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Mike Mignano

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2026-07-06
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2026-07-06
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  1. “I do think routing is interesting and important right now. Again, as enterprises are trying to optimize their token spend, they want to make sure that the model they're using is the right model for the job, not only in terms of its capability and what it can get done, but its cost. And so you're going to have companies that are singularly focused on this, companies like OpenRouter out in New York, which is doing some really interesting work. And then you're also going to have companies that are leveraging other parts of the stack for their products that build their own routering layer as an opportunity to monetize. Actually, we've talked to a number of companies building at various different levels of the stack that when you talk to them about their business model, they talk about building a routing layer. and monetizing the routing layer. So I think it's a really interesting area that has a lot of opportunity and a lot of different companies are going to go after it because they see the potential.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think, look, I think startups and teams go where the incentives are. I think as we shift to a world in which this rebel alliance might actually have a fighting chance, we're going to see a lot of smart teams going more and more towards open.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “80% of non-coding tasks in the enterprise can be done with models that are not at the frontier. I think if you're coding, you probably want to be leveraging frontier models. But I think things like summarization or the generation of docs and briefs and things like this, I don't think you need to be at the frontier. And so you probably can leverage open source models. I think a lot of the open source models we're seeing are catching up faster than they were previously. I don't know that you need to be at the frontier if you're not coding.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I do think engineering organizations are going to evolve. You will increasingly have probably somewhat smaller teams of higher caliber and higher quality engineers because I think a lot of the lower level tasks increasingly can be delegated away to agents.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think you're going to go to a startup, especially the startups right now that are mission driven, especially the startups that are mission driven, which, by the way, I don't know that we've really been in that mode for the past couple of years. Yes, Anthropic's been mission driven, but there's so much money and capital sloshing around the valley in this ecosystem. I think a lot of companies haven't needed to be mission-driven. I think now they will, and it's going to work to their favor.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Totally sweet. I think if you're a startup, the calculation probably looks a little bit different. Your organization is smaller, right? So you're not going to have a situation where you have 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 employees just spending out of control. You can more tightly control the spend. But also, I think as a startup, you need every advantage you can get right now. And so if I, you know, if I were the CEO of a startup right now, I would actually still be pounding the table to maximize token spend on the right things, right? Definitely with coding, maybe not with other things, just for simple tasks like summarization or, you know, operations type work, I'd probably be leveraging Sonnet or something. But if I'm at a startup and I'm coding, I want to be using the frontier. I want every advantage I can get against Salesforce.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think it's a risk. There are two schools of thought playing out right now with regards to token spent. I think one school of thought which we're seeing, and I think when I really think about it, probably applies more to the incumbents and the big companies, the sales forces of the world rather than the startups, is that if every employee is just spending like crazy on tokens, the fundamentals of these businesses are going to be in trouble. They're just too big, right? There's too many employees at a sales force or, I don't know, a Microsoft such that every employee can just have an unlimited token spend budget. So I think we're going to see a lot of those companies start to constrain their spends. And we've seen mentions of things like these on X recently.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “What I see in Anthropic is I see an extremely mission driven company and anthropic, you know, love them or hate them. There's no doubt they've been extremely successful. I think at the time of us recording this, they're the most valuable privately held company in the world.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Didn't do shit for us. Yeah. Right. We still got to control it, right? Yes, maybe we let these companies learn about our interests and the things we care about, but it wasn't out buying stuff for us, right? It wasn't out sending very personal messages to family members and loved ones. It wasn't a second self, right? It wasn't us. I think now we're going to be doing stuff like that. And it might just make us think a little bit more about the incentives of the model that are doing those things for us. That's number one. Number two, I'm not sure that every model and every agent needs to be superhuman aligned. I'm not sure every person needs to care about it. I just think enough people have to care about it such that one player or a few players keep the others in check, right? I think we need market forces where a couple of good actors keep the rest of the other actors in check. So is it going to happen? I don't know. History says it won't.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “No, no, no, you're not. I think there's a good chance you're right. You know, if we're just thinking in terms of bets and probabilities, I think the history of the internet and personal computing suggests that you are right, Harry. But two things. First is, I think we have never handed over so much of ourselves to a technology before than we're about to do with agents. Yes, you're right. We browse the web. We used Chrome. We used”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And you might think to yourself, hey, if I'm outsourcing all of my agency and all of my personal information and these goals and my credit cards and all these things to an agent, I want that thing to work for me. I want that thing to be completely aligned with my incentives. You know, I published a thing a few weeks ago on X called Who is Your Agent Working for? And that was the big idea we were trying to get across with that. And that I think in the future, as you become more and more comfortable handing over the keys to an agent, you're going to want to know that it's working for you. So I think that's a little bit like what that second future looks like.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I feel so bad for that. No Will be like, oh, her. I think of the harness as the application that tightly, tightly couples with the model. So in the case of Claude, it's like the Claude desktop app. And I would say specifically Claude Code and Claude Cowork that are sort of having this loop, this flywheel of product and model sort of engagement. You know, some other harnesses that I think people are pretty excited about are things like Hermes. I consider Hermes a harness that takes over your Mac Mini. I don't know if you've set it up yet. from Arendelle is another great harness European company having products agents harnesses that are human aligned and aligned with your own goals and incentives I think is going to be really really important I think people are going to be a little more self-conscious about the incentives of the model they're using obviously the incentives of the models that come out of the big labs are to make the labs models smarter better faster and”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think in that world, enterprises and individuals are probably optimizing for a couple of things. I think they're probably optimizing for cost, right? They're starting to think about the trade-offs between intelligence and spend and how they can optimize their token spend. So what does that mean? It probably means leveraging things like open weight and open source models. It probably means leaning into things like the routing layer to optimize the token usage towards the model that maybe gives you the most bang for your buck rather than always just token maxing and picking the most powerful model. I think the other thing it looks like is choosing tools and products and hate to use the new buzzword of the past six weeks, harnesses that are maybe a little more human aligned.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Probably done by one of the labs that already has all these advantages, these vast computed advantages. They already have models that are at the frontier. They have the infrastructure. They have the chips. So I think it's probably done by one of them. That said, there are a bunch of amazing researchers working on incredible new architectures that maybe haven't broken through yet, but maybe they can. Maybe they're building something that is better than the transformer, right? There are a number of these labs out there, thinking machines, safe superintelligence from Ilya and Daniel. I think if I were to bet, I would say the labs that already have the advantages, but that doesn't mean there isn't a new architecture being worked on in a lab somewhere that could leapfrog all of it.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “This is self improving AI, right? This is super intelligent AI that can do its own AI research, right? So once you have it, once you deploy it, it can just continually improve itself on the exponential forever until it plateaus, until it self-limits in some way. And by the way, we don't know what that self-limiting”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “One future is that the labs, especially the ones that are starting to approach something that feels like super intelligence, if they reach it, once they reach it, we will have some form of recursive self-improvement such that we hit this exponential growth of intelligence. The thinking goes that whoever gets there first will run away with it, right? Once you reach recursive self-improvement, you're gone. No one can catch up. That's not necessarily the future that I am hoping for.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “That's totally okay. Much like building a startup or building a product, I think if you're investing, you also have to be willing to put yourself out there and take a risk and place a bet. Now, listen, you can hedge that bet a little bit. You can place a counter position bet in something else maybe to offset the risk of that. But I think you have to be willing to put yourself out there if you want to succeed at anything in technology, whether it's a startup or a venture capitalist.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Or this is the person, or this is the team I should be talking to. So I think you need a great network. I think you need to ship your ideas. And I think you need to be willing to take bets on people, which again, I think you've done a good job of with your program.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Think the best funds in the world at doing seed are really, really good about building their networks and meeting amazing people. I think you've been doing a good job recently at empowering a new class of entrepreneurs here in Europe and in London with very, very, very early stage seed checks. So I think you have to build a great network. I also think to do seed well, you have to put your ideas out there into the world. You have to show the market what you're looking for. You have to be willing to take a stand and take a position and say, I just put out a post yesterday about the rebel alliance and saying, hey, USV, we're really interested in the rebel alliance. This new universe of open weight models and open source harnesses and distributed compute and agents, right? Human aligned agents. And I think when you put things out into the world, you're sending up a bat signal that's telling these early stage founders that maybe haven't gone out into the world yet with a product. Oh, this is the VC.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I do think that we're entering a world in which context is increasingly valuable for the labs and also for the application layer, right? And so I think we will see products and businesses increasingly try to push us further and further along the edge to an always-on world. I mean, I can remember 10 years ago when I got, you know, an Alexa in my home and thinking to myself, wait a minute, this is always listening for the wake word. And now we've, I think to your point, we've kind of moved past that where, you know, let's say you're in a meeting, you're having a meeting, you're having, you're in a conference room. I think, you know, more often than not, I'm hearing somebody say, hey, I'm granoling this, right? So I think we are moving more and more towards that world for better or worse.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I think there is still value to be created and accrued to the infrastructure layer. We're not done. The build out's not done. But I also think now that we've got enough new toys at the technology that we will see massive value creation in the application layer as well.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So many applications, so much software, that you're not really going to be able to make a bet unless you know what you're looking for. And I think that's what USV has always been great at, knowing what they're looking for and placing the bet when they see it.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So, I think that we are coming out of a time in the market where we have went through a massive infrastructure buildout in AI. We've had these new companies. These companies building these brand new technologies, which have required vast amounts of capital to build out the infrastructure. And obviously I'm talking about the labs. I'm talking about OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, SpaceX, et cetera. And those required a lot of capital. And they produced magical technology that has generated billions. We're about to see trillions of dollars in value. But now that infrastructure is built. And it reminds me a lot of the early days of the internet when we built out fiber and we built out broadband. And then we had these new technologies to play with. And the internet came along and an application layer came along and took advantage of that new technology. To me, it feels like we are back in that mode right now where we've got this infrastructure. And now it's time for the applications to be built. And I think there's going to be.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I decided to go to USV because I am from New York. I've always been in or around New York. And as a builder, when I was building anchor in New York 10 years ago, I got to meet USV and I had an incredible, despite them passing, had an incredible experience, started a very, very long friendship. I ultimately became an LP in the funds. And I just really always appreciated their ability and their willingness to be really opinionated and to be very, very thesis driven, even at times in which the market said it makes sense to be very consensus driven. And by the way, there have been times in the market, including recently, where being consensus driven, has been extremely valuable and extremely lucrative as a fund. But the way I like to work, the way I like to build, the way I like to bet is by being thesis driven. And I recognize that being thesis driven can also be super risky, right?”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think that there's so much content and the tools have gotten so much better that out of the box you can have a really, really decently sounding or looking podcast with almost no effort. And so if you want to break out, you actually have to go above that. The baseline has to be excellence. The baseline has to be incredible editing. The baseline has to be, you know, a phrase that you used back, I remember, 10 years ago, insights per minute. And so now I'm actually a huge fan of insanely high production value when it comes to podcasts, when it comes to YouTube videos. You know, we were talking a little bit before. You asked me about some of the content I've been producing. And, you know, we've tried to do something very, very different where we actually break out of a studio and we bring in multiple cameras and multiple mics and we try to do something very, very, very high production value because I think that's the only way to stand out. So anyway, I think you were right. But it took me.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think both to some extent. I think the fear of failure is very, very, very important. I actually strongly believe that great, great things, great companies, great products, great people come from constraints. And I think that failure is the ultimate form of a constraint. You know, you talked about anchor. Somebody just asked me the other day, they said, at what point in your life did you do your best work? And I thought about it. And the honest answer to that question was, I believe I did my best work when we were three months out of cash when we were about to run out of money and when we were about to fail is when we did our best work. It's so clarifying to know that you're going to fail unless you turn the thing around. And so I think failure can be an incredible motivator. But I also think that you have to have an insanely ambitious mission that you're trying to accomplish, right? You want to win. You have this hunger to achieve something really hard.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “We've got this infrastructure. And now it's time for the applications to be built. I think we have never handed over so much of ourselves to a technology before than we're about to do with agents. As a startup, you need every advantage you can get right now. If I were the CEO of a startup right now, I would actually still be pounding the table to maximize token spend. We like to bet on businesses that obliterate, that literally obliterate markets and existing business models. I think this era of building AI products is in many ways about being first and about moving really, really fast. I think traditional media in many respects is dead.”

    2026-07-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Now is the Time for the Application Layer | Why OpenAI & Anthropic Won't Win the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Why VCs Should Reduce Weighting on Price & Ownership in an Age of AI with Mike Mignano, USV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source