20VC: The Best AI Companies Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies | Will Simile Kill Kalshi, Polymarkets and NASDAQ | How to Sign Fortune 500 Companies As Customers in Weeks with Joon Sung Park, Simile

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN. Arena recently surpassed $100M ARR just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, powered by more than 30 million monthly users. AGENDA: 00:00 – Intro: "Kimi beat every American model": What Nobody Wants to Admit… 05:20 – Is this the true commoditization of models? Are they just a utility layer now? 07:30 – Do Chinese open source models cannibalize the closed frontier labs? 10:30 – Why has America's open source community lagged so badly behind China? 17:20 – Will Chinese models be banned in the US — and does hosting locally really kill the backdoor risk? 23:20 – Are enterprises really terrified of working with the frontier labs? 27:20 – Why hasn't inference got cheaper — and what happens when Anthropic's "disgustingly high" margins go public? 30:20 – Who should decide if a model is safe to release: the government, a neutral body, or nobody? 33:10 – Are we about to see cyberattacks like we've never seen before? (The fake candidate who passed every interview) 37:00 – 75 Neo labs: what separates the winners from the two-thirds worth nothing? 40:45 – Is data actually a commodity — and can data providers be $100BN companies? 48:00 – Can you be the referee when the players are paying you? (And Arena's real revenue) 50:45 – Will the model providers eat the application layer? Are Harvey, Lagora and Figma in trouble? 54:10 – Quickfire: Why hasn't NVIDIA bounced on the rise of open source, who hits $10 trillion first, and does the compute debt cycle end in insolvency?    

Joon Sung Park is the Founder and CEO of Simile, the AI simulation company building foundation models of human behaviour; allowing companies to test how real people may think, decide and act before making a decision in the real world. Simile has now raised $300 million in total, including a $200 million Series B announced last week at a $2 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Index Ventures. AGENDA: 00:00 We Will Pay $100M for a Single Query on Some Models 10:00 Why Stock Markets May Not Exist in 5 Years Time 15:00 The Best Companies All Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies 19:00 The Best AI Companies Have Clear and Fast Reward Functions 24:00 How We Sign Fortune 500 Companies for $10M Contracts in Weeks 32:00 Does Similie Kill Kalshi and Polymarket? Prediction vs Changing the Future 42:00 Inside Similie's $300M Raise; What Every Founder Needs to Know    

AGENDA: 05:00 Jensen's Open-Weights Letter Puts Anthropic on an Island 10:00 OpenAI's Model Targets Hugging Face in a Cyber-Security Scare 18:00 America's Open-Model Push Accelerates as China Looms Large 30:00 Etched Raises $300M to Take on Nvidia 34:00 Google Cloud Grows 82%—So Why Did the Market Panic? 41:00 Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms and Physical AI 51:00 Francisco Partners Raises $21B: Can Private Equity Still Save SaaS? 1:00:00 Mark Pincus Says Quit When It's Too Hard—Jason Lemkin Erupts 1:07:00 Stripe vs Revolut: Which $100B+ Fintech Would You Own?    

Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures, who just raised $3 billion in fresh capital, its largest pool ever. Matt's portfolio includes Anthropic, Lovable, Legora, OpenRouter, Chai Discovery, Axiom, OpenEvidence and more. AGENDA:  00:00 Why Menlo Broke All Its Investing Rules to Back Anthropic 09:00 Why Ownership Matters Less in an Outlier-Driven Venture Market 13:00 Do We Have an SPV Problem in Venture Today? 20:00 Do Margins Still Matter in AI? 23:00 Why Open Source Won't Derail Anthropic's Growth 26:00 Does Every Model Provider Need to Build Its Own Chips? 29:00 Why Anthropic Is Not a Threat to Legora 32:00 Why Series A Is the Hardest Place to Invest Today 36:00 Why Signalling Is B.S. and Every Fund Is Going Full Stack 42:00 Why Building a Company in Europe Is Hard Mode 47:00 Why Triple-Triple-Double-Double Is No Longer Venture-Scale Growth  

Osvald Nitski is the Chief Product Officer at Mercor, the AI-training and expert-data marketplace powering frontier-model development. Mercor last raised a $350 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation, and is reportedly in discussions for a new round at a $20 billion valuation. Mercor crossed $2BN in ARR in June; doubling from $1 billion in only four months. AGENDA:  00:04:00 Will open-source models kill the data-provider business? 00:07:00 Are enterprises still terrified of working with frontier model companies? 00:09:00 Does every company end up with its own specialised AI model? 00:10:00 Do enterprises actually have an AI ROI problem? 00:11:00 How should founders balance AI performance against exploding token bills? 00:14:00 Does AI mean product teams build 10x more—or ruthlessly simplify? 00:15:00 What does it now take to be a great product manager in an AI-native world? 00:20:00 Is the boom in AI services and forward-deployed engineers here to stay? 00:37:00 Can Mercor escape its dependence on a handful of frontier-model customers? 00:47:00 Are AI-generated code and agents creating a cybersecurity arms race? 00:56:00 When will robotics have its real "ChatGPT moment"?  

AGENDA: 00:04 China's Kimi and Qwen Put Frontier AI on Notice00:08 Washington Debates Whether Chinese AI Models Should Be Banned 00:17 Can America Build a Profitable Open-Weight AI Champion? 00:21 OpenRouter's Moment: Is This the Perfect Time to Sell? 00:31 Fireworks' $1.5B Raise Signals the Real AI Money Is in Infrastructure 00:39 Why Every Great AI App May Need to Build Its Own Model 00:50 Stripe's Bold Play to Buy PayPal 01:01 The AI Funding Frenzy: Why Late-Stage Venture Is Winning 01:12 Nuclear Startups Go Wild While Databricks and Stripe Stay Private 01:15 The AI Supply Chain War: TSMC, ASML, DRAM—and Nvidia's Next Move  

Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch.  AGENDA: 00:07 — Why Did Fireworks Bet on Inference When Everyone Else Was Chasing Training? 00:13 — Can Open-Source Models Turn AI Infrastructure into a Commodity? 00:19 — Should Enterprises Trust Chinese Open Models With Their Most Sensitive Data? 00:25 — Will Model Progress Keep Moving This Fast—or Are We Nearing a Plateau? 00:28 — Will the Multi-Model World Create a $100BN Routing Layer? 00:37 — How Much Will AI Token Usage Explode Over the Next Two Years? 00:43 — Will Token Costs Fall 10x—and Unleash 100x More Demand? 00:49 — Does Fireworks Eventually Have to Build Its Own Data Centres? 01:02 — What Is the Real Bottleneck Holding Back the AI Economy?  

Fred Turner is the Founder and CEO @ Curative, one of the wildest stories in tech. Fred scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5BN in revenue and took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just 9 months. They did over 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts in the 100s of $Ms with several of the largest states. Today, Curative is a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents for one of the largest markets in healthcare.  AGENDA: 00:00 How Did a Spare-Time COVID Test Become a $5BN Business? 07:00 How Do You Go From Testing Cows to STDs, Sepsis and COVID? 21:00 When Did Fred Realise COVID Was Massive—and How Did Curative Scale to $5BN? 36:00 Why Pivot Into Health Insurance—and What Is Broken About US Healthcare? 40:00 How Is AI Rebuilding Curative—and Which Departments Go to Zero? 45:00 Is SaaS Dead? Why Is Curative Cutting 80% of Its Software Spend? 48:00 Are Legacy Insurers Screwed? What Will Anthropic Be Worth in Three Years? 59:00 Will AI Make Companies Smaller? Which Jobs Will Survive? 1:10:00 Why Nuclear—and Could Subcritical Become Bigger Than Curative? 1:17:00 What Have Marriage and Fatherhood Taught Fred? What Has He Changed His Mind On?    

AGENDA: 00:00 – Apple SUES OpenAI: Did They Steal Apple's Biggest Secrets? 05:10 – Is OpenAI's $6BN Hardware Bet Already Dead? 12:50 – Zuckerberg Is Back: Meta Finally Takes On OpenAI 18:05 – The AI Spending Bubble Nobody Is Talking About 23:45 – Claude Is Coming for Designers, Product Managers & Figma 27:15 – Anthropic's $50BN Explosion: Have We Already Hit AI's TAM? 36:00 – The $26BN AI IPO Powering the Entire Industry 40:00 – Seed Investing Is Dead? Jason Calacanis Changes Strategy 57:00 – SaaS Is in Trouble: AI Is Accelerating Terminal Decay 01:15:00 – Why Greylock Said No to Billions of Extra Dollars  

Avishai Abrahami is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wix, the NASDAQ-listed website creation platform serving millions of businesses worldwide. Today, Wix generates more than $2BN in ARR and has a market capitalization of approximately $2.1BN, after reaching a peak valuation of $17BN over the past two years. The company also acquired Base44, one of the fastest-growing AI application-building platforms, scaling it to $150M in ARR in record time. AGENDA: 00:00 The SaaS Apocalypse: What Does Wall Street Still Not Understand About Wix? 07:00 Is the Market Valuing Wix's Core Business at Less Than Zero? 12:55 Will AI Kill Wix... or Make Base44 Bigger Than the Entire Company? 19:15 "You Are NOT Going to Vibe Code Shopify" — Why Everyone Is Getting AI Wrong 23:00 Would You Really Pay $80M for a One-Person Startup? 24:15 The Buyback Disaster: Would Avishai Do It All Again? 31:00 Why Every AI Customer Support Startup Keeps Failing (According to Wix) 37:00 Should a 22-Year-Old Still Learn to Code in the Age of AI? 42:20 Has AI Been Overhyped? Avishai's Most Controversial Prediction Yet 49:00 The Hardest Lessons on Leadership, Marriage & Building Through Chaos