# Inside Accel's $4BN Growth Investing Machine Cursor is Dead is Total BS: Here is Why · What Missing Rippling and ElevenLabs Taught Us · Are $2BN-$10BN IPOs Dead · Why Now is a Great Time to be Thoma Bravo with Miles Clements 20VC · Mar 9, 2026 · 63 min · 12,768 words Speakers: Miles Clements, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-4129b88c/ ## Cold open **Miles Clements** [0:00]: Sometimes getting overly fixated on the financial metrics in this environment can leave you just like with an unsatisfying taste in your mouth. Growth can obscure and blind you to a lot of underlying ills in the business. I think you can actually be successful in this market investing in consensus. Investing is an art and a science. The science is understanding how to properly value a company, and the art is understanding when to break the rules. Focus on hitting singles and doubles and let the home runs take care of themselves. **Harry Stebbings** [0:26]: This is 20 VC ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:27]: with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, today, I'm thrilled to welcome a dear friend to the show, Miles Clements. Miles helps lead Accel's growth investing practice where he's buying some of the best in the business, including Atlassian, Linear, Cursor, and many more incredible companies. Now Miles is an old friend, and so this was a very how do I put it? No holds barred discussion. I think he put up with a lot of very pressing and prying questions, and I don't think you've ever heard an Accel partner be quite as open and honest as this, which was just fantastic. Miles really was very special to have on. But before we dive into the show today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [1:04]: over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable. 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After MetaView captures what was said, Turing helps you build with the people who can deliver after it. Frontier Labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks, but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools, and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core block off for agentic models. That's why NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce, Gemini, and other leading lab partners partner with Turing. Turing is the research accelerator focused on post training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next generation data quality systems built from real world operational traces, and coding datasets that stress models under conditions where failures matter, state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls, and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur. To find out how, visit turing.com/20vc. That's turing.com/20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [4:30]: Miles, we are in person. I love it when you're in town. It's so lovely to see you, man, and it makes it so much more special doing it in person. So thank you for joining me. **Miles Clements** [4:38]: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's always fun being here. **Harry Stebbings** [4:40]: Now, I wanna start with the cool question that I think every investor is thinking about, which is how do we ascertain true value in an AI world where technology seems so transient and revenue seems so endurable? **Miles Clements** [4:54]: I think in terms of evaluating these AI categories in companies, there's a pretty useful framework, which is basically trying to understand a company's time to value and then the durability of that value. So I think that a number of these companies sort of shine on different dimensions. If I were to look at legal AI, accounting AI, a company like Basis that we just invested in, I actually think these companies don't have immediately quick time to value. And so when you look at like the deployment cycle and getting lawyers and getting accountants sort of sold on the technology, that can take a little while. But once it is hooked, the durability of that value is like transformational to these firms. On the other end of the spectrum, I would take some of like the very early vibe coding companies, right? Very quick time to value. Like you start vibe coding, all of a sudden you have a weekend warrior pickleball app ready to go overnight. You can start using something very quickly, but the bottom just fell out for a lot of these apps because there was no durability of value. The reason that I think coding has become like the vertical in AI is because it shines on both dimensions. Like you can start using Cursor in an afternoon, and by that evening, you're 10 times more productive. The time to value is very short. And then the durability of that value compounds as the team starts using it. So Cloud Code, Cursor, all of the great products out there, like, think this is why coding has become the vertical that is the battleground in AI today. **Harry Stebbings** [6:12]: Jerry Murdock on the show said from Insight the other day, not me, but, like, overheard from my portfolio. No one's using Cursor anymore. Everyone's using Cool Code. We just saw Chamath tweet last night. We're gonna have to move off Cursor because it's just simply too expensive. And the Twittersphere seems to have turned against Cursor with the Cursor is Dead meme. But then they hit 2,000,000,000 in ARR. I'm trying to understand what is going on here. **Miles Clements** [6:35]: I think there's a couple of things at play. You know, I I saw the Chamath tweet. I I listened to the Jerry Murdoch show. With all due respect to those guys, I think there's a few things at play. First of all, this market is growing enormously, and I don't think a lot of these companies are actually experiencing success at the expense of the others. Take Claude Code as an example. First of all, what an amazing product. Claude Code has absolutely captured the imagination, in part driven by OPUS 4.5, OPUS 4.6. Like I think the success of Clog Code is also very much tethered to the success of the underlying model. So it has captured the zeitgeist. Like that's unmistakable. With that said, I think these things are so market expansionary that it's not necessarily coming at Cursor's expense. And I think they're market expansionary on two dimensions. First of all, they're bringing so many new cohorts of users online. So people who would not have been software developers a year ago today can be software developers with these tools. They're also expanding the market in terms of consumption. You hear the ARR growth leaked for both companies. A lot of that ARR is not like net new companies paying per seat pricing. A lot of that ARR is consumption, which is off the charts for both tools. I think that's one thing that's going on. I think another is this sort of misunderstanding about Cursor being tied to the IDE. In some ways, Cursor is a victim of its own success. Like they were so disruptive and so innovative around the IDE a year ago that people can't help but over make the assumption. What is happening though very clearly is like the world is moving to agents. No one has been more vocal and thoughtful about that than Michael Truell from Cursor. I just sort of look at the numbers. According to Michael's post, which was public on Twitter a few weeks ago, there are two times more people using agents in Cursor than using the tab feature. 90% of Cursor users are daily active users of the agent product. The agent product grew 15x last year. The Cloud Agent product, which was new as of October 30, so it's only been in market for three months, is now responsible for 35% of merged PRs in Cursor. Those are happening by Cloud Agents. All due respect to Jerry Murdock. I think he said, well, you know, I thought about these metrics, and this company needs to pivot. Like, all due respect, I thought about playing in the NFL, but instead I walked onto a college football team and was the fifth string inside linebacker. You're not looking at any real metrics. Like, who are are these people to make these judgments? So I get a little bit spun up about it. The thing that's so cool about the team is like, they are focused, they are unfazed, they're just building. **Harry Stebbings** [8:57]: Do you think they are fundamentally challenged because of their reliance on bluntly Anthropic in their models and what that does in terms of cost inflation for end users of Cursor? **Miles Clements** [9:08]: I don't think so. I mean, I think in a number of dimensions, the beauty of Cursor is their ability to be multi model. I think it's valuable for a couple of reasons. First of all, we put this survey into the market. You'll have to have me back on the show to like give you the full readout because it's only 90% of the way complete. We just wanted ground truth on like what's going on with the mindset of developers today. And one of the things that we're learning is 50% of developers switch model families on a daily basis, and 95% of developers switch models on a daily basis. I think the world wants to be multi model, and that experience is fundamentally enabled by Cursor. The other thing that comes from being multi model is you basically become like an index of AI innovation. Because you get this compounding product benefit where every new feature, every new enhancement that the Cursor team makes, that obviously improves the product experience. But every improvement with the underlying models also improve the capabilities of Cursor. And so you get this like compounding product flywheel that's very unique. Was **Harry Stebbings** [10:05]: Cursor wrong to focus on building their own models? **Miles Clements** [10:08]: I don't think so. I think what they're gonna be able to achieve is incredible. I also think we need to frame in the right context what their aspirations are with these models. There are generalists and there are specialists. Cursor is going to build specialized coding models that are gonna serve specialized coding tasks, especially for a lot of enterprise users. They don't need for their models to be good at poetry or teach you how to make an apple pie. Their models are there for professional coders to do professional work. And I think that like that's very powerful and will continue to make the product experience really differentiated. **Harry Stebbings** [10:40]: When you were investing at what was the first round price? **Miles Clements** [10:44]: 9.5. **Harry Stebbings** [10:45]: When we're doing like a 9.5 and a 27, what are we underwriting it to? Now if I was your partner, I'd be like, Totally get it and this is super exciting, But like, what's the upside here? **Miles Clements** [10:55]: How did you think about that? There's a couple of ways to frame the upside. One is that you think about like platform companies that are publicly traded that own their domains. There's very few of them out there. So Salesforce historically has been like the go to market platform company. CrowdStrike and maybe Palo Alto are like the platform cybersecurity companies. There has never been a platform company for engineering as a vertical. And engineers are like, I mean, is the fastest growing, most dynamic vertical there is, no one has ever owned that. Now you've had companies that have built tremendous value biting off pieces of the stack. You know, Atlassian, hugely valuable company we love, began around issue tracking, Datadog around monitoring. These have been like 50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000 companies built over time addressing like one portion of the engineering product stack. No one has built a platform company to own it all, and we think they have that aspiration. So that's one thing. The other is like, we were also joking before the show that I think sometimes getting overly fixated on the financial metrics in this environment can leave you just like with an unsatisfying taste in your mouth. Actually, this company is growing so quickly that on a multiples basis, our first investment was at four times, five times year end ARR. That wasn't like anything that we talked about or part of the underwrite. **Harry Stebbings** [12:10]: Because now it's at 2,000,000,000 and you did it at 9, essentially. **Miles Clements** [12:13]: The company said, I think a week ago or it was leaked, that they passed $2,000,000,000 So yeah, that's a fair assumption. **Harry Stebbings** [12:18]: What was it when you did it? Just because you need to have that mental plasticity. **Miles Clements** [12:21]: We had a conversation with Michael where we sort of said, Where is the business today commercially? And he told us, and it was I'm not evading the answer. I don't specifically remember, but maybe it was like 100 of ARR. **Harry Stebbings** [12:29]: Give or take, yeah. **Miles Clements** [12:30]: You know, we said, What do you think is realistic for the end of the year? He said, I think maybe like our aspiration is, you know, these assumptions go right and these are the products we're going launch, and then we can get to 500. And Andrew Brochio, who I was working with, you know, Andrew and I sort of looked at each other and we were like, I think we should haircut it and call it 300. Like getting from 100 to 300 would be extraordinary for this kind of a company. You know, they ended last year somewhere in the billions, I think has been reported. But it really never was about and still is not about financial metrics. The financials of this company to me are purely a reflection of the product market fit, and it's unlike anything I've ever seen. **Harry Stebbings** [13:02]: When you are so off in your ability to predict revenue at year end, how does that change your go forward investor mindset? Do you just place no value on revenue predictions? How do you think about that? **Miles Clements** [13:15]: I think revenue predictions are important in that they sort of encode a lot of business assumptions. If we get this product right, if our pricing here is correct, if our penetration of this customer segment works out, we should be at this rough revenue scale. But you know, the idea of having a budget so that you can go hold the founder's feet to the fire quarter after quarter and is just not really relevant. So to me, the less important thing is if a company finishes, you know, 10% below plan, 10% above plan, like we're not public market investors. We're not managing to earnings calls. We care a lot about the inputs that go into the assumptions, but, like, the output is a little bit less important. **Harry Stebbings** [13:56]: When we think about that and the revenue numbers that you see there, it makes other things seem quite boring. It does. I mean, this is the sad case. Are we in a world where triple triple double double's dead, when you can have a company like Cursor going from 100 to 1,000,000,000? **Miles Clements** [14:15]: Absolutely not. I mean, send send me all of your triple, triple, double, double companies that you're not interested in investing I **Harry Stebbings** [14:21]: was thinking this last night. Everyone says this on the show. I guarantee you'd be like, no. **Miles Clements** [14:27]: No, no. Here's why. I think you can actually be successful in this market investing in consensus. And I think you can actually do really well investing in like non consensus. I think you get hammered sitting in the middle. You know, a company that's not growing 15x year over year, that's fine. There's all these other really important inputs that go into it that I think can make for like a really interesting investment outcome. **Harry Stebbings** [14:49]: I'm sorry, I still don't quite understand. If you have a pot of money and you can put it in companies that are growing 15x, to then put it in companies that are growing 3x, 3x, 2x, 2x, the opportunity cost of your cash is real as your partner, I'd be saying, why are we doing that? **Miles Clements** [15:05]: Yeah, but this is where, you know, we're ignoring like all of the other important inputs, right? Like quality of the founder, what market are they in? What ownership are you getting in the investment? All of these other things factor in too. So I think one thing that's happened in our market is like investors have tended to just flock to the extremes. Either like, we're AI maximalists, we're gonna buy the basket, ownership valuation, be damned, we want everything. Or like, we hate the valuations, they make no sense, we're gonna sit on our hands and wait until things cool off a little bit. The reality is like the best funds in the world, the best investors in the world embrace the nuance. The right answer is always somewhere in the middle. Constructing a basket of companies where maybe some they were undisputed breakout leaders and you didn't get the ownership that you wanted, but you you wanted to be a part of that company and you wanted to be partnered with that founder. There's room for that in the portfolio. But there's also bootstrap companies in Little Rock, Arkansas, where you can have a different ownership threshold and work with a really special founder and build the company in a different way, and you can do very well that way too. We don't really run from the nuance, like we embrace the nuance, and there's a lot of benefit to being a multistage, multi strategy firm. **Harry Stebbings** [16:14]: That's wonderful, but your funds are too big to embrace nuance, dude. How so? I'm sorry, you need to have $50,000,000,000 plus companies to return your fund sizes. **Miles Clements** [16:23]: I think we will. I mean, about this. A decade ago, how many trillion dollar companies were there in the world? **Harry Stebbings** [16:29]: No, and you're right, I use this stat too in the expansion of outcome sizes. But dude, they're very, very rare, and they take seventeen to twenty years when you look at the majority of them. **Miles Clements** [16:38]: But this is the cycle repeating itself. And to answer my own rhetorical, which nobody asked me to do, a decade ago, there were zero companies worth $1,000,000,000,000 Five years later, there were six public companies worth $1,000,000,000,000 Today, there's a dozen companies worth $1,000,000,000,000 in the public market. Plus, you have the labs, you have SpaceX, and, you know, companies in the private market. So the sizes of the outcomes are enormously bigger. And I absolutely think that firms can make substantial returns in the late stage business given those outcomes. And I will say, it's really hard if that's the only thing you do. If all you're doing is buying late stage momentum companies, I do think that's hard. There are people that do it well, but it's hard. I think being a multi stage, multi strategy fund where you also have a really focused early stage effort and a growth effort, I think you can absolutely continue to support companies at every phase of growth and make a lot of money. **Harry Stebbings** [17:29]: But can you do vertical SaaS growing triple, triple, double, double? **Miles Clements** [17:33]: I wouldn't write off a company purely because that's the growth profile. Now, I see the point. You have to focus on large outcomes, and I agree with you there. **Harry Stebbings** [17:41]: I'm like the team, we need to do two things. One, we need to replace seats. We're replacing labor. And then two, I need to see a billion in revenue. Before it was like 100,000,000 and we can sell it for a billion or IPO. A billion dollars, it doesn't do shit for us now. **Miles Clements** [17:55]: Yeah. I agree with you. As much as I enjoy sparring with you, I agree with you on this point. If you can't articulate the big outcome, and if the founder can't articulate the big outcome, that is probably a sign that you don't wanna be involved with But I think that, you know, what you're describing is basically the mistake that we made on a company like ServiceTitan. We had fallen in love with our end via. We were chasing this round. It was going to happen in the $250,000,000 or $300,000,000 range. And we had these rigid rules about like, you definitely can't pay more than six to eight times forward for vertical SaaS, and you definitely can't pay more than 10 times forward for vertical SaaS. We lost it because we sort of got queued on price. And then that went on to be a $9,000,000,000 company. If you really understood the depth of the market, and if you really understood what they were disrupting in that era, you would have done it even though it was a vertical SaaS where you might have otherwise historically thought it was constrained. **Harry Stebbings** [18:48]: When we said about Cursor, I liked your description of the platform company for engineers. And I see it and I see that grand play. But then it kind of goes against something that we kind of noted down before you said, who will win is a narrow minded framing of the market. Are they not paradoxical? If you think about Cursor being that engineering platform company, totally get that. And I believe in that view of the world. But I don't believe the who will win is narrow minded view. **Miles Clements** [19:13]: I think Cursor will win. I think there's huge value to being the winner in these markets. But the reason I think conversation is like the framing is overly simplified is people forget we don't operate monopoly markets in this country. Like the forces of capitalism don't permit it. And if they did, then the federal government wouldn't permit it. So like, I think the best software company in the world is AWS. AWS has like 35% market share. Everyone aspires to win. And you get into business with these founders because you believe that they can win. But I also think the way that a number of these verticals are gonna play out in a number of the AI categories, there's gonna be a couple of really big companies in several of them. **Harry Stebbings** [19:53]: Do you not think we do legitimately operate in monopoly markets? I mean, let's look at like NVIDIA. Let's look at Apple for consumer hardware. You know, Salesforce for CRM. You know, Salesforce is a $250,000,000,000 business. **Miles Clements** [20:05]: Yeah. But I I think it's different when you get into, like, the mega cap companies. Like, there are monopoly conversations, and that is, you know, what the federal government is there for, some would argue. I would not argue, but that's what the federal government tends to do these days. You know, I think in the private markets at the scale of companies that we're talking about, I just don't think so. And like, I'll give you one framing for like the winning conversation. We've talked about, and you talk on the show a lot about deal. People say like, DEAL has won the market. Alex is phenomenal. DEAL has won. We're not investors in the company. I think it was published that they passed like a billion dollars of ARR. It's incredible. It's like, welcome to the big leagues. ADP has $20,000,000,000 of ARR. Like you are one twentieth the size of ADP. And by the way, in this market, you've got like Paychex is a $60,000,000,000 company and Paycom and Paylocity. And I think the venture framing of this company, one, is not always, you know, I think it can be a little bit oversimplified. **Harry Stebbings** [20:57]: Do you reflect on those two? You're not in deal or Rippling? **Miles Clements** [21:01]: Separate conversations. We're not in deal because we're in remote, and I'm thrilled that we're in remote. I think Joven and Marcelo are like very special. I think their product vision is very different and unique. The Rippling one, yeah, I I think about this one a lot. I mean, this one stings. **Harry Stebbings** [21:13]: Why? **Miles Clements** [21:13]: I think a lot about the physics of these businesses and the product mechanics behind a lot of these companies. And what I mean by that is I think a lot of investors tend to look at like, what's the product, what's the growth rate? No one really has an appropriate appreciation for what I think of as like the marginal ease of ARR accumulation. What are the downstream levers that you're putting into place that you can pull on in the future that will allow you to grow at these crazy growth rates in year four, five, six, seven? And how do you build this growth mechanism that is better than like, I put in a marketing dollar and I get out $1.20 of revenue? I think nobody in the world does that better than Parker Con Conrad. So the first time that he sort of outlined the vision, I was like, this is really compelling. I think that's what he does. He has this innate sense for pockets of margin that other people wouldn't go build companies around, like laptop provisioning and physical IT leasing. That would be a tough standalone business, but like as a revenue line item for a company like Rippling, it's really interesting. I just think that Parker is a generational founder, and we don't get it right all the time, but he's he's certainly someone I wish we were in business with. **Harry Stebbings** [22:23]: Why are you not? Was it because of the remote situation or price? Or I think **Miles Clements** [22:28]: it was a couple of things. Parker previously had a reputation. I'm not gonna opine on whether it was deserved or not, but he had a reputation that I like to think he's now totally overcome. That just came up in the conversation. And in a market where like, the moon was moving very quickly and other people were moving quickly, like it probably made us a step slow. I think this is also one where we stuck to our knitting on the investment framework, the ownership thresholds. The opportunity to get involved was going to be at a high valuation. And maybe there was I don't remember the specifics, but there was a mechanism where you could invest more over time. And it would have required us to break a lot of rules. And I think, like, I don't I don't regret not breaking the rules in general, but, you know, this would have been a time when it could have been worthwhile. **Harry Stebbings** [23:11]: Slightly confused right now as to whether we should break the rules on Series A's. The prices have gone from 20 on a 100 to 20 to 40 on 200 to 400. And I'm forced every day to question, should we break the rules on ownership for these incredibly fast growing hot AI companies? And we go back and forth on it. We're friends sitting in a coffee shop. What would you say to me if I was debating that? **Miles Clements** [23:34]: Yeah, I'm chuckling because there's this funny quote that comes to mind. I've been very lucky at Accel to learn from a lot of really great people. One of them is Jim Breyer. Jim used to say this thing, which I think he was paraphrasing from somebody else, but it was basically that like investing is an art and a science. The science is understanding how to properly value a company and the art is understanding when to break the rules. I just think in this market, like you got to do that constantly. Generally speaking, sticking to your rules is a good place to be. Now I do think, you know, the vocabulary around what a Series A is in this market is just very different. And so I would actually, you know, I think there's like multiple subcategories of investing that goes on in Series A land. And you just have to decide what you want to participate in and what you don't. It's okay to say no. Like, you don't have to be in every single round. So I think that like breaking the rules is something you should do very, very rarely. **Harry Stebbings** [24:24]: You said that kind of brilliantly wanky phrase, the marginal ease of ARR accumulation. I'm gonna give you five tequilas and then ask you to say that again. Sounds wonderful. Where did you think there was marginal ease of ARR accumulation, where there maybe wasn't? And what did you not see? **Miles Clements** [24:44]: I think as the market has gotten more competitive, the pressure to be right, to pick correctly, has never been greater. It causes you to extrapolate. You have to extrapolate from early data points. There have been investments where a company went from, they had a million dollars of ARR, and then in the period before they fundraise, they had like a $4,000,000 quarter. And it's like, they've got it. Like the product market fit snapped. This is it. This is the time to forward invest and you can extrapolate these trends. And then it turns out sometimes they just had an anomaly quarter. I have fallen into that trap before. **Harry Stebbings** [25:19]: Do you have that more and more now when we see companies being maimed by others so significantly? **Miles Clements** [25:25]: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I agree with this. I mean, think this is why the benchmarks that used to give us all comfort are largely obsolete now. And so like you have to be really clued into the usage intensity of your product and really understand how people are using it. Because growth can obscure and blind you to a lot of underlying ills in the business. So I do think that being clued into like how people are engaging with the product, whether you're an enterprise company or a consumer app, is more important than ever. **Harry Stebbings** [25:53]: Do you find it hard, the binary nature of this world? Honestly, we come into work sometimes and we're like, what the fuck are we doing? I'm being serious. Like, you know, was talking to my dear friend Jason the other day, and he's like, fuck this. I've had enough of this. I just wanna do an Anthropic SPV and go home. I don't wanna pick the winner in a SaaS company that oh my god. We feel so unimportant. I have to be honest with you. **Miles Clements** [26:19]: No. Like, I fucking love it, to be really honest. Like, I'm so lucky to be in this industry. And the competitive thrill of chasing down these founders and chasing these deals, it's awesome. How lucky are we to get to do this? So, no, like, I understand where you're coming from, but I love it. **Harry Stebbings** [26:37]: When we look at the big assets, let's say, you've got Databricks, you've got Anthropic, you've got OpenAI, and you've got SpaceX. As a partnership, do you guys lament that you're not in them? **Miles Clements** [26:46]: Oh, of course. I mean, we we are in some of those companies, but we yeah, absolutely. Nobody is harder on on us than we are. We wanna know where we went wrong. We also, though, we do that in the interest of getting it right going forward. And when we looked at the future, there's a lot of things that we're really excited about. A lot of companies where we are sort of the investor of record, we intersected them very early, continued to buy up all the way through the growth stages. Excited about those, but absolutely, we hold ourselves accountable when we miss companies. **Harry Stebbings** [27:14]: I spoke to one of your LPs before and they said, Help me understand why we're not in any of the foundation model companies. Why are we not in Anthropic and OpenAI as an Accel LP? Was that just like a miss or was that a belief that they wouldn't be good companies? **Miles Clements** [27:28]: A lot of firms miss the model companies early and we're guilty of it. Nobody has looked in the mirror harder than we did and course corrected. **Harry Stebbings** [27:36]: Can I ask, when you did, is it like a partnership meeting, have we fucked up? Or is it like an unspoken rule, like the British people when it rains and we just pretend it doesn't rain and we walk anyway? **Miles Clements** [27:48]: No, it's the most important conversation there is. So it's a global off-site where every partner at Accel sits in a room together, and we say, how did we not get this right? And how do we fix it going forward? What are the 50 best private companies in the world right now? And for how many of those companies are we not just a passive passive shareholder, but like the investor of record? And what is our score? And then what do we think is the next set of 50 companies? And how many of those are we going to win? And like, if we are not getting better, no one will beat us up more than we will ourselves. So that's what the conversation is. I mean, it's the most important thing for the entire partnership globally. **Harry Stebbings** [28:22]: Are you playing a coverage game? You know, when we had Anys from Andreessen on the show, he was like, 100% we are playing a coverage game. We get split up fiefdoms, and we get split up stages and split up categories, and you are expected to see 100% of yours. And if you miss, it is not acceptable. For me, for example, we play a different game. I don't have to see 100%, but I need to hit one of the big ones. **Miles Clements** [28:43]: Yeah. We're organized a little bit differently, but of course we hold ourselves to the same standards of coverage. I mean, the aspiration is 100% coverage, 100% win rate, right? No one in the industry does 100% of both. But if we're failing on one dimension or the other, we're going to talk about it and understand where we need to be better. **Harry Stebbings** [29:00]: What was your win rate today? How would you **Miles Clements** [29:03]: measure it? **Harry Stebbings** [29:03]: When you go for a deal with a term sheet put down. **Miles Clements** [29:06]: Mine individually or as a **Harry Stebbings** [29:08]: As a firm. **Miles Clements** [29:09]: I think a healthy win rate would be like 80%. And the reason it's not a 100% is because Dude, no one's gonna have a 100%. Some people have come on this show and said that they have a 100% win rate. And you **Harry Stebbings** [29:19]: should, Andreessen. **Miles Clements** [29:21]: Well, I wasn't trying to call him out specifically, but I've just heard it said before. **Harry Stebbings** [29:24]: Well, fair enough. If I said I never lost a deal, I'd be happy if someone said I **Miles Clements** [29:29]: don't mean to be combative about it. I think my, like, my polite and professional response would be, I think if you're not putting yourself out there in losing sometimes, you're not chasing competitive enough things. I really like sticking my nose in a competitive fight, like that I have no right to win. I really like doing that. But I also really find a lot of joy in finding these founders who are just doing things a little bit differently. Maybe they've bootstrapped the company. Maybe they're located in some geography that's like far away from Silicon Valley. And having these non consensus ideas that other people might think are silly or they might not really have their heads wrapped around, it's like, I think that's great too. Part of Is **Harry Stebbings** [30:08]: that kind of growth equity like technology venture not inherently the most fucked in this AI world? **Miles Clements** [30:15]: I think that business has gotten harder. **Harry Stebbings** [30:16]: Yeah. **Miles Clements** [30:17]: And I think that was like, frankly, that was the core of our early growth this was was unbelievable, **Harry Stebbings** [30:23]: like the bootstrap, like 1Password, Qualtrics. Totally. Mike From and Thoma from nowhere. Amazing. I love Absolutely. **Miles Clements** [30:30]: And that is still out there, and we still do a lot of it, and we aspire to be the best in the world at it. **Harry Stebbings** [30:35]: Is it still out there in the world of It is. **Miles Clements** [30:36]: It is. This is the funniest thing. Every time we have an offside or a strategy conversation, we keep saying like, there's no more bootstrap. There's no more bootstrap. And then like you find a Laravel. Like they are still there. They're really hard to find. And I think we're like the best in the world at finding them. **Harry Stebbings** [30:52]: And it makes sense from opportunity cost of capital to put your money there versus just putting another $100,000,000 into Cursor. **Miles Clements** [30:58]: Nuance in portfolio theory. A part of our business will always be doing that. It's very distinct. **Harry Stebbings** [31:03]: Growth fund? **Miles Clements** [31:04]: At the moment, we have a $1,400,000,000 growth fund, and we have a larger sort of later stage pool of capital. **Harry Stebbings** [31:09]: No, 100% is at $1,400,000,000 and then you've got leaders, which is like three or four. Is the growth fund subscale then? Because David George has got six or seven to play with and Josh has got nine to play with. Is that subscale, or should we think of leaders as the growth fund in the same way? **Miles Clements** [31:25]: In many ways, the market today is like what the venture market was in 2000 but inverted. So the idea was like, I'll do my Series A, I'll get 30% ownership, I'll take a bunch of dilution, and when the company goes public, I'll own 20% of it. That was like roughly the math. Today, you have to back into 20% the other way. You do what the market will allow in the earliest possible investment. You sponsor a tender. You do a growth round. You do an IPO round. And you can ladder your way up to 20% ownership. You have to be a multistage fund to do that. **Harry Stebbings** [31:54]: Or you hope and pray that the expansion or, like, the multiple or the size of the exit, sorry, is so much bigger than it was. Not a billion to 5,000,000,000. It's 50 to a 100 that actually having 5% is actually just as meaningful as having 20% of the prior. **Miles Clements** [32:10]: Sure. I think you won't be surprised to find that, like, I don't think hoping and praying is a great strategy. **Harry Stebbings** [32:14]: Dude, we are all fucking hoping and praying right now. I'm sorry. That is an absolute Figma is an $11,000,000,000 company. The unbelievable, unwaveringly brilliant founder of Dylan, and this was the swan song of software is 11,000,000,000, which is incredible and incredible, incredible. Totally. But, you know, it doesn't return your growth fund. But we're we're **Miles Clements** [32:36]: arguing two separate points, and I agree with you on the Figma case study and all these, like, fundamentally incredible businesses out there that have gotten beat up. That's a separate point that we should circle back to. The other point is like, do you have to swing for the fences? You know, I go back to Arthur Patterson, co founder of Accel, always says this thing, focus on hitting singles and doubles and let the home runs take care of themselves. And what he means by that is if you're just constantly stepping to the the plate and trying to I can see at the Series A that this is gonna be a $100,000,000,000 exit, you will just overswing and you will fail. **Harry Stebbings** [33:08]: No. But isn't that what I'm I'm deliberately being No, not actually. I'm actually just fundamentally disagreeing with that. That is not what venture is about, especially at the Series A. You want to have a diversified portfolio enough that you have one or two of them hit, but you want 30 swing the fuck out of this, and it could be a 100,000,000,000. We're not here to do the singles and doubles. **Miles Clements** [33:30]: I think different ways to practice the craft. I do think the market has evolved a little bit, and a single and double today might look different than it did, you know, in the year 2000. I think what he means is like, know what you're good at, focus on founder relationships, stick to whatever your particular strategy is, and just try to do that really well. Don't just go sling it into things that are momentum chasing opportunities where you're not gonna be any better than the next investor. I think that advice is fair. **Harry Stebbings** [33:57]: Do you not think we're all momentum chasing? I mean, like, if we look at the AI entry for you guys and then the defense entry with housing, like, we're all slightly momentum chasing. **Miles Clements** [34:06]: I would go back to nuance, subtlety, portfolio theory. Like there are absolutely companies where it is justified to chase momentum. We don't like to use that vocabulary, but we see a company like Anthropic and how valuable they are as technology partner to like every other company in our portfolio. The momentum is very obvious, but the business logic and sort of the business intrinsics are also very obvious. So does it make sense to have a relationship with Anthropic? Absolutely. So guilty of that. **Harry Stebbings** [34:36]: You did the 180 round? **Miles Clements** [34:38]: We've invested in a few rounds of Anthropic. **Harry Stebbings** [34:40]: Can I ask what was the first round you did? **Miles Clements** [34:42]: One hundred eighty. **Harry Stebbings** [34:43]: When you were doing that as a team, how did you think about outcome planning there and sizing that? **Miles Clements** [34:49]: I think that company and a small handful of companies in the private market today are operating on a different plane. I think it is not bombastic to say that some of those businesses could be trillion dollar companies. You know, people who are underwriting these rounds believe that. So I think that is like a different category. But the danger in this business is ascribing the characteristics of an Anthropic or an Andro or an OpenAI or a Stripe to the things that don't really fit the paradigm at the Series A. **Harry Stebbings** [35:18]: But when you're doing an Anthropic round at 180, are you saying we fundamentally think this can be a $2,000,000,000,000 company at a 10x? Implicitly, yeah. We're not What do you need to see to write the jack? It's like, you know what, three to 5x is enough on growth? **Miles Clements** [35:33]: There's never a partnership conversation where we sort of say, hey, we've built a model and squinted our way to a 3x outcome. Like, that's just not exciting. The reality is that I do think like a lot of these funds revert to the mean. If you can generate 3x net funds, that's a pretty good business to be in. But if all you do is aim for 3x investments, like, of course, that's not really the math that gets you there. If we can have a conversation about this company is special. Its reach is unprecedented. Its founders are very, very different. The comps for this business would be platform companies like Google and Microsoft and Amazon. Then of course, you wanna participate in those companies in the private markets. **Harry Stebbings** [36:11]: You said about spice. Do you feel better or worse to be an Anthropic shareholder post Anthropic versus the Pentagon? **Miles Clements** [36:19]: Yeah. You were definitely gonna give me some spicy ones. I **Harry Stebbings** [36:23]: can feel your compliance team just shit themselves. **Miles Clements** [36:26]: They're **Harry Stebbings** [36:29]: just crying. Look. **Miles Clements** [36:31]: I That one to be How can you I don't want to answer this question. How can you not admire the founders for sticking to their knitting on and sticking to their conviction and sticking to their principles? Now, I have no idea how this is going to shake out, right? I mean, like Did you not write Dario's memo for him? Ghost written. I'm definitely not intelligent enough to ghostwrite anything for Dario. I think this is an opportunity for, you know, a lot of these companies, they signal virtue. And they believe in a world where AI is going to be a force for good. And then there are commercial opportunities where that gets put to the test. Can you really blame a founder for saying, I'm sticking to the mission? I get it, and I respect it. **Harry Stebbings** [37:14]: I mean, we're seeing it bluntly play out for him in terms of loyalty, in terms of talent. Totally. Consumer adoption. Mike Krieger put they're doing a million a day in net new consumer sign ups. Yeah, mean, **Miles Clements** [37:23]: they passed GPT in the App Store. Isn't it ironic that **Harry Stebbings** [37:26]: this is what was needed for them to surpass? **Miles Clements** [37:29]: No, don't actually believe that they were doing it for that reason. I don't think they did it as a calculated business move. I think this comes down to No, I think it was an accidental bit of luck that I agree. Worked out I think it comes down to ethics and principles and call me old fashioned, but if you behave the right way, Call me. You'll be **Harry Stebbings** [37:45]: Yeah. Are you in OpenAI as well? I'm not. There are a lot of businesses today that we're in historically, which I don't know what's gonna happen. I love Snyk. I love Miro. I love 1Password. But they were done at such high prices, and the new reality is very real. How do you opine and think about businesses like that when you sit in the partnership meeting? **Miles Clements** [38:06]: The market has gotten so humbling. The greatest companies of three, four, five years ago, many have gotten totally beat up in the public markets. I believe many are oversold. I think this is where it comes back to this being a human business. Who is the founder founder that you've gone into business with? What is that founder gonna do when their back is against the wall? Like **Harry Stebbings** [38:26]: if you look at Snyk, I'm in Guy's new company, but he ain't What do you do? It's 300,000,000 ARR growing 15% and his last price was 7. **Miles Clements** [38:35]: I think this is in some regards, like as the founder of the company, we lose sight of this. That's not a great setup for people who might have invested at $17,000,000,000 but it's a great business with a great product, with a great customer base. You know, there will be an outcome for that company. It is humbling relative to, you know, the valuations of the 2021 era. But again, who is the team that you're in business with and how are they behaving? And how are you behaving more importantly as an investor when the team's back is collectively against the wall. **Harry Stebbings** [39:07]: What happens? Do these businesses go public? Do they get taken up by M and A? What do you think is the route for them? **Miles Clements** [39:14]: I think it's probably a good time to be in the LBO business. I think it's probably a good time to be in the Thoma Bravo, Vista, Blackstone, KKR business. There will be homes for a lot of those companies, you know, who get themselves to a sustainable place and they will find homes. These homes for a lot of companies will be different than what the aspiration was when the founder started the company. That's just the reality of this market. **Harry Stebbings** [39:37]: I totally agree. Are you with me in the camp of when the founder goes, my conviction goes? When Andre is at Miro, I'm like, Andre is still batting. If Andre is still batting, I'm still there. **Miles Clements** [39:47]: There is unmistakably something special about a founder led company. **Harry Stebbings** [39:51]: Mike being at Atlassian, when I interview him, I'm like, I still feel that you've and his passion is still there. **Miles Clements** [39:56]: Never bet against Mike Cannon Brookes. Absolutely But when the CEO's there, I'm like It's not that it can't work. Yeah. There are incredible professional CEOs. I could have It's now. If I could have Frank Slootman come be the CEO of a number of companies I work with, I bet the founders would say, Yeah, that's a great trade. I mean, there are incredible professional CEOs. What have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months as an investor? I believed this thing a year ago that in hindsight I feel very stupid for having said. I believe that, like, all of the generational investments in AI had been made. You know, I looked at my partner, Levine, incubating Scale AI, building a relationship with Alex Wang in 2016 in making investment. You know, the early investments in the labs, I sort of thought, listen, the bets were made eight years ago, and it's too late. And now we're all sort of fighting for what's left over. That was a really stupid thing to say, and I no longer believe it. That's probably the thing that I've, you know, fundamentally changed my mind on, both because those companies will be bigger than the outcomes that I probably envisioned a year ago, and there is still time to be a part of some of them, and because, like, the innovation flywheel is just getting started, we are barely scratching the surface. When **Harry Stebbings** [41:08]: you had the scale exit, for context, 14,900,000,000, amazing exit. Dan was unwaveringly the first investor there from the dorm room style moment. Epic. When you had that so, the company's got an offer for 14,900,000,000. Is there like a high fives and this is awesome around the table? **Miles Clements** [41:31]: No. There is an appropriate congratulations and acknowledgment to Dan. There is a huge, loud, full throated thank you to Alex. And then everybody gets the fuck back to work. It's a humbling industry, and you are only as good as the next thing that you do. How **Harry Stebbings** [41:47]: do you analyze that market stakes? There's one that I really struggle to get my head around in a way that not cynically, not paranoid, I just don't know. There's so many different providers that are all at very meaningful revenue scales. Yeah. The scale of Merkor market? Yeah. As we said with your Mercos, with your Turing's, with your I mean, there's 10 or 12 of them, Micro I **Miles Clements** [42:08]: probably struggle with services businesses in general getting valued on like extreme, extreme ARR multiples. **Harry Stebbings** [42:14]: You said about kind of the value of different revenue multiples. And we've spoken a lot about Mike at Atlassian before. There are clearly things that Mike is not able to do because he's public that private company founders like the Colossians are able to do. How do you think about the benefits of public versus private today? And given liquidity so inherent within secondary markets, like we're seeing with even as early as your Linear's where you're doing tenders, folding clay has tenders and then stripes on bigger scales has obviously much more liquid markets, why would anyone go public? **Miles Clements** [42:45]: Well, the reverse is true too. There are things that Mike can do as a public CEO and that public companies can do that private companies cannot. But I think you're asking the right question. I mean, I think there's a reason a lot of these founders are staying private longer. What are the things that you typically needed to access the public markets in order to do? Liquidity for employees. You can certainly do that now as a private company. M and A currency and just increasing your valuation benchmarks or your valuation mark, you can totally do that as private company. So I think that is all true. With that said, I think that applies to like the 10 best private companies in the world. Like Databricks can do those things. Stripe can do those things. There's a lot of companies that just do need to get public. **Harry Stebbings** [43:26]: The trouble is those companies need to get public, but they're in the, like, 2 to $10,000,000,000 range. Does anyone care about the 2 to $10,000,000,000 range? **Miles Clements** [43:34]: I think you've seen this phenomenon where I would actually peg the range a little bit lower. These companies that have gotten public in the, like, 2 to $45,000,000,000 range, and then they never really break out. I think that's a difficult that has been a difficult threshold for a lot of these companies to break through. And I do think this is why you see a lot of good companies waiting. People say, oh, it's because the investors will be underwater. I don't think that's actually the reason. I think it's because generally speaking, you wanna go public and you wanna be able to have like fairly clear line of sight to hitting the $5,000,000,000 threshold and trading beyond that because it's murky below that. Is **Harry Stebbings** [44:09]: this SaaSpocalypse an overreaction? Or is it actually the fact that we were just bluntly valuing them far too highly on actually relatively mediocre 18% to 20% growth rates, and this is a realisation of that? **Miles Clements** [44:21]: Fundamentally, people are valuing the future cash flows and the future terminal value of these companies differently. And I don't think that's wrong, but I do think this has been an over rotation. What is the most oversold stock? We are not a part of Figma, but have a lot of respect for that company. But I know that Dylan is a generational founder, and it's a very important company with an incredible financial profile. And it just feels for a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, oversold. **Harry Stebbings** [44:49]: We mentioned the liquidity inherent within kind of companies now as it goes later in later stage. How do you think about when's the right time to take chips off the table? **Miles Clements** [44:58]: I think you have to operate from the first principle of what is best for the company. Now, if the company is saying, hey, we're gonna do a big tender and a secondary round that it's okay if investors wanna sell. I think in those circumstances, it's generally wise to diversify. But I think that, like, it's gotta be the right thing for the company and for the founders first and foremost. **Harry Stebbings** [45:18]: Can I ask you I'm sorry to be so annoying? I used to be so nice. You should have done the show five years ago when I was a sweet little boy. That's just not true. Like when you look at say WeWork, Benchmark were fantastically smart to get out of it. When you look at Lightspeed and Jeremy Liu selling with Snap, they were very wise to get out of it. We're seeing prices so far ahead of company traction now. It's not in their interest for the investor to sell. Jesus, we're paying 4 years ahead of Totally. It's in our interest. **Miles Clements** [45:47]: It's so situational. So like as a principle, do I think it's good to get liquidity back when it's available? I do. But it's so situational. You use the WeWork example, like we were not a part of WeWork, but had I been a shareholder in that company when it was worth like $50,000,000,000 I don't know a whole lot about the commercial real estate market and the office space market, but I probably would have been seeking liquidity. Like, that just feels rational. You know But **Harry Stebbings** [46:12]: does it not seem rational to seek liquidity at Miro at $17,000,000,000 **Miles Clements** [46:15]: I think that was you know, we didn't take liquidity out of Miro at $17,000,000,000 But again, what was Andre doing? What was the founder doing? What did he you know, what was the the course that he wanted for the company? And that's, like, the only thing that matters. The example I would point to is CrowdStrike. Sameer Gandhi and John Locke intersected CrowdStrike when it was, you know, there was like $1,000,000 of software revenue and there was a 9,000,000 consulting business. And like, that was the company. And I think they invested in 2011 at one hundred sixty Post. Now there have been nonstop opportunities to diversify and sell CrowdStrike stock. It's a public company. You could do that today. But Sameer and John led the next round. They led the next round. They bought the IPO. And it's a $100,000,000,000 company today. We're sure glad we didn't take chips off the table. **Harry Stebbings** [47:01]: The question there of like, you mentioned obviously buying into the IPO and kind of the decision to hold thereafter. Obviously, to the core, I have the evergreen vehicle, which there's been a lot of talk about. Do you think that venture firms should have the responsibility of managing the book into the publics? Or do you think it should be a distributor LPs and it's discussed from there? **Miles Clements** [47:19]: Yeah, I think fundamentally we're in the business of identifying outlier founders. If you're a multistage fund that gives you the flexibility to stick with some of those founders for the long run, you should definitely do it. I think in the George Kurtz case, absolutely worth doing. In the Mike Cannon Brookes, Farquhar case, absolutely worth doing. But not every company has the mechanics to compound for a long time. You can't just do it as a blanket rule. **Harry Stebbings** [47:46]: I don't like public markets right now. And I think it's a no. It's just a bad place to be because you're seeing the casinoization of public markets where a citrini report can wipe billions of dollars off, Anthropic doing a security release impacts CrowdStrike? I think the public markets Are no longer rational. **Miles Clements** [48:06]: Yeah. To me, it's not good or bad. It's just different asset class. And it's stick to what you're good at. And I don't think we would be excellent stock pickers, but I think we're pretty good at what we do in terms of early stage technology investing. So I just think it's an asset class that I'm never going to be best in the world at understanding public stocks, and I think that's okay. **Harry Stebbings** [48:24]: Who's the best sourcer inside Accel? Sourcers finding great companies. **Miles Clements** [48:29]: Christine Esserman. Really, really good eye for companies. And she relentless in getting in front of founders. She's great. Who's the best picker? Andrew Bracha by far. Andrew is wise. Andrew has seen success at incredible scale. He's our best picker. **Harry Stebbings** [48:46]: When it comes to winning, core part that we don't talk about enough, I don't think. Who's the one you're like, okay, we need to win the deal. We need to bring in. **Miles Clements** [48:55]: I think Sameer Gandhi is incredibly compelling and hits it off with founders in a very special way. **Harry Stebbings** [49:01]: Do you think the best founders need your help? I was going through the pillars of venture there in terms of sourcing, selecting, securing, and servicing. And I was like, do think you the best founders actually need your help? **Miles Clements** [49:12]: I think need our help is an overstatement. I think of the role of a good investor. There's basically these like bumper decisions that come up a couple of times a year. Like if you're a founder, your life is a bunch of little decisions and then a couple of really big decisions. The little decisions are like, you know, design decisions about the product and pricing and should we dial up CAC and should we make this higher? You don't need an investor micromanaging you through all the little decisions. I do think every year, there's probably a couple of like big decisions where having a good sounding board can be really useful. Should we do this partnership? Should we make this acquisition? Do we need to pivot? In there, yeah, I think having a good investor or just a good partner to the business can be really useful. It's all about striking the right balance. You like being **Harry Stebbings** [50:01]: a **Miles Clements** [50:02]: board **Harry Stebbings** [50:02]: member? **Miles Clements** [50:02]: Yeah. I love it. **Harry Stebbings** [50:03]: Who's the best board member you sit on a board with? **Miles Clements** [50:05]: The best board member I've ever seen in action. My friend Ravi at Sequoia is a very good board member. He was at Sequoia. Now he's doing his own company. He's done a lot of different things. He's been an operator. He's been a buyout guy. He's been a growth equity investor. But I think it's more about his demeanor and the humility with which he delivers feedback. He has this way of sort of saying, let me politely make an observation and you can sort of choose to accept it or reject it. There's just sort of like wisdom and humility in how he communicates, which I appreciate. **Harry Stebbings** [50:36]: If you're a founder listening to this, what advice would you give them on how to observe for potentially not helpful behavior from a board? There's a lot of bad board members. **Miles Clements** [50:46]: I think there's generally an inverse correlation between how vocal somebody is and how helpful they actually are. So the person who just has to get the first and last word in and shows up at the board meeting and and has to teach you something that you didn't already know. Like, I don't actually think that **Harry Stebbings** [51:04]: is the **Miles Clements** [51:04]: model for **Harry Stebbings** [51:04]: wisdom as a board member. It's a brilliant one. The coin box that rattles loudest has the least in it. And another one that a fan told me the other day, I thought was helpful, is like my lesson from boards, is VCs are great at identifying when to hire someone, and they're awful at identifying who to hire. Yep. Your buddy is probably like the CRO of Atlassian. That's not great for my tanning and ARR business. Right. That's not a good thing. **Miles Clements** [51:29]: That's exactly right. **Harry Stebbings** [51:29]: So yes. Dude, I'd love to do a quick fire with you. Okay? I'd love it. So seed firm, Series A firm, and growth firm that you have to invest in. And obviously, you put all your money in Accel. Yeah. Yeah, of course. **Miles Clements** [51:42]: Seed Fund, I really like the guys at Liquid too. Nate and Matt Mulvey. Those guys are prolific. They have an incredible network. They have great tasting companies and they are kind, enjoyable people to work with. So when they send me something, I take it very seriously. Series A? The vocabulary on what a Series A is these days has evolved. So I'm not sure how you would bucket these guys. I really like the team at Meritech. I think they have very good tasting companies. They do some Series B and later stage things also, but great tasting companies. And they are gritty and they hustle. I would say it's not coincidental that Max and Alex were also trained at Summit Partners. I really respect that part of their pedigree, but I really like those guys. Great. How can you not acknowledge how successful Josh has been at Thrive? I really admire the way that they have scaled a business that not only can initiate investments and invest across funds, but like really reflect their conviction at the late stages. So, you know, we compete with them fiercely. We also work with them. I've gotten to work with board, which has been a great experience. **Harry Stebbings** [52:49]: Miles is amazing. **Miles Clements** [52:50]: He's great. He is my much more articulate, intelligent VC alter ego, the other Miles. But we have a lot of competitive respect for those guys. **Harry Stebbings** [52:57]: He's also like a marathon runner in like two hours, ten minutes. This guy is like a specimen of could a human finish **Miles Clements** [53:04]: a marathon in two hours and ten minutes like on a motorcycle, but it's definitely a I perfect see **Harry Stebbings** [53:08]: Miles, and I'm like, oh, I need to be better as a human being. Different strength. I totally agree with that. **Miles Clements** [53:13]: I could win in an arm wrestling match. **Harry Stebbings** [53:15]: If you could add one person to your team, who would you add? This can be completely hypothetical. It can be Pat Brady. It can be Josh Kushner. It can be Elac Gil. They are going to most move the needle in our ability to win. **Miles Clements** [53:28]: I'd probably try my very hardest to talk Mike Cannon Brookes into retiring from operating into being an investor. He would never do it. If I could like go to war side by side every day with somebody, like it would be Mike, never bet against Mike. What about other VCs? **Harry Stebbings** [53:43]: I agree with you, I think Mike would amazing. I'd probably take Neil Mehta. I don't know anyone who has the investor breadth that Neil has from doing windsurfs first round and sticking with them throughout many pivots to doing Carvana in the public markets and having that breadth of aperture. Or Mickey Malker. Mickey Malker's ability to see trends so early is just exceptional. **Miles Clements** [54:06]: I'm gonna answer this one, but it's a really good question I hadn't thought about. Do you ask this one a lot? This is a really good one. **Harry Stebbings** [54:11]: Thank you. I saved it for you. **Miles Clements** [54:12]: Oh, thank you for that. This is great. I'm jet lagged, discombobulated, and I didn't prepare for this. I think somebody who I not only have a lot of professional respect for, but somebody who I personally just like a lot, it's actually Matt Bornstein at Andreessen. Do you know Matt? **Harry Stebbings** [54:27]: He **Miles Clements** [54:28]: works with Martin. He's deeply technical and very thoughtful, was instrumental in their finding the Cursor investment. Matt doesn't like admitting that he also has an MBA from Harvard, but we sat next to each other for a semester at school. I really like him. I enjoy spending time around him, and I think he's really, really smart. **Harry Stebbings** [54:45]: What advice would you give to someone starting their career and venture today? **Miles Clements** [54:50]: I would give the same advice that Arthur Patterson gave me and says all the time to us as a firm, which is, it's just about professionalism. Arthur says this thing that anybody, any firm can be professional over short periods of time. But his aspiration in starting Accel with Jim was to maintain a standard of professionalism over long extended periods of time. That means respecting the process, respecting the partner meeting, respecting the portfolio review, respecting the rituals of the firm, and going about the job in a professional way. I would give that same advice. Tell me, **Harry Stebbings** [55:25]: what deal did you not do that you wish you'd done in the last twelve months? **Miles Clements** [55:29]: I think ElevenLabs is a clear company that we wish we had been a part of. We haven't spent enough time with the founder, which is our loss. Think we really regret that one. Did you **Harry Stebbings** [55:39]: try and do the $11,000,000,000 round? We didn't. We didn't. **Miles Clements** [55:42]: You know, as I said, nobody has a perfect success rate. Like this is one that at the next off-site, we will beat ourselves up over. But as I understand it, very special founder, very clearly an important part of the modern AI stack. So that one stinks. **Harry Stebbings** [55:54]: What's worse, losing or not seeing it? Because losing everyone says not seeing it, not seeing it, but losing really sucks. **Miles Clements** [56:01]: They're equally bad, but losing stings more. Having had the opportunity and failed stings. **Harry Stebbings** [56:07]: Can I ask which loss hurts the most? **Miles Clements** [56:09]: I don't know that I would characterize it as we lost, but the company that I really, really loved, the founder and we didn't get there, was and a bridge. We actually hosted this AI dinner a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, I'm going to manipulate the seating chart and get to sit next to Shiv because I just I think he's like generational and very good. And I regret that we didn't get to work with him. **Harry Stebbings** [56:31]: What win feels the best, that moment of jubilation? **Miles Clements** [56:34]: There was one where I was going through some personal things and happened to be able to compete for and ultimately win the opportunity to work with Linear. That one on a personal level was maybe the best week. It had been the worst couple of months that I'd experienced in a long time. There was this very surreal week where it felt like Cary might decide to raise capital. I basically decided that I was going to go park myself in Southern California. He lives in Del Mar outside of San Diego until he basically decided whether or not he was going to raise money. **Harry Stebbings** [57:05]: When you say parked yourself, I didn't mean it's badly, but he literally parked outside of his apartment. **Miles Clements** [57:10]: No. I got a hotel room somewhere, and I would get up and go for runs and see if he wanted to hang out and try not to bother him. But in the event that he said, yeah, I'd love to get lunch. Like, I just wanted to be nearby. It's a little bit creepy as I say it out loud, but at the time, you know, it seemed right. And I had a lot of stuff going on at home. It was my best friend, my best friend Craig's birthday. Craig, by way, is the only reason I got into this industry to begin with. He got me my first job and then my second job. And, you know, I was flying back and forth. I would I would go home, see my kids, go to San Diego, sit there, try to hang out with Carrie, go home, attend Craig's birthday, which he wouldn't have cared about, but he's my best friend and I needed to do it, go back down to San Diego. And there was just a lot coming to a boil in my personal life. And when Cary called and said that, you know, he wanted to work together, like, it was pretty euphoric. I will always remember that week, and it's been a special company to work with. But on a personal level, that one felt pretty good. **Harry Stebbings** [58:00]: The two companies that I've never had more requests for intros to is that I had just carry every growth investor wanted to meet him before that round. It was like it was annoying, to be honest. He he's he And then lovable was really annoying. That really annoying. Pre the round that Xenia did Yeah. Because we're in the round before, it it was just embarrassing. Yeah. I mean, like, five to 10 a day. And it is very awkward because Who else are you getting bothered about right now? I should I should **Miles Clements** [58:28]: go see them while I'm here. **Harry Stebbings** [58:29]: Yeah. There's two or three. And it's so funny. You see the investor wins where it's just like Yeah. And you don't bother sending it to the founders because it's like, I'll send you a list of names of people who want to. **Miles Clements** [58:38]: Yeah. And it's **Harry Stebbings** [58:39]: even worse for me because I often have them on the show, and so people assume that you're great friends. Yeah. Yeah. No. I know. I just met, like, you know Right. Whoever it is when we did the show. I just assumed you were **Miles Clements** [58:48]: best friends **Harry Stebbings** [58:49]: with everyone who comes on the show. Best friends. Final one for you, dude. What are you most excited about when you look forward? I think it's really important to be optimistic. Optimists make money. Passimists are right. Yeah. What are you most excited about? **Miles Clements** [59:01]: Honestly, the thing that I'm the most excited about is watching the younger team at Accel flourish. I'm not smart enough to predict where the world is gonna be a decade from now, but I can tell you that Christine Esserman and Ben Quaso and Josh and Rohan and a bunch of folks on the team, Gonzo and everyone who's gonna be mad that I'm leaving them out. Like we have such a talented team. They are the unsung heroes of the firm that don't get necessarily the attention that they deserve. I'm so excited to see what they're doing a decade from now, and, like, I'm proud to know them. **Harry Stebbings** [59:28]: Dude, it's such a pleasure to have you on. It's so nice to see you in person. Thank you so much for **Miles Clements** [59:32]: joining **Harry Stebbings** [59:32]: me, dude. This is **Miles Clements** [59:33]: a blast. Thanks, Harry. **Harry Stebbings** [59:36]: But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [59:38]: over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable. Airtable combines AI with the scale of an award winning infinitely flexible no code system, a platform where you can see all of your data in one place and use it to make really big picture decisions. Think of it like mission control for your company. Airtable goes beyond organization and automating repetitive tasks. It lets you use your data to inform strategy, monitor progress, and take action. Every cell is capable of performing hundreds of AI powered tasks like web research or localization and using those results to inform and update hundreds or thousands of other cells and workflows in real time. 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