20VC: You Need $1BN To Do Seed Today: The Untold Truths of Venture | Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next Decade of VC | Why Margin and Price Matter Less in a World of AI with Sameer Dholakia, Bessemer

Sameer Dholakia (0:00)

Intelligence is going to be bigger as a market than oil. I've been in software for 31 years now, and the handful of other moments where I have felt magic, a trillion dollar super cycle followed every single time, and it doesn't happen very often. I absolutely believe capitalism, though, not being a giant global platform or an incredible specialist who can add differentiated value, I think it's a hard world to make money.

Harry Stebbings (0:24)

$5.75 billion.

That is how much Bessemer Venture Partners raised across their two new funds, a $4 billion fund and a $1.75 billion seed fund. My word, they really took it literally when I said you need a billion dollars to do seed. Well, I saw this and I thought, we've got to have Sameer on the show. Sameer is one of the leaders at Bessemer today. He led investments in Legora and Fireworks, 220 VC companies as well, which is awesome to work with them on, and he's one of the best growth investors in the market today. It's a spicy show. It's kind of what we're calling in the UK a bread and butter show in the way that this is right down my fairway. So, unlike the AI, deep tech, infrastructure where I'm learning as I go, this is really in my zone of comfort and we had a great discussion and I love doing shows like this. Like, these shows are why I still do 20 VC with such passion. Sameer was patient. He put up with me and hell did we have a discussion. But before we dive into the show today, Blitzy, the autonomous software development platform that's built for enterprise scale, is proud to sponsor today's show. Enterprise codebases have grown beyond human comprehension. Tens of millions of lines, decades of tech debt, complexity existing tools cannot fathom. Blitzy starts by understanding. Thousands of agents reverse engineer your codebase into a proprietary knowledge graph that maps architecture dependencies and business logic. That graph surfaces every CVE and zero day hiding in your code before anyone hands you a ticket. Grounded in that context, Blitzy then executes entire epics autonomously, modernize off legacy systems, ship new features 5x faster, or batch remediate CVEs at scale, surfaced by the platform. Blitzy not only generates code, it validates and end to end tests every single line. And that's why Fortune 500 enterprises are shipping enterprise grade code five times faster. Go to blitzy.com/20vc to learn more. While blitzy helps you build faster, flex helps you run your finances smarter. Business owners run their whole financial life on flex. One platform from business revenue to their personal spend. Float every purchase for 60 days. Tap capital that grows with your revenue and pay vendors in 170 countries across 32 currencies. Plus the whole back office, bills, expenses, accounting, all in one place. So you spend less time reconciling and more time growing. That's why thousands of owners use flex. Named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of 2026 Visit flex.one, that's F-L-E-XO-N-E and use the code 20VC. While flex runs your finances, Vanta keeps your compliance covered. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but no buyers will sign these days without proof of your security. Here's what happens if you're not prepared. A prospect asks for proof of compliance. The deal stools when you scramble. Your engineer gets pulled off the road map to audit prep. Every enterprise conversation turns into this horrible fire drill. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the leading agentic trust platform that not only gets you compliant fast with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR, but keeps you compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. So your deals keep moving and your engineers really keep building. Now, access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, even if your team lives in Claude or Cursor. And that's why Vanta is trusted by more than 16,000 companies like Ramp, Harvey and Writer. So prove you're ready for business and get $1,000 off Vanta. When you go to vanta.com/20vc, that's vanta.com/20vc.

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Sameer, last time that we did a show, I was about 12 years old. You put up with some very, very poor questions then. So I'm hoping that this will be an improvement. So thank you for joining me, dude.

Sameer Dholakia (4:26)

Dude, I'm so fired up to see you. As they always say, longtime listener, now second time caller. I'm fired up to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

Harry Stebbings (4:33)

So we were just chatting beforehand and we said, are you SV and like 900 million? And you know, you guys just raised, you know, the size of the US Treasury, it would seem. He was $1.75 billion seed fund. We'll get into that, dude.