20VC with Harry Stebbings
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Duolingo’s Engineer Strategy
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-20 14:00
So you're the guy who puts ads in my Dualingo. But I did that. Yeah.Jeem Canu, CPO at Dualingo. Jeem leads product strategy for over 90 million monthly active learners. Consumer products live and die in the pixels.Product managers are sometimes viewed as I'm the mini CEO. I decide strategy and then people execute. That is like the worst definition of a product manager that I've ever heard.So if someone is actually creating more output with AI, well, they'll probably get promoted faster. Why would you write ...
“Microsoft & OpenAI Control The Future Of AGI”
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-20 08:38
We're going to hit AGI when Microsoft and Open AI litigate what open AGI is cuz everyone else is using that term loosey goosey. It could be now. It could be 2045.Who the knows. Now half a trillion dollars of value depends on that word. I can tell you that is the only part of the contract where you go ooh cuz it's ambiguous.So you're right. That would be a fun vector of this discussion. ...
Is Scale a Dead Man Walking?
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-19 14:00
Company Outlook - Scale 可能无法从失去创始人中恢复,公司前景黯淡 [1] - 对某些公司(old guard)失去信心 [1] Market Dynamics - IPO 周期中,可能没有公司选择上市 [1] - Microsoft 拥有相当大的优势,因为这对他们来说不是生死攸关的 [1] - 另一方可能没有优势 [2]
How We Avoided Theranos 😬
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-19 05:00
How did Theronos happen. The big loss there was for me personally. We signed up to do a secondary at a really good price and met with management.Something didn't feel right. Can't say that I was like, "Oh, it's a great gigantic fraud." I didn't know what it was. Did you meet with Elizabeth.No. The kind of seauite without her. And something just didn't feel right.So, we went back and we had a that form I told you about binding to transact. Oh, no. One page. One page.Simple. Companies love it. So, I ripped it ...
Can Non-Technical CEOs Win?
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-18 14:00
For Open AI, you have a CEO and now another CEO that are both not technical. I think it's really weird. And listen, Sam is obviously off the charts genius level.Even though he's lost a lot of people, he can recruit like no one on planet Earth. And maybe that's all that matters as a CEO. But my life experience is non-technical CEOs.Now we have two of them. They can't win at companies like Open. And yet they are winning.But my experience is they almost all fail. Why Fiji built our naps ecosystem at Facebook u ...
How We Made $1BN On Spotify 😮
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-18 05:00
So, one of the first employees I hired, he was working as an analyst with me. This is like 2014. I was telling him this story about how my mind exploded when I was in college and I could download Metallica on Napster.And he's like, you know, you've heard of Spotify, right. And I'm like, yeah. He's like, well, maybe we should buy some shares in Spotify.And we started searching around and we found a celebrity that was going through a unfortunate change of life scenario and a divorce and he had like $4 million ...
The Real Problem With Silicon Valley
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-17 14:01
I bought into the whole hook, line, and sinker of the entire problem in my opinion of Silicon Valley. What is that problem. Losing focus of what you're hired to do and paying more attention to the lifestyle that comes along with being a money manager and the circles that you roll in and about the deals that you're doing and the money that you're managing versus at the end of the day, the actual value you're creating for your people who have trusted you with their capital and making a difference for your und ...
How We Made $800M on Coursera
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-16 17:01
We were the largest shareholder of Corsera through our strategy. We owned 16% of Corsera when it went public. What did it go public.Huh. We sold the stock at 36 bucks a share and it's $8. $800 million back to LP. ...
“We Made Millions on Lyft, But Lost on Uber” 😱
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-16 14:01
So when we go down to that first 35, that's how many companies give or take? Like seven. But most of it is Alibaba, Spotify, Palunteer, and Twitter. This is just dumb block. Come on. I'm not that smart. I mean, we made ridiculous sums of money for LPS in that period. We made a ton of money on Lyft and we lost money on Uber. What? Yeah. How does that work? 40% of my third fund went into Spotify. I went back to our LPs and said, "Listen, we weeded up. We need to pivot. We need another 300 million bucks becaus ...
Fiverr Almost Became WHAT! 😱
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-06-14 14:01
One of the strategic opportunities was to create Only Fans many many years before Only Fans and we decided not to do it. How does that come as a strategic opportunity and why did you decide not to do it. The reason why I'm saying that we could have done it is because this was actually bubbling within the first versions of Fiverr organically.We didn't have a category for that. We started noticing this was happening behind the scenes. There were like code words that people spread on social and said, "Oh, go t ...