Depending on your point of view, the news that 28 year-old podcaster Harry Stebbings has just raised $400 million for his third fund is either hugely inspiring, or pretty bloomin’ annoying.

The overachiever was even featured on the 

 in Europe list for the first time not this year, not last year but way back in 

Whatever your take (and don’t let jealousy rule your emotions here), Stebbings has clearly been putting in the work for some time.

We know what you’re thinking – surely his industry or familial connections helped give him a leg-up right? Well, reportedly not. Apparently Stebbings started the Twenty Minute VC podcast in 2015, with just $50 to his name and precisely zero contacts in the venture capital game. He did, however, manage to bag an interview with VC legend Guy Kawasaki for the first episode of the show, published on 10th January 2015, when Stebbings was 19. (“I learned inexperience does not inherently mean not valuable. There are incredibly high potential people at the very beginning of their career,” Stebbings recently 

What else do we know? We know that Stebbings did work behind a desk at venture capital firm Atomico but left in May 2017 after just six months in their employ. And we know that he co-founded his own VC firm Stride in 2018 with a hundred million quid’s worth of investment before eventually stepping down.

It wouldn’t be until May 2020 – when most of us were baking banana bread and bingeing 

 during lockdown – that Stebbings would launch his own VC project, the 20VC fund, with the aim of focusing on investments in North America and Europe.

In June 2021, the company raised $140 million in funding, and to date its largest investment is Tripledot Studios, a mobile games studio in London. It also has fingers in pies as diverse as: Nex Health, Captions.ai, Linktree, Linear and Merge, with over 

 as of this November – thanks in large part to the massive coup Stebbings just managed to pull off.

, the influx of new cash comes from the investment company of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Horsley Bridge and RIT Capital Partners, alongside around 40 tech entrepreneurs, including founders from Canva, Deliveroo, Spotify, and Vinted, as well as Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner.

The new dosh will be divided up between $125 million for seed investments and $275m for Series A cheques into existing tech companies, with the total cash to be split evenly between investments in Europe and the US. Stebbing manages the fund alongside three investment partners and a 13-person media team.

“The work you do in private is the work you are rewarded for in public. Today’s news is 10 years in the making. $400M raised. Time to get back to work and work harder than ever,” Stebbings 

 after the news broke, raising the question, can’t Gen Z ever just have a day off and enjoy a nice cup of tea and some biscuits?

Speaking to website Sifted, Stebbings suggested his business acumen comes in part from tips gleaned from the 2,750 or so interviews conducted with high net worth individuals for his podcast. “I learnt this from the podcast: At the end of each show, I’d say ‘I loved this… Who are three other journalists/founders/investors I should speak to?... Would you mind introducing me?”

Using this method Stebbings says he meets at least two new LPs per week. It’s a snowballing effect leading to an ever-growing contact list. And when he does cold call potential new clients, he does so with a whole list of favourable references from previous podcast guests, meaning he “

calls with multi-million dollar founders because I’ve got to do the reference

It’s pretty savvy, treating his ventures not as disparate entities, but as facets of a whole, with everything feeding into Stebbings’ upward trajectory. Even his socials are on point, with his videos attracting 15 million views per month on TikTok and YouTube. “The portfolio loves us,” Stebbing says. “We’re like an outsourced media agency for them.”

He’s also keen to point out that he works seven days a week, dedicating 80% of his time to the fund, and the rest to the podcast – which does make one wonder when he manages to do normal things like go to the cinema, or see his family. “My job is to find great founders before anyone else,” Stebbings tells Sifted, “and I want to see the spinouts from their companies”.

Despite his rocket-like ascent, at present, Stebbings isn’t looking to bring on partners to expand the investment team further. “Politics is a killer. I don’t want associates, and it’s super important to me that everyone can write cheques,” he explains.

What makes Stebbings’ recent round of funding more miraculous is that he recently 

 “Now is a S*** time to be raising a venture fund,” opining that “Every fund is back in market NOW wanting to get into the Jan 25' allocations for LPs” and as a result the “liquidity window remains closed.”

It seems then, that by a savvy, multi-pronged approach, Stebbings has beaten the odds, cementing his place as a business savant before his 30th birthday. Whether he can maintain this pace remains to be seen. And forget that downtime; as Stebbings himself has said, there’s work to be done.

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