Smash Notes

Back to 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, with Sameer Dholakia.

Was the Anthropic Round Bessemer's Lowest-voted Deal?

Sameer Dholakia says the Anthropic round was the lowest-voted deal in Bessemer's history for as long as Byron Deeter had been at the firm. Harry Stebbings asked whether the deal was controversial. Sameer Dholakia said Harry had no idea how controversial it was.

Anthropic was one of half a dozen or more labs trying to build intelligence, so the bet was not obvious. Sameer Dholakia thinks the AWS internal model, Nova, was not particularly distinctive, and AWS had just put a very sizable amount of money into Anthropic. The AWS relationship mattered because it would supply compute for training and early distribution. Empowerment is a Bessemer value, and the partners with conviction were told to do the deal, because that is where the alpha comes from. He wishes he had convinced the firm to write a bigger check. The risks at that stage were visible. He still wishes the check had been larger.

Transcript

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 ·

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

More from this episode

  1. Why Is AI a Bigger Market Than Oil?Sameer Dholakia says intelligence will be a bigger market than oil. Oil powers machines.
  2. Does Entry Price Still Matter in Venture?Sameer Dholakia says entry price always matters, and about 150 times current revenue was still a price he would pay for Anthropic because the company could…
  3. Do Near-term Gross Margins Matter in AI?Sameer Dholakia is not worried about gross margins over the next 12 months on a growth-stage check.
  4. Is Capital a Moat in AI Markets?Sameer Dholakia believes capital is a moat in AI markets and a signal to the market.
  5. Do You Need a Billion Dollars to Do Seed?Sameer Dholakia does not see how a small seed fund succeeds at the prices coming in for early-stage deals.
  6. Why Do Venture Firms Need to Be Giants or Specialists?Sameer Dholakia says a venture firm has to be a giant global platform or an extreme specialist, because the middle is a hard place to make money.
  7. Does Bessemer Still Want Concentrated Growth Bets?Sameer Dholakia says the numbers in a $4 billion Bessemer growth portfolio are large, and the firm still wants concentrated bets.
  8. What Company Does Bessemer Regret Missing?Sameer Dholakia says the company Bessemer rues missing is Stripe. Bessemer was the developer API venture capital firm, and the firm was not in Stripe.
  9. Can Waymo Become a Trillion-dollar Business?Sameer Dholakia thinks Waymo can become a trillion-dollar business, and ride hailing is not the only market that gets it there.
  10. How Fast Could AI Change Drug Discovery?Sameer Dholakia says the next decade of biology, therapeutics, and drug development can show what would have taken half a century.

People

More answers like this

More with Harry Stebbings

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.