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Will Model Labs Eat the Agent Harness? · The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

20VC: Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value | The Future of the Inference Market | Why Founders Should Take Discounts for Tier 1 Firms with Harrison Chase, LangChain

Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, which helps developers build, test and deploy AI agents. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and IVP, LangChain has announced approximately $160 million in funding with the last round at a $1.25BN valuation. The company works with 35% of the Fortune 500, has surpassed one billion open-source downloads…

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Notes

  1. Should I Take a Sequoia and Benchmark Discount? at 0:00

    Harrison Chase says it is absolutely worth taking a discount for Sequoia and Benchmark. Full answer

  2. What Is the Hardest Part of Building AI Agents? at 4:27

    Harrison Chase says the hardest part of building agents is getting the system to behave reliably. Models are non-deterministic black boxes. Full answer

  3. Will Model Labs Eat the Agent Harness? at 8:56

    Harrison Chase says the agent harness should stay neutral, so the memory and context an agent builds are not locked to one model lab. Full answer

  4. Why Do Domain Experts Win With Vertical Agents? at 11:45

    Harrison Chase says a founder should start a vertical agent at the harness layer, doing context engineering before any post-training of the model, because… Full answer

  5. Why Hasn't Anyone Solved AI Memory? at 26:09

    Harrison Chase says the hardest part of AI memory is the intelligence that decides what to keep, not the database. Full answer

  6. What Kind of Agent Do Most Apps Need? at 32:36

    Harrison Chase says most apps probably need a vertical agent of their own. Full answer

  7. Why Are AI Bills Rising Even as Models Get Cheaper? at 35:52

    Harrison Chase says AI bills rise because agents burn far more tokens, even while frontier models get cheaper on price for performance. Full answer

  8. What Share of Engineering Salary Goes to Coding Tools? at 38:29

    Harrison Chase says they spend roughly 30% of engineering salary on coding tools. Full answer

  9. Should Companies Fear Open Source Chinese Models? at 43:57

    Harrison Chase does not think fear of open source Chinese models is justified. Some enterprises are fearful of working with open source Chinese models. Full answer

  10. Should Founders Discount for Sequoia and Benchmark? at 53:12

    Harrison Chase says taking money from Benchmark changes a company's trajectory completely, and a discount is absolutely worth it for Sequoia and for Benchmark. Full answer

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