The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

20VC: Deepseek Raises $50BN | Wall St's $725BN AI Question | The Rise of Open Source & How it Threatens OpenAI & Anthropic | OpenAI Builds it's Own Chip: Jalapeno | The Death of Moats & The New AI Software Winners

June 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

DeepSeek's $50BN Round, Google's Talent Exodus, and the $725BN Question Hanging Over AI

DeepSeek closed a $7.4 billion Series A at a roughly $50 billion valuation — but the founder is personally contributing $3 billion, fewer than 10 investors participated, and none of them get voting rights. Only the Chinese state gets governance control. As Rory O'Driscoll put it: "The only people getting voting rights are the only people who don't need them. They have an army."

Google Loses Two Generational Scientists in 48 Hours

Noam Shazeer, co-author of the original attention paper and founder of Character.AI, left Google. John Jumper, Nobel Prize winner and co-creator of AlphaFold, left for Anthropic. The panel saw this as a symptom of a deeper structural problem. Google built an environment that once attracted the world's best researchers — but that environment is cracking under the pressure of trying to compete as number three in AI.

Jason Lemkin argued that the best researchers now only want to work on exactly what they want to work on, and they can afford to walk away from billions in unvested compensation to do it. "In today's world, we're on a bull run like we've never seen in our entire lifetimes," he said. "There's nothing like this where a so-called startup can pay billions of dollars to acquire hire you, and then you leave with 50% of your billions unvested to roll."

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (05:06) **DeepMind Loses Two Generational Scientists** - The panel discusses the departures of Noam Shazeer (Character.AI) and John Jumper (Nobel Prize, AlphaFold) from Google DeepMind to Anthropic.
  • 2 (13:49) **Why Number Three is the Worst Position in AI** - The panel explains why being the third-place closed-source model is uniquely vulnerable to open-source disruption.
  • 3 (19:58) **Sovereignty, China, and the "Fake" Open Source** - The panel discusses how national sovereignty drives AI investment, particularly in China, and how this distorts the open-source market.
  • 4 (27:52) **Memory Costs Surge as AI Sucks Up Resources** - The panel discusses how AI infrastructure demand is driving up the price of memory (DRAM), impacting everything from iPhones to data centers.
  • 5 (30:12) **The $725 Billion Question: Who Pays for AI?** - The panel wrestles with the massive gap between AI capex spending ($700B+/year) and current AI revenue (well under $100B).
  • 6 (36:22) **2027: The Year of "Show Me the ROI"** - The panel predicts a major shift in enterprise AI spending from "token maxing" to demanding demonstrable returns.
  • 7 (41:04) **The AI VP of Finance: Agents Replacing Humans** - Jason shares a concrete example of building an AI agent that outperforms human contractors in finance and sales operations.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Rory O'Driscoll Jason Lemkin

Show Notes

AGENDA:

00:00 – Google Loses Two AI Legends as Anthropic Wins the Talent War

14:45 – China's $50B DeepSeek Bet Changes the AI Power Balance

27:15 – AI's Memory Crisis Has Begun — Apple Warns of a '100-Year Flood'

30:00 – Wall Street Finally Asks the $725 Billion Question: Who Pays for AI?

41:00 – We Built an AI Finance VP... and It's Better Than Humans

46:30 – The Death of Moats? Why Founders Should Stop Talking About Defensibility

58:30 – Databricks, ServiceNow & the New AI Software Winners

01:07:00 – The Seat-Based SaaS Model Is Dying

01:12:00 – OpenAI's Custom Models Could Rewrite Enterprise Software

01:17:00 – OpenAI's Biggest Threat Isn't Anthropic Anymore

 

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