20VC's Big Fat Quiz of the Year: Founder, Fund and Breakout Company of 2025 | Predictions for 2026: The Company to Buy, The Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win 2026 and The Tailwinds NVIDIA Will Face

AGENDA: 03:48 Founder of the Year 2025 06:58 Product of the Year 10:05 Fund of the Year 20:52 Breakout Companies of 2025: Who Made the Biggest Impact? 26:57 Biggest Surprises of 2025 32:57 Predictions for 2026: Top Performing Tech Stocks of the Year 35:25 B2B Stocks to Watch 38:31 Why Salesforce Could Be the Buy of 2026 47:11 Google, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft: Buy One, Short One 55:38 IPO Speculations: Who Will Go Public in 2026 01:00:57 The Impact of AI on Employment

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think we see four IPOs backloaded next year. SpaceX goes out first. Canva comes out of nowhere second. Databricks does it in the back half of the year because it's just time. Anthropic does it at the end of the year. OpenAI probably should have gone first, but it's burning too much. There's no ceiling on venture, which changes all the math and calculations. You haven't missed the boat as investors because what agents can do, we just started.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  If unemployment rises up even two or three points, regardless of the reason, could just be the business cycle. You'll see a tech lash that makes what we're dealing with now an understatement.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Society will be terrified of AI.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  If the robots are going to take over society, I want to be sure that I own the robots.

• 0:41Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC and the new show of the year for us has been our weekly show with Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll. It's been incredible to see the response that it's got. And for the final episode, we are doing a big fat quiz of the year. What does that mean? It means we are giving out awards to best fund of 2025, best founder of 2025, best product of 2025. And then we do a look forward and we make some predictions. Which public stock is the stock to buy, stock to sell? Which companies will go public in 2025 and so much more. This was great fun to do and I always want your feedback, [email protected]. Let me know what we can do to make these better for you.

• 1:23Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:05Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:49Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:34Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:20Harry Stebbings?

  Leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Lovable, Synthesia, Clay, Vanta. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, scale your support, and give team members time to focus on the really high-level strategic work, learn more about Finn at fin.ai/20vc.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:41Harry Stebbings?

  Boys, it is the big fat quiz of the year. I don't know if you have this in America. The big fat quiz of the year is like a comedy show with Jack Whitehall, where they do like a review of what's happened and then they do your predictions for next year. I thought that, you know, I could be the Jack Whitehall in this scenario and we could do a review of what happened last, in the last 12 months, and then look forward on 2026 and some predictions. And so we're gonna start with number one, the most important part of all of our ecosystem, the founders. Founder of the year for 2025, who would you have as your founder of the year?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Listen, I know what the product of the year is. The product of the year is Claude 3.5 or 3.7. Without this, we have no vibe coding. Without this, we have no Lovable, no vacations to Greece, no Replit, no Cursor that really works, no Gamma. None of these products, many of which existed for years, did not work until, we could debate when it was. They worked with Claude 3.5 at the end of last year, but they didn't real, they weren't great until 3.7 and then 4 this year. And 4 changed our lives. And you may not use it, you may use the outputs, you may use Agent Force, which is not all that. You may use Cursor, which is 90, still 90% powered by Anthropic. You may use Gamma, or Replit, or, again, Lovable for Harry.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  None of these products we use, this changed the way we deliver AI inside of products. It's not just coders, it changed everything else. So, do I give Dario credit as CEO? I don't know. I mean, I don't love all those warnings about how 90% of the world's gonna be unemployed in several weeks, but he delivered, right? So, I think you got, without question, it is the software of the year. Do you give the CEO credit for the product of the year? Maybe not, I'm gonna anyway, though.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Damn, because God, I hate agreeing with Jason, but I'll just take a while to get there. Because first of all, he didn't answer the original question, the whole product of the year. Focus on the founder of the year. Anyway, I mean, look, it's a one, I'm going to start with Harry. I'm going to be grumpy today because I hate these events. I hate these kind of wrap up things. I think they're bullshit. So I will be grumpy the whole time, and I make no bones about that.

• 6:50Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, Jason, we started this school when we were waiting for you, and I'm like, Rory. He goes, fuck off.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  So second, it's a second. So let's talk about that. You're founder of the, the problem, one, one thing about that, you know, the Ballon d'Or where they pick the best football player, right? As we call it, our soccer, as they do here in America, right? And, you know, it's kind of one of those things where, but, you know, every year it's kind of try and come up with someone else. But we all know it's messy, you know, it's a 10 or 15 year period where it's just silly. Or maybe it's Ronaldo. So I feel, you know, if you really, when we come to pick founder of the decade, founder of the blah, it's going to be Elon. But so let's just leave that to one side. As well, exclude him from the year because otherwise it gets boring. I do actually come out exactly the same place Jason did, Dario. And I do think it's not just product of the year, but also what I like, I, I find the stuff about unemployment to be bizarre.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  And I think he's wrong and I'll come back to that. But that's the CEO as pontificator, but on the CEO as business executive making a difference. I think he played a very steady hand and by kind of going for the sensible play and the sensible party to make another Monty Python reference because it's been that kind of day. The sensible party versus the, obviously the other party. He's cranked out the, I'm going to get profitable, I'm going to be sensible. And you look at growth rate faster than OpenAI, convert valuation convergence, even, even after OpenAI's potential new around at 800. I think he's played a great hand. If you own those stocks at the start of the year, this is the stock you'd feel most excited about during the course of 2025 of the kind of mega caps. So I give him founder of the year again.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I do not think we'll all be unemployed on Friday week. I think that's all nonsense, but we can come to that another day.

• 8:30Harry Stebbings?

  I'm going to add two. One is a cheat because she's not quite the founder, but I think Gwynne Shotwell, running space.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  I totally agree.

• 8:38Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's going to be the biggest IPO of all time, navigating pretty challenging times geopolitically with Elon's brand this year and navigating that so well and elegantly as CEO is exceptional.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  I'll give you half my, four out of 10 of my chips back to you for that. Yeah, that's a good call. That's a good call.

• 8:58Harry Stebbings?

  And then I'm going to surprise you with another.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:00Harry Stebbings?

  If your job as a founder is to build enterprise value and return a shitload of cash to your investors, are we forgetting that Alex Wang delivered phenomenally for his investors and provided a great outcome to shareholders?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  And we got it. What did we get out of it? A video app? A video social network? No. That no one used? Listen, respect 100 out of 100 to him, right? 100 out of 100. Founder dinner at night, talking about, you know, at some posh London club, talking about how the way to do it for myself, yeah. In terms of impacting the world, gotta be not quite top decile. This is sort of a 4X TVPI founder in terms of world impact, but like a 10X in terms, a 20X in terms of returns, right? But world impact remains to be seen. The Machiavellian element of this pod, which should be the majority of it in a sense, that deserves to be in the above the fold, right? Which? Okay. No, scale, Alex. I mean, just the sheer returns, taking advantage of a moment in time, right?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  You leave the keys with the rest of the team, done to perfection. You know, when we started this pod, I don't even remember what we called these, right? Pseudo hires, Rory was great. Yeah, I remember. It may be 2026, we don't see as many, but this was the best of the best, the best of the playbook this year, right? Oh my God, talk about a moment in time and playing your cards right. I'm giving you three of my chips, Harry, on that one. But, but I don't know if he'll make, he would make the list in 2026. Gwen may even be the winner next year, right?

• 10:25Harry Stebbings?

  She will be the winner next year. She has to be.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Can I add one for fun, where I'm not an expert? To me, a space I don't understand and thought was borderline ridiculous is Vlad at Robinhood. And Harry, obviously you've done this because to dominate a market and then go multi-product the way they've done, and I know Rory makes the point, there's the whole point of fintech, right, is to build an Uber app that does everything. But the execution level here. From revenue, from stock price up 220%, becoming almost a meme app for kids to becoming a trusted app for adults. I mean, JFC, you know, I wish half my founders could execute half this playbook.

• 11:01Harry Stebbings?

  Nine products do over 100 million in revenue.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, JFC. How many of our founders are talking about maybe getting another agent into market next year?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Vlad would be like, I got 50 AI agents done over the holidays, guys, and they're all doing 100 billion. Vlad for Sassy, Vlad for, bring them into SaaS.

• 11:22Harry Stebbings?

  I like it as an addition. I can totally see that Vlad is incredible. Okay, we're gonna go to number two, Fund of the Year. Which fund deserves the title as Fund of the Year?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  With the continual caveat that I despise this process, but I'm gonna answer specifically on the performance for the year. I think it's Index. Competent execution across multiple different exits, because exits are the coin of the realm. The only fair way to measure things is, did you end up owning a lot, have a big ownership in big exits? And then you measure that for the year in which it happens. You don't try and account for other years, and then it's at least objective. And they had Wiz, for the record, hasn't closed this year, but was announced in March of this year, where they were an early investor. They had Figma, where they were the seed investor, and it's not an exit, but Revolut, where they just raised at 75 billion and they have an early position in. And, you know, also done by a number of different partners. You look at all those things. I just love, there's

• 12:16Speaker 01

  a lot of people talking about new venture models, and we'll talk about that in a second. Index just took that same old model, which I like, because I'm a boring kind of guy, and just executed to perfection. I give them the nod for 2025. Strong opinion.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I'll give you two. Rory's right. At the end of the day, venture is ruthless capitalism. You have to judge folks on either present or coming returns. That's it. But there's also multiples is another way to judge firms, right? Even if the absolute ones are really high. And then, we are part of social media. There's aesthetic. What is the most aesthetically successful CEO or fund? I'm gonna vote for Neo. I'm giving Neo my vote. Neo, if you look at aesthetics, let's look at aesthetics. First money Into Cursor, Calshi, Cognition, pretty hard to do for someone that 24 months ago seemed to be having weird arguments with Gary Tan on Twitter.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Okay. And then takes that and relatively hustle, literally hustles his way into Cursor, hanging out at MIT, giving programming tests himself. Probably actually, I think, being the second investor in Cursor, but maybe the first pseudo institutional investor, putting his own 5 million into Calshi out of his own pocket. Maybe his absolute returns will not equal indexes or not equal the average GP sitting at that. Where's that, where's that fancy office, Harry, next to Horsley where I saw Index when I was there? What's that? Burning to an arcade. Whatever was very nice where Index is, right? So maybe, maybe Neo isn't gonna, all that hard work won't, won't equal one, one nice nine-figure managing general partner checking index.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  But from the aesthetics of venture, I give Neo a vote and I also give it a vote because 12 months ago, it seemed like YC had won the accelerator race. Now, YC since then, ironically, like the Bay Area has pulled away even further. But Neo, South Park Commons, so there's so many others that are exciting, HF0. And so the rebirth of the accelerator and the fact that Neo got so many hits so quickly. I would say I'm, I'm impressed with Index. I'm a little jealous of Neo. So Crandam's and Crandam's my second vote, notwithstanding the European bias here. Those are my top two votes for the year. And Crandam because expand. Trade Republic just did a deal at 15 billion. There was that little one. I mean, I'm tired of talking about the lovable. Is there an E in that one or not?

• 14:34Speaker 00

  I can't remember. Karna wasn't bad. It might not be a revolute, but that was a pretty good one this year. And what I mean is, I mean, obviously it's a global fund, right? But their ability to do pretty darn well and sweeted and project power. I mean, Harry, you're, you're the Euro, you're the head of everything and the head of European. But for me, as a, as a Yank with some European investment, I think Crandam, I don't think it's a quiet giant, but pretty impressed.

• 14:58Harry Stebbings?

  Creandam have created a phenomenal premier dominant brand that is rivaling Index and Excel in a way that very few people have done in the last years.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  That's why they got number two on my list.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  I'm really worried that Harry's going to start on his Europe, Europe over allies chant now that we have two of the top names being from Europe originally.

• 15:17Harry Stebbings?

  I'm actually going to break him down. Seed, you've got to put Hummingbird up there. Hummingbird on billion to one, make over 800 million.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was the third on my list. I just thought it was an obvious choice, Harry, so I didn't include it. But that was actually, I did want some homework. That was third on my list, right after Neo and Creandam, then came Hummingbird. But I just felt it was obvious.

• 15:37Harry Stebbings?

  100 million fund returning 800 million. They were the first ever investor in lovable. Kraken continues to be a great company where they were a very early investor and then they did have a three billion accident delivery this year.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  For sure, it makes the list above the fold. And all serious, 100 to 800, is that what you said?

• 15:53Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, it's 100 fund and they made 800 on it.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  Wait, the funded 8X net or the partners made 800?

• 15:59Harry Stebbings?

  No, no.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Okay, honestly, I don't feel like I would get full kudos from my LPs for that performance today. Honestly.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Oh, give me a break.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  You laughing? You're laughing? Honestly, because my anchor is the same as Neo, is the same as initialized, is the same as South Park Common. I'm not in the top, the very, very top group of my peers. I would have to do 8X to even like get, get to speak at their AGM. If this was the first pod of this series, I wouldn't have said it, okay? But in the age of AI, if you're a seed fund and you bought 10% of Cursor and Neo didn't get 10%, if you got 10%, 8X would, would seem like a round, like you, you, you would invite those guys to dinner.

• 16:41Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, I get you. I'm just like, I'm the one getting in trouble for irrelevance. And he's saying one deal returning 8X a fund isn't enough to be called to speak in AGM. So my seed, my seed is Hummingbird. My series A is Benchmark. I'm sorry, Manus, Sierra, Firework, Lagora, Cerebrus, Langchain. My word, that is one killer fund.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree. Because I think what's interesting about them as an early-stage fund is a lot of folks have wrestled with how to win in this market and have internalized that one of the "easiest way to win" is have super-big funds and just deploy lots of capital at the late-stage and make the math work. What I find super impressive about that fund, I think it's the 21 Fund, is they stuck to their knitting and still have compellingly good overall returns by just doing the thing that they do. In a way, it's a little like my comment on Index. Because that's the milieu I live in, I'm just always impressed with people who just stick to what they're doing and just do it well enough to make it work and not get distracted by... The horrible thing is getting distracted by a different

• 17:44Speaker 01

  strategy, trying to do it and failing when the thing you did worked. It points to another bias I have, and I think all these comments make it, which is, I think in venture, there's a lot of strategies that can work done well. I think the mistake is often to say, "Oh, X strategy works and Y strategy doesn't." The truth is, X and Y strategy both work if done well and neither work if done badly. I mean, you have Benchmark who've killed it just doing Series As and seed an A, exactly what they said they'd do 20, 30 years ago. You've got firms like Engrisun who've killed it by getting huge and making 15x on a late-stage fund. Turns out, there's lots of ways to make money, you just have to be good at doing it. And as you say, and Hummingbird doing it by their own statements, picking psychologically

• 18:27Speaker 01

  damaged human beings and backing them to the hilt. It's a wonderful, wacky world. It should make it easier for me to raise. This is true.

• 18:34Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of disciplined stage, though, the Growth Fund of the Year for me, we can't not, is Josh and Thrive. I mean, the expansion of fund size, the expansion of vehicles, the holding vehicle now, the roll-up play, OpenAI, Central Position, Cursor, Databricks, Carvana, Revolut.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 18:52Harry Stebbings?

  Just what a year. And the other one is Founders Fund, deploying 3 billion in under 12 months, but deploying it into Stripe, SpaceX, and Anduril. You're like, as an LP, "What the fuck? My deployment period has gone way down." And then you're like, "Oh, I've sorted it. SpaceX, Anduril, and Stripe. Fine, keep going. Keep going. Great."

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  My odd runner up is Google. It may not be at a fun structure, so I'm having a little bit of fun. I get it. Owning almost 10% of SpaceX, owning perhaps 14% of Anthropic, depending on dilution. Now, and obviously, now this is the greatest circular investment of all, owning the vast majority of Waymo, which is going to blow up. But those three are like SpaceX, Waymo and Anthropic to have double-digit ownerships, even if they're done in a circular way in one of them. I give that the corporate investor of the year.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I think that's a good nomination.

• 19:45Harry Stebbings?

  The other one that I did have just as like, you know, notable mentions, we had this at school when you did like, you know, sports day, like notable mentions. Menlo, amazing returns with Chime, and then doing Anthropic at 4 billion.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Totally. It was on my list, too. I think they did a brilliant job. One train has left the station, there's a new train pulling out, you jumped on that carriage and grabbed on firmly. No, I give them huge credit for that.

• 20:09Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree. Alrighty, if we dig a layer deeper, though, beneath firm, investor of the year. I'm asking for one individual.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Just to name someone we hadn't named, you got to hand it to Alad Gil. Being good enough to be able to raise a $3 billion solo fund. I mean, you two guys have solo funds, and to be good enough in terms of your returns to be able to raise that size of fund as a solo GP, I would say also to have, going back to the word that we clearly love in 2025, a perception of taste and style such that you become a preferred investor. You got to hand it to the guy.

• 20:45Harry Stebbings?

  I agree. I think Alad's fantastic. One thing I didn't realize with Alad, though, I was chatting to him the other day, he does have 18 people.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Of course. That's even better. Where you just, it's all you, but then you have the people who do the work. And Harry, who are you to judge about that? How many people do you have, Mr. Stebbings?

• 21:00Harry Stebbings?

  I have none. It's all me. It's just me working away. Yeah, absolutely.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. You know, built by the sweat of your brow. Don't make me laugh. Again, it points to a part of the market where that so, where the important, because brand is easier to build as an individual in the short term. I think being able to break through the noise as a perceived high-value, high-thoughtful investor, where there is an endorsement on the cap table, it speaks to the market we're in now. I think he's done a great job.

• 21:28Harry Stebbings?

  I'm gonna throw in a name, which is Lee Murray at Planet Perkins. Two deals, returned a shitload of money, one being Windsurf and the other being Chronosphere. Two and a half billion and three billion, both liquid this year, returned a lot of money back to KP. Amazing work.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because liquidity is the, I mean, you know, I will say I did contradict myself on that name. I picked a lot because I think just in terms of the raise, but you're right. One of the exercises we do and and we do it actually in the first week in January. So we haven't done it yet is we just rank the actual bona fide exits for the year. We count nothing else. We call it the great exit database. We've done it for 20 years and we just rank them by size and then we look at who did them. Third week in January, I'll know exactly. And that is in the end what counts. If she had those two, that's a great win.

• 22:14Harry Stebbings?

  Back to the company side, what is the breakout company of 2025? Whose year was made in 2025?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  So I think there's a ton. It's really interesting. Just to pick a few, I think open evidence in the AI medical space really nailed it. I mean, one of the things we saw stepping back when we looked at a lot of these academic research, academic research, search engines is if you look at people looking up papers, about 60% of that traffic was doctors. Doctors are the biggest single demographic of people who want to look up a recent academic paper and find out a result. And I remember we were looking at some of the broad horizontal science search engines and thinking, hmm, that's interesting. Open evidence didn't just think it was interesting. They very wisely focused on that space and said, look, doctors, even ordinary GPs, sometimes they have a patient with special, an obscure question.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  They want to know what the latest research is on XYZ. This perfectly lends itself well to an LLM based application. They built that product totally suited for the target audience. And they went from nothing to 500,000 doctors out of about a million in the US in the space of one year. Obviously, the revenue was followed. Why does the revenue follow? Answer, because you have doctors typing into a search engine. My patient has this obscure disease called blah, and I need help to find out what's going on. Who wants that real estate? The drug company who makes the $40,000 orphan drug that only has 10,000. Thousands of customers in the US with that disease and now you've put up your hand and said, "My patient is one of them." It's a perfectly targeted business. I mean, it's a great business. They're expanding, doing a lot of other things now on top of that.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  But it's just one, and it just come from nowhere because it hit the need perfectly, but on the need for the specialist search side, which is the doctor, and then totally on the need of the advertiser side, which is the drug company. Perfect product.

• 24:04Harry Stebbings?

  My patient is Irish. How do we solve this problem?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Well, you lot put us in prison, or conquer our country, or give a shit for 800 years. That's how you solved it, but it didn't work. As I told you, I'm grumpy today, Harry. Sorry, Jason, you're up.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm gonna give you an answer that first you're gonna say doesn't qualify, but when I fully answer, you'll agree with me. Mine is Databricks. We did a Saster Annual during the pandemic in 2021. We were the only event in the entire California Bay Area that I know. It was pretty fun. It was all outdoors and Ollie came. Yeah, I didn't even know much about Databricks and he did this deep dive on everything. I went back and looked at it. Nothing was about AI. It was about a hint. It was all about managing cloud compute data. And to be able to ride the AI, like our job, every founder that's listening to this and every VC, every menlo, right? The job was to ride this torrent of AI if you're not an LLM. Your job this year, if you're an LM, your job was to do more LLM, right? To get 3.7 out so you could change the world.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  If you were a B2B company, however you broadly describe it, your job was to ride the greatest wave of our lifetimes. And you know, Snowflakes, it's all definitional, right? But Snowflakes AI revenue is pretty small. Its agentic strategy is just starting. And Databricks rode this to, now they're both at 5 billion and Databricks is growing and accelerating at 55% growth? If we had to have Canon of the Year for who rode the AI wave and utterly changed the trajectory of the company, it would be Databricks, even though obviously they were successful before, but JFC for this one. So that gets my, that's because this was all of our jobs. If you didn't ride that wave this year, or as a founder, you get a D minus.

• 25:43Harry Stebbings?

  Mine would be 11 Labs. I think when you look at what 11 Labs have done this year, scaling to 400 million in ARR, standing off competition from OpenAI and any of the other incumbents.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  It's a crazy good one. It deserves to be above the full.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  It is an excellent one.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  You know what? You know what's interesting about 11 Labs? There's a two by two of best of breed, which is hard to win at in AI, right? Because it had to be best of breed to win, right? And there may be cases where this isn't true, but for us, in utterly insane value. This is what sometimes people miss. How did 11 Labs go to 400 million in a year, right? We were in Saster, London, a couple of weeks ago. We need to do all the voice of God for 200, 100 speakers or whatever we had. And, you know, that used to take two weeks and you'd have to pay someone, maybe a couple of grand, and they wouldn't do some of them and they'd mispronounce stabbings. And it was terrible. Amelia literally filed up, fired up 11 Labs the morning of the first day, when you have other stuff to do, and just had 11 Labs do it all. Trained her voice. She's used 11 Labs before, but she couldn't find it. She retrained her voice, like in two minutes, and it did all of them perfectly.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  And that was 30 bucks, 30 bucks instead of 2,000. And it was done in 10 minutes instead of two weeks. That is why these apps are blowing up, because it's not the little step function we got before AI. $30 in 10 minutes versus $2,000 in two weeks. I don't even care exactly what it costs at that level, right? So, yeah, that one counts.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  One of the things I love about a lot of these companies is it's a go to market that gets, that empowers individual users to grab the technology and just, as you say, get shit done. I had, you know, you had a boring job of, you know, recording 200 names, and now you just type it in and away it goes. I have a bunch of other breakout products, I mean, and they're all the same. It's like, at the app level, it's really just about getting in the hands of individual users and just having it explode. I mean, I'm amazed you guys didn't throw out your favorite, you know? I mean, the fact that you're going to get your breakout product of the year and not mention Lovable and Replit, I'm kind of disappointed in you guys, right? Come on, I mean.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  I think it's, I think it's, I don't, listen, for me personally, it was the breakout tool of the year, right? It was where I spent too many hours. In terms of impacting the world, I think we're going to see next year. I don't think any of these, any of these prosumer vibe code apps had a material impact on the world. It's just because it's early, like, no one built a game changing B2B app with, with nine figures of revenue on Lovable or Replit. I do believe it will come, like, I was beyond skeptical of the vision when I started the journey. Now it's clear it will. But if we're talking about human impact on the world, those guys have just started. Like, they're just at the very beginning of the journey. So I'm not giving them, they're not going to make it above the fold on my list for that.

• 28:16Harry Stebbings?

  I found this next one a hard one. What was the biggest surprise of 2025?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  That's easy. The talent wars. The fact that everyone would tear up everything to get shit. In retrospect, it's obvious, and I'll talk about that in a second, but wow. Meta is willing to just give a dude 100 million bucks to show up. Meta is willing to buy a company for 14 billion dollars and say, give me the people. You guys keep the company, see if I care. And you guys can give that 14 billion back to yourselves and then let the company be a host. See if I care again. Nat and Daniel have a venture fund. No, we should just buy that too, right? You know, and it's the biggest, but they weren't the only person doing this. I mean, you had the whole Google windsurf saga. The entire convention on why people buy companies, how other employees get treated,

• 29:05Speaker 01

  how much a human can be paid to do a job, got thrown out of the window in the space of six months. Blooming Way. And yeah, as I say, in retrospect, I mean, the logic that someone has unveiled is pretty compelling, which is if you're spending 73 billion dollars on CapEx, spending 5 billion dollars to make sure that the people using the CapEx know what they're doing, probably makes sense. So you look back and you go, it shouldn't have been surprising. But at the time, you're like, wow. I mean, remember, it was incredulity about the money and also incredulity about the damage to the quote unquote, you know, social conventions. Not to me, I wasn't ready for that this year.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  One is just that there's just no limits to the exit value of tech, of startups. It just changes the whole industry. It's, we've talked about it. It has changed so much since we started this podcast. The idea that we will have a trillion dollar IPO next year, maybe two, we might have two trillion dollar IPOs, that getting in at Anthropic at 100 million or 80 million or whatever was the deal of the century from a risk reward outcome.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Brilliant, to be clear.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  The fact that whether, who knows where the future goes, that so many of these folks lovable could go from two to eight or six in weeks. So can Harvey, that these weren't one-off step-ups in valuation, that that's the biggest one. It was unexpected. So that's the main one. There's no ceiling on venture. Which changes all the math and calculations. You know, when I go back, I was thinking the earlier days when I started investing, I remember Byron Dieter came up to the old Saster office, ran the cloud practice at Bessemer, and he said, I'm here to mark up your investments, Jason. I'm here to mark up your investments. I want you to give me your top one or two, and I will mark them all up. And I thought that was the greatest deal in the world. I'm going to invest at 10, and Byron's going to invest in them at 50, and I will be a genius,

• 30:53Speaker 00

  because I got in first. I thought that was all the game was in venture, because I would walk in at the end of the year, and I would have a 3X and a great IRR. And Byron was the sucker, because he had to enter at 50 and 70. And maybe that was true at a brief moment in time, but not really, right? Now the sucker is is fine wasting all the energy to have smaller ownership anywhere on the journey, when you could have put in either nine figures or significant ownership later. It just changes the whole calculus. And I literally, the what's the like, what is it? Fuse Energy in Europe, that one just did it five billion. Here's the classic one. You know who that was led by lowercase? So the greatest seed investor of several generations ago, Chris Sacca, right? Now, he put a lot of money into Twitter and others, right? But he

• 31:38Speaker 00

  sniped deals at three, four, five pre is now leading deals at five billion. That those are different times, aren't they? So that I that I didn't foresee. The other one, just as a vibe coder, autonomy plus reasoning. I started this year as an AI want to believer, but skeptic, because I couldn't get anything to work at the start of the year. I launched one agent that was a digital version of me that people loved. But all it did was parrot me back with AI. People loved it. It was used 100,000 times in like 30 days. JFC, what agents can do now, like, you haven't missed the boat as investors, because what agents can do, we just started. Outside of parts of coding, we just started. So those are my two. Those are my two.

• 32:21Harry Stebbings?

  Mine, super simple. The three days when Windsurf was being bought by Cognition, and I interviewed Varun the day before.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  I remember that.

• 32:28Harry Stebbings?

  And it was like, what the hell is happening? Are they being bought? Are they not being bought? OpenAI will buy them, and then they're not. And then it's what's left. That was a bizarre moment. And then Nvidia investing $100 billion into OpenAI and the start of the circular deals was the most bizarre.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, overall, just not all of us giving up on caring about things like circular deals. We don't care. If it drives the stock price up, great. If it marks up my fund, great. It's just the way it is now.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  You won't care until you do and you'll look back and go, the first ones were sensible. And it's like everything in finance. It kind of goes back to the other thing you mentioned, Jason, which is the surprise of the extent of the upside, you know, how big these things can be. And I agree with you. I think that is probably the biggest change in venture zooming out over 20 years. But the markets themselves became bigger and the end results became, you know, the outcomes became bigger. And then on top of that, because they were held for longer as private companies, more of that bigness went to the venture sector versus the public markets. That is their overwhelming economic story. Technology is a percentage of the GDP shot up and the percentage of that technology that the venture business grabbed shot up, right?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Now, a converse comment is, we still don't know, is the calibration quite correct? And until we see some of these $500 billion plus deals get done in the public markets and find that equilibrium price point in a very different, more liquid market, we won't know all these marks correctly because what happens with exciting financial innovation is it works, it works amazingly and it overshoots. And one of the interesting thing on both some of these valuations and frankly, on some of these round trip deals will be, have you pushed a good thing too far and does it blow up in your face? And we'll talk about that later.

• 34:20Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, well, we're going to move to predictions for 2026 then, Rory. One of my predictions is that you're going to continue to think that every question I ask is shit and all I do is hope to one day meet your bar of question asking. But that will be our year in 2026, Rory, I promise. Okay, I'm going to go home on.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  You've got to start as you mean to go on then because I'm not a fan of the 2026 questions. So go on.

• 34:42Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, good. Well, there we go, Jason. He's in a really good mood.

• 34:47Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I hated 2025 questions and 2026 are worse. You said you didn't want to be negative, so I'm starting on a positive. Number one, what's going to be the best performing tech stock in 2026?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I mean, how the hell, I mean, the best, okay, let me ask, I'm gonna pick on you. What was the best performing tech stock in 25? If you don't know the past, how the frick are you going to predict the future?

• 35:12Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know the past?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  I do, because I checked this morning and what's it, literally, if you rank every stock in the US and vaguely defined as tech and don't put a market cap filter, Planet Labs, Bloom Energy, Open Door, Oclo and Seagate, top five performing stocks this year, right? That's why your funny little non-recognition face, Harry, shows, the thing is, because what you were really asking that is of the big caps, obviously of the big caps, the Nvidia and Google nailed it this year and the others were roughly flat. So that's a more boring answer. But it's always, if you're gonna ask what the best performing, that's why it's such a bullshit question. The best performing tech stock typically is a smaller stock that ran, all of those stocks are more than a three X year on year. And, you know, I know some of them. I mean, look, Planet Labs, gotta love that company, especially as space

• 35:59Speaker 01

  starts to take off. You know, they do satellites in space for imaging, pop to about five billion this year. And Bloom Energy, I know, but not as well. Open Door, we had him on, it's been, you know, we'll see TPD on how it goes, but the guy can make the stock jump. And then Oclo, you've got Fusion. And then Seagate, which is the fifth best performing stock, now you're on the first AI-centric story, which is obviously, and it's to Jason's point, it's co-attach, you know, if they're spending on AI, they're spending on everything to do with AI, even God bless them, hard disks. So you look at those five names, utterly idiosyncratic, fairly on thematic, and, you know, you're not gonna get there with some kind of tops-down analysis. If you can barely nail the past, the best performing stock at 26 is a bridge

• 36:44Speaker 01

  too far for me. So no, I don't like your question, Harry. Sorry.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll tell you what I think. I will bet that the top six public B2B stocks, at least three of them are in the top six next year. And if we go back, like, let's go back to 2024. Two of the top performing were Apple and Palantir. Okay, Apple up 700% in 2024. We all thought it was crazy. And then this year, it's up 124%. Still, still, actually better than my fund. I didn't go up 124% this year. Palantir, number one performing of this B2B group that's public, 2024, up 340%. But my point is, I don't think the Mac, I'm gonna bet, not being a public company guy, not being a hedge fund guy, not being Steve Cohen, that the trends aren't gonna change much next year. Like, the mobile ad trends fueling Apple. So I'm gonna bet Palantir,

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, and Snowflake. Those are the big boys, not the, not the hyperscalers. Those are the big boys in B2B. There's gonna be some shifts, okay? Shopify is getting some interesting headwinds, but it's slow to AI. Mongo started, had a really rough patch this year, right? And then blew up in the back half of this year. So I think this top six is gonna up now, but the PCM, SCS, what do we, we used to call them fangs, and we stopped caring? My Pocahontas, Pocahontas, Palantir, Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, Snowflake. I'll, I'll bet you 10 grand, three of them are in the top six of this cohort at the end of next year. Jason, which three would you put in there? I'll answer it for fun, but if you think about, what's interesting is these top six,

• 38:16Speaker 00

  right? If we slow it down, Palantir, Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, they're all teasing, they're all leaders in slightly different elements of this AI, of this AI phase, right? Palantir's got AI for defense and government. Cloudflare owned, right, how, how we, how we deploy the internet. Mongo looked like it was gonna be a database loser in AI, right, with Superbase, and everyone came roaring back. Shopify is, is e-commerce, which is different. CrowdStrike, security, right, and Snowflake data and data lake. So now you're making me bet on a macro trend, right? How could I bet against any of them? The reason they're in the top six, I think, I'm not gonna bet that e-commerce is gonna, e-commerce had a record year. We don't even talk about it much on this show. E-commerce is on fire.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  You could do exclusion. You could go, actually, Snowflake, you're going to continuously be cannibalized by Databricks.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  But Snowflake's reacceler-- here's the thing. Snowflake is not going to catch Databricks, I don't think, in terms of, but it re-accelerated in the back half of this year. Even Snowflake re-accelerated. Mongo re-ex-- so this this re-acceleration and also this maiming we talked about on the prior show, this is super important going in. So I think the folks that are that are re-accelerating at the end of this year that have figured out their AI tailwinds, I'm sure not going to bet against them in 2026 because I think these tailwinds are going to accelerate for at least two, three, four quarters. In fact, I'll go the other way. The ones that underperformed this year, right? We go from the bottom up. I think Salesforce might be the biggest beneficiary next year. We could go through the ones that declined the most this year. And you have to be honest, are they at least tapping into AI tailwinds?

• 39:47Speaker 00

  For real or for pretend? Or is it performative? Are they claiming they have AI revenue like Adobe? But it's really an AI product, but not revenue. What I know is going to happen with Salesforce, this is even a prediction. I just don't know how it's going to work out. I believe half of their customer base want to buy an agentic product that works tomorrow. They may not want to buy another, yet another cloud. They may not want to buy your data. They may not want to buy Informatica. I don't know if they want to buy Informatica, but when their rep calls them up and says, listen, Agent Force is crushing it now. We can get rid of 200 people in your sales team, 100 of your marketers, 100 in field support with AI and it works. You're going to see attach rates like we've seen in coding, like everybody's going to want to buy that Agent Force.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  So if these are bets that we, now we got to squint at the bottom, who's doing that? Or who's quietly giving up, like maybe an Asana is? Like, I don't know.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  It's funny. I think those are such different bets. The first is your momentum bet. They're all killing it in terms of momentum. And what you're saying is the momentum continues. And you know, that would be true until it isn't because what you're not--

• 40:49Speaker 00

  But I think the AI is going, I don't mean to interrupt, but I think it's not just momentum. It's this AI, it's this AI--

• 40:54Speaker 01

  That's what I mean. The AI momentum. What you're basically saying is, if I look, I mean, now I'm going to try and be a public investor. If I look at factor investing, if I talk about the first list, you're saying is all these are going to do relatively well up until the moment if the AI-- Kind of lift starts to recede or even the way the chain starts to decline a little bit. And then they'll all wump down because they're way over their long-term valuation, any kind of meaningful long-term valuation multiple. So as long as it's all working, Palantir will keep compounding. And at some point, someone's going to look up and say, oh, my God, 70X, shit, I should panic. So it's pennies in front of steam wells. The Salesforce bet was a super interesting one and you could apply it to a number because it's totally different. They're trading at all-time lows on a revenue multiple, five, five and a half times revenues.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  And I totally agree and it's what we're talking about to start. All they have to do to lift that puppy 20, 30% is maybe this recent acquisition they did quantified. Co-attach 20% of their customers to the product, grind out a year of, you know, getting that co-attach up. And suddenly, you know, you buy that stock and you're less likely to get a 3X, but you're more likely to get a 20% lift and you're not taking the valuation risk. Those are very different bets because in a world where, you know, the juice goes out of the market and the high flyers collapse. You know, at five and a half times run rate revenues with 30% cash flows, Salesforce could go down 20%, but it's not going to go down 60. So those are just very, it's just, they're very different bets. Because I didn't talk about it in the past.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  One of the disappointing investments in the public markets this year has been traditional SaaS, right? I own a lot of Salesforce, it's down 30% in the year. HubSpot, where we were lucky enough to be early investors, stocks down in the year. Across the board, you know, the Asana's this, well, all of those guys. And now it rates and valuations where all you have to do is get a bit of a lift and you can outperform. You know, it's almost the antithesis.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  That's the question. Yeah. So I look at the bottom six, the bottom six I have GitLab, Atlassian, Adobe, Monday, Bill and HubSpot. HubSpot, Bill, Monday, Adobe, Atlassian. And you kind of have to look at those six and say, are they talking AI or are the tailwinds real? I'm worried about most of those six, that they talk a lot on social media and Twitter, but it's not enough to have an AI product. You have to have the co-attach that Rory talks about. You have to have something where someone's going to go in and pay as much or more for your core product for this agent. I think people will pay a hundred thousand dollars a year for a Salesforce GTM agent. Whether Atlassian can pull this off or Adobe or folks I love, Monday, Bill and HubSpot.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  I don't think they've proven it yet, so I don't know. I'm not being critical, but they haven't seen a lift, right, an attached lift. That's the one I worry about for next year.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  I think in different ways they can, you know, I was on the board of Bill for many years. I think Renee's a really talented entrepreneur.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  As good as they get.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot they can do and they'll be doing it. I think it's, I think actually interestingly enough, yes, they've done it on the invoice recognition and kind of the back office. I also think there's a lot you can do frankly on the broadly financial management in the kind of stuff that Ramp does where they're coming at it from less on the card side, more on the AC8 side. So there's a ton they can do there that's AI first, but not just AI. There's other uplift trends they have.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure. But the question is, can they dramatically lift ACV pricing, deals for it? That's where I worry about some, as a Bill, as a happy 100 NPS Bill customer and super fan of Renee, since we started together as founders, I don't know, but I'm worried some of the ones that didn't grow this year, it's not that they won't be amazing AI products next year, it's that they can't charge more for it, right? And that's why Notion to me was, it's not on this list because it's not, but Notion was the biggest surprise of this Uber group for me because I didn't think they could charge this much for their agent. I sort of get it, but I didn't think people would pay 50% twice as much for Notion to talk to their Notion, but I get it now.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  One of the things that I talked to another big executive of a large multi-billion dollar revenue SaaS company, one of the things I've learned to look for, and I'd love to know the data from Salesforce, because he wasn't a Salesforce executive, to be clear, is, yeah, you're seeing this AI revenue, but what's happening is it's been bundled. You're attributing value to the AI product, but separating out what is your core product, what is your A product is tricky. And some folks are getting a little bit of revenue lift that looks like it's coming from assigning dollars to AI, but really it's, it's the core product. And then the scary thing about that, just to be clear, is if you break apart your product and you price the AI product separately, and then a year from now, the customer says, oh, I'm not going to keep that AI product, but I still love your core product, but you've gone down 10% in pricing to go up to add 20% uplift from the AI product, you could have a nasty renewal cycle.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  So you've got to not just sell the product, you got to deliver the value. All these things, it's going to come down in the end, deliver the value. I think the opportunity is there for most of these companies, or at least the ones. That I know well, I don't on the to do and personal planning side, the sound is this well, not as clear. But actually, as I think about it, there is a ton you can do in terms of managing personal productivity with AI. So the opportunity is there for all of them. I think that, as we said last week, the difference will be the executives who can see a way to getting it done.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  I mean, to me, the worst one, the one, the worst offender is Adobe, okay? Because Adobe announced they had five billion of quote AI influenced revenue this year. Let's be kind, it's, I'm sure it's true, I'm sure they're using Firefly and generated images with AI. But to me, it don't count unless it's net new bookings. If you're gonna hide in your tower or at your end of the year meeting, your planning meeting and say, hey, we grew eight percent this year is the bad news. Scale, the good news is half of our revenue was AI influenced. I mean, that's table stakes. So to me, Adobe gets the worst score. To me, if it's, it's private, if I have the numbers right and Notion hit 50% growth at 600 million this year.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  I think what they did, the only thing that makes any sense to me, the reacceleration, is they got people to pay 20 bucks a month per seat for their AI offering instead of 10. And I will say, the other day, one of my portfolio companies shared a Notion, a board update with me and it didn't have the AI on it. And I couldn't talk to it, I'm like, this, this sucks. Like, I can't use Notion without AI as a 10 year customer, whatever I am, it just, it is worth the 2X. And that's the one that so many B2B companies want to do this, they want to double their pricing for AI. But Notion might be one of the very few that earned it. It's very hard for a HubSpot or Atlassian or others to just double their pricing to use their AI. We just expect it to be free like Adobe, but somehow Notion pulled it off.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  I don't see any other way they did this, other than to get people to go from the $10 a month plan to the $20 a month plan. It's the only way I can see the math pencil now.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you've got to be hard nosed about two things, one, delivering value. So you can't bullshit yourself that you're not delivering value. And then you've got to be hard nosed with the customer, making them pay for it. And you're exactly right, actually, I'm thinking about this now in the context of another one of my companies that, you know, mid-stage, 100 million plus or minus unveiling AI products. And you're right, it's very easy to slip into the, oh, this is good, we'll give it to you in the base package. And that's just not going to move the needle. And you're exactly right, Jason, you got to say, no, this is Really good. Here are the different quantum of value we're delivering you. And as a result of that, you got to pay more. And that dynamic, which I'm thinking of a specific private company I'm working with at the moment. But that is the dynamic that everyone from Salesforce on down has to be dealing with. Not just AI influenced bookings, but actual here's the extra. I totally agree.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Because if all that happens is you take your same revenue line, you bundle in a whole bunch of AI. You don't expand your revenue. Congratulations, you've reduced your operating margins by 10%. My suspicion is Adobe is one of the worst offenders there. That is the challenge. It feels like it should be doable. I think it's a great example of notion doing it, but that is.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  It's hard, though.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  The interesting thing is, going back to, we started this question about stock for 2026. If someone like Salesforce or a service now can figure that out at scale, you just get such operating leverage. It's wildly hard, but I agree with you. There's almost every Salesforce customer saying, oh, please, God, integrate this shit so I don't have to deal. Damn you, you haven't.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Here's the thing that I know is true. So 2025 was the year, there was coding, but it was also the year of support. Once Claude 3.5 and 3.7 came out, just like vibe coding worked, so did AI support. It just didn't work before. It wasn't good enough. Okay? It was the same issue. It got so good. That benefited a few leaders a little bit, right? But when it works, now Salesforce is like a seventh cloud company. But when it works in 2026 for GTM, every Salesforce customer is going to want it. Every customer, you know, Mark came on this pod with us earlier this year, right? And he talked about how they had, what, a billion, million, 100 million leads at Salesforce they didn't talk about? The only problem is that agent force takes time to deploy. It's just getting going. But when they can turn that up, do you think, as we said on the pod,

• 49:38Speaker 00

  every single Salesforce customer is going to want that product when it can be delivered quickly? This is another $100,000 a year, but our agent will automatically go after all the customers your team didn't follow up with. Sign me the F up. And so that is a bet I will make for next year. The flip side is, you know, if you ask me the biggest failing of this year, we talked about, I want to say in 2020s. Going to Rory's point, it was the co-pilot. The co-pilot was the worst of all worlds. We're not going to put it in our base product. We're not going to make the core product better, but we're not going to provide so much value like a notion that you want to pay for it. That was, that was the cynical whiteboard of January 2025 that failed up and down the B2B board was the, was the expensive co-pilot.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Starting, let's be honest, with Microsoft. Yeah, it wasn't enough value. Wasn't enough value, and I think, I think the biggest risk, it's interesting, we're kind of dissing on Adobe, we're kind of worried dissing on Microsoft, we're dissing on so I think what they all have in common is they're just so big, and the bigger you are, the easier it is for you as the supreme leader to just get told that it's good three, four, five levels down, and unless you're hands on on the product and really brutally honest, you're just gonna fall for that, maybe it'll happen, and and you're gonna end up not delivering value, and I think just being really on that is key.

• 50:52Harry Stebbings?

  Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, buy one, short one for twenty twenty six.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Google, Nvidia.

• 51:00Harry Stebbings?

  You buy Google, you're short Nvidia.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yes, because at some point, if the capex cycle continues, and we're all still spending, Google, I mean Nvidia does fine, but I don't know, unless, I don't know at this point do they need continued acceleration of the capex cycle. Google has upside. If the capex tide goes out, Nvidia is gonna be very heftily priced, and Google still has its business and can gradually roll out AI in a more measured fashion. Oddly enough, Microsoft and even more so, Apple and definitely Amazon, they are kind of meh in the middle on the AI cycle. They're not getting any lift from it. Oddly enough, even Microsoft, obviously they're open AI investment, but they wisely, in my view, have pulled back from doing some of the marginal data center stuff.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  So they're like meh in the middle, Apple's meh in the middle to the downside, Amazon meh in the middle to the downside. If you wanna play the, how do you think about AI capex in the next couple of years, those are the two that are interesting.

• 51:54Harry Stebbings?

  Surely your Apple would be the failed AI. I mean, Apple has failed across all elements in terms of integrating AI.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  It has, and as yet, the stock's held up, and I own a lot and I sold some this year. To me, that's one, the question there is, how long can you continue to trade at a premium multiple when your growth rate is less than ten percent, albeit your EPS is growing more? And, you know, you're trading at an all time rev multiple or PE multiple high, and there's no catalyst. But I don't think it's an AI, I don't think that they'll sell a whole ton more if they had some great AI, I think they'll do marginally better. So, yeah, so, but I, I, I think there's risk in that stock. If I was just answering on a standalone basis, just looking objectively at what I did, I sold some of my Apple and I didn't sell any of my Google. That's Rory speaking with his facts.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  You're a fool to invest against Nvidia for 2026. And I think you are arguably a fool to invest into Amazon in 2026 for a simple reason. Just a simple, I didn't say 2027 or 2028. It is not enough time for all this competition to come online. It is not enough time for everyone. Everyone's trying to do a TPU now, right? Their own version. Amazon's got theirs. Google, OpenAI has its own team. Everyone's trying to get out from the, as Rory keeps pointing out, the massive Nvidia attacks they think they're paying. It's just natural to design out your most expensive component. It's just natural. It ain't going to happen in 2026. There is not enough time. There's not enough time to produce enough GPUs and TPUs to get them into data centers that don't exist.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  And I don't, and I'm not a public company expert, but I don't believe the public companies look as far into the future and as thoughtfully as we think. So I don't think we're going to have any down quarters unless AI stumbles. And I also don't think all the great things Amazon is going to do. Amazon stock's only up 2% this year. If, and I think they're going, they will be the underperformer next year for the same. There's just not enough time. But 2027, I don't know, like the pace are, but you just can't make semiconductors from scratch that compete with Nvidia in weeks. This is not software. There's no base 44 of GPUs. It just doesn't exist.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Who do you think the biggest risk? I think I was very thoughtful about it. I think the time, and I didn't like the question when Harry asked it because I think the time, look, it's always the truth about shorting. That's why I don't do it. You can be right in conceptually and just wrong in timing, and then you're just definitionally wrong. Whereas if you're long, you just hold and in the end you can be right. It's why shorting is such an incredibly hard way to make money. And buying puts, which is basically the coward's way of shorting, which is what I would do, is an even shittier way to make money because you also pay more for the privilege of your bet. Again, Harry, back to comment, I hate your questions. But to get a useful one out of it, Jason, what do you think is the bigger risk to Nvidia? A, continued massive demand for compute, but other people introduce competing TPU

• 54:45Speaker 01

  products to their GPU products in the case of AMD. And it was market share erosion. Or B, erosion of demand such that the continued explosion in demand tapers off because the investments overall get cut back. Which of the two is the biggest risk?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  There's no risk other than some existential power risk because the only real risk here is that OpenAI can't give them 100 billion to buy their chips. But good news is Nvidia is going to give them 100 billion. So that risk off the table, right? OpenAI has taken the position that growth in compute, growth in GPUs, growth in just power is one to one correlated with revenue growth. They put this out. It's one to one. So they're like, yes, I need 100 billion, but I can prove to you, whether it's correlation or causation will be the debate. I can prove to you there's a one to one correlation that if historically, if you give me 100 billion to buy compute, I will generate 100 billion in revenue, right? The market is going to solve for that

• 55:41Speaker 00

  problem in 2026. So I think everyone should feel pretty good about their 401ks.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  You could be right. I mean, look, the breaking news in the last hour, 24 hours was another 100 million, billion, million, billion, wow, I gotta be careful, Rory, for OpenAI, which obviously, I mean, Tomas had mentioned, you know, keeping an eye on the Oracle CDS swaps. My guess is a lot of the risk goes out of that deal if OpenAI gets another 100 billion dollars. And you're right, as long as the protagonists who believe it should keep going, keep getting money, it will keep going, right? And you're right, OpenAI is the prime protagonist, the prime believer in the more CapEx equals more intelligence. And if they got another 100 billion, you're right, bets are on for another 12 months, which would take you back to Harry's comment. I don't think you try and make a clever market timing position yet. The towel's not there.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we can make fun of these circular deals and they should be, they should be made fun of. But Nvidia is going to take its, you know, what, almost 100 billion of free cash flow a year, and it's reinvesting it aggressively, thoughtfully, strategically. It wants other partners. It can't do it all on its own. But it is going to lubricate all of this business model in 2026 as much as it can. Leaving that cash on the balance sheet does it no benefit.

• 56:53Harry Stebbings?

  Alrighty, so Jason, I can assure you one thing with my next question. Rory's gonna hate it. He's gonna hate it. So I assure you this.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  He's gonna like this one. He's gonna like this one. That's my bet.

• 57:01Harry Stebbings?

  Which companies of the mega companies speculated will go out, go public in 2026?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  This is an interesting, okay, I don't hate this question because. See, I win. You know, I don't hate it because it's a legitimate question. I mean, you know, you have the two AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic. I mean, just taking the hugeies, you have Databricks, you have Stripe, and then you have the big one of all SpaceX. I think Stripe, least likely, take it off the table. My gut would be Anthropic gets it done, it's a more manageable bite size. I think one of the interesting questions on both SpaceX and OpenAI, and actually all these in general, and we kind of hit on that last week. And then I just saw a really good information article is the bankers are finally getting to grips with the problem of how do you take a company public at plus or minus a trillion dollars?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  You know, raise fifty billion, five percent. And what do you do with the other nine hundred and fifty billion dollars in terms of lockup, in terms of generating demand? And I think they're beginning to internalize that, look, in a hypermarket, all three can get done at the high watermarks or beyond. But that's a lot of demand that you have to create and there's a lot of shares to follow it, right? It's not like, and then this is very ill thought out, but it's like, if you think about some of these other high priced story stocks. The story stocks that are worth, you know, seventy times revenues or twenty times revenues, the Palantirs, the Teslas. The way that happened is a lot of retail bought in early, made out like bandits and believed. They have real believers on the table who are in the money and they've got a lot of people, I'll never sell my Tesla.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  It's going to be tricky to take a new company out, starting at a trillion. No public investors made money on it. A lot of the institution money is already in it and maybe now, and institutions are ruthless. When they hit their price target, there'll be sellers. So they're beginning to wrestle, I think quietly, with the problem of what do I do when I take my company public at a trillion dollars? I raise fifty million, there's a fifty billion, fifty billion, there's a fifty billion float. It bounces around like crazy for six months. And then nine hundred and fifty billion dollars of stocks are available to trade, many of whom have been into stock for ten or fifteen years. Could be tricky. Finding a way to get that done will preoccupy the mind. Probably one of them gets done because just, you know, there's gonna be a lot of brainy people going

• 59:23Speaker 01

  at it. But it's a interesting banking problem that we've never seen before. I mean, it's one thing to take a Ramco public, which the other big was a Ramco, but where it's priced, you know, not an excessive price. It's priced that, you know, boring P E multiple, right? When you're taking, if you really are taking something public at thirty, forty times run rate revenues, you have the growth rate in the case of OpenAI to justify it, but you have the burn. You don't quite have the growth rate in the case of SpaceX, but you do have the profits on a unique market position. Neither is quote unquote crazy. You're gonna have to generate a huge amount of demand for a highly priced risky stock that hasn't traded. So I don't think all three get done. I would be surprised. I don't know which. I think it'll be idiosyncratic. And if OpenAI gets their hundred billion in the next few

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  weeks, they can exhale and take a whole year off from capital raising.

• 1:00:11Harry Stebbings?

  Come on, Rory, put a bet down. I'm gonna put a bet down that Anthropic will go out and SpaceX will go out, but Databricks won't, OpenAI won't, Stripe won't.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  That's probably where I'd go too. The most cogent argument against going public, I was rereading the Ashley Vance biography of Elon Musk from two thousand and fifteen. It's a really good read now because it's ten years on and you can, he actually calls some things very interestingly. But there's an appendix to it where Elon does this really good post about why we're not gonna go public at SpaceX right now, why being public is a pain in the ass, and why it's just really hard. It was a really good post. And I read it. And I thought, this is the, one of the smartest first principles thinkers on the planet. God, he really had a good argument against being public. So if he's going out, it must be purely because of cost of capital.

• 1:00:55Harry Stebbings?

  June next year, SpaceX goes out, money on.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Okay. Do you think it goes out at one and a half? I'm not gonna bet.

• 1:01:01Harry Stebbings?

  No, I don't think it does until, I think it goes out at one, one, two. Jason?

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  I think we see four IPOs backloaded next year. I think it's, this is the order. SpaceX goes out first, probably as early as makes sense with the summer dynamics. Canva comes out of nowhere second. It's not that AI first, so now it's time. The AI story is not perfect. But the numbers are there. It's got the numbers. Do it now. Otherwise, you risk looking obsolete. Get it done. Canvas number two. Databricks does it in the back half of the year because it's just time. It's just, it's just another finance. It's the Series M. Databricks is just the Series M. They do it. Anthropic does it at the end of the year to go first and because it's the simpler way to solve their capital needs. And because there's no downside, other than the headaches of being public. OpenAI probably should have gone first, but it's burning too much.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  So this is sometime mid 27. So that one's just below the line. But I bet SpaceX, Canva, Databricks, Anthropic, all next year in that order, more or less. And it's roughly consistent with what they've said publicly, the limits that they've said. So that, that's, I've, I've, I've proven with Harry, I'm always too optimistic by a quarter or two, sometimes two years. But I think this, that makes, I think this makes sense.

• 1:02:12Harry Stebbings?

  Is there one more question, boys, that you want to choose for 2026 predictions? Or do you want to annihilate me again, Rory on my dress?

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  No, I've got one. By the end of 2026, does real AI-driven unemployment show up in the numbers? The federal numbers, the real numbers track, not just by what tech people are shouting on X. Can we really track an impact on unemployment by the end of next year? Because this will be a massive change to society.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  I think there's two separate questions in that because you made a statement.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Reduction in employment. Help me.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Let me tell you, I disagree. It's important. You made a statement that if it can be actually tracked, then more heat will come on the issue. I disagree. I think that the mere fact that unemployment ticked up, first comment, separate comment, all the AI executives talk about there will be an impact on unemployment. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. It's interesting from an economics perspective, and I'd love that discussion. Politics doesn't work that way. Politics isn't sitting there. Humans aren't sitting there going, well, let me see the long-term correlations and look at the BLS data by subgroup to figure out is this. All they'll know is two things. Unemployment's ticked up. It ticked up this month. B, those guys who are building AI are saying that they're causing it. They're like admitting the fucking crime.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  So I predict if unemployment goes up for any reason, tariffs, random bank events, you know, whatever. Ever big company goes bust, the drumbeat against AI because you're the guy will go up because they've kind of confessed to the crime. It's like, we did it. We put you all out of a job. Almost regardless of whether it's true or not, unemployment going up will be a backlash event for AI. And I didn't see that as clearly until I started to speak, but now that I think about it, yeah, you've put yourself out there. You said this is going to change everything and we're going to be on purpose. And you said, oh, government, you should deal with this. Remember how scared we all were in oh nine when unemployment was ratcheting up or twenty twenty when COVID unemployment was ratcheting up?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  If unemployment ratches up even two or three points, regardless of the reason, could just be the business cycle. You'll see a tech lash that makes what we're dealing with now an understatement.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  I think your point that they've already admitted to the crime is is very important, right? I also think there's this, like when the CEO of Walmart is saying every job will change, lay off like, but that's also signaling. There's like, there's a lot of things going on when the CEO of Walmart says here, there's a lot to unpack. And so I agree with everything you said, but I think there's also an intellectual argument we're also waiting to see. I want to see the numbers. I want to see if this is really true. It doesn't really matter if cursor got to twenty seven billion with three hundred employees. It doesn't really matter. It's not going to impact McDonald's and the service economy. I think when we can really say, oh, my God, we lost half a million jobs last month in November twenty twenty six due to AI.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  I do think, not to be, I do think it will change our society even more, even though they've admitted to the crime. I think this will accelerate it when there's hard numbers at the top of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Assuming we still read anything at the end of next year, I think it will become every dinner table conversation for real. Every single dinner.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Society will be terrified of AI if would that be understood.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  I think they, um, good news would be as investors, at least the deals were working. Cause my fear is that the.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Great. Well, I'll be on Elysium together. The three of us will be on Elysium. Perry will have the biggest house on Elysium with his funds. Rory will be living good. I'll be like a couple smaller house away from the park. We'll be up in space.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  It's, I remember someone succinctly describing their objective as follows. He said, they said to me, if the robots are going to take over society. I want to be sure that I own the robots, but.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Elon even said that literally, Elon said it literally. Yeah, you said, "I wish I could slow down robots and AI, but because I can't, I'm all in."

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think actually we could end up in the weird quadrant of it's not as impactful in the short term as we think, but because we've confessed to the crime, we're going to take the heat when generalized, because every CEO, as you pointed out earlier, can blame it. So I think it could be interesting politics there. Okay, but we don't do politics.

• 1:06:17Harry Stebbings?

  Happy Christmas. What a joy. I think we put a pin in it there before Rory tells me off. This has been fantastic. Big fat quiz of the year.

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