20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2026
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Shiv Rao is the CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge, a leader in generative AI for healthcare. The company reached a $5.3 billion valuation following a $300 million funding round with investors including Jensen Huang, Henry Kravis, USV, Bessemer Venture Partners and Elad Gill. A practicing cardiologist, Shiv has scaled the company to 450 employees and partnered with major health systems like Emory and Yale.
AGENDA:
04:00 — You just have to survive long enough to not die
06:00 — Did USV liking music make them billions of dollars?
13:58 — The three variants of an AI native company
15:00 — How do you know if foundation models are going to kill or help you?
22:15 — Why OpenAI and Anthropic doing consultancies is such an obvious move
41:00 — Biggest lesson from Jensen Huang at Nvidia
41:00 — What Founder Mode truly means
52:00 — What the founder of Duolingo taught me about sacrifice
56:37 — If I started a company again, Elad Gill would be the one investor I go to
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | you have to taste good things to have good taste. |
| 0:02.2 | It is critical in vertical AI, being one of the first. |
| 0:07.0 | When you saw, like, the announcements from Open AI and Anthropic about forward-deployed |
| 0:11.8 | engineers and, you know, these partnerships with big private equity groups to go help their |
| 0:16.5 | portfolios, if that wasn't a sign that there is absolutely an incredible opportunity for |
| 0:22.9 | the foreseeable future, for vertical AI, I don't know what is. |
| 0:26.2 | We're in for a tsunami of healthcare needs and the system is not prepared to deliver it. |
| 0:32.8 | They did the seed and the A. |
| 0:34.6 | USV was our business model initially. |
| 0:37.3 | The more you can feel inevitable, |
| 0:39.8 | the more you will be. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, joining me in the hot |
| 0:44.2 | seats day, we have Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of A Bridge. What I love about a bridge is, yes, |
| 0:49.6 | it is a $5.3 billion company today. Yes, they have the best investors in the world in the company today, |
| 0:56.8 | but they went through a five, six year wilderness period where they were founded in 2018. They |
| 1:02.8 | did a seed round of five on 15. That level of dilution, wow, those were the days. But now they |
| 1:09.5 | are one of the hottest companies in AI, going to show that persistence and consistency in the face of people not always believing in you is the key to success. |
| 1:18.6 | As I said, $300 million Series E last round at a $5.3 billion valuation. This is an incredible story and I'm so happy to welcome Shivered a bridge. But before we dive into the show today, here's a question for any founder |
| 1:32.2 | listening. What would your marketing team do with an extra 30 hours a week? That's roughly what |
| 1:37.4 | teams get back when they stop manually building every campaign, every workflow, every email. |
| 1:43.2 | Right now your best marketing people are spending their day's cloning templates, |
| 1:47.0 | configuring audience segments, and chasing data across systems. |
| 1:51.0 | That's not what you hired them for. |
... |
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