Any venture investment not run by a founder will be a zero in the AI age—professional CEOs without founder DNA cannot navigate the disruption, making founder control packages worth the dilution.
Jason argues every non-founder-led company in his portfolio will become a zero, because only founders have the conviction and technical understanding to pivot through platform shifts—and this justifies extreme founder compensation packages. ✦ AI generated
Jason · 20VC · 2026-08-13 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 108:50
“What should LPS do looking at this?”
Any investment I've made that is not run by a founder is a zero. It's going to be a zero in this age. It's going to be a zero. I look across. Now you we have different portfolios, but the ones I have that are not run by founders, whether they're at 20 million or 200 million, they're all going to be zeros. And so if the price of me not having a zero is getting Nick to 40% in my be I wish I was a shareholder.
verbatim transcript · starts at 108:50
(00:00:47) >> I mean, this is such an entitled podcast. Oh, poor anthropic engineer only made 35 million. I mean, go out to the goddamn panhandle. No one's making 50 grand. It must be extraordinary validating if you're Jeff Dean to leave as a non CEO of a two or three trillion dollar market cap public company and have the stock go down by a couple hundred billion [music] dollars. Google's efforts so far are B+ A minus.
(00:01:08) They're not A+. >> Any investment I've made that is not run by a founder. It's going to be a zero in this. Ready to go. [music] Okay, boys. We're going to start with something other than open AI or anthropic today. We're going to start with Canva, baby. We had Cliff on the show before. Now, Canva cuts 2026 growth by a third as AI serving costs blow up.
(00:01:40) So right for those that maybe missed this story on Canva, what should they know that they need to know here? >> Sure. Yeah, let's start with the facts and then kind of come to the question. The facts are that Canva, you know, large privately held company in the kind of creative suite space discloses its revenue even though they're private and you know they they were at three billion
(00:02:00) in gap revenue last year. Going into this year they're growing at 30%. and the CEO Melly Perkins disclosed kind of midyear that they're probably going to be growing 20% by the end of this year. So, as you say, a one-third slowdown in growth rate, but still a healthy 20%. And then the other half of what she said was interesting, which was that they're obviously adding a ton of AI features.