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Saam Motamedi

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2024-07-15
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2024-07-15
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  1. “I think one of the distortions of the 2020 to 2023 period is we all forgot about the power law and we all forgot that very few companies matter, but the companies that matter end up being much larger than we think. And so with that lens, I actually do think it's rational. And I get really upset when I hear people say, oh, I love this company at 20 posts, but at 30 it's too expensive. And the reason for that is like, if you run the scenario math and you ask yourself, Harry, what is the outcome for this company? We're at 30, I'm disappointed, but at 20 I'm thrilled. The only possible outcomes where it would matter are really intermediate ones, right? Okay, the company sells for 150, a net of dilution, you make a five axe versus a three axe. That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Maybe it matters if you're really, and I'm not talking about 150 million dollar fund. I'm talking about a really small fund. But for most funds, those outcomes just don't end up mattering. All that matters is are you backing the team that has a chance of building an iconic enduring company?”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “There's variants, but no, I'd say in many cases I'm seeing teams where the company was incorporated last week raising in that range.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Let's talk about pricing first, and then is it rational? And I'll start by saying the thing we all know, which is there's a wide range, but let's talk about kind of what is the bread and butter. So in seed, if you are a high quality team coming out of a company where you've been on a growth clip, you've seen how a great business gets built, and you're building a new company in an area that is secular, right? Maybe you're building an AI BDR, maybe you're building a co-pilot for lawyers. I think seed pricing is between 20 to 40 posts for Series A, based on what we're saying, again, for that cohort of companies, if you have a little bit of product market fit, again, we're seeing pricing between 80 and maybe 150 and 200 posts on the high end.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Path down And I think people saw, hey, actually it's not going to have the impact we thought at least this quickly. But the bet I would take is if you take a slightly longer term view, I do think you will be able to increase pricing power. But the way you're going to do that is by really replacing elements of work. And if we take the sales rep example, actually making the sales rep twice as productive. It's not just like a co-pilot inside Salesforce. I think I'm less likely to pay more for that. But if Salesforce would come to me and say, hey, Som, you don't need a BDR anymore. Because I have this AI BDR and they can go out and email Harry and get Harry on the phone and book a sales qualified meeting with Harry for you and you just show up and that meeting is booked on your calendar. Well, suddenly that's really valuable. And so I could see myself paying a lot more as a sales rep for tool that could replace that element of work for me. I just think it's too early and we haven't yet seen, again, you and I are seeing it in the seed stage founders that are pitching us, but in terms of like companies at real revenue scale.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think it's too early to say. A year ago, everyone got really excited. All these public companies were telling analysts, hey, people are going to pay a lot more. I can't remember exactly what week it was, but there was that week three weeks ago, I think Salesforce reported earnings and all of software had a bit of a correction.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Company, and I think actually build the next Salesforce, but something that feels radically different. And the same is true across all of these functions. That's why I'm excited about going and investing.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Fly materialize the views of data it needs to help you run your sales team. So when you're doing a pipeline forecast, you don't need to go into Salesforce. You can just ask an AI application to generate your pipeline forecasts for you. And by the way, it's going to be a lot more accurate because it's not going to be based on what your sales reps put into Salesforce. It's going to be based on the actual raw text of all the interactions with your customers. That's on data model. On delivery model, pricing's going to change to our earlier conversation. The way you think about seats is not going to be the same. And sure, Salesforce over time will adopt that, but there's going to be a window where they won't adopt that because it's going to cannibalize their business and startups can come in with really disruptive pricing. And then number three and most importantly, I think the interface is going to change. And I don't think we're going to be spending our time doing pivot tables in Salesforce and figuring out where to put in dimensions. We're going to be talking to an agent. That agent's going to be consuming information from us and it's going to be navigating systems for us. And those three things mean that you and I could go start a very different CRM.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, so now to connect it back to why is now a great time to be investing in SaaS. If you buy my point that the largest outcomes in SaaS come from when you're able to go after these horizontal, big application companies, right? Again, think Salesforce, think ServiceNow, think Workday, think SAP. You need disruption on these three buckets for the opportunity to be real. Otherwise, it's just incremental. And I'll give you an example of what I mean to make it more concrete. There were many mobile CRM companies. Like, hey, I'll put, you know, CRM on the iPhone. Great. That's not that different. It's just another client for interacting with the CRM. Salesforce now has a mobile app and you and I don't talk about any of the mobile CRM companies anymore. Let's take the last eight years that I've been investing. Those three things have not been true, which is why I would argue it's been impossible to go after those large platform companies. I now think they are true. I now think you don't need the data model that Salesforce suggests anymore because your AI agent can go and just suck up your inbox, suck up all your gone call recordings.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Interface. So, Harry, you probably have a lot of sales reps in the companies that you work with who complain about Salesforce. They hate using it. They hate the UI. It's super clunky. They're constrained by the interface, yet they've learned how to use it. If you hired me as a new sales rep tomorrow, you're going to train me on some. Here's how you do your work inside Salesforce. With generative AI, the entire interface could change. There may no longer be an interface. I may have an agent that's working alongside me as the sales rep helping me do my job and it's navigating all the underlying systems on my behalf. And by the way, when it doesn't know something, it'll come back to me and it's not just going to be a chatbot. It might be a UI, but it'll be a generated UI. It'll be very dynamic. And I would argue in 10 years, sales reps won't even know what the Salesforce UI looks like because the interface to the underlying system of record has changed.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Delivery model is how the software is actually delivered and consumed and priced, right? I would think about the shift from on-prem and Oracle SIBOL to cloud-based, SaaS-based, and now we may see a new shift in delivery, which I would argue is mainly going to be on pricing. It's not just seat-based, but it's seat plus work or work only. That's pretty disruptive.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So Salesforce has an opinion on how you should run sales at your company. There's a customer object. There's an account object. There's a relationship between the customer and the account. There are different dimensions around that that your reps are filling out. And they've picked a model. We can debate if the model is good or bad. The reason why it's important is because everyone around them, whether it's the users, the sales managers, the channel partners who are implementing Salesforce, or the tools like Gong and the rest that have been built on top have adapted to that data model. And so that data model, that schema, if you will, has become the standard for how people think about CRM.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “HubSpot, another great example. Now, why has there not been a new deep horizontal system of record SaaS company built over the last five or six years? I can't think of one. There have been vertical ones built. There have been features built around the major systems like a gong built around Salesforce, but no one's been able to go after the core. I would argue you can only go after the core when either the data model profoundly changes, the delivery model profoundly changes, or the interface changes.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I couldn't disagree more. I sincerely believe it is the best time in a long time to be building SaaS companies and investing in SaaS. And I'll tell you why. If you think about what have been the largest outcomes in SaaS, most of them are deep systems of record for important horizontal functions. We talk about Salesforce, we talk about Workday, which started at Greylock ServiceNow.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You know, I do and I don't. I think a lot of it depends on how your product drives value. I think we're going to see hybrid pricing models where you're going to layer on to seats the type of work that you're doing for the end user and you're going to monetize that separately. And that will allow these companies to continue growing inside accounts, even if seats are not expanding.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Personal agents possibly horizontal enterprise agents. I think code generation is one where you might want really tight tie-in. There are companies taking both approaches, and we'll see what ends up winning. But those are three that I think require really tight tie-in. Whereas you mentioned customer service AI, that's an area where I don't think you need tie-in, where the startup should be really focused on everything except for the model.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “That's not the code generation itself, but maybe it's the incident response and SRE workflow. Maybe it's debugging tools. Do I think those are going to be kind of core foundational things that OpenAI is going to need to own? I don't. And so kind of our lens is we're not closed for business, but we've really got to believe to back a team that's competing on something that we'd call quote-unquote foundational, just like we'd really need to believe if someone wants to go compete with the Apple calculator or maps. But we think there's like immense, immense opportunity in really focused applications on top. And that doesn't mean focused applications are small. I think there's going to be many, many large companies, public companies built, that will be focused applications on top of these large model capabilities, but that's where we're focused.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So we have to start by acknowledging OpenAI is ruthless and the quality of their execution is just incredible and we should expect them to continue executing and shipping amazing products. Harry, I'll tell you my mental model for this. It's not quite consumer versus enterprise, but the way I think about it is there are some applications that I use the word, and this word is overloaded, but I think of it as very foundational, like very foundational primitives and workflows on top of AI. And you talked about the calculator or maps on the iPhone. You could say those are foundational capabilities for the iPhone. Content generation and writing, editing is a foundational capability. ChatGPT is really good at it. I think coding is a foundational capability. And I think if you just take kind of pure code generation, I would bet very strongly that OpenAI is going to compete ruthlessly on that. Now, do I think building a co-pilot for lawyers or for physicians or building software development tools?”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “List Figmon R portfolio being high on the list have gone on to be iconic businesses. By the way, SAS has littered with lots of point solutions that didn't do that, had more superficial value. Maybe they got bought a lot during the COVID period. And now they've completely flatlined and there's no growth or there's decelerating growth, including names you and I both know well. And so, you know, we'll see that happen in AI as well.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I don't think it is, and I think this is like one of the biggest misnomers in the venture Zeitgeist, where everybody's talking about like, hey, are these just rapper companies? What makes these things defensible? Is value going to accrue to them? I don't think any SaaS software company is rocket science in terms of the underlying technology. I saw a tweet from Brian, the founder of HubSpot maybe yesterday or today where he said, like, hey, people used to say HubSpot was a rapper on a database, right? and just some workflow on top of a database. And I think we're going to look back on this discourse a few years from now and it's going to feel very similar. I come back to like the SaaS companies that have really become market defining build for a specific end user very deep and valuable workflow that becomes very sticky and critical to that person's job and are able to have significant pricing power. And then they get to distribution before others who have the distribution, namely incumbents, are able to copy their innovation. The ones that have done that really well, HubSpot being very high on the”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Hasn't that always been the challenge about SaaS investing? At least in the eight years I've been doing it, there's always been multiple competitors doing very similar things. You could argue now there's more excitement. Maybe there's seven competitors instead of two or three, but I feel like that's always been a question we've had to ask ourselves as investors. And I think for us, we come back to the basics, which is which one has the best founder and the best management team? Who has a point of view on what's going to drive real product depth and workflow and stickiness and defensibility? Where is the distribution really unique and self-compounding? But candidly, Harry, those are the same questions we asked ourselves on, you know, non-AI SaaS companies.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It's a good question. The way we reconcile this is we take two lenses. One is we look at the data, and as my partner Reid always says, when you see the data that that's explosive, the question you have to ask yourself is not why invest, but why not invest. You need to come in with an orientation of something seems to be really working, we should be in this business and then convince yourself why you shouldn't be. So we are certainly reactive to that. But the other lens we take, which isn't equally important lens that I think the venture industry has sort of forgotten in the last year, is a very fundamental lens, which is what are the market dynamics? Does the product really have product market fit? What does retention look like? What is the defensibility of this business? And if we don't like the answers to those questions, it doesn't matter if the company's gone zero to 20 million in six months. We're not going to invest. We feel completely comfortable with that decision. Again, it's early, but we're seeing some of the first generation AI apps that two years ago everybody was talking about writing assistance and the rest that had unbelievable.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Absolutely. I'd say that's a really big distortion that's happening. Harry, to your point. And the other big distortion that's happening, which again is a positive, but I think it also cuts negatively, is some of these companies are growing explosively. When you look at the revenue growth, it is amazing. Yet at the same time, the long-term retention on these companies is very unclear. And I don't want to pick on a specific company, but take your favorite AI prosumer application that's growing really fast and just go run the Google trend graph on it. For many of them, you'll see an amazing peak and then also it really quickly comes down. And so, you know, you're investing in revenue today and you're putting some multiple on that revenue, but I think you have to ask yourself, have these products really proven persistent user value? And are you really buying revenue that's kind of going to recur with high net dollar retention, all the things we love? I'm not sure. And so I think that's also creating a bit of a distortion.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Range. Now you're investing at $100 to 200 times revenue when public names are trading at the best public names are trading at 15 to 20 times. That dislocation does not make sense to me unless you believe that these companies fundamentally have much more persistent growth than prior generation of software companies. And like, look, it was just reported. I think the information ran a piece last Friday that OpenAI is at 3.4 billion of ARR and it's doubled in the last several months. That's impressive. But I would question how many companies other than that are going to be able to persist that rate of growth at those scales. If you don't have the growth persistence, it's very hard to see any of this investing make sense.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “The short answer is yes, we are in an exuberant bubble. I think we may not even fully appreciate in how big of a bubble we're in. And what's happening, I could argue, is even crazier than what was happening in peak 2021, 2022 zero interest rate period. It's not unusual for us now, again, in kind of pure AI to see seed rounds for companies that are just getting started being priced in the many tens of millions of dollars, even $100 million plus post-money ranges. And then companies that have a little bit of revenue growth, you know, raising at 100 times, even 200 times their revenue. That's with a backdrop where when you look at the top public names, I think the most valuable public company today on multiples basis is CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike is trading at, I think, 20 times forward revenue, right? And by the way, there's like maybe only five companies trading at North of 15. So you have this odd thing that's happened where in 21 we were investing at 100 times revenue, but you had public names trading in the 50 to 80x.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I mostly agree, but I'll tell you, there are exceptions, right? Like my partner Rashim, the data would suggest is a truly generationally great investor, has been doing this for more than 20 years, has had many IPOs under his belt, and still work seven days a week. And if he learns of a founder fundraising that he thinks is high quality, he'll drop everything he's doing and go meet that person tonight. So I think some people are just wired that way. And if you're wired that way, I think it doesn't matter if you're 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old. But I think if you're not wired that way, you're dead. And it takes a while to notice given the lagging nature of our business. But this is a super, super competitive game.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, it's a great question. So I grew up in Houston, Texas, was born and raised there all through high school, and then moved out to California for school. There's a lot in my childhood that shaped me. I think maybe two things are probably most formative. I wasn't built for sports, but I was really good at debate and really competitive in policy debate in school. I think what that taught me is just a love for competition. And whether it's on the venture business when we're competing to work with the best founders or the companies we partner with, I think you have to be mega competitive to be good in our industry. And then the second is I also did a lot of biomedical research and work around designing early cancer detection techniques that we published on when I was in school. And that taught me just the power of small teams and with the small research team, we were able to produce some pretty cool work. And I think that's been quite formative to now what I do, which is Invest in teams that are really, really small and then help them go on to build really formative companies.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Thanks, Harry, for having me, and likewise, I've been a longtime listener and fan, and I've heard the best things about you from a bunch of friends who have been on. So I'm excited for this conversation.”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “What's happening, I could argue is even crazier than what was happening in peak 2021, 2022. It's not unusual for us to see seed rounds for companies that are just getting started, being priced in the many tens of millions of dollars, even $100 million plus post-money ranges. I think the series B market may be even frothier than it was in 2021. I think playing the game on the field would have cost you dearly at many different periods in time. And our view is most people in venture capital are not helpful”

    2024-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Are in a Bubble & Now is Frothier Than 2021 | Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | Why Seed Pricing is Rational & Large Seed Rounds Have Less Risk | Why Many AI Apps Have BS Revenue & Are Not Sustainable with Saam Motamedi @ Greylock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source