20VC: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is BS | Why China Will Win the AI War | Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist and are Tourists | Why Stock-Based Comp is the Hidden Sin of the Valley with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital

**Mitchell Green** (0:00)
What I'm the most excited about is there's gonna be a really bad downturn. If you don't have earnings or EBITDA, there is no floor in a lot of these things. AI is not gonna be about the next call center company or the next work day. Bytedance is the most advanced AI company in the world. Don't count China out. I bet they win the AI world. Don't underestimate Chinese creativeness and ingenuity to figure out how to reverse engineer and engineer things in much cheaper ways than Americans can do. Buying is glamorous. Selling is the job. There's 50% too many VCs. 50-60% of people in this industry that actually probably add negative value to companies.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:34)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and for the show today, we have Mitchell Green at Lead Edge joining us. I freaking love Mitchell, and I'll tell you why. In a world of fluff and framework thinking investors, Mitchell Green is a money maker. Mitchell has co-led or led investments in insane companies like Alibaba, Benchling, Bytedance, Grafana, among many others. Across different cycles, he's shown an ability to make money, real DPI, unlike anyone else. This was an investor nerd's dream show to do. But before we dive into the show today, this one's for the finance pros who want to drive real business impact with travel and expense, rather than waste time chasing receipts or force people onto outdated tools that only add to month-end chaos. Enter Navan, an AI-powered travel and expense platform that helps save your company money through real-time visibility, policy control and high employee adoption. It's easy to use, you can book a trip in 7 minutes, compared to, and this is mind-boggling, the industry average of a whopping 45 minutes. And smart AI approves in-policy bookings and blocks everything else automatically. And you can track travel spend in real-time, see exactly how you're saving up to 15% on your travel budget. That's why the world's smartest companies like Anthropic, Figma, Stripe, Canva, use Navan. Go to navan.com/20vctoday to see for yourself and to find out how you could win two business class flights anywhere in the continental US. Because we all deserve a vacation, right? No purchase necessary, rules apply, good luck. While Navan streamlines travel and expense end-to-end, Airways helps you pay and move money globally. Founders, let's get real about the growth tax. You've raised VC funding and you're scaling globally and it's no longer about shipping product. It's about orchestrating operations across continents. But suddenly, your payments and finance stack is choking your growth. You're logging into lots of different banking portals, waiting days for transfers and reporting across entities. It's operational drag and it's at your scale. It's costing millions. That's why I'm so excited to partner with Airwallets. Airwallets are more than just a banking alternative to HSBC or Citi. Airwallets brings you an intelligent financial operating system that powers how global businesses operate and grow, allowing you to manage and automate banking, treasury, payments and spend. The most exciting part for me, they're heavily investing in agentic finance. If you're scaling globally, you need a banking and finance platform that's borderless, real-time and intelligent. Check out Airwallets today and see how they're helping thousands of businesses like Canva, McLaren and Deal. Scale at airwallets.com/20vc.
Terms and conditions apply, your monies are safeguarded, not FSCS protected. See airwallets.com for more details. You have now arrived at your destination. Mitchell dude, it is so good to have you back in the studio. I love doing these with you and Larry are my favorites. You know why?

**Mitchell Green** (3:31)
You gotta have a sign together.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:32)
No, I do want to be great to have you on together. If you're in London together, we should do it and we should do it actually over like a dinner and mic everyone up.

**Mitchell Green** (3:38)
That would be amazing.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:39)
Listen, I want to start with something that's actually quite disarming for a lot of investors today, which is bluntly the SaaSpocalypse, the Sassica. And we're looking at the markets and they're just in the shitter. And I think there's a lot of people who are questioning whether they are actually good investors or whether we were just in a bullion cycle. Is this justified in terms of the downturn or is this an overreaction to AI and anthropic product releases?

**Mitchell Green** (4:05)
We are buyers. We're buying software stocks right now. You know, a portion of our funds can be invested in public equities.
So, we're buying companies like Procore, Workday, Appian. We love Clearwater Analytics, but it's in the process of being taken private, so the stock doesn't move. We're big investors in Toast, which we've been buying back. We were early investors in it and sold and are rebuying. These companies aren't going anywhere. Like, the incumbents have distribution data and balance sheets. It's a fool's errand to think all these companies are going away. Not being said, in any period when there is big periods of disruption, there will be new companies that are created. There will be incumbents that thrive and adapt. There will be some incumbents that blow up.