10+ hours of podcasts, in 5 minutes.
Host, 20VC
4 quotes from 3 episodes on 20VC with Harry Stebbings, each with a timestamped link to the source.
Harry Stebbings sees a broken venture market where investors reject highly profitable software companies. A business generating $20 million in revenue with 700% growth can see zero venture interest if it lacks an AI narrative or a trillion-dollar vision.
Venture capital firms now demand the potential for a trillion-dollar market cap before they show any interest in a company.
“It's this power law on steroids requirement where unless you can paint me the trillion dollar market cap, I'm not interested.”
Harry Stebbings found that a software company with $20 million in revenue and 700% growth received zero interest from investors. Firms pass on these strong metrics if the company lacks an AI narrative.
“I think venture is broken today in the way that I'm meeting more and more companies that fit this profile. I just met a company today and I have a company that's 20 million in ARR growing incredibly fast 6 700% profitable brilliant business with a great team crickets VCs do not want it.”
A few companies thrive by integrating AI into their products, which leads observers to ask if the overall software market has recovered or if just three strong performers are pulling away.
“Is the SAS apocalypse over? Or is this a case of three good performing companies pulling away?”
“…company was doing $485 million growing 20% yearonear ultimately at a 1.285 billion acquisition price. It's not the outcome that everyone quite wanted or expected, but it's what we have today.”
From AirTable's $11B to $1.285B Sale: What SaaS Founders Missed
How we attribute quotes. Every quote was matched against the episode transcript, so the words and the timestamp are real (we trim filler words like "um", nothing else). The name comes from our written summary of the episode, and we use it only when a separate check of the captions finds that person on the episode. YouTube gives us no voice-by-voice transcript, so open the timestamp to hear who is talking. See a wrong name? Tell us and we fix or remove it.
10+ hours of podcasts, distilled into one 5-minute read. Free, every Sunday.
For now, every subscriber gets both newsletters. No spam. Unsubscribe with one click.