Matt Murphy
Partner, Menlo Ventures. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investor@mmurph ↗menlovc.com/team/matt-murphy ↗
Matt Murphy is a Partner at Menlo Ventures focusing on multi-stage venture investments across AI infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, and robotics. He previously spent over 15 years as a partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he managed the iFund and served as a board observer at Google.
1shows
1appearances
35statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
5said about them ↓ Everything Matt Murphy said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Open-source models will not displace top foundation models like Anthropic
“I think the foundation models, let's say specifically Anthropic, have such special models. This can be hard for somebody to just kind of say, I've used open source with my data. It's going to be functional and positive for some amount of what you're doing, but…”
Small stakes in massive outliers beat high ownership in mid-sized exits
“You have to be in the big outliers to drive great returns, and you're better off being in them at a very small percent than owning a large percent of a company that exits for three to 500. Those just aren't going to move the needle.”
Lovable scaled from zero to $300M ARR within one year
“Where you see a company go from zero to something like three hundred million in a year. I think we intercepted them around, well, we kind of got, tried to get in when they were around 30, 30 of error, but we around, we did was around one 50.”
AI compute costs cap startup gross margins at 60% to 70%
“You know, a lot of companies, just because of the cost of computing inference, it's harder to say you're going to be an 80, 90% gross margin company anymore. But, you know, great companies are, you know, 60, 70% gross margin.”
Using Anthropic drives higher retention and revenue than open-source models
“What's happening is companies see this, like, yes, I can get lower cost, but if I use Anthropic, it actually increases my customer retention. I generate more revenue. I get users to Engage with the platform more. And that is what the data is suggesting now wit…”
Menlo Ventures' Anthropic position is worth over $10 billion
“No, our position is, is north of that, but that's not that you can do the math on what carry usually is.”
Market will not sustain 60 independent AI model companies
“There's no way in hell that, you know, we're going to have 60 independent model companies in addition to all the open source and everything.”
Anthropic matched ChatGPT performance pre-launch using 1/50th of the capital
“All the benchmarks you could see that they were kind of better or at the same level of performances as ChatGPT at the time. And they'd spent like, I don't know, A 50th of the capital.”
Foundation model markets will never be dominated by one player
“These markets are never dominated by one player. There's going to be an alternative.”
VC funds should never sell early stakes in outlier winners
“Like I think if you're a believer, I think more than ever, we're in an environment where your outliers, your winners will compound and drive fund returns. So those are certainly not the ones you want to sell from.”
Bad actors harm secondary markets by marketing fake startup access
“I think the problem is, you know, it's secondary markets, SPVs, they've just become, Too annoying and aggravating in the market to founders. And someone else is basically like, I don't want you marketing my stock. My, and I want to be the one who's figuring ou…”
Enterprise AI workloads will split across proprietary and open-source models
“So I think, you know, you're going to have the combination of something like that, a family of models from Anthropic, and then a set of open source models and things that you train with your own data, and you're going to look across that whole tapestry and say…”
OpenRouter is wildly profitable and operating at unexpected scale
“Like this company wildly profitable and, you know at a scale that would probably shocked most people”
Menlo Ventures raised its instant seed check limit to $8M
“We've got the specific seed strategy where three partners can, you know, right up to an eight million dollar check, like on the spot that used to, that number used to be three.”
Negative signaling from institutional seed investments is obsolete
“Everyone used to make this argument in the seed world, like, oh, there's negative signaling if you let an institution in, in there, and I think that's kind of out the window, As well, because for the right companies, like everybody's getting preempted and the …”
Multi-team VC platform expansion destroys partner alignment
“When you go full, full stack and you have like five different teams, you start doing sector, like everybody's kind of out for a pass and Sometimes I've seen this in other places where you feel like, well, I could do whatever I could do great things, but I can'…”
Menlo Ventures broke its standard investment criteria to back Anthropic
“And I'll, that's, I'll take you back to our investment in, in Anthropic. Like, same thing. It's like, This doesn't really fit. This isn't what we normally do, but wow, if this works, I mean, you got such a special founder in Dario and an amazing market.”
European founders have more grit than Bay Area founders
“There's kind of more grit to be a great entrepreneur in Europe than let's say in the Bay area where, you know, it's not that it's not incredibly hard to get into YC and just be a founder. I think in Europe, it's always been a lot harder.”
Small initial check increases next-round lead likelihood by 10x
“And I would say if you get even a wedge into a company, you're 10 X more likely to be able to participate significantly in the next round or lead.”
AI startups are reaching $100M revenue in one year
“When we look around and see these companies doing zero to a hundred in a year, never seen anything like it. And there's more examples of that than I can probably count right now.”
Outlier venture investments do not require internal partnership dissent
“I don't really ascribe to this point of view where you need like a bunch of no's and there's one person who's a yes, and that leads to an outlier. I know there are examples of that, but that's not really been my experience in the firms I've been part of or wit…”
Menlo Ventures invested $10M in Anthropic before raising $500M+ SPV
“The first check was a little over 10 and then, you know, the, so that was kind of the starter check because the average, like I said, you try to kind of, you know, venture fund kind of have this kind of narrow window of what you invest, but then the next round…”
Menlo Ventures does not aspire to raise a $10B+ fund
“We don't have a 10 or twenty billion dollar fund, nor do we aspire to have that.”
Menlo Ventures signed Anthropic term sheet two weeks after LP meeting
“So we literally came out of that meeting and said, all right, we've got to do this. We've got to figure out a way to lead the round. And two weeks later, We signed a term sheet. We, you know, aggregated all the kind of demand from RLPs and folks we knew and, y…”
The other half of the tape: Matt Murphy's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 3Mitchell Green 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 5
2026 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- OpenRouter CEO: Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating the US | Why Enterprises Fear OpenAI & Anthropic
- Why You Need a $1B Fund To Do Series A | SpaceX at $2TRN & Data Centers in Space | Groq's $20BN Deal · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mitchell Green: Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Gitlab Founder, Sid Sijbrandji on Lessons From Scaling from 400 to 1,000 People in 1 Year, Why You Have To Have A Low Level Of Shame On The Product You Release & The Secret To Making Remote Work So Effectively At Scale
- 20VC: Carta Founder Henry Ward on Why The Best Companies Are Not Product Led But Distribution Led, 3 Requirements Needed For A New Market/Investment To Be Exciting and Why Small Markets Are So Attractive
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Matt's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Partner, Menlo Ventures | 1 | 35 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |