20VC: Corgi Insurance: The Most Intense Workplace Culture in America: 7 Days Per Week, Founder Sleeps in Office, Corgi Cafe Open 24 Hours a Day, 60% of First 30 Employees Have Corgi Tattoos | The Journey from $0 to $2.6BN Valuation in Just 2 Years

Nico Laqua is the Co-Founder and CEO of Corgi Insurance, an AI-native insurance carrier built for startups. Corgi is the most intense workplace culture in America. The team works 7 days per week. The founder sleeps in the office. ⅔ of the first 30 team members have a Corgi tattoo. This week, Corgi raised $106M, valuing the company at a whopping $2.6BN. AGENDA: 06:35 Why going to university was a massive waste of time 09:42 Why we work seven days a week 11:58 Why we do work trials and how that is a test of people's stamina 18:41 Why we created a cafe in the biggest annoyance with San Francisco 22:00 Why I am so bullish on London 23:49 Why I haven't sold a single secondary 24:19 Why people who found companies in New York prioritise dating over their company 30:46 Biggest lessons on cash comp and equity 31:13 Team members can be split into three separate groups 34:59 Biggest lesson from Brian Chesky on price 35:44 What is the right amount of time to be fundraising for? 36:47 Good companies get deals done and what makes the best venture investors? 40:34 Why AI makes sales and marketing more valuable 43:12 Why I don't like boards and I don't think they're effective 46:19 What I would like to see more of from venture funds 48:05 Who was Corgi's first believer?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every week, then you will not have a place at Corgi. I don't sleep a lot. I think the average night, couple hours, probably three to four hours.

• 0:10Harry Stebbings?

  So you literally live in the office?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I have a mattress there and I would rather like measure my lifespan in victories than than yours.

• 0:18Harry Stebbings?

  Would you rather Corgi was a trillion dollar company, but you died at 50? Or it was a fail and you lived till you were 80?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I think the answer to that is pretty easy. I get a lot of backlash, the death threats and the DMs, you know, people, people think I'm I'm nuts. I think the number of good companies is very small.

• 0:36Harry Stebbings?

  The most insane workplace culture in America. The company works seven days per week. The founder lives and sleeps in the office. The team have a cafe that was built for them that is open 24 hours a day. Two thirds of the first 30 team members have the company logo as a tattoo. Welcome to Corgi Insurance, the most insane workplace culture in America. Joining me in the hot seat today, their co-founder and CEO Nico, who just closed their latest funding round, valuing them at a whopping $2.5 billion. But before we dive into the show today, so what if your gym was already home?

• 1:21Harry Stebbings?

  Well, one, I'd probably be a lot fitter and actually better than a gym you're driving to. Sounds pretty good, to be honest. Well, that's AMP, a beautiful wall-mounted smart gym that brings strength training, HIIT, Pilates, mobility and yoga into one incredible system without the commute, the clutter or the schedule. AMP adapts to you, personalized games, AI coaching, automatic weight adjustments and real progress tracking, all in a design that fits your home and your life. We actually have one right here in the 20 VC studio. I'm a complete sucker for fitting in a quick 15 minute bicep pump, which you wouldn't tell from watching the videos. The whole team, though, has also been using it and no one is now missing the gym.

• 2:04Harry Stebbings?

  It's why AMP has over 20,000 users, won the 2026 Forbes Vetted Best Product Award. Was featured in Fast Company, USA Today and more. You need to train better and you need to start today. Go to amp.ai to get started. That's A-M-P dot A-I. While AMP Fitness logs your sets, Granola logs your calls. You're in back-to-back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI-powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns them into really clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. No bots joining your call, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus.

• 2:49Harry Stebbings?

  During or after the call, you can chat with your notes, ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email even, or coach you using recipes which are pre-made prompts. It's actually the same technology we use to create our podcast notes. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's really hard to go back. Head to granola.ai/20vc. That's granola.ai/20vc and get three months free with the code 20vc. That's 20vc. Once Granola turns the conversation into clear notes, Finn keeps the conversation going with customers. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job.

• 3:34Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience, from service to sales to success and beyond. Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers. It's powered by custom models, trained on years of real customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self-managable, so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves. No third parties required. Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash and Crypto.com already use and love Finn to deliver better customer experiences. So see what Finn can do.

• 4:20Harry Stebbings?

  For your team at fin.ai/20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. Nico, dude, I am so excited for this. I was more excited, I have to admit, for this than I am almost any other show in the way that, one, I think we align, and, two, I think we align on something that's rather different. And so, one, thank you for joining me, dude.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 4:42Harry Stebbings?

  I'm often struck with great CEOs. What is it that motivates you? Is it the fear of losing? Or is it the thrill of winning?

• 4:49Speaker 00

  I think you can't be afraid of losses. Losses are like beautiful because, you know, you can have asymmetric upside with winning. So I think you have to love winning, and you have to love the victories. I think Jeff Bezos, he said something a number of years ago that has always really stuck with me. He gave it as a baseball analogy, I guess, very American, but, you know, in baseball, there's four bases and you can score a maximum of, or there's three bases and the home plate, but you can score a maximum of four runs when you're at bat. So if you go up to bat and every single time you swing, you try to like, you know, hit the ball out of the park. That's a losing strategy in baseball a lot of the time because upside is capped. You know, you have you have maximum of four runs, but your probability of striking out of scoring nothing is quite high.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  In business, it doesn't quite work like that because instead of four runs resulting from a homerun, a homerun might result in actually infinite upside. It might result in something like AWS popping out of nowhere. I really think like seeking asymmetric upside or infinite upside, uncapped upside with capped downside is the core of business and taking a lot of shots on goal. And if you look at kind of people who started important things, not every single thing they did work. Like Napoleon was the best general of all time, but he didn't win every single battle. You know, he won more battles than average, certainly more than most other generals, but I don't know. I think the fear of losing can't really motivate you because otherwise you just become this like, uh, this creature afraid of doing anything.

• 6:14Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to Josh Young on your team and he said that Nico is probably the most aggressive person I've ever met. He sets goals that might seem unrealistic to others. When you think about the most aggressive thing you've done, I was gonna ask you, what did you do that was too aggressive? But I actually get asked shit like that all the time and I think that's totally the wrong framing because nothing's too aggressive. And so I'm gonna ask you instead, what were you not aggressive enough on with the benefit of hindsight?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. I think going to university, going to college, that was a big mistake. If you want to do big things, you need to go out in the wilderness a little bit and be humbled. You need to kind of metaphorically get beat up. You need to, you know, go through the lows before you go through the highs. I wasted some amount of time in my life doing that.

• 7:04Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think university carries less weight than ever today?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  I don't know if it carries less weight or more weight or, you know, I don't really think about that because you kind of make your own weight in life. And it's kind of an interesting point because startups are fundamentally, I think, about like a crisis of legitimacy. And that was a big problem in like the Roman Empire, right? Like it was a non-hereditary monarchy, you know, the emperors weren't inheriting any legitimacy. So if they were a bit crap, you could just kill them and then, you know, replace them with the next guy. And I think startups are a little bit like that where there's not like some inherent loyalty, you know, there's no reason to work for this company or that company. There's no blood ties, there's no inherited structure and you can just go out and make your own. So I think the process of like going through a company is just kind of, you know, building that legitimacy. And I think that's why people try to point to

• 7:51Speaker 00

  things like the idea of tier one investors as a way to borrow that legitimacy. So universities, I suppose, the point is to give a credential that carries some legitimacy, otherwise you wouldn't do it. You know, you can learn all the material online, you can learn all the material with an L O M much better than you can from some professor. But I don't think the credential of a university actually conveys the legitimacy that it ought to. I think it's a bit too naked, you know, and on the nose.

• 8:18Harry Stebbings?

  It almost reminds me of Marc Andreessen where he says essentially when a company is invested in by a fund, the fund is loaning them the brand and the validity that the brand name of the fund has until the company is big enough where then it transitions and Corgi then loans the brand to Kanye or to JD at TCV and it's the other way around. Do you see what I mean? It's like the legitimacy of brand.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, he also says, do you want to be liked or do you want to win? So I think if you talk to a lot of founders, there's often a perception that that capital is fungible. And you know, what we're seeing with kind of the the perception of funds and the idea of value add and tiers of investors is that perhaps capital isn't so fungible after all.

• 9:01Harry Stebbings?

  What makes you say that?

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Apple was invested in by Sequoia, but I think it'd be very unlikely that Steve Jobs would ever go flexing that Apple was a Sequoia company. You know, that would feel very strange. That'd be very unusual. But but now, you know, it's not unusual when describing a company, say, is a is a tier one company or so Y C company or so this company or that company with the descriptor being their investors to signify something about the way that the the company, you know, acts or ought to be. And it's a bit unusual because, you know, people will say that out of one side of their mouth, then the other side of their mouth, they'll acknowledge that when they invest in companies, they can't do anything about their investment. You know, like if the team's incompetent or if they're making bad decisions, then that's a really hard thing to to solve.

• 9:44Harry Stebbings?

  No, that is 100% true. I have to ask you, you said that, you know, do you want to win or do you want to be liked? You and I both have a theory around work and work ethic and what it takes to win that's not always popular. Can you help me understand? You work seven days a week at the company and the company is expected to work seven days a week.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can you help me understand why that is and how you thought through that as a decision?

• 10:08Speaker 00

  If you're solving the most important problems, or if you want to like dream big and like scale up your ambition, whatever you can get done in five days, I promise you, you'll get more done in six and seven and so on and so forth. And I think that like if you're doing a startup and you're serious about it and you want to win, you want to do the biggest possible things, you want a sense of community. And camaraderie and have brothers and sisters in arms with the people you're working with. Then you should go all out. You shouldn't do the half-assing it. Five days, why not four, three, or two, or one, right? I think you should just, if you're doing something, you should do it properly.

• 10:41Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not believe in the benefits of rest then? I'm 100% with you on the work ethic. And I do actually think having a day off can be helpful. Do you not think that rest does carry?

• 10:52Speaker 00

  I mean, for some people, if they want to take a day off, they should take a day off. But there's nothing about the weekend, I think, that signifies.

• 10:58Harry Stebbings?

  But they wouldn't have a place at Corgi.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  You can take a day off every now and then. That's all right. But if your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every week, then you will not have a place at Corgi.

• 11:10Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, how does that go down in hiring? I would love to be able to do that. And you could say, Harry, you could do that.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should. You can just say it and say, why? Because we want to build the biggest thing ever. And if you want to build the biggest thing ever, you need to win. And if you want to win, then actually it's something that I think attracts the right type of person and absolutely repels the wrong type of person. Because particularly for young people, I think there's a lot of people that want to dream big. They want to do something big with their lives and important with their lives. And if you want to do something important with your lives, you're going to do it a lot and you're going to win. And if you want to be a winner, if you want to be a killer, then sure, you can do that for 30 minutes a day. But I think doing it all the time is better.

• 11:50Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have people who turn up to interview processes and think it's kind of it, but don't realize the intensity?

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we have everyone do work trials. That scares them off.

• 12:01Harry Stebbings?

  What do you mean work trials?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  I think it's really important. People need to know what they're getting into on both sides. So before people come in, we really like to have them kind of like do kind of mock work for one or several days. Especially if it's over the weekend and then they see the office full. That helps them very quickly learn that we're not joking around.

• 12:19Harry Stebbings?

  That's a benefit of actually working weekends is people can do it in their jobs without taking time off.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  It does make it easy to poach.

• 12:27Harry Stebbings?

  What in a work trial impresses you most versus turns you off most? Because it is tough in a two day trial to have much impact. You're onboarding and whatever.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, the soft skills matter, I think, more than the hard skills for me. Because if someone really wants it, if they're like all in, if they want to like do the maximally hard thing, the ambitious thing with their lives and they actually want to go all in, then you normally can find a place for someone like that. And it might not be exactly what they are applying for, what they think they're going to be doing. But I think you should just solve hard problems. You should do hard things and you can kind of tell if someone's into that or if they're into checking in and checking out.

• 13:05Harry Stebbings?

  What questions do you find most revealing when you're interviewing people?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  I like to ask people what matters to them and why. I think that they tend to answer that honestly.

• 13:14Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find money is an alarming response? If I said to you, I'm just hungry to make money, dude. I want to make money for my family. Do you mind?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't necessarily mind. That normally comes from a certain place, I think. Like to me, that answer normally would reveal that someone didn't have a lot of money. I think my answer for that is probably a little different, but I don't find that to be necessarily alarming, although I think that being extremely money motivated leads you to short term local maximums that don't actually result in the most money being made.

• 13:43Harry Stebbings?

  What is your answer to that? If it's not the money, we were chatting earlier, your sacrifice is unwavering to this business. We'll get on to more of it. What is the reason if it's not money?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  I want to build the most important company in the world. I want to, you know, win. I admire the greats. I very much want to join them. I think that as people living in this like time and circumstance, you know, we're subject to the world historical conditions in which we're in. If we were alive 200 years ago, we'd probably be generals like fighting some sort of wars or something and that would be very simple. The winning would just mean, you know, killing your enemies. And unfortunately, you can't do that anymore. So I think that the next best thing and where we're at now is that you can actually in a positive some way, like make a really big difference in the world. So I want us to always be solving the hardest problems possible and I want to win. I want to add value.

• 14:35Harry Stebbings?

  I heard from one of your investors that you live in the office.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:39Harry Stebbings?

  What does that look like? Do you actually live in the office?

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's one thing to say like, oh, why don't you guys work seven days a week? And you're on like some yacht somewhere like, like hanging out or at Ibiza or something. It's another thing if you're actually like putting in the work. So I think symbols often really matter, you know, like the cosmetic stuff, like having a sign on the building or.

• 14:59Harry Stebbings?

  We're gonna get to the sign, Dee, didn't we?

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the cosmetic stuff, I think it does matter, like symbolism matters. There's a reason why governments and religions and all of the really important things tend to care a lot about symbols, you know, the flag's very important and all that. And I think that the symbolism around like working hard is quite different, like leading the troops from the frontline versus like saying, oh, why don't you guys work hard and I won't.

• 15:23Harry Stebbings?

  So you literally live in the office?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I have a mattress there and that sort of thing. I used to shower at the Equinox like one street over and they they close very early, like 8pm on on Fridays, so that was unpleasant. We don't have a shower in our SF office. Our London office actually has a shower, so.

• 15:40Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I had this in Founder's Room. Is that what it's called?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Some people have called it that, but is normally people just say, oh, it's Nico's room.

• 15:47Harry Stebbings?

  I got Founder's Room showers at Equinox, works every waking hour. How long do you sleep for?

• 15:53Speaker 00

  I don't sleep a lot. I think the average night, couple hours, probably three to four hours. But some nights I really do make an effort to try to sleep a little more because I find I'm.

• 16:02Harry Stebbings?

  Have you ever had health scares?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think sleep is important and I encourage people to sleep a lot. I think I would rather like measure my lifespan in victories than than years.

• 16:12Harry Stebbings?

  Would you rather Corgi was a trillion dollar company, but you died at 50? Or it was a fail and you lived till you were 80?

• 16:20Speaker 00

  I mean, I think the answer to that is pretty easy because if I'm dying either way, but for now, life is short. We'll see what happens.

• 16:27Harry Stebbings?

  It reminds me of Olympians, though. I don't know if you've ever seen this study, where it's like they say, would you rather live 10 years less but have a gold medal? And 98% of them said unwaveringly yes.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  You need to want it and that's presupposing that that death is coming either way, which you never know.

• 16:46Harry Stebbings?

  Brian Johnson has his way. You said if you're going to be a hyper growth startup and you're not working weekends, you're basically just quiet quitting.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I strongly believe that.

• 16:54Harry Stebbings?

  But you're the only one doing it, aren't you?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, if you visit very high growth AI companies, at least in San Francisco, you know, the offices are pretty full on the weekends. I don't think it's a coincidence.

• 17:05Harry Stebbings?

  It's easy to look at this and go like, and people will. So unfair, harsh. You also have a chef seven days a week.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Not anymore.

• 17:15Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, talk to me about that. Why did you decide to have a chef seven days a week and why do you not now?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I I loved our chef. I thought she was really great. I think that just like ordering food is a little more like logistically easy. I think having food in the office is actually important because otherwise people like lose a lot of time like going out and like getting food and like coming back is just very inefficient. And you know, people need to think about like where they're going to buy the food and it's just, you know, extra like cognitive load, you know, you're you're spending more time like doing that than you are doing something that's that's high leverage. I really dislike the culture of like pampering everyone or like taking care of them as if you're you're their parents. I think Google is like the worst of that.

• 17:57Harry Stebbings?

  Did it feel like you were pampering them when you had a chef seven days a week?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Maybe a little bit, but that that's not the reason why we don't have a chef anymore.

• 18:04Harry Stebbings?

  Why don't you have a chef anymore?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  We really liked the idea of having a chef. And again, like the chef we we got was awesome. I I really liked having her. But I think that sometimes doing more that's not like core can like lead to logistical burdens. And it's better to focus your energy on things that directly lead to growth or indirectly lead to growth.

• 18:25Harry Stebbings?

  Things that indirectly lead to growth.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:28Harry Stebbings?

  So I actually said very excitedly the other night about our show to my girlfriend and she said, huh, I just saw a job application. And I was like, I'm sure not related, it's a San Francisco company, she's a lawyer in London. And she was like, no, no, it's the same one. Cafe expansion head. And I was like, that seems eerily similar to Corgi's role. And I think maybe it is. Talk to me, you have 24 seven Corgi Cafe. Why you're an insurance company?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when we rented out our building in San Francisco, we needed to get signage on the side of the building. And it was zoned or something, so when we got our primary floor, we were forced to take over the retail space. It was like this empty barber shop. It was like really dungey, like, you know, I'd been out of business for probably a couple of years. We moved in and, you know, everything was fine and, you know, we have the sign on the side of the building, great. But I'd walk in every day and I'd see this like empty barber shop. And it would just piss me off because like I'm paying for that, but like there's nothing in it, like it's a waste of, you know, it's a waste of everything. At the same time, a huge complaint I have with San Francisco, everything closes really early, like it's a big problem, especially in the financial district where offices and there's a lot of really great startups that want to like push themselves hard,

• 19:42Speaker 00

  but you cannot find a cafe, you can't even find a place to eat past like 6, 7pm most days. Like, like things just are, it's a ridiculous situation. Clearly, most restaurants don't have a growth mindset. The other issue that I think we wanted to address is that for people that are serious about technology, about building things, about starting things, there's not actually, even in San Francisco, which is supposedly the center of technology for the world, you know, there's not a lot of places where people can actually, who are serious about that can come together, have a place where they can basically work hard. Yeah, we decided to just kind of impromptu, it wasn't like a big planned out thing, open up a 24/7 cafe. Caught on a lot more than we thought it would. Now it's always full, there's people signing term sheets and getting deals done and...

• 20:24Harry Stebbings?

  How much money did it take to start a cafe?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  We spent under $100,000 opening it.

• 20:29Harry Stebbings?

  But under $100,000 opening it?

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:31Harry Stebbings?

  Has it been successful?

• 20:32Speaker 00

  I mean, it's always full. If you go there, you can go there at 3am and I'd recommend writing term sheets to everyone there because they're working hard. I can't tell you, it's probably like over 20 people have told me, like, "Oh, like I submitted my YC app and like the Corgi Cafe and I got in," or something along those lines, or "I signed a term sheet there," or...

• 20:50Harry Stebbings?

  You should do Corgi Ventures, which operates from 3am to 5am. And it's like those founders that are there.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the problem is if anything becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a good measure once, once, you know, the alpha disappears very quickly.

• 21:05Harry Stebbings?

  I totally get you. Does it make money?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  We lose money on the cafe with sponsorships because our drinks are sponsored and shout out to our drink sponsors.

• 21:14Harry Stebbings?

  You have like Brexpressos.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, Brexpresso, we have, we have Deal, we have, we have a couple of them.

• 21:19Harry Stebbings?

  What did Deal sponsor?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  It's the Deal Speed, it's a smoothie.

• 21:23Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Deal, love Deal Speed. Yeah, yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  So, so with, with that, I think we're probably slightly profitable.

• 21:31Harry Stebbings?

  If I was an investor, I'd say, Niko, I love you. Dude, I love the energy. This is a fucking distraction.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, they hated it at first.

• 21:37Harry Stebbings?

  Why, why are you doing a cafe expansion?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Oh, you, you sound exactly like our investors. I got, I got a ton of calls and texts that said that before it opened.

• 21:46Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  I did, I did, I promise you.

• 21:48Harry Stebbings?

  I've learnt that you don't get any credit for ever criticizing a founder. So I just don't. You know what I do? Dude, I'm here for you. Well done.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Our investors didn't get the memo, so I heard plenty of that.

• 21:59Harry Stebbings?

  But dude, why are you doing it? I get it in SF, cool. You're opening in London.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, we have an office in London. I think, I'm very bullish London, actually.

• 22:09Harry Stebbings?

  Why are you bullish London?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  I think the talent is exceptional, both British talent and European. And I think, you know, there's very few places in the world where if you tell someone like pretty much anywhere to move to, they're like very happy to do so. I think San Francisco is one of those places. I think New York's one of those places, although I don't think that good companies tend to be in New York. And because of that, I think that there's certain exceptional qualities that London has. And given the whole like visa situation in the United States, I think there's actually a phenomenal opportunity for London to become like a center of AI and a center of tech. So we opened a London office before we opened a New York office. Like we, you know, we're very long London.

• 22:45Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find it much cheaper to hire in London?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  It's a little bit cheaper. I think we, you know, maybe, maybe we're paying above market, but we're not paying that much. The thing is, if, if you're working for like a salary, working at Corgi, you're doing something wrong. Like if you're super hyped about your cash, like comp, then, then probably.

• 23:01Harry Stebbings?

  Are you more generous than others on equity? Cause you understand that you are asking for more of someone's life being seven days.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we're generous with top, top offs. After people are working, we, we give more, more equity based upon performance. That's, that's where we're generous, more than the initial equity that people sign on.

• 23:15Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. So it's like accelerators on milestones hit.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's a little more ad hoc than that, but yeah, something like that.

• 23:22Harry Stebbings?

  We said about distractions, a lot of founders angel invest. How do you think about founders actively angel investing?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  I don't angel invest. I think it's a distraction. It doesn't feel like it's core to like winning.

• 23:36Harry Stebbings?

  Have you sold secondaries?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  No, I haven't sold any second. People are always trying to buy them, but I've yet to sell a single secondary.

• 23:42Harry Stebbings?

  Why is that?

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Because our equity is going up and maybe I shouldn't say that, but I believe our equity is going up and I'm voting with my feet. If I have the, in my opinion, the scariest asset that I could have any meaningful influence over, and I think that we're going to keep doing well and keep kicking ass, you know, why would I sell that? Like, I don't really have a...

• 24:02Harry Stebbings?

  You don't have huge rent to pay, that's for sure.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 24:06Harry Stebbings?

  Despite the bullishness on London, you're still super bullish on SF.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love San Francisco.

• 24:11Harry Stebbings?

  Why is the amount of great talent building in SF? Is it just there's nothing else to do there?

• 24:19Speaker 00

  That might be part of it, which, you know, is maybe a bit of a problem that London has. You know, things are actually open later in London and, you know, there's more people about too many pubs. That might be a problem.

• 24:29Harry Stebbings?

  It's a lot of pubs.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  There are a lot of pubs.

• 24:32Harry Stebbings?

  Do you drink?

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Um, no, I don't drink. But I think San Francisco is a special place because particularly with people in the US, if you want to do something big with your life and you're not really quite sure like where to go to, San Francisco is like, you know, an end destination where like, you know, if you're a bit nerdy and if you love technology, you love programming, you love kind of these slightly unpopular sort of topics. It's a place where you can actually like find your people oftentimes and where like you'll find yourself moving to. And I think that that's a special quality. It's almost like a, you know, a spiritual quality, like you, you know, everyone's in exile or something. And I think that there's something that's like very unique. That's why New York is not a good place to have a company at all. The people that move their companies to New York do so because they want to date.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  You know, that's the only real reason why they do. Same with Miami or, you know, all of these other places. If you're hardcore about startups and you're American, then I think you should, you should go to San Francisco. Oftentimes, I mean, there's super great other cities. Like I do like Chicago and we have an office in Dallas that's really great too. And if you're hardcore about startups outside of the United States, I think London is second to none as well, although you gotta avoid the pubs.

• 25:44Harry Stebbings?

  The pubs are really getting it. I get you. We've spoken a lot about everything from chefs to signage on buildings, to corgi cafe, to work ethic. You're a little bit younger than me, but I do reflect on how I've built the company. When you reflect on what you did that you wish you hadn't done, what was the biggest?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  I don't dwell on mistakes. I think-

• 26:07Harry Stebbings?

  How very Marc Andreessen of you.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I look more at the victories than the losses because I think there's more to learn from the victories. And if you can kind of emulate the things that have worked really well again and again.

• 26:18Harry Stebbings?

  There's a brilliant commencement speech by Matthew McConaughey at the University of Texas, or University of Houston. He says, you know, "Study success and the importance of lessons from success." If I would have then flipped it and said, "What success have you studied? And what do you learn from it?" What would you say that is?

• 26:35Speaker 00

  I think that you need to look at the greats. And the greats are oftentimes outside of the context of startups. Like, you know, people like, there's the obvious, like, famous startup founders. But I think that looking at everyone from Alexander the Great to Napoleon to, you know, so on and so forth is also very informative. If you want to, like, change the world, if you want to do something important, and you don't want to just be like, I'm a medic copy of everyone else, or you want to be class president or something, that's fine. But if you want to actually, like, do something big, then I think that being a student of the greats is great. The important thing, I think, is probably not copying them. Like, you should have your own style. But being a student of history is probably a pretty positive thing.

• 27:14Harry Stebbings?

  If I were to ask you, what's Corgi's culture in one word, what would you say it is?

• 27:19Speaker 00

  We have a culture of winning.

• 27:20Harry Stebbings?

  Winning. That's it?

• 27:21Speaker 00

  That's it. Maybe in the past, I would have answered, like, ex-founder, like hackers, like, other things. But I think all that's actually kind of fake, and we just like winning.

• 27:30Harry Stebbings?

  How big's the team?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Uh, maybe a bit over a hundred now.

• 27:33Harry Stebbings?

  Can you maintain the intensity that you have today when you're at a thousand people?

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, easy.

• 27:40Harry Stebbings?

  Really?

• 27:41Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 27:42Harry Stebbings?

  Why has no one else been able to do it?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  So naturally, there's roles, I think, that creep in. A lawyer and accountant are not going to work in the same way that a software engineer might. And that's just a fact of life, so, okay. So if they don't want to work quite as hard, then you just need to hire more of them for the same work output, which is okay. It's just like a return on investment calculation. The only reason I can think of is, you know, there's some point in which you need to take the off-ramp of being super hardcore and you need to accept maybe lower growth, but less volatility. I personally, at least at the current stage I'm at, don't mind volatility is something that I think is, can produce alpha in a lot of ways.

• 28:21Harry Stebbings?

  What would you say to people who say that you're exclusionary in the work culture and that parents couldn't do what you want?

• 28:27Speaker 00

  I mean, we have plenty of parents that work at Corgi, so life's about trade-offs and sacrifices. I think Corgi is a great place to work if you want a sense of community and camaraderie with the people you work with, if you want to have friends in the workplace, the social life, attached to your workplace, if you want your work to be additive to your life as opposed to separate. That applies whether you're married, whether you have kids, don't have kids. Some of our best people have, you know, a lot of children. But if you want to, you know, clock in and then just check out of work, then respectfully, there's infinite other jobs you can get, and that's okay. You know, Corgi's not for everyone.

• 28:59Harry Stebbings?

  Do you care about the backlash that you get when you speak about this?

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I get a lot of backlash, the death threats and the DMs. You know, people, people think I'm, I'm nuts.

• 29:10Harry Stebbings?

  Do you care?

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Not really, no. I don't know, I mean, I-

• 29:12Harry Stebbings?

  Have you ever cared?

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. I think when you're a young person, particularly, I think, young men, you know, don't have that much support within society. And I think it's something, of course, that like weighs on people, particularly if you don't have, you know, a lot of external validation or credibility yet. Credibility is something that, you know, is hard to get, which goes back to the crisis of legitimacy that I think is, is core to startups.

• 29:36Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you're legitimate yet? I know that sounds strange.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I mean, so we're like more regulated than a bank and we make a lot of revenue and have raised money. I don't think we're quite legit yet. I think we're, we're getting there.

• 29:49Harry Stebbings?

  I think you're legitimate when you're in that you don't get fired for buying IBM. And I would, in my context as a fund, if you're Andreessen or you're, you name these great, like big, large platforms, you don't get fired as an LP for doing Andreessen.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can, like, period.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's probably exactly right. The thing is, in the fund context, you know, Andreessen or Kleiner or even Sequoia back in the day, at some point, they were just a couple of guys in some shitty room that like, didn't really know like, what they were doing and were making it up as they went along. And they were probably pointing at, not probably, they certainly were pointing at other people and saying, oh, one day we'll be legit like them and the institutional LPs will take us seriously. There's always, you know, more legit, right? You can go from pension funds to university endowments to the government. You know, that's the ultimate form of legitimacy, probably because the government can just take people's money.

• 30:40Harry Stebbings?

  What are your lessons on paying people? So what I've learned, for example, is that when people ask for more money, they tend to be very good. When they ask for more title, they tend to be very bad. Any lessons on salaries, benchmarking, comp?

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Low cash comp is something good, generally speaking. Who ends up doing extremely well? Like, if people are doing well, you need to just like, give them more like equity especially, and make it so that like, if they're doing a very simple return on investment calculation, that the highest EV thing they can do is like, work in their current role. And if you can't provide that upside, like, there's no reason for them to like, continue like, working super hard and they should be doing something else, whether that's working for someone else or starting their own thing or whatever. I think separate from kind of the comp and the simple EV calculation is that you need to actually be like, solving big problems. And if you're not solving big problems, then no matter how much you pay people, you're not going to retain them if they're actually good.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  You can probably split, like, within any organization, the team into three. You can have people that are like, really good, people that are kind of fungible and like, mediocre, and then people that are bad. And I think getting rid of the bad very quickly is important, even if it makes a lot of noise.

• 31:52Harry Stebbings?

  Do you keep the mediocre?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  I wouldn't put it like that, but you know, I think in any organization, there's people that, you know, you wouldn't be devastated if they, if they left.

• 32:02Harry Stebbings?

  The question I always ask is, knowing what you know now, would you hire them again? It's the most important question.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people where the answer might be yes, but you know, you're not going to be sobbing and punching the wall if they're no longer with you.

• 32:14Harry Stebbings?

  Fundraising is a big part of your job as a CEO. You recently raised, I think, 1.5?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, 1.3.

• 32:21Harry Stebbings?

  1.3 from TCV. Love TCV, love John Doran, spoke to him before the show. What are your single biggest lessons on fundraising? Having raised now across pre-regulated, post-regulated, revenue scaling very fast. What are the most non-obvious lessons you have from raising several hundred million dollars?

• 32:40Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know if I'm actually an expert there or anything like that.

• 32:43Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you're a good fundraiser?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  I think I'm all right at it. I've had to do it for years now, so I think if you have to do anything for years.

• 32:49Harry Stebbings?

  What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started?

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I started, my pitch was not very good. Like, I remember my first pitch.

• 32:55Harry Stebbings?

  Who was it to?

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Probably First Round Capital was my first pitch.

• 32:59Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Way back in the day, the very first VC I ever talked to was at Google Ventures. But yeah, I mean, my first pitch for Corgi, I think, was maybe First Round Capital. I remember I took a red eye the night before. My eyes were actually red. I looked like I was high or something. I was like so nervous because we had to get $5 million and we had like 24 hours. Or I flew back Thursday night. I was like, oh, we'll get the money to you in a couple of days. Like, you know how the banks are, it'll take some time to transfer the money. So I started pitching Friday. We had Saturday, Sunday, and had to get the money by Monday. And, you know, I think the pitch was not very good, honestly. It was, I think it was a lot of like, just trust me. I wasn't telling them the name of the insurance carrier because I was afraid they'd like call them and ruin it. The first set of pitches I did weren't that good.

• 33:42Harry Stebbings?

  And you were raising two on 10?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  We were raising five on 28 with that one. And that was 2024, so that wasn't super easy.

• 33:50Harry Stebbings?

  That was recently. It was like two years ago.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:54Harry Stebbings?

  What was the best VC meeting you had?

• 33:56Speaker 00

  The worst are when it's like super structured and when they start asking me like BS about like our like balance sheet or like, you know, they're getting the nitty gritty. I'm not that type of guy. I think that the best ones tend to be when someone is like very like growth minded or product minded. We just get to vibe about like where we're going and like how we're gonna win.

• 34:15Harry Stebbings?

  So what was the best VC meeting that didn't invest?

• 34:18Speaker 00

  I've had plenty of great ones that didn't invest. I'm not gonna put them on the spot because they might, they might invest later on.

• 34:23Harry Stebbings?

  Ah, okay. What was the worst?

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Oh, I've had some really bad ones.

• 34:27Harry Stebbings?

  Have you had some really bad ones?

• 34:28Speaker 00

  I've had some super bad ones. I've had people like, especially the first round, like the early stage investors are disrespectful. I've had people driving. I've had people flossing their teeth on the meeting, like chowing down food, like barbecue ribs or something where it's like getting all over their face. I've, I've seen it all.

• 34:44Harry Stebbings?

  What do you say? I mean, please finish flossing. It's okay.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had one on FaceTime where the guy was like hitting his vape and I thought he was asleep because he just had his eyes closed, like leaning against the wall. I've had some like crazy pitches, particularly at the early stage.

• 34:58Harry Stebbings?

  What are your biggest advice to founders on price? Price is a difficult one.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think price, Brian Chesky told me one time to never take the highest price and I've taken that to heart. So we never take the highest price ever. That's just a good rule of thumb. Like we always go with like the second or third highest price. I don't do a lot of negotiating on price. I just kind of see where the market's at and then if something seems reasonable, I just stick with it. And, you know, we could raise all of our rounds at higher prices, but we never do.

• 35:24Harry Stebbings?

  How long does it take to raise rounds for you normally?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Couple of days at most. If you're in the market for a long time, it's a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing for your like valuation or for the amount of money you're raising or funds you're raising from. But I think it's a bad thing for the company because you, you start to optimize for like selling equity instead of like selling your goods and services. Fundraising is like super distracting. It's not quite as bad as audits after you like get the term sheet, but like it is pretty distracting.

• 35:50Harry Stebbings?

  Couple of days at most. I hear you. I'm on the other side of that deal. And I'm like, dude, I'm with you. You don't want to do it. I don't want to be in a fundraiser process with you either. But I do want to get to know you and I do want you to know me.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Well, VCs always say that, but the thing is they could put in the work to get to know you, but they never do. And I think that's just like.

• 36:10Harry Stebbings?

  So again, this is interesting because like we're totally on the other side of the table. We fucking try and you know what we get? Thanks so much for your email. We're heads down.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm heads down, you know, because if you're if you're working on an important deal, that's going to like double your revenue. The last thing you want to do is meet with some VC.

• 36:29Harry Stebbings?

  I get it, but then help me understand.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  You know what an investor told me one time, actually? He said, good companies get deals done. At first I was mad. I was like kind of pissed to hear that. Like it was like, you know, like a like a backhanded like. It wasn't even a compliment, I guess. It was just an insult. He was implying that we weren't a good company because we weren't getting deals done. I've actually taken it to heart because I think it's true. Good companies do get deals done. Since then, we've like shifted our approach and we've started getting deals done. You know, we've stopped being such absolutists. And we move with haste. Time kills all deals and we like, as a company, we like get deals done. Like that's the key. I think that a venture capital firm is a lot of things. It's a brand, it's a lifestyle business. But one thing is certainly is a company. Good companies get deals done and I think that applies to venture capital firms too.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Some deals, you know, are made in in times of crises. I think the the venture deals that I respect most of all are the ones that I hear about from my funds where their company was not doing well at all. And a VC came in and saved them. And the amount of gratitude, I think, that like founders have for something like that is extreme. The amount of courage it takes to do like something where the company might be contentious or controversial or the metrics might be going in the wrong direction, not the right direction. That that type of behavior, I think, is is hard. And I think doing the hard thing in venture is is rare, unfortunately.

• 37:48Harry Stebbings?

  But genuinely, then you would rather do a deal with someone you don't really know if it's in a few days?

• 37:54Speaker 00

  One thing I know about them is they can get deals done quickly, right?

• 37:57Harry Stebbings?

  Sure, but they can also be assholes.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  That's true, and I've had plenty of bad investors in my life. Bad investor is much worse than no investor, and it's hard to get rid of them. But the thing is, if you're doing well and if you're pricing your company cheap, and if you go out to market, you can get a deal done very quickly. It's just the fact. Why would you waste time?

• 38:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you price your company cheaply?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we price all our deals cheaply.

• 38:20Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 38:21Speaker 00

  I mean, people might not think that when they see our stuff posted, but I think every round that we raised, we could raise at a higher valuation. I'm very sure of that.

• 38:29Harry Stebbings?

  Are you not doing disservice to your existing investors by not?

• 38:32Speaker 00

  I don't think so. They all got good deals too. If we were a public company, we'd probably be worth less because the public markets don't know how to evaluate high growth or potential.

• 38:41Harry Stebbings?

  Talk to me about that.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Look at the financial services companies on the public markets. They're all terrible. They all don't grow. But they're good.

• 38:48Harry Stebbings?

  So are they mispriced, or are they actually accurately priced because they don't grow and they have poor margins?

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Some of them have good margins. They make money. Private markets feel to me like they're a vehicle for valuing growth, whereas public markets feel like they're a vehicle for valuing cash flow. In the past, we'd call it dividend stocks. Maybe that's not so favorable if you're looking for asymmetric upside and are an investor because you don't have access to private deals as much. But certainly from a company perspective.

• 39:16Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not think at some point all companies are embodiment of their future free cash flow? That is what a company valuation is?

• 39:23Speaker 00

  No, I don't think so because, I mean, maybe at some terminal point from a theoretical perspective, but brand is worth something and identity is worth something. Why do you buy a Rolex watch instead of a Chinese copy of a Rolex watch? They might be the same materials or the same whatever, both tell the time.

• 39:41Harry Stebbings?

  If I gave you unlimited money, what would you do that you're not doing today? So for example, I'd be on the side of an F1 car. I would be opening Japan.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  If you had unlimited money, I think you'd have bigger things to do than be on the side of an F1 car. Right? But I mean, there's a lot of things I'd love to do. Like I think within the context of Corgi, like every single like super, super regulated like financial institution type, where right now it's like run on. Like fax machines and with like boomers like we'd like to like, you know, have those not waste people's time and and charge less fees and make everything a little more protected and a little more efficient, a little more profitable. I think outside of that context, I'm a techno optimist. I I believe very strongly in the power of technology to make the world a better place. Across a wide variety of like industry sectors, corgi is a bet mostly on like the most regulated sectors, but

• 40:33Speaker 00

  there's very few problems that technology can't solve and probably there's a lot of areas that are exciting like in medicine and and mental health. There's crises in a lot of like concurrent areas where I think technology can make things a lot better.

• 40:46Harry Stebbings?

  What role do we not have today that you think we will have and be very commonplace in five years' time?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  I don't know if it's like a role in particular, but I think that actually AI makes sales and marketing much more important than than it was in the past. In the past, I think if you had a really rock solid, like super hardcore engineering and product team, you could come out with something that would just like blow everyone away, be faster, it'd be better. Now you can make something faster and better. You know, if you don't have people to sell it or to market it or to tell people that it exists, it's not really worth the whole lot. There's like organic network effects around particularly B two B product launches just don't really exist in the same way that they used to.

• 41:26Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think traditional B two B marketing is good?

• 41:29Speaker 00

  I think traditional B two B sales is good. I think marketing is awful.

• 41:32Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  There's a lot that B two B could learn from consumer. The conferences are not it. Like I I'm I'm not a fan of you know, going and hanging out with a bunch of like sweaty like people in like a room. Like I don't I don't really like that. I think that like consumer companies have perfected marketing and B two B companies have perfected sales. Much like in a company where you have like a dominant product, how that kind of becomes the company and like it's hard to like really care that much about auxiliary revenue streams. As an industry, if you're selling B two B products, like you're gonna get very good at sales and marketing will tend to be an afterthought in most instances.

• 42:06Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to move into a quickfire where I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 42:12Harry Stebbings?

  So I think changing one's mind is important. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 42:17Speaker 00

  There's a lot I've changed my mind on. I've grown to value experience a lot more. In the past, you know, I've probably made certain statements around, you know, boomers being slow and bad, or I've definitely undervalued people that have been doing something for a long time. Because a lot of times, there's like these like little nuances or edge cases. When you do something for a long time, you pick up and maybe you're not as fast or as efficient or as able to use the latest tools. But there's an extraordinary amount of knowledge that lives in kind of the older generations, especially the retiring ones. And I think it's a big problem in that there's there's trillions of dollars to make getting that knowledge out and putting it inside of inside of computers that can think and talk. I don't

• 43:00Speaker 00

  think I viewed those problems in that lens. You know, I think I just considered old people using fax machines moving at two miles per hour to be like, you know, something uniformly bad. But now I see that there's value in their knowledge.

• 43:13Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you not have on the board that you would most like to have on the board?

• 43:16Speaker 00

  I don't like boards.

• 43:17Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  I believe in executive decision making. You know, our board's great and yada, yada, yada, all the disclaimers. But I think you just need to be able to decide and you need to be able to do things. You think Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg are caring what their board thinks or their board, you know, you think that they're like, all right, guys, let's huddle up, let's like make a decision. Like every committee decision, I think, is like BS. Like, sometimes you need to be able to take an unpopular stance and you just need to be able to plant your flag in the ground.

• 43:43Harry Stebbings?

  Is the board a check the box?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  I think so, a little bit. Like, it's, you know, a little theatrical. I guess it's good to make sure you're not like a scam or like doing like blatantly illegal stuff. But if management is unethical or unscrupulous enough to scam people or do illegal stuff, then they're gonna do it anyways, probably with or without a board. And that's a management problem.

• 44:03Harry Stebbings?

  You can buy OpenAI or Anthropic today, both at the same price, nine hundred. Which one do you choose?

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna get in trouble for this, probably, but I guess the disclaimer is this might be a stated preference versus a revealed preference, given that we spend maybe like four hundred thousand dollars per month on Anthropic and zero dollars on OpenAI at the moment. But I think that like spiritually, like OpenAI is, I guess, a little more pure because they kind of created, you know, this idea of like a AI lab as a company, dating all the way back to YC Research. And, you know, Anthropic is a result of, you know, employees that didn't like the management or the direction. There were complaints about profit and ethics and all this other stuff. And, you know, the EA movement and all of that. You know, I, I, I think when you're like, when your origins are that impure, it's a little hard to overtake the king.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  And, you know, right now Anthropic, frankly speaking, has been out executing OpenAI. Their product's much better. We use the best product in every category, at least from a, from an enterprise or like workflow automation perspective. Anthropic's better, so OpenAI needs to lock in.

• 45:07Harry Stebbings?

  How easy is it for you to switch back?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  I don't think it'd be that hard, although all of the labs are always trying to make us sign contracts. And if they give us a big enough discount on, on tokens, then we'd, we'd consider it.

• 45:18Harry Stebbings?

  What is no one talking about that you're spending more and more time thinking about?

• 45:23Speaker 00

  To me, there's good companies and there's, you know, everyone else. I think the number of good companies is very small. And a good company wants to win is like world historic, will be talked about in like a hundred years. Those companies, you know, there's just not many of them because people don't want to win. They don't want to put in the work. They don't want to, and that's okay. Like, it's okay to be average and part of the mediocre masses or whatever. That's all right. But I think that the cultural or internal kind of character of the companies that are good companies is something that's not appreciated enough. From a metaphysical level, there's a really big difference between Anduril and like Anthropic, right? Those are like super different companies. I think both those could be good companies, but I don't think people really understand

• 46:06Speaker 00

  the philosophy behind the management teams that they're investing in.

• 46:09Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you think is the most underappreciated CEO today? When you look at your style, who most aligns to your style?

• 46:17Speaker 00

  My style is my own style. I try to just do me. I think there's plenty of super underappreciated CEOs that like. One area where more than kind of venture-backed companies, what I would love to see more of are venture funds, you know, speaking out about these sort of important topics. And I know like startup founders love to clown on VCs for chiming in about like topics that they might not know a lot about. But I think that venture funds are actually in, you know, despite the fact that they're, you know, need to raise from LPs and LPs, you know, can crack the whip or whatever. Like, I think that venture funds are in a really strong position to influence the way that the startup ecosystem looks. Because they're setting the incentives and incentives often drive behavior.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  One thing I would love to see are the CEOs or the people that are running venture funds actually taking a more active stance in aligning their, you know, deployed capital with the changes that they'd like to see in the world. And to me, that's perhaps a more important issue than like any particular company's CEO or management team, broadly speaking.

• 47:17Harry Stebbings?

  Would you blame VCs for the dramatic increase we've seen in fraud? Especially around ARR. We put so much emphasis on zero to 100 million in X amount of time. No wonder founders lie.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  I mean, like, a lot of the issues with fraud we've seen are downstream of like credentialism or that quest for like legitimacy in a lot of ways. You know, I'm not going to speak about specific frauds, but I'm sure some come to mind that kind of check those boxes. I think VCs are partially responsible, but as a venture investor, after you invest in a company, there's very little you can do. So if the management is unscrupulous, is going to be scamming people or their product doesn't actually work or whatever, then I don't think you're really responsible for that management team committing fraud. I think on the extreme, you have, if you go back in time a couple of years, a lot of the crypto investors would encourage company founders to take on quite a lot of personal liability, including criminal liability in many cases.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  And, you know, basically they'd be like arbitraging that and like pumping the tokens or whatever. In hindsight, I guess that was the wrong type of tokens to work on. And I think In those cases, probably venture investors bear more responsibility. I think that people blaming like, you know, Y C or whatever for some of their companies being frauds is probably not like directionally correct because it's not like any venture fund really wants to like invest in a fraud. And people that are like doing these things, they're very good at wrapping it up and disguising it in such a way that it will pass muster. Especially if a round is moving quick, which most good companies' rounds do.

• 48:47Harry Stebbings?

  Who was your first believer with Corgi?

• 48:49Speaker 00

  It was probably Jared Friedman from Y C. Yeah, there's been times where he was our only believer, you know, everyone else is a doubter, is a naysayer. But Jared Jared's always been there for us.

• 48:58Harry Stebbings?

  Would you do Y C again?

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd do it again.

• 49:00Harry Stebbings?

  Final thing for you. What are you most excited for when you look forward to the next 10 years? What do you like this? I can't wait for.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  You know, it's a little hard to say because if you ask that 10 years ago, the technology that people were really excited about didn't exist yet. It was only late 2022 that people actually started getting with Chat G P T 3.5 that large language models were obviously very important and very exciting. Like within the the next 10 years, technology will solve a lot of problems. Perhaps it'll create some too, but I think it'll solve a lot more than it creates. I think that there's certain areas where venture investing hasn't worked before, where there could be like category defining outcomes and where there could be new kind of industries where where smart people are actually interested in going into. Like biology is one that comes to mind.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  I really strongly believe that, you know, we're going to probably see more like Chat G P T moments, maybe a couple of years from now that that will really shake things up.

• 49:55Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I have to say, it's been so wonderful having you on the show. As I said at the beginning, some of my most unpopular beliefs you align with completely. And so it's nice to have a kindred friend. Thank you so much for joining me today, man.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 50:10Harry Stebbings?

  But before we leave you today, so what if your gym was already home? Well, one, I'd probably be a lot fitter and actually better than a gym you're driving to. Sounds pretty good, to be honest. Well, that's AMP, a beautiful wall mounted smart gym that brings strength training, HIIT, Pilates, mobility and yoga into.

• 50:29Harry Stebbings?

  One incredible system without the commute, the clutter or the schedule. AMP adapts to you personalized games, AI coaching, automatic weight adjustments and real progress tracking, all in a design that fits your home and your life. We actually have one right here in the 20 VC studio. I'm a complete sucker for fitting in a quick 15 minute bicep pump, which you wouldn't tell from watching the videos. The whole team though, has also been using it and no one is now missing the gym. It's why AMP has over 20,000 users, won the 2026 Forbes Vetted Best Product Award and was featured in Fast Company, USA Today and more. You need to train better and you need to start today. Go to AMP.ai to get started. That's A M P dot A I.

• 51:13Harry Stebbings?

  While AMP Fitness logs your sets, Granola logs your calls. You're in back to back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do and in the background Granola transcribes and turns them into really clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. No bots joining your call, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus. During or after the call, you can chat with your notes, ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow up email even, or coach you using recipes which are pre-made prompts. It's actually the same technology we use to create our podcast notes.

• 51:58Harry Stebbings?

  Once you try it on a first meeting, it's really hard to go back. Head to granola.ai/20vc, that's granola.ai/20vc and get three months free with the code 20vc, that's 20vc. Once Granola turns the conversation into clear notes, Finn keeps the conversation going with customers. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job. Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience from service to sales to success and beyond. Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences.

• 52:39Harry Stebbings?

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