Des Traynor
39 statements across 4 episodes · 4 bullish · 12 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jul 18, 2022 by Des Traynor · said 24 times in 13 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Des Traynor's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (14), Shishir Mehrotra (4), Hubert Palan (3), Eoghan McCabe (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Figma’s IPO: The Full Breakdown & Why Melio’s $2.5BN Acquisition is “Discouraging” · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- George Sivulka, Co-Founder & CEO @Hebbia: The Future of Foundation Models | E1250 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025
- Benchmark vs a16z: Why Stage Specific Firms Win · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Daniel Khachab: "We Are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent" | E1220 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eoghan McCabe, CEO @Intercom: Freedom of Speech, Censorship and Government Control | E1213 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 3 mentions in 1 episode
2020 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: The 4 Phases of Effective Decision-Making, The No 1 Quality of Good Decisions, How To Approach Effective OKR Setting, & How To Optimise and Improve Your Operating Cadence with Shishir Mehrotra, Founder & CEO @ Coda
- 20VC: Intercom Founder, Eoghan McCabe on How To Deal with the Weight of Expectation, Having Your Identity Tied To Your Company, How To Be Your Authentic Self Even with Stakeholders & Why There Are No Rules
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
Everything said about Des Traynor, oldest first
Jul 18, 2022
Des Traynor: Startups With Horizontal Runway Should Delay Moving Upmarket
“If you think you just have loads of run room horizontally in the market, so you can just keep getting more and more customers like the ones you already have. And I mean, exactly like them then I, and you don't have to change your product to do that. Then I thi…”
Jul 18, 2022
Des Traynor: B2B Buyers Only Care About Making or Saving Money
“This is going to sound quite reductive and it kind of is, but I have two numbers to worry about Harry. Are you going to make me money or save me money? And if so, how, and why should I believe you? And that's what the buyer wants to know. Cause they're just tr…”
Jul 18, 2022 negative
Jul 18, 2022
Des Traynor: Startups must test core differentiators before building standard infrastructure
“My advice in those cases is work on your differentiators first. So in the case of say an email client, oh, we have a new take on email. I would say, right here, here's what I believe. I believe you're a competent engineer. I believe you can work out SMTP and I…”
Jul 18, 2022 negative
Des Traynor: Resume brand names rarely guarantee candidate high performance
“Probably earlier in my career, just being blinded by the logo, I think was probably the biggest thing. Like, such and such a person worked at such and such a company... But that's probably the single biggest thing is like assuming that because somebody worked …”
Jul 18, 2022
Des Traynor: Follow-the-Money Forces Horizontal Software Into Enterprise B2B
“Inevitably, like, the problem with most of those use cases is, once you start to follow the money, you end up back in B to B SaaS land, right? Like, or at least B to B land anyway, right? There's not a lot of money selling software to wedding planners. There's…”
Jul 18, 2022
Des Traynor: Horizontal Software Products Must Pick Specific Marketing Lanes
“All of your desperate attempts to horizontalize yourself When it comes to marketing, you still need to pick a lane and say, here's what we are. Even if you're just saying it for one person, you still need to say it. Like you can't be everything to everyone. Ca…”
Jul 18, 2022 neutral
Jul 18, 2022 positive
Jul 18, 2022 neutral
Jul 18, 2022
Des Traynor: Evaluate features by total cost of ownership, not build effort
“Every complex new feature we build has to get marketed by a marketer and has to get sold by a salesperson and supported by a support person. So you have to think about the total cost of ownership of that feature, not just how hard was it to build.”
Jul 18, 2022 neutral
Jul 18, 2022 bullish
Jul 18, 2022 neutral
Jul 18, 2022 neutral
Des Traynor: High valuations tempt founders into grand statements over execution
“Because when you start telling, if you have to do, if you just sit down with a journalist and say, well, you're now worth whatever billion dollars they're worth. You feel obliged to say all this new shit, right? Like you feel obliged to say, well, we're actual…”
Jul 18, 2022 negative
Des Traynor: Functional teams require varied skill levels, not just A-players
“The ingredients of a team is not like just a load of people all walking around telling each other the best. Like you actually need a mix and people come to companies to learn. And by definition, that means they're not the best. They believe they can get better…”
Jul 18, 2022 bullish
Jul 18, 2022 bearish
Nov 15, 2023 neutral
Traynor: Winning in AI software requires more than LLM agnosticism
“I think it's a really important attribute to be able to transition from one LLM to another. Because if somebody does unlock new power, you'll want to be able to use it very quickly. I just, I don't know. I think winning involves more than just simply being agn…”
Nov 15, 2023 neutral
Des Traynor: AI infrastructure will consolidate into 3-4 price-competing providers
“They'll probably be three or four big providers is my guess. You'll be probably GCP, AWS, maybe OpenAI directly, and I'm sure Azure. That's how I think that layer will play out, and they'll end up in pretty direct price competition with each other.”
Nov 15, 2023 bearish
Traynor: Thin-wrapper AI startups face higher mortality from platform updates
“I think it's reasonable to assume in this massive sea of uncertainty that we're in, you know, like the margins being, the compute being so expensive the margins being so thin, that a higher than normal amount of these startups will die for one of the following…”
Nov 15, 2023 negative
Des Traynor: Startups shouldn't market themselves as new versions of incumbents
“Most startups with marketing with B to B or B to C, they forget to say the reason, they forget to say the thing that makes them unique, that's valuable. To the users. And if they're going up against an incumbent, the worst thing they can say is like, oh, we're…”
Nov 15, 2023 negative
Des Traynor: Founders should avoid raising billions at astronomical valuations during market frenzies
“Here's a shit lesson that's just true, right? If you're in the weirdest capital market in history and everyone's telling you to, like, raise billions of dollars at, like, ridiculous valuations, don't do it.”
Nov 15, 2023
Des Traynor: Scaling startups cannot rely exclusively on hiring top-tier talent
“You can't only hire like A++ superstars because we'll be waiting all year for our next engineer. So you start to work out ways to like scale and you say, you know what, how about the A++ person leads the team and they can hopefully drag the B person up to an A…”
Nov 15, 2023 negative
Nov 15, 2023
Des Traynor on why point solutions struggle against vendor bundling
“I generally think if you're playing in somebody else's playground and you're bringing in one little thing even if you do have a reason why your thing will be definitely better persistently and sustainably, it needs to overcome a lot just to be worth the cost o…”
Nov 15, 2023 bearish
Traynor: Expensive AI API calls compress traditional 80% SaaS gross margins
“I think a second one will just be margin compression. The B to B SaaS model, LTV, CAC dynamics, and all that sort of stuff, it does have some assumption in there of like, 80 to 90% margins. Maybe 70 to 90% margin is kind of what you expect if you're running li…”
Nov 15, 2023
Nov 15, 2023 negative
Traynor: Intercom's early blog prioritized general audience over buyer persona
“I think probably I prioritized growing an audience for the blog, overgrowing the right audience for the blog. And the net net is that we have a large audience for the blog. People who are like design or into product or even into engineering. People are maybe i…”
Nov 15, 2023 bearish
Nov 15, 2023 neutral
Nov 15, 2023
Nov 15, 2023
Nov 15, 2023
Traynor: Startups should keep their physical office space slightly too small
“You always want your office to be a little bit too small, because it gets you this sort of vibrance and this kind of sense of hustle, like, this should always be a pile of work, and like, There should always be a sense of like, holy shit, we've got so much to …”
Nov 15, 2023
Nov 15, 2023
Des Traynor: Repeat founders bring executive leadership skills, not GTM tactics
“The stuff that I would definitely bring Into the next company is not specific, like go to market tactics or like bottoms up adoption versus like going into the top of the market. It's not like marketing channels or tactics or anything. I think what it would be…”
Nov 24, 2023 neutral
Traynor: AI infrastructure will consolidate into 3-4 providers in direct price competition
“There'll probably be three or four big providers is my guest, probably GCP, AWS, maybe open AI directly. And I'm sure Azure, that's how I think that that layer will play out. And they'll end up in direct price competition with each other.”
Nov 24, 2023 bullish
Traynor: Action-capable Siri will transform desktop and iOS interaction models
“I think what they'll win is this idea of Siri might finally become useful. Siri is currently not useful because it doesn't really have enough smarts, but I think when Siri can be as conversational as ChatGPT and can take actions on the device, it'll change the…”