YouSaid · the spoken record

Miles Grimshaw

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-09-18
most recent: 2023-09-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There's tens of millions of developers becoming AI developers, and it's sort of a new computing paradigm, right? Like it's not retrieving from the database. It's generative. And the framework to build AI apps for every developer and the tooling around that new paradigm is the focus. And I don't know, you could look back to, you know, if you want sort of trying to analogize recently, you might look at things like NextJS and Vasel, you know, and that journey if you want to go to the past, you might think about Rails and things like New Relic around it, which were tooling and monitoring. You might analogize and think about things like Docker, which made a lot of development much easier by Dockerizing. There was a new framework for doing it all and empowered. I think there were quite literally tens of millions of developers with Docker accounts now, a way of building applications containerized. That will happen for AI apps. And I think that's the exciting opportunity to chase.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the point of having deep curiosity. I can't help myself, but sometimes think about later stage things or, you know, like flexibility probably comes with a curiosity in many ways. Not entirely, right? Having one main manifestation of that channeled into early stage partnership, there's pain in being focused in a good way, right? Like I think Steve Jobs has famous saying that I really like, which is you only know its focus when you're deeply troubled by all the things you're saying no to where they feel like such good ideas, but you're still saying no to them. Speaking of Toby and responding to Zerp, I think he also said like the main thing is keep the main thing, the main thing. And that's really hard to do and perforces excellence and his productive pressure. So that's probably the biggest thing.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My partner Eric. I think there are two expressions in venture I don't like and think differently about. And I think he embodies the way I think you should think differently about them in a context of a board too and a relationship. One is founder friendly. I don't think you should be founder friendly. Not that you shouldn't be friendly, obviously, but I think the higher purposes like founder respect and friendly can imply like cheerleading yes person, et cetera, to honor and respect a great founder means sharing truths, maybe not saying the easiest thing to be safe, maybe saying the uncomfortable thing to say. That is respect. So I kind of like found respect and found a friendly more. And the other would be, I think first call is a very reactive mindset, so Venture always talks about wanting to be the founder's first call. I think of it as first two call and being proactive, right?”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He might hate me for he's so less well known by intention that mentioning him may piss him off, but I hope not. He used to be at Sakora and Sequora, you know, has a full website with lots of information and every investor has like a profile with questions. And he never did the questions. And I think he's just said like, get in touch. But he is both a great investor and has taught me a lot and been very kind to me. So I have a lot of thanks and gratitude for him. But Michael Abramson and the ability to do back of the envelope math to sort of distill complexity into the few things that matter and have real clarity of thought. I've learned a lot from him on that. And by example, and so I'm very grateful to him. He happens to now affirm. So he fits your question, but that would be the person.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure we could list out a bunch. I would say that the more exciting thing is how the leadership to learn from of how some have changed and reacted posted. And so we can all name the lists of the 2020 and 2022 timeframe and some of the silliness. But I think the more interesting lessons to learn is from how great leaderships reacted. And so for Toby at Shopify to make an acquisition and then divest it within a year, maybe it was a year and a half, like not very long for an organization to make a big move and say, nope, we made the wrong decision that fast and not get locked into it, not get locked into the ego of having made the call and wanting to look right, but to be so truth-seeking to be able to recognize they made the wrong decision and correct it at that scale. That's something for everyone to learn from. Changes like this offer the opportunity, I think, to take lessons like that.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're all really relational beings. I've noticed myself, I think, change in response to my son. I think he brings out a better version of me. He makes me more present. He makes me more patient. He just doesn't give two craps about what's going on with my day, right? And I think that's a good thing in many ways. And as maybe a better person, and I think the idea that my son unintentionally can do that speaks to sort of the relational aspect of humans. And we're all doing that to each other every day in our own ways, right? It's made me more vigilant to how I show up to people and that. So that's probably how it's, it wouldn't be advice for myself before I had it, but would be the way in which it's affected me so far.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One more step. Keep going. Yeah, that 60 hour we did. We probably did like 250 miles or so. You can go through two nights. And so the first night, you're in northern, northern Maine, like right by the Canadian border. One team actually got arrested because they crossed over, they got lost because you're in the woods with a map and compass, no GPS. And one team got lost and ended up crossing into Canada and got arrested. We ended up in a small town the first night and a McDonald's opened up at 5 a.m. as we passed through and we slept on the benches of McDonald's for an hour. I've never felt worse waking up from that. And then the next night there were sort of man checkpoints where the staff and you actually physically check in and like if you're going to drop out, there's probably a call that can take you a few hours later like back to the town and other things. But there's something they set up fires or warmth and stuff like that. So we slept on the ground and you do it as a team. So I had to teammates race with me like spooning each other with an emergency heat blanket like on the ground for like an hour and a half and you never”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trials for women, and she's like got all of the stuff down. These days, I have a kid and I'm a recreational runner. So I don't add extra stress for it by having rules. I just go out to enjoy it.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very fascinated in high school or college by the question of just how far can you go really? That book born to Randaza as the sport called Adventure Racing, which is multi sport orienteering. And I do like 60 hour races. I do like ultra marathons. I'd run 150 mile multi-day stage race thing. And so I was just really fascinated by how far can you go? And I wasn't the fastest for sure, but I usually thought I could outlast someone. I enjoyed all of that. And there's just the challenge of that question. I would spend a lot of time on nutrition in those days. So pre-raised the sort of paleo diet was big at the time. So I did a lot of a paleo diet. You know, you've got to make sure if you're doing long triathlons, I did sort of like a half iron man. I never did an ironman, did a half iron man triathlon amount of salt you're doing and other sorts of things. I'd try and find like, I really end up liking honey stinger as a brand for like gels and stuff. And so I spent a lot more time on that than the best person to ask now would be my wife who's a marathon of probably like the 100th fastest marathon in the US and qualifies Olympic.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chocolate Kwasan's are wonderful items and give great joy. And how can you be sad if you had a chocolate croissant each morning?”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing. But like before 10 15 mile weekend hail run or whatever. And my secret to life is a chocolate cross on most days. So, probably a chocolate croissant and”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I also think it could unlock segments, which is different to sort of being the means of distribution, right? But the change of business model here might unlock segments that were previously not served as well in the same way that an architecture of SaaS allows you to sell to SMBs and do PLG in a way that's very different, right? So SaaS 2.0. And so that might be possible here. But unlike the internet, which literally allows you to reach customers through this one means in a way that you couldn't before, it's not quite the same in that way. But I do think it could be a catalyst for consumption and an enabler of new market segments to reach if you feel like you kind of embrace it.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that co pilot is an incumbents game. We're seeing a lot of co pilot, but I don't think that misses what is possible. And I think that the new architecture and new business model associated with it is starting to happen as around the corner to make work will be very orthogonal. It won't be new distribution like the internet was a way to reach customers it couldn't otherwise reach, right? Or mobile and say it's not going to be a distribution opportunity, but if the opportunity”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, we probably could have taken Probably could take more now at Langchain, obviously. Like, we have more capital than we need right now. But the bottleneck's been like hiring great people and the initiatives we want to work on. And that's driving investment and pace of investment versus we have the capital. So why not?”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say to a point earlier, right, like more than half of what we do is the first partner, you know, probably a third kind of an inception. As one was exploring more of what was possible with things like sort of reacting the agent ideas and this idea that every developer would become an AI developer versus just the ML wizardry, you know, Harrison very definitely, without grandiosity, put out an open source library with the beginnings of abstractions for making agentic behavior and now a lot more around retrieval and other things easier. And we just started spending a lot of time together. Probably three or so months before we ended up actually investing, talk about what was happening. We talk about his framework. We talk about strengths to be building now, et cetera, and just build that relationship. And I never pressured him to say, you've got to start a company. There are some people who pressured him to say you got to start a company, but like that's got to be a founder's calling. It's a real responsibility. And so he then said, hey, I want to go do this. And I said, great, let's partner. Privileged journey since.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe a bit to my comment early on diet. I think there can be a lot of high fructose corn syrup of adoption. Like there's an amazing magical moment and a wow, right? When you go experience chat GPT for the first time or some of the imagery models for the first time. The rate of adoption of like sign-ups to some of these things is just astounding. Some investors have been trained again with a data first deal flow, rules checklist mindset. And to the point of thinking about like some of these like are off the charts on some of those. If you think from their paradigm, like they're amazing, I think when you think about sort of enduring need for some of these and long-term solutions, you can make the argument that you look a little more like a high fructose corn syrup diet. TBD, if they go to zero, right? Great teams will reinvent. Great teams will use that to maybe do something else. So situation specific. But I think if your mindset was a little more like it beat the metrics and other things.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We suddenly think that, and to the Lang Chain point, the idea that every developer is going to come to building AI native AI enabled applications, right? Incumbents are going to enable it, new companies are going to fully embrace it, and needing new tooling and new frameworks for that environment, like I think is absolutely happening. I think in the arc of time, if it is a shift like the internet was, the applications might not look like an applications, right, in the way that we think of them, but might look more like this control center idea will have profound amounts of value to them and will probably also pull through even better infrastructure in the way that Facebook became some of the biggest contributors to my SQL, a bunch of open stuff. It pulls through the infrastructure. That, I think, will be in the arc of time.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the IPO is around. I forget whether it was pre or post, but it was 2012. And so give a take around that time period. You want a story of like Microsoft. Microsoft acquired Nokia in 2013, right? Like it's not just sort of fun history, but I'm not surprised if we just look at this specific situation, the factors, that it might take a moment to really embrace what's fully possible with its new architecture.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You probably need some fine tuning around it, fine tuning available to startup is only just starting to happen, right? You could have been a savant and maybe take it open source models, but the open source models weren't that good until Llama Twuma recently. And so you were fine-tuning not good enough. Now you could fine-tune better and fine-tuning the services available, how to wrangle the stochastic thing is hard people have kind of had like nine months to do that now, so it's still nascent in it all. And so when you want to sort of offer up a totally new experience in this way, you need time to figure it out, right? And so I think we're starting to see that boots on the ground, more anecdotes of it, but I'm in some sense not surprised that we maybe haven't yet, right? Like go back to history, as I said earlier, Salesforce five years after, you know, the internet came about, even in mobile, you know, Facebook didn't launch a native mobile app until 2012, right?”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are some obviously ones that are not that already, right? And so think about what's happened in some, a point mostly probably to imagery, things like mid-journey or runway ML Nvidia and some of these other things, right? Clearly kind of not rappers in those ways. A lot of what has happened in SaaS and certainly what you see the most of in the news because incumbents are doing is the co-pilot idea. And I think co-pilot is an incumbent strategy. Is that a wrapper around the model? Sort of in a way, right? I think they're doing a bunch of other stuff to it, right? For this new application paradigm, but it's that. We at benchmark are starting to see what we're really excited about is what we're just talking about, this idea of this new architecture, this idea of sell the work, not the software that you have an SLA on outcomes, not reliability, a UX for the manager, not the worker, et cetera, right? This sort of fundamental change. And we're starting to see those ideas really percolate. A lot of it, though, is things that are kind of just becoming available. You do need better models for it.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put aside why you might think that way in terms of why that's a good thing for your business, but just mentally, the idea that this doesn't exist in some database somewhere that was queried when you put in that query and it retrieved and got that thing is like a total change in all application architects, how applications work, mental models that we have. But it's like such a break that I think is what is also exciting.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also think you go spend some time with, which I have sort of folks at big companies, including a little media. And again, to this idea of a new architecture, they constantly go, but like, where was”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll actually be a good thing. I think as a function of LLMs, trust centralizes. And this huge economies of scale to subscription businesses and advantages. And so, fun idea, but if we're in media, I think there's something.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think though that trust, if we go to the media specifically different from building software, I do think trust comes into question a lot as a function of both imagery and language models. If any investor says AIA has a big opportunity, and many of them also say incumbents to advantage, so do you think incumbents have this co-pilot advantage, right? But I think that there's an opportunity for startups in this new architecture. But if they do say those things, I say those things, they should probably have an interesting late stage public company, even public company kind of like pick in some ways. So to the media one, actually the New York Times is an interesting position. Who's going to be the arbiter of trust anymore? You're still going to need new information and you're still going to need incredibly trustworthy. And I think”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. I think the human spirit is indomitable and pretty good at adjusting, not amazingly fast sometimes, but like we adjust. And I trust it'll sort of work itself out in that way. It creates abundance and I don't think we should sort of constrain the technology's pursuit of that. And there may be consequences to that in terms of redistribution and taxation, those sorts of other things.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing and your work. And so, how much is available? Is that enough to sort of satiate yourself and building strength that way? Is actually all you really need is a startup. And two, I think this idea of sell the work, not the software. We're all going to have to retrain ourselves. Sell the work, not the software, have an SLA on an outcomes, not on reliability. It's going to be a great value proposition. I'm sure since you run a very successful fund and media company, you have a CFO. And CFO, maybe if they're full-time, has external parties that do stuff for them, right? Imagine someone comes along with a brand you can trust, right? Where they say, use me instead of that external firm for like half the price. You sort of be negligent not to switch. Hey, you have to go do some of this work now and you've got it, okay, that's not going to work. But if I say, my SLA will be on the same performance, same outcomes, maybe better, but cheaper and more pleasurable to deal with, et cetera. Like, I think it'll be a very powerful proposition.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, you don't need as a startup too much market or too much market changing hands really fast can be dangerous. As a startup, you could only take on so much. You can only grab so much market share in the grand scheme of things. And if there's enough market being dislocated up for grabs in a year for you to fully satiate yourself, quite frankly, in that year in terms of what's possible and you get that stickiness, that's how real power crews. 60% of the available market share, 60% against, 60% against, 60%, and 60% each time is of a bigger absolute number. And so that's all growing. And you look back and suddenly the market size that now exists for this sort of an offering, you've got like 60, 70, 80% of it, and it's locked in and you're the main vendor, and you're going to get 70, 60, 80% of the next year is available. And anyone who compete with you can't get all that moved. And there's only going to be able to try and compete you away for 20% of what's incrementally available. And you've got all of the cash flow from having won their customer funding your innovation, your model.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think incumbents can have a lot of cake with a co pilot idea right now, and that'll be the focus. I wasn't around for it. But when Salesforce launched, I think there'll be some entrepreneur or a few entrepreneurs hopefully in the coming year or so, let's say, who channel maybe the Mark Benny off 1999, like No More Software. If you sort of study that time period, a Salesforce Benny officed outside of Siebel's conference, right? No more software, end of software, right? It was a rallying cry. I think there'll be someone who will channel that in the coming year. It looks small. It might start in SMBs, you know, it might start in people who couldn't hire workers to do some of that in sort of the upstarts, the challenges. And so in that proverbial, like, it looks like a Toyota start. It might look a little that way, but I think it is the mental model and a strategy that encapsulates a more holistic attack to steal shit and expand market because I think this is a way for market to expand.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This idea that you would have a UX not for a worker, you'd have a UX for a manager, the idea that you'd sell work and outcomes not software, right? Like the idea that you're Salesforce, right? Selling cloud subscription managed by OSP versus Siebel selling an on-premise license, you install, you manage, you get patch for. Like that's orthogonal, right? There's so much wrapped up in the fundamental business as in company architectures and all the systems internally and all their operatings around that, that it's really hard to just change. That's why it ends up being asymmetric competition. It's not to say they can and they won't, but it's a lot more painful of work to be done of organizational change to enact. And so I think a startups opportunity is to build their strength and build from scratch that strength in a way that is really orthogonal to those incumbents. And I think it's this idea of this more all-encompassing change in architecture and business model that AI enables in the way that the internet really enable totally enables SaaS 1.0, enabled a totally different architecture.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's so much holistically in a company that gets wrapped up around a business model, right? And if you have a co-pilot business model or your product is wrapped up around that way, your distribution model is wrapped up that way, sales education's wrapped up around it. And that's why I think business model, which encompassates product and distribution and markets, if you can be orthogonal to that to an incumbent strategy there. And obviously you have to be correct. What does this mean?”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the co pilot, this idea of I'm still the pilot, I'm still the user controlling everything. And it's sort of like giving me assistive suggestions like GitHub co-pilot fits into the UX of incumbents. It fits into the business model of incumbents and they already control all of that distribution. The opportunity offered up to a startup being a co-pilot for something else probably won't be that amazing. And there might be pockets of it where it can really work, but the opportunity to disrupt is to be orthogonal to the incumbents.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of what we've seen has been co pilot stuff. And I think co-pilot is an incumbent strategy. Incumbents own distribution, they own data, they own the UX, and they own a business model that all aligns to a co-pilot. Copiler as GitHub co-pilot, right? Like inline suggestions. Think of it like how most go to any Microsoft product right now. Every Microsoft product now is a co-pilot experience. And so a sidebar, an autofill, things like that, right? Where the UX, the core product, it's a layer on top of it, right? It's immediately added in, which is also a totally incumbent strategy. And it's still about sort of supercharging that worker, but still where every user has a seed and every user is doing most of the work. And it works probably, you know, if you think about the evolution here, the models most of what's rolled out might not be good enough for some of this yet, right? But that's what will come around the corner. You know, if you think back to Salesforce disrupting SIBO, Salesforce launched like five years after Netscape launched. Like it might take a moment for that to happen.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To SLA on outcomes, on work performance. That's what can be offered up by this. You see very little of it so far. I think AI is offering the potential for that architecture shift. And if we get that, the whole seat model, the whole the worker does it and the product paradigm, the distribution in terms of who you can reach changes because ACVs change. And in that way, I think it will be very different to mobile, which was mostly another UX, but the same architecture, same business models.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That might be an example, right? And so we'll move from a world where the users are doing all this work to a world where the application is doing a lot more of the work, right? Where the AI, the notion of agents inside of it, et cetera, is doing it. And where right now, like you go to any SLA for any software, you get uptime, you get support SLAs for questions and things like that. I think there's a world where we move to in the future where like an SLA maybe almost looks more like a BPO would in some sense. An SLA will be you wanted a efficiency of X on your market We delivered that. You wanted this many leads from an SDR team like we do that you wanted this sort of accounting and books closed by two days at the end of a quarter We'll give you an SLA on that not on the software's up you'll go from Copa to Control Center it'll be a UX for a worker which is dominant to a UX for managers you'll go from a seed add-on to software and labor and you'll go from SLA on like reliability”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the way to encapsulate would be this idea of selling the work, not the software, and that we'll move from a paradigm where you might think of it as moving from what we see right now as a co-pilot and moving to what I think about as a control center, where we'll sell an SLA on work, not an SLA on uptime. And so we'll move from a world where we all as users of software kind of like monkeys doing data entry usually. Like what's most software, it's a database with a form on top of it for users to manage information, put information, get information out.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really changed the architecture and business model. We went from on premise, license based SaaS use install it, you manage it to SaaS 1.0, which was we manage it for you bi-monthly access to it. That begot Siebel becoming Salesforce, that begot PeopleSoft becoming Workday. And that was total disruption. There was an old architecture, an old business model, and we have a new architecture and a new business model. You then unlocked with that new business model an ability to reach new segments that wasn't maybe as possible before SMB starts to open up. you get things like hubspot, Prosuma starts to open up and says if you get all sort of PLG companies but that's enabled by that architecture and business model and I think if AI is to be the force that it can be I think you will get a new architecture and new business model emerging from it versus what we only see right now which is kind of a sustaining architecture which is just that of a co-pilot which fits on top”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Miles Association was pretty much the same, and those things can really lead to disruption, can lead to new style competing. And most of the incumbents before mobile were the successes in mobile. The new people that won really took advantage of native consumer experience with a ton more time that got unlocked by mobile because mobile unlocked a ton of consumer time, or what was really enabled by GPS on mobile. And so you get Snapchat and Instagram on the native consumer time getting unlocked, but it's kind of the same in that way. But what really got unlocked was geolocation services, so things like Uber and DoorDash, you might also argue, if you want to get really specific, that gaming did get really unlocked by mobile. And it was because a whole new business model really got supercharged, which was free to play as a distribution strategy and mobile, again, with consumer time unlocked a huge amount of consumer time. So distribution into that with a free-to-play mechanic that changed. The internet, though.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think as shifts happen, we want to analogize, and no analogy is going to be perfect. Compare it more to the idea of what the internet enabled, the mobile enabled, but like both of those were also new distribution channels. And this is not a new distribution channel. So both of them are fundamentally flawed in that way. I'd also argue, though, if you think about distribution, it's closer to the internet in that the internet was a distribution channel also catalyzed the buying. It catalyzed the idea of sort of buying an internet native solutions, right? You think back to the story of Microsoft. And 95 Bill Gates wrote sort of the Paul Harbour memo of like, we need an internet native kind of like strategy to it, right? It was a catalyst for consumption and sort of change within those organizations, more so. But none of them are perfect. The reason why I think mobile is a more flawed way to think about it is that mobile really was the same architecture and business model as what was before it. The way we architected applications didn't really change the business.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ML had been in many ways reserved for ML Wizardry. The folks who knew how to build the models, changed the weights of the thing. Many teams had ML folks on the team, right? Just for their application, just doing stuff with their data. But it was sort of like a separate group than every engineer. And you start to feel, and I start to think in middle or so 2022, that every engineer would become an AI engineer. AI would be a part of it all and there wouldn't be”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I was spending time sometime in 2022. You saw the first versions of things which were sort of spitting out content, right? But you started to see in mid-2022 or so this idea that the models had some amount of reasoning capacity. And there's two things I might point to in that one. One is they can do things like know which colors are like each other, which things are the ability to do math. Now, in some sense, that's learned from the language and it's just statistics at the end of the day. But the fact that those properties were kind of there was fascinating and then you've got things like the React paper, which was sort of this reasoning and actioning and the model kind of giving feedback to itself. And you started to see, at least I started to see when I saw those, is like, there might be so much more here. It might be a sort of new computing paradigm in a way. And there's more power in this than just sort of marketing copy. And you combine that with another aspect that I felt could be possible in proving out to be true is that”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. But I think hopefully can help people get connected to those people for those expertise if that's really what makes it. And there's a lot else that goes into building a company. And there's moments probably where those metrics are the wrong things, right? Like where benchmarking perfectly to the playbook of their vertical, like you're going to break it in some way. It's going to look different in some way. The generalist being a biologist versus a physicist. And I think that the specialist can become a bit more physicist. Like here's the playbook, here's the rules. And I think of myself as a biologist in that you're constantly looking for new adaptations, new variants, and curious that, which is why the Figma thing annoys me so much of myself, right? It's a new adaptation. That's the sort of psyche one applies it to. If you want to deploy capital, being a specialist is probably good because you say, hey, if I pass enough of these rules and I have a wide enough portfolio, it'll be good enough, but I just don't think like that.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Copy replica of a playbook from some other prior either. There are lessons absolutely learned from the past, but I don't think it's a stamp it out assembly line process, right? Stripe is not PayPal at segment. There was a lot of pressure, and we did also in the positive way learn lots of lessons from Stripe, but we were very different to Stripe. And too much of the Stripe lesson was detrimental actually to being the best version of ourselves. And so I don't think greatness is a carbon copy either. And so I think in order to be the best partner to a founder making the very best decisions, you become a specialist in theirs, but it's about applying strategies and learning from strategies, not learning procedures. And I think the more you become a theoretical specialist, the more the temptation is to say, here's a procedure, here's a checklist. And I think the very best at not that. I can't help it.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just sort of insatiable desire to learn. I think most people I know, most friends and others would say that's true of me as well. But when you see someone with it even more so, it puts you in your place. But in some sense, well, how have I wide the breadth? It's just curiosity pulling me into different places. And usually in many ways, very founder driven. You have an inkling of interest in an area and you meet someone like Tom and you go, you want to work with Tom. You meet someone like Dylan, you meet someone like Zach, you meet someone like Saji at bench lang in some sense, I think myself is sure a gemalist, really ending up being a specialist in helping founders like that accomplish their dreams to make the very best decisions. And I think myself has become a specialist not in the same degree, but in many ways in their companies and their situations. And a specialist in helping them connect up that strategy and vision into the sequencing and to the organization. And I would say that many of almost all the great companies are not like a carbon”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firstly, I can't help myself. Maybe too much curiosity. That said, I thought I had a lot of curiosity and then I really got to know my partner, Peter Fenton. I think he has like clinical curiosity. Even my curiosity has a ways to go to catch up.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I got too intellectual about it. And again, amazing founders, like people I feel lucky to still call friends, and just people who even then I knew I wanted to just work with. And that's the magic of this journey. So those are the big regrets.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question This to me would be a story of the world doesn't necessarily work the way it should work in that Plaid really solved OAuth for bank accounts. But the idea that OAuth in general was a hard problem was like not that hard. Like Reddit, I think probably has an OAuth system. You can build an OWAL system. Conceptually, the world the world should work is every bank. And by the way, I highly concentrate in the US. So like five banks control over 50% of accounts in the US. The idea that those five banks couldn't offer an OLAF system to get account of rounding numbers. That's all you need, two numbers. Out of them to authenticate, in my mind, it should work. Now they have no incentive to do that because if they let you do that, it's easier to move money out and they don't want you to move money out because they make money on you storing money there. That's how a bank works. And so no bank has an incentive to actually offer this. And so again, you think user first incentives in the system, it sort of shouldn't work like this, but it's not a complicated technical product in the system. So it should work like that.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Potentially coolest for a lot of excitement and suddenly to be a student of. And I like to think of myself that way. And so it's the one that grates me the most because it was right there when I didn't wear it enough.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their avenue was. Yeah, and everyone was like Dylan had showed charts. It didn't sit in my mind properly enough at the time of all the other non-design users inside the companies using it and them as active seats them as paid seats. And I think now if you go out for their spend on Figma, many of them probably spend more than Slack, which was wild to think about and I would never have guessed when you think first principled about it, the nature of that product, it sort of makes sense. And so how that actually plays out is probably a third of the company from my surveying has paid seats inside of Figma and they pay out three times as much as they would for something like Slack. And so the bill and the revenue they're driving is enormous. I didn't appreciate that. So it's a lesson for me in really thinking about and sort of inspecting getting to know and understand like what's unique, what's sort of counterintuitive anytime you're getting to know a team and thinking about a product even post that if something seemingly unintuitive is happening that's”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was stupidly myopically thinking of it as a design seat, as design software. And what I should have been thinking about it is the nexus of collaboration for digital product, of which design is the core stakeholder, but all these other people orbit it and are very involved. It's if you go and look at the data at the time, it actually was there. It was in front of me, sometimes maybe not being data first enough is a miss.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't released. Yeah. I spent time with Dylan at the round the Kleiner ultimately did also, again, at a when Score I invested. It's definitely the one I am most mad at myself for. So I'll think about the hesitation I had. I didn't think designers was a particularly large M. I think if you went and asked how many designers there were, many of your companies, suddenly relative to engineers, would be a tiny fraction. I think N of designers relative to accountants of some later stage, startups would be tiny. So what do you mix? Yeah, what I missed, the adoption brought far more users into the product. And I know you conceptually knew it, but I didn't wear it enough at the time. And that's what eats at me the most because I think about doing this when I look at products and be product first is what's that nature of the product? And the nature of design inside a company of digital product really brings copyrighters come in, marketing people come in, product managers come in, engineers need the handoff. There's a lot of people that orbit that asset inside of a company that workflow inside of a company.”
2023-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source