Snapshot · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Mikey Schulman, CEO of Suno, told Frankel he spends 30–40% of his time on recruiting — echoing Jeff Bezos's famous claim that he spent 50% of his time on hiring.
Where this was said
At 13:46 · chapter starts 5:21
An honest and revealing section where Frankel admits what Founder Collective has become in this market: an insurance policy. He's seen it clearly in the last 20 deals — founders take the multi-stage fund's $8–9M but keep FC in at $500K or $1M, knowing their champion at the big fund might leave, might lose mandate, or might simply move on to the next hot company. FC's brand and reputation as patient capital is itself a product. Frankel also issues a clear-eyed warning: there is very little evidence yet that the hot AI companies raising massive rounds are capital efficient — if anything, they're anything but. The discussion then moves to valuations: uncapped notes are economically bad for investors but Frankel has written one because he loved the founders. He also raises the normalization of startup founding through YC and questions whether there's a meaningful difference between 'founders' and 'entrepreneurs' — arguing the latter is a rarer, more demanding breed.
Frankel agrees that the worst-performing funds of this vintage will be the $50M–$100M seed funds — too big to be a collaborative friend, too small to lead an $8–$10M seed round.
Of all companies created in the last 25 years, fewer than 100 have sustainably maintained a valuation over $10 billion.
Forget trillion-dollar outcomes. Founder Collective's internal analysis shows the median valuation among the top 500 companies created in the last 25 years is $2.6 billion. Own 5% of one of those, and you've returned your fund. Seed isn't dead — it's just math.
Founder Collective's analysis of the top 500 companies created in the last 25 years shows a median valuation of $2.6 billion — meaning 5% ownership returns a seed fund.
Smart founders are increasingly taking $8–10M from multi-stage funds while quietly keeping Founder Collective in at $500K–$1M. They know the big fund's junior associate might leave, and FC is patient capital that won't orphan them. It costs very little to have a real insurance policy.
Frankel is looking for one specific combination: a CEO who is a great salesperson and a CTO who is a genuine magician. The alchemy between them — not identical, not finishing each other's sentences, but deeply aligned — is what separates fundable companies from great companies. In 18 years, he's seen it five times.
Every technology wave has produced bigger bubbles than the last — internet, SaaS, mobile, AI. The AI wave is the biggest yet, and Frankel has no doubt there will be enormous roadkill. But the survivors — OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX — will be the Googles and Metas of this era.
Sam built Algrow from zero to $14,000 in monthly revenue within just six months of shipping his first MVP.
Algrow reached over 10,000 users in roughly six months, driven almost entirely by organic Discord community growth.
Sam acquired his first 400 users entirely through Discord communities, without paid advertising or traditional outreach.
Algrow added exactly 480 new paying customers in its most recent month, demonstrating strong ongoing growth.
Sam's Stripe dashboard showed over £10,000 in revenue in the last four weeks, equivalent to roughly $13,000–$14,000 USD.
Sam gave all early users free access so they could show the tool to friends, turning them into live demos and advocates who helped the product spread virally.
By silently screen-sharing his tool in Discord voice chats rather than posting links, Sam attracted curiosity without violating no-self-promo server rules.
Before building Algrow, Sam and two friends made over $10,000 in revenue through affiliate marketing for RizzApp by posting faceless texting story content.
Bhanu grew SiteGPT to $13,000 monthly recurring revenue entirely through organic channels, spending nothing on paid marketing.
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