20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 2025-09-19

59:19

Jesse Zhang is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Decagon, the conversational AI platform for customer experience. As one of the fastest growing companies in the valley, they have raised over $230M at a last round price of $1.5BN. Prior to Decagon, Jesse founded Lowkey (acquired by Niantic), studied CS at Harvard, and worked at places like Google, HRT, Citadel, and Intel.

AGENDA:

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Messages

03:43 Olympiad Mathematician to Startup Founder

05:34 Selling to Niantic and What I Did Differently the Second Time

07:16 Why 90% of Founders Build Companies the Wrong Way

12:19 Scaling to $50M ARR in 15 Months

31:31 Is the AI Talent War Out of Hand: How To Compete with Meta Pay Packets

32:38 Why Remote Work is Total BS

34:06 Competitors in AI Customer Experience: Sierra, Intercom and more

37:34 AI Market Predictions

44:56 Embracing Stress and Winning Culture

50:13 Quick Fire Questions: Most Underrated AI Founder, Biggest Changed Opinion

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

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman.

If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.

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