YouSaid · the spoken record
Shiv Rao
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- 2026-05-16
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- 2026-05-16
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“And they had Apple there and it was like concentric circles before their headquarters. There was Google, it looked like a neural network, Facebook looked like a graph maybe. There was Microsoft and it looked like Silos pointing guns at each other. And that's what healthcare is in the United States. It's providers, health systems pointing guns and getting pointed at by insurance companies.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I'm focused right now is healthcare. Like, that's all I live and breathe. That's all I think about. Healthcare, it's just an absolutely messed up market. You remember that XKCD from years ago, I think it was, where it was about Conway's law, you build what you look like.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question. I honestly like because we talked about that Costco CEO. I think it's Sakai. What's his name? Ron something. I think he's a guy who went from the forklift to the executive office, like all the way up. He's a lifer over there. He carries a torch of culture. And he's managed to continue to grow a business that obviously he inherited or was already awesome, but they've only had, what, three or four CEOs? That's like one of those businesses that you don't read about enough, I think, that is absolutely amazing. Obviously, I have my idols. Like I have people like Aligadzi, who I think is an absolute legend in the way he plays chess and navigates his market. And I just try to learn as much from a side outside in, but that guy, I think, is pretty, pretty awesome too.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many lessons, I always feel somewhat like just like a pupil with him. I just want to like learn. But recently we've spent time over the last year talking about Corp Dev. His lessons learned from his days at Twitter and like, how do you do that effectively and how to think about Corp Dev and how aggressive you should really be if you decide you're going to do it, how you need to have people just fully focused that needs to be their entire job. You can't split people's brains on it. If you're going to do it, you got to be binary. Learned a lot, but there's lessons like that that always come out of him.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started a new company right now. I would call Elad Gill. We'd go big single GP, you know, like all of the wisdom in his head, all that I've learned from him, his ability to go every stage and be incredibly valuable. What's your biggest?”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel our mission is absolutely inevitable. And I think we're in a war to make sure that we're the ones that we make it happen. But on some time horizon, it's absolutely inevitable, making healthcare cheaper, better, faster. But we're at war to make sure that we're the ones to do it and we do it in the next two to three years.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's less the brand, it's more the placebo effect. It's more the psychology. The more you can feel inevitable, the more you will be. And I think when you're able to spend time with folks who you really admire, who've got incredible track records, when they bet on you, that just sort of starts to seep into your psyche.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking about venture and raising, I would say that one of the most generous things, maybe not kindest, but like the most generous things in reflection was people betting on me early when I had nothing really to show for it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like less managers, like a lot more ICs, super ICs, taking on that much more. Everybody with these tools able to move in lockstep and able to be coordinated in a way that was impossible before.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've changed my mind on how a company can operate, how it should be built, you know, how flat it can be. And anymore I'm in this very idealistic mode that we can be a very, very flat company in the near future.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we did it exactly at the right time. As we were inflecting, we just needed to be in that moment. And the amount of ideas that you just osmodically absorbed by being there, the kind of talent that you have access to, the kind of mentorship that you have access to, I think it's super important.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many cracked early stage teams over there, and the reason why I don't agree is this moment is so insane. You know, like the amount of people, the amount of ideas, the amount of creativity, the amount of energy right now that's concentrated in that area, it's just wild. We went against the grain when we started. We started a lot of Carnegie Mellon DNA. We started in Pittsburgh. We built in Pittsburgh for years. And then I think with this AI moment, it just became so clear that we had to move in 2022, 2023.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Sunday with my dad and my mom. Big part of the reason that we're still in Pittsburgh, honestly, although I try to convince my 15-year-old daughter to move to us off recently, it didn't work. But I think we're on the field. But a big part of the reason we're in there is aging parents. My dad is heart failure. I get to see them and I get to bring the kids to them. And it's the highlight of their week. And I get to do that every week. I'm happy to live on airplanes to make that happen. So that's the thing I'm not willing to give up. And it's an incredible opportunity and privilege that I get to do it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I interviewed him. I remember in his S1, he's from Pittsburgh as well, and also Union Square Ventures funded. And I'm sure that had something to do with USV being more comfortable with me because I certainly didn't have a track record ahead of that seed round. But he has that one line in this one about how the only thing you need to know is that I'm dedicating my life to this. On some level, I think my family are all dedicating a portion of our lives to this and we're all eyes wide open on the sacrifices that we're making.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're invited to do their reference calls. Yeah, I think in 2023, we did like three LP meetings. That's when I knew things were going well. No, I don't think about it. I think we have a job to do. We're doing it. They're a part of it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we found folks who believed and Winnington Ventures, for example. Like we did a round at a 2X. Folks believed that it was coming soon.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did the seed and the A. USV was our business model initially. We had other great investors like Besssemer and Pillar and plenty of others, but we were pre-INFLC. And so we knew we could feel it. It was happening.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the fuck is this? Yeah, obviously things are tough over there. But those first years, we talked about like the consumer product business models not feeling right.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hardest round was a series A one. You know, venture capital, you obviously know it was a weak round. We were in a weak spot because there's like a digit at the end of it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You hire really principled finance leaders who can work together with you to unpack what the goals of the company are and then recognize that against certain goals, you don't want to blink. You raise this capital because it's a brute instrument now that is going to allow you to win. And so against certain things, you just don't want to even debate. And if you are, you're doing it wrong. But having the right business-minded folks and finance leader means that you should probably also have the discipline to know that you didn't need what I just ordered for our New York City office, like some fancy speakers. But sometimes that stuff creates culture too. So, yeah.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, honestly, the chapter of company that sucks the most is like the one where you don't feel pressure. Like we have a saying the company pressure makes diamonds. When it feels somehow like you're on cruise control, you're on autopilot, that kind of sucks. If you're not figuring out how to 10x your ambitions, if you're not figuring out how to think outside the box or find new pockets to pull from new value to create, if you don't feel that pressure for some reason, if you're coasting, that doesn't feel good at all.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't be. There's no other way to be. You're always competing. You're in a market that is moving so fast. Like who's a peacetime CEO? Like even the Costco CEO, who I think is awesome and under-celebrated? Is he a peacetime CEO? Maybe he is. Maybe he's a good peacetime CEO.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like the Joshua from Lux, I remember years ago meeting him, and I think he says this a lot, but chips on shoulders makes chips in pockets. I think that's a hard thing to kind of be able to assess in a person. But there are just certain people who have insane slope and that slope is coming from something very, very deep in core to who they are. They're on a mission. And you see them and you just want to invest in them. You want stock in them and you just sort of feel it. So I think it's not that you're looking for like there's a bunch of VCs out there looking for broken people. And we're talking about psychological assessments, I think, before we started how some VCs will do that. And I had one before we took money from one of our investors. But I think it's just looking for a level of fire that's going to translate into not only those SLAs you talked about, but resilience and grind. And it's always”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that there's any playbook, honestly. I think it depends on who's around you, too. Like what executives are around you who can do a lot of that work as well. I think culture is critical. And no matter what the founder CEO thinks, they play a huge part in setting it. And there are a lot of different ways you can kind of convey what you believe is the culture that's going to help you win, achieve your mission. And meeting every single candidate isn't necessarily, in my estimation, one of them. I think if you really trust your hiring managers and you really trust your executives as carriers of that culture, you can work it out.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question. I think so. I think it takes everybody in the company continually looking at what their bar is and reassessing and making sure that everybody”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love being around the people. I love being at the whiteboards, but I'm also living on airplanes. But I just know how much, especially EPD benefits.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just have certain folks who have to travel long distances in order to get in the office, and so we're still adjusting what exactly like the sweet spot is.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say people's strengths or their weaknesses, too. There's like a shadow to what you're very, very good at. I have HR reporting to me. That kind of stuff is not the kind of stuff where I think I'm operating top of license that comes to my license.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually what I said. My buddy Jansen. She was like, whatever. I was like, Hello Jensen. I'm like whispering to him. He was calling me back because of an email I had sent him. I'd sent him like a two-liner earlier in the day. So his SLAs are insane. He responds that fast. It's really wild. He wanted to unpack like a challenge that I was experiencing. But one of the lessons for me that day was just like, your job is to fall in love with whatever the job is. That is something you can do. You can convince yourself. You have to find a way to bend your DNA to like CRISPR new DNA in that loves living on airplanes. I live on airplanes now. And I think if you caught me like five years ago, I'd be like, never, we're not going to do that. Like we're going to find other ways to grow and scale. But this is what the job requires and I enjoy it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they're, they go together. I think founder mode is just about, to me, it's about tours of duty, depending on what's on fire inside the company or like what's the most important thing and what you're best at. You just go crush. You just have to go kill whatever that challenge is. And it doesn't mean getting into the details and micromanaging everybody in the company. It means doing the Torah duty when it makes sense. Jensen, Nvidia is one of our investors. And Jensen told me this, he once called me at midnight. And I was like, on his way home, cold call. And I knew it was him. And I picked it up and it was awesome.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just think getting really amazing executives like really high judgment executives into a company like ours is critical. A part of it is because this is pretty unprecedented this moment. Being able to have folks who can serve as guides who have a lot of patterns that they can match against priors, but the right person who can kind of go against those priors but can kind of reflect upon them. The time between a decision and an action is getting compressed. Obviously product development, we do things differently now than we did a year ago even. Every layer of the company is getting compressed and I think high judgment people, incredible executives is still a thing that I'm working on.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to I don't know about the specific number, but I think directionally, I think so. You just can't get enough of this technology once you start to use it, even as inference costs come down, you just end up using more and more and more of it. I think for certain jobs, especially the jobs that you'll never be good enough on, you know, those are bottomless pits. Now more than ever before, even reflected in the way people are organizing their companies these days, you can cover a lot more surface area. So just do that much more.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low stakes, high frequency as it gets. But it's those types of workflows that will progressively get automated till we get to some approximation of maybe the most boring variant of primary care that nobody wants to practice. But as soon as you get into the hard stuff, you talked about taste and judgment earlier. That's where I think things get very real. And that's where Invoke Jeffan's paradox or whatever. But we're in for a tsunami of healthcare needs and the system is not prepared to deliver it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. So every clinician, if a bot can do their job, I think most every clinician will say, like, what are you talking about? There was an American Journal in General Internal Medicine article that was published a few years ago that suggested that doctors need 30 hours a day to get all of their work done. So understandably, we've looked at the paper. We've parsed all the different tasks that lead to 30 hours, and we're picking them off. We're creating these teams of assistants, of agents that can go and get all the precharting done for the doctor before they walk in, tell them what questions to ask, help them create their note, do their billing, all the other things that we can do. We absolutely will try to do. At the same time, though, I think to your question, there's high frequency, low stakes care that absolutely needs to be automated. Right now in Utah, for example, there's a bunch of controversy around companies being able to or starting to automate medication refills. Can AI automate prescription refills for a patient?”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think we have the benefit of being able to release a good amount of oxytocin for candidates. We're like a purpose company. We are a meaning company. You can be post-money but still want to put your best years into this company because we're at scale and we're trying to do three things. We're trying to save time for the people who matter most in healthcare. We're trying to save money for the system. We need deflationary economics in healthcare. But we also want to save lives. You talked about the greater good. We want to help clinicians feel like superheroes. We have a feature, for example, we just released where a doctor goes in. We give them cues on what questions they should ask or diagnoses they should consider. And we're doing it in a totally differentiated way, unlike a lot of clinical decision support products out there. We're using context. We're engineering the context about who this patient is that context comes from all those different systems of record and from the conversation.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“B, no question about it because ultimately it's always about the people. And if you've got incredible people, you're going to build your own models, your own primitives. And yes, the frontier models, you're going to be able to ride. But that arbitrage, that period of arbitrage, that's not the be-all end-all for us.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But who's a stakeholder? And so for us, when we build new features that leverage data, we have a refrain in the company which is earn the right. So we always go back to our health system partners, and oftentimes they know about our roadmap in advance, and they've already blessed it and they've already papered this into the contract that we can build XYZ with the insights that we get so that we can improve the product or build other adjacent products that create whatever value. But building that foundation model is like we talked about it before, we do reach lower into the stack. We do train our own models. And to some extent, we are, you know, these models are the real workhorse for us. And so could we build a model that ends up serving that kind of function for the greater good? Absolutely. We would just want to do that with everybody's eyes wide open. All of our partners saying, let's go. We want that too. In this industry, it works. In this industry, people kind of get.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't make any money selling data. We don't because trust is everything in healthcare. Like the industry moves at the speed of trust. It's like takes so long to build up. And we've been able to build it up, I think, in record time, relatively speaking, in this industry. I think we've done in four years what a lot of companies take 15 to 20 years to be able to do. And that's all things to the people inside the company and the relationships that they build. And at the core of the product that we've been able to deliver and the value that we've been able to create.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're building in a way where the competitor couldn't build because it would impact their current business, it would hurt them. It really pushes them to think hard and probably prohibits them from directly competing against you.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you want to compete against them. You obviously want to kill the competition, but the way you can kill the competition is mostly focusing on your product and keeping in mind what they're doing so that you can competitively position, but also counterposition. Big companies oftentimes have a lot of soft spots that you can counter position against where they just have to watch you.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So far, by, I think, even competitively positioning against that. But there's a part of me that thinks that we need to continue to take notes here because I see some companies in other verticals with incredibly complex structures and find out it's working and wonder if there's something to it.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't see either of those companies much anymore. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with bundling. I think it has to just do with us being able to carve off like a category, you know, create a category that I think has resonated with the marketplace. I was two days ago. I was in Atlanta and at Emory and was on some panels over there. But one of the doctors on the panel used a bridge as a verb. And then another doctor later used it as a verb. And then I asked one over dinner, like, what'd you mean when you said that? And when they describe what they mean by that, they mean something that it's a lot more than like, oh, created a note for me. It's like, oh, it did all these different jobs for me and it unburdened me and it allowed me to help, you know, just focus on the patient in front of me. And I think that's what's allowed us to win. Back to your pricing question. Yeah, I think there's a part of me that thinks that there's a lot of complex models out there and especially like the Microsofts of the world just obfuscate things so much and make things so complicated we've won”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah yeah Well, it's interesting. I think we're still learning. We started with a keep it simple idea sensibility, perceit, you know, an enterprise licensing, the entire system. The first big competitor for us was Microsoft. They had bought a company called Nuance for 20-some billion some years ago, and they had a product in our category. And we still compete with them in the marketplace. But I think we've established ourselves as a completely different type of company with a completely different kind of offering. And at this point in time, we don't approach them the same way we used to.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively speaking, maybe we could have spent a little more cycles on RD as opposed to we were really banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out business models that could work. You know, maybe that's the mistake. It's not actually that we built in that space that I really worked hard to figure out if we had a company there. And we didn't because the companies that you can build on top of just the consumer in healthcare, oftentimes there's the kind of companies that paint themselves into a corner that can never be trustworthy enough to go enterprise. They're the kind of companies where the business models would require you to take multiple showers every single day because you're selling really private sensitive information to who knows what entity. And we didn't want to be that, but like we realized that too late. I think the pivot that I should have made is probably, okay, we built something really valuable here, but let's not lose sight of what were the actual revenues are going to be. And so like back to your maybe original question, I think like very”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the pandemic, I think everybody's just sort of figuring it out. I think perhaps we could have doubled down on research and just sort of hibernated for a beat into a research caves, or we were fine-tuning BERT models. BERT and BioBert, Long Farmer and Pegasus and T5, and we had published a paper in 2021 around how you could actually do some of the jobs we do today at scale, but do it with models that predated LLMs. There's a world where we could have done more R&D, but the decision that we made pretty early on, even before the pandemic, was that the barred entry on the doctor side was so high, let's go build for patients. So we built a direct consumer app that would allow any one of us to ask our doctor, hey, can I record and capture the conversation and create a summary for themselves? I remember when we first pitched USV for that seed.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sacrosanct moment in healthcare where the actual value is getting exchanged, where the doctor and the patient or the nurse and the patient where they're talking about the care plans. And so being able to capture them in a way that's not just clinically useful but compliant is a way to build out that layer over time and you can extend very easily.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a product or a feature. They have something out there now even that's been out for a beat that helps with notes. But what I was explaining to you earlier is really, really critical. For us, it was never about the note. It was always about the signal, the conversation that we were using as the wedge. That conversation that spoke in signal allows us to now build into any number of workflows even beyond notes. And when you're building notes with, for example, all of the revenue cycle that comes next, you build them differently. It's a moment where kind of like the foundation model company, like we don't ever want to be an electronic medical record. And by the way, like I grew up with Epic and I was at a health system that had multiple medical records and I was always the happiest when I was using EPIC compared to any others out there. So we build on top of them, but the layer of the stack that we are building is the intelligence layer. And the wedge that we've chosen is the conversation because it's that.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to end up being bills. So let's approach this note generation architecture, that workflow, and now what's become a much more agent or in process, let's approach that very deliberately so that we have the immediate extension afterwards into the CFO's world.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's not only fair, it's also what we want to do when you think about it. In the United States, but really this is true in many parts of the world, clinicians, doctors, they're not compensated for the care that they deliver. They're compensated for the care that they document it that they deliver. When we first realized that, okay, we're going after this spoken signal and the first thing that we're going to build with it before, during, after we capture it is a note. We knew we were creating bills too. And so you got to take that responsibility very seriously because the enterprise motion in healthcare is complicated. You have a lot of different stakeholders. You have your end users, but then you have the decision makers. And there's a CMIO, Chief Medical Information Officer. There is a CIO, a chief information officer, and then there is a CFO. And they all have a different lens. And being able to thread the needle, being able to resonate with all three win the day. And so being able to recognize from the get that, okay, these notes are actually”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. Let's do orders. They hate billing. No doctor went to billing school, accounting school, revenue cycle school. And when I was a corporate VC at a large health system, we used to have these lunch and learns as a doctor where we try to teach doctors about revenue cycle with pizza and PowerPoints every single doctor thousand yard stare. Nobody want to be there. So can we automate that for them? Absolutely. So now we've gotten to this point over the course of a few years where it's like every single clinician has this team of assistants that we are deploying in the background to go do all the jobs. And many of these jobs nobody wanted to do in the first place.”
2026-05-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source