to claim $50 in credits for 20VC50. While fireworks.ai powers product intelligence, Asana keeps the work moving. Most companies have tried AI, most aren't seeing results. Not because AI doesn't work, it's because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready-to-go AI teammates, pre-built for marketing, ops and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup, they show up where the work is happening, already onboarded, in your workflows, ready to deliver. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or a team of 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's asana.com. While Asana organizes the work, Superhuman speeds up the day. 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. 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 is 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 like 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. David, last night you sent me a forwarded email and it was my first ever email to you 11 years ago. 11 years. I can't believe that. Do you know what I found so funny is I just had dinner last night with Mamoon and I look at the people who've been kindest to me, which is you, Mamoon, Josh Kushner, Neil Maiter, and it's just fascinating that the people who were there when there was nothing are also the greats. And it's like maybe that's what made them great, that they give time to people where they just believe with no reason to. Does that make sense?