20VC: Who Wins the Model War: OpenAI, Anthropic or Open-Source | Token Maxing, AI Hangovers & The Coming ROI Reckoning | Labour Displacement Fears are BS & Overblown | From Physicist to Sequoia Founder with Matan Grinberg, Founder @ Factory

**Matan Grinberg** (0:00)
The world going forward, there is going to be nothing that no one can build. Everyone is trying to commoditize the other. Value accrual is a time dependent phenomenon. So many of the tasks that we're doing, we don't need the very frontier to do it. We might see a short term contraction of usage of the very frontier models. I think it's pretty embarrassing that we don't have frontier open models in the United States. Name a legendary company that has a shit sales or marketing team. You can't. The age of the polymath is back. All right. You have a meeting with the Sequoia Partnership tomorrow morning. Be ready to present. No one else would have believed in me except him. We will see the best companies treat teams more and more like whatever, SEAL Team 6 or NBA, like professional athletes.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:41)
So I invested millions of dollars in the founder that we're about to meet. I invested millions of dollars on a walk around high park after about four minutes. He was that compelling. Meet Matan Grinberg, CEO and co-founder of Factory. Before Factory, he literally never had a job. He was a physicist, okay? He spent 12 years trying to be one of the best string theorists in the world. Now he's changing the world of software development. He raised money from Sequoia. The first check was a million dollars at five million dollars. He just raised an incredible round at one and a half billion dollars. He works with some of the biggest enterprises in the world. He does look like Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting. So what a treat if you're watching on video. But he is one of the best founders I've met in the last year. And that's why I wanted to write him a multiple million dollar check after just five minutes. 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. 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. Once conversion gets the conversation going, Granola makes sure the key moments stick. You're in back-to-back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI-powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns them into really clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. No bots joining your call, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus. During or after the call, you can chat with your notes, ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email even, or coach you using recipes, which are pre-made prompts. It's actually the same technology we use to create our podcast notes. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's really hard to go back. Head to granola.ai/20vc, that's granola.ai/20vc, and get three months free with code 20VC, that's 20VC. While Granola handles the recap, Superhuman handles the inbox. 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 four hundred other things in between. My inbox does not sleep, and neither do I, which is why I look about seven hundred years old. I was using AI tools, but honestly, most of them just made it worse. Another tab, another window, copy this, copy that. God, I couldn't even keep up. That's why I started using Superhuman Go. It's an AI chat that's always there when I need it. Already up to speed on what I'm 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 the inbox. No new tab, no switching apps. From the makers of Grammarly, Superhuman Go works inside the tools and sites that I already use. Inside my browser, my inbox, my docs. It handles the really repetitive stuff so I can just focus on doing hopefully great shows. 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.