The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: The Venture Model is Broken | You Need to be Greedy and Selfish to Win Early Stage Investing | Why Margins Do Not Matter for Early-Stage Startups | The Growth Rate that is Required in a World of AI with Gili Raanan, Founder @ Cyberstarts
133 snips
Mar 28, 2026 
Gili Raanan, founder of Cyberstarts and longtime cybersecurity investor, gets into why venture math may be breaking, the madness of $150M seed rounds, and why early investors must stay ruthless on price. He also explores extreme startup growth, created versus existing markets, AI-era margins, mega funds, secondaries, and the tensions between LPs and VCs.
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Fast Growth Becomes Company DNA
- Exceptional growth is the strongest signal of a healthy business and often becomes part of company DNA.
- Gili Raanan cites Wiz going $1M to $2M to $8M to $24M in quarterly sales, and Cyera rebounding from two zero quarters to $12M of new business.
Why Some Great Startups Plateau And Others Expand
- Most startups plateau, but exceptions either outgrow niche limits or invent entirely new markets.
- NoName surged from about $3M to $15M then slowed because API security stayed niche, while Island built a multibillion-dollar enterprise browser category customers never said they wanted.
Too Much Money Hurts Only Weak Businesses
- Too much capital only hurts when growth is being engineered with poor sales efficiency rather than real product-market fit.
- Gili Raanan says if magic number is awful, cash gets wasted, but if yield is decent, extra hundreds of millions simply fund the next years of company building.