20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Author: Harry Stebbings November 21, 2025 Duration: 1:19:22

Max Altman is Co‑Founder & Managing Partner at Saga Ventures, a US$125 M early‑stage fund.  Before Saga Max was an investor with Apollo Projects, Hydrazine Capital and Altman Capital (where he helped deploy over US$500 M) into breakout names such as Rippling and Reddit.

AGENDA:

03:55 – Venture Capital Is FULL of Tourists With Single-Digit IQs

06:20 – Inside the Madness of Parker Conrad: Genius, Chaos, and WTF Emails

10:35 – The Rippling Deal That Changed Everything

12:40 – Living in Sam Altman's Shadow: The Confession

17:30 – $200M Fund Mistakes: Max's Brutal Lessons From Hydrazine

22:05 – The $2B Reddit Return… and the $2B Left on the Table

25:00 – Why Climate Tech Is a Total VC Mirage

28:40 – The New Seed War: Can Anyone Survive Sequoia & Andreessen?

46:55 – Max's Boldest Predictions

 


Hosted by Harry Stebbings, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) pulls back the curtain on the high-stakes worlds of venture capital and startup building. Each episode is a compact, twenty-minute dive into the minds shaping the future of technology. You’ll hear candid conversations with legendary investors, the very individuals who fund and guide the next generation of companies, featuring voices like Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Beyond the capital, this podcast dedicates time to the founders themselves. Weekly, Stebbings sits down with transformative entrepreneurs such as Spotify's Daniel Ek, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman, unpacking the real journeys behind their iconic companies. The format is direct and focused, cutting straight to the core insights on funding strategies, pitch dynamics, and the personal philosophies that drive success. Tuning into this podcast means gaining an unfiltered perspective from both sides of the table, all delivered in a concise and accessible style that fits into your day.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Podcast Episodes
20VC: Anthropic Raises $30BN from Microsoft and NVIDIA | NVIDIA Core Business Threatened by TPU | Sam Altman's "War Mode" Analysed | Sierra Hits $100M ARR: Justifies $10BN Price? | Lovable Hits $200M ARR & Rumoured $6BN Round [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:30:09
AGENDA: 04:06 Anthropic's $30BN Investment from Microsoft and NVIDIA 07:01 Google vs. OpenAI: Sam Altman's "War Mode" Memo 15:27 NVIDIA's Customer Concentration: Bull or Bear 22:12 Is "War Mode" BS: Does Hyper-Aggressive…
20VC: Base44's Maor Shlomo on How Vibe Coding Will Kill SaaS and Salesforce | Why it is BS that Vibe Coding Platforms Do Not Have Defensibility and Bad Margins | Why He Worries About Google, Not Replit and Lovable | Why Long Anthropic, Not OpenAI? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:43
Maor Shlomo is the Founder and CEO of Base44, the AI building platform that Maor built from idea to $80M acquisition by Wix, in just 8 months. Today the company serves millions of users and will hit $50M ARR by the end o…
20VC: Cursor Raises $2.3BN: Who Wins the Coding War | Peter Thiel and Softbank Sell NVIDIA: Analysed | Why Venture Capital Will Hit $1TRN and the Opening of Retail | Why Stripe and the Best Companies Will Never Go Public [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:22:38
AGENDA: 04:47 Cursor Raises $2.3BN at $29BN Valuation 11:36 What Gemini 3 Means for Lovable, Cursor and Replit 30:54 Peter Thiel and Softbank Sell NVIDIA: The Bubble Bursting? 48:54 Oracle Credit Default Swaps: The Risk…
20VC: Andrew NG on The Biggest Bottlenecks in AI | How LLMs Can Be Used as a Geopolitical Weapon | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI? | Is Defensibility Dead in a World of AI? | Will AI Deliver Masa Son's Predictions of 5% GDP Growth? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:53
Dr. Andrew Ng is a globally recognized leader in AI. He is Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Executive Chairman of LandingAI, General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera. As a pioneer in machine learning An…
20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:25:43
Ev Randle is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the best funds in venture capital. In their latest fund, they have Mercor ($10BN valuation), Sierra ($10BN valuation), Firework ($4BN valuation), Legora ($2Bn valuation)…
20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:34
Joelle Pineau is the Chief AI Officer at Cohere, where she leads research on advancing large language models and practical AI systems. Before joining Cohere, she was VP of AI Research at Meta, where she founded and led M…