20VC: The Pro-Rata Battle: Valar Atomics Sues Day One Ventures | Meta Returns to the AI Frontier With Muse Wonder | NVIDIA Eyes $30B Reflection Deal & Jev Raises $870M at a $7.5B Valuation

AGENDA: 04:00 Valar Atomics Sues Seed Investor Day One Ventures Over Pro Rata 17:00 Meta Returns to the AI Frontier With Muse Wonder 20:00 NVIDIA Eyes $30B Reflection Deal as Amazon Circles Decart 26:00 Jev Raises $870M at a $7.5B Valuation—Weeks After Launch 31:00 42 New Decacorns: The AI Boom Overtakes 2021's Record 36:00 Isomorphic Labs Eyes $50B Valuation in New Funding Talks 46:00 Anthropic Slashes Haiku Prices by 90% as AI Price War Intensifies 52:00 Bending Spoons Slashes Airtable's Team: What Do Founders Owe Employees? 57:00 Bumble to Go Private in $1.3B Deal: Can AI Transform Dating? 01:01:00 The SaaSpocalypse Deepens: Why $500M ARR May No Longer Be Enough 01:06:00 Flock Safety Cuts 270 Jobs Amid Privacy and Security Backlash

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think Zuck's had a lonely stretch. There's a material chance Meta has just a monster AI product on its hands.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  We roughly generated 20 plus or minus Decacorns per decade for the last five decades. And we generated, what did you say, 42 Decacorns in less than a full year of this decade.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  I think everyone without massive scale is living a worse SaaS apocalypse than in March or April. I don't think we should be breathing any sighs of relief.

• 0:27Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, the biggest news in tech. What is on the agenda today? My word, the salaciousness, we have Valor Atomics sues its own pre-seed investor, Day1, and the Pro Rata debate that ensued on Twitter. Then we have Meta, Zuck, and Alex Wang. The bromance is real. They're crushing it with Muse Wonder, their new model, just shy of Opus. And then big tech, they go shopping. Amazon in talks to buy Descartes. And Nvidia circling around Reflection for a whopping $30 billion. This and so much more later today. But before we dive into the show today, every great software company eventually runs into money.

• 1:09Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:43Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:46Harry Stebbings?

  Boys, it is my favorite 90 minutes of the week. We have some big stories. I love the like salaciousness of this market. I remember when it was quite boring, I look back. And so we're going to start off with the news of the day. Valor Atomix sues its seed investor over Pro Rata. And so the backdrop here is that Day1 Ventures put about $1 million into the seed and $15 million into the A. They hold about 5%. And the fight is over August's billion-dollar series B at $6 billion led by Sequoia. Basically, the CEO asked every major investor to take zero series B allocation.

• 4:27Harry Stebbings?

  But there's a springback clause which basically meant that Day1 wouldn't relinquish this and basically put up a bit of a fuss when everyone else didn't. How did we think about this? And is Pro Rata outdated in modern venture?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And just to remind everyone, Pro Rata simply means if you own 5% of the company, you can get 5% of any round. So you can, quote, "protect your ownership." Typically, all major investors get that. It's typical also that a majority of the investors can waive it for everyone. So someone can say, hey, you know, if most of us don't want to do this because we want to do a different thing for the company that's right for the company, normally you should just be able to waive it. And then those rights go away for everyone. So it cancels the problem entirely. But then you mentioned it. The second thing is you have these weird springback rights, which it's something like, if we waive our Pro Rata rights, and then one of the investors who had Pro Rata rights gets to put some money in, then you can say, hey, you waived, but then you took care of yourself specially. That's kind of unfair. It's not really a fair vote.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  So I get my springback rights too. And that's what I think they want, is it was asserting at one point in time. And there's actually another level of app, but those are the two big rights.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  I think, as usual in these disputes, no one's 100% right here. It's rare in life. There are disputes where someone's 100% in the wrong. And even when you look back, you might say, you know what? Maybe I contributed just a little bit to that. Here's my read of the situation for what it's worth. Here's the more interesting thing. What happened? Listen, we only can read the tweets, right? And I love the fact that immediately everyone was all over it, saying that Day1 was suing their portfolio company, which was completely wrong, right? It was quite, it's quite the opposite, right? They may have hired Quinn Emanuel, now a notorious firm, but it's Valor that wants declaratory judgment to move on. They just want an answer. So all of a sudden, X decided that Day1 had sued their portfolio company, which wasn't true.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  The other thing that I think if I read what Masha, who's my co-investor and owner, I don't know her that well, but I have observed her behavior, and she's a good investor. It sounds like, to Rory's point, what really happened was Sequoia came in very aggressively and said, we're going to make, we're going to make you a great offer. We're going to make you a fast offer. It's clean, it's simple. And just like Sequoia and Index and others do, everyone has to waive their Pro Rata so that we can get our ownership target. And I can say, as a seed investor, this happens all the time. It happens all the time. The big funds, in fact, they put in their term sheet without even checking it. Their lawyers immediately put in that my Pro Rata is waived in every single round. Okay? So it happened here, probably annoyed Day1 because they clearly had, even though they're a $450 million total fund, they have more funds, whether it's SBV or whatever.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  So this annoyed them, they want to do the Pro Rata. So be it. And then Valor said, oh, we're actually letting one of our investors invest because they're strategic. They're strategic. This might piss me off too. What is, first of all, if they're strategic, they're already on the cap table. You got the strategy. You already got the strategy you need. If they're a new investor, right? If someone wants to invest and help this nuclear startup go further that's truly strategic, let them the hell in, right? But this is someone already on the cap table that wants to own more, which I get. That probably means they're adding more nominal value than your early investor, which I get. But this is the whole point, right? This is, you're not supposed to play favorites. And so I get all of it. Having said all of this, I've observed versions of this many times.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  I've observed VCs suing their portfolio companies for doing the wrong thing. When founders have decided to do this, you just got to get with the program. At the end of the day, when the founders are in the wrong here, and the big funds often convince founders to do some things that are a little bit wrong, you've just got to get with the program. It's not your company.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  It is to be clear, say, hey, that feels unfair, but I accept. I'm not going to waste time with Mr. Quinn and Mr. Emanuel. I'm just going to go with it. Is that what you're saying?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  You might even, listen, if you feel so wronged, and I'll tell you why I think that Day1 feels wronged, if you want. If you feel so wrong, maybe you do send a letter, okay? And maybe you don't hire Quinn Emanuel. Maybe you hire Stebbins and O'Driscoll because they're not quite as intimidating. Maybe once in a while, you send a letter, which you shouldn't, but you do. But then you got to let it go. You just got to, you just got to get in line and move on. It's not your company. It is not your cap table. And this isn't just assets. These aren't just, I mean, the founders have to work at this company for 20 years, right? That's the uncomfortable part. But the fact that they bridged the company when no one else would, led the rounds when no one else would, and then were discarded later, you know, that can hurt. It's happened to me several times, and it hurts as a human being. It does hurt as a human.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  I don't have, I didn't have 100 million lined up to do the Valor round, don't get me wrong. But multiple, I've had three or four portfolio companies where with a small fund, I had to bridge or do an A, B, or C, which I don't even have the resources to do. And then sometimes the founders just forget it even happened. And that would bother me.

• 9:13Harry Stebbings?

  I actually agree with everything you said there, Jason. The challenge is you are seeing people like Ali Partovi, who's a fantastic investor, who's made a lot of money for his investors, and he's brilliant.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I nominated him last year for Investor of the Year, right?

• 9:24Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, come out and say, we waive our rights and we don't think it's right. And many great investors support him. There is a moving tide towards Pro Rata rights not being included.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know why he said that? It's because his fund doesn't need them. His fund doesn't need them.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, because you then have the Gary Tan comment on how pro rata rights is what made his IRR and I think initialized one of his funds on Coinbase, right? I think, look, if your model is all seed and no follow, then you can waive your pro rata rights no matter what. I mean, the interesting question is, will the mega fund be waiving its pro rata rights? In other words, is Sequoia coming into this round saying, I'm not going to take anything on the follow on round? So to me, I always think anything that a majority can control in a cap table, which is heterogeneous, where there's lots of people, should be roughly fair. If a majority can waive pro rata rights, if it's good for the company, typically two or three of the VC investors can get you there and it should all be fine, would be my assumption most of the time. I do think for the seed guys, I can see why it sticks in the throat of a seed investor

• 10:24Speaker 01

  who takes all these risks and, you know, most of the deals don't work out and only a few of them work out well and they're going to want to grab some of that when the guys coming in later say, oh, thanks for everything and now you should waive. So I totally see that.

• 10:36Harry Stebbings?

  So is it complete bullshit that we have to just let the big platforms come in with their timesheets that automatically waive our rights?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Look, there's obviously many types of rounds, but I would say roughly there's two later stage rounds, okay? There is the Sequoia index or whomever that wants to take all of it. They have the resources, the capability, the fund size, and they've been very aggressive since for 20 years, right? These terms are not new. We take the whole round, everyone wins. This is not a new thing. Some funds do that and then, or sometimes you'll find other investors that are growth stage, that their target's 5% or 7% and all of a sudden everyone gets, can play in the round. It really seems like there's two types and founders get really pressured to go along with the program. That, look, the Sequoia brand is super powerful, right? It has been since the 1870s. You're treated with love and you're paraded in the office and you're given, these days

• 11:29Speaker 00

  you're given a very generous evaluation set of terms, right? And you're given help and you're, and you feel great and I just ask one ask, we have a target, Harry, and we just need to own 15% of the company, 10% of the company. So I just ask that you let us do the whole thing. And nine times out of 10, founders agree to it without thinking and maybe that's the right thing to do, maybe it's not. But there's another category of investors that that's not their target, right? There's plenty of growth funds that isn't and it's the way the sharp elbows are in the industry. This is not an industry full of soft cushy elbows and this is a messy, messy way for it to spill out, right?

• 12:02Harry Stebbings?

  So Jason, you're on the side of day one.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  I think everyone's wrong here.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  I think it went too far. I think the CEO handled it poorly and said he wished they'd never been an investor when they clearly bailed them out multiple times. That's not cool. And hiring Quinn Emanuel for a very aggressive investor is a step too far. They both did the wrong thing.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. Because I think, no, play it out here. I mean, because, I mean, now down in the weeds of what are you actually going to win here? Whenever you start an argument, and I do this a lot too, you forget to ask yourselves, what are you going to win? First of all, you've waived your pro rata rights. So you own 5%. You're not going to get 5% of the round because someone's waived the rights. Once that's happened, it's all up for grabs. The springback is only proportional to how much the other person who got to come in on springback rights puts in. In other words, if the strategic got to put in 5 million, then your ratio is relative to that. So it might be a whole ton of money anyway, right? So you're suing for the right to get 10 or 15 million bucks in at 6 billion pre, when you already own 5% of the company, which is worth $300 million. What are you doing here? Even if it's $100 million, right?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  You have your win, picking the fights are a mistake. Whenever you pick a fight with a founder and occasionally you do it when you're not thinking, it's just not worth it. I'm kind of with Jason. Both people can be intellectually wrong, but pragmatically right. Pragmatically, this is a, you know, why and say I'm hurt and then move on. And we've left out the whole Russia Epstein dimension, there's a whole bunch of noise around that, that's very Twitter centric about day one and I know nothing about it. I'm going to acknowledge it and I'm sure at some point it'll be used in the defense. I think, forget that, leaving that aside even, I think the pragmatic thing is, what are you fighting for relative to what you already have? Why are you doing this?

• 13:44Speaker 00

  That's just my life lesson is, listen, if you are quote, air quote, wronged by a founder as a VC, in fact, it happened to me once with Harry years ago. Raise it once and let it go. Raise it once and, I made this mistake once years ago. Around years ago, Harry doesn't even know, he wrote a small check in to a company he didn't know and a very large fund. This is one of the rare cases where I wanted my pro rata. It was important to me. I don't really care after the second check, but I needed to get my second check in. And I love this guy, Harry Steppings, but I get an email that Harry's invested in the round and I'm, I'm cut back to zero. And I'm like, I was the only investor in this company for years. I bridged you, I helped you, I've been the only one. And I love Harry, but I know he has this fabulous podcast, but why is Harry getting an allocation and I get nothing? This is a true story.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  When I said it that way, and I shouldn't have quite said it the way I did, it was so obviously wrong that Harry got his allocation that it really bent the relationship with the founder. It didn't break it, but it bent it, right? Because there was no good answer to why Harry, Harry gets his allocation and I don't. And I learned from that, don't even say it because the decision's been made. It doesn't, it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. Let it go. It doesn't matter.

• 14:49Harry Stebbings?

  But Jason, I felt a real bond with you as a result of that.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  You didn't even know what happened until today.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Say that, Harry.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  This was five or six years ago. You never even knew until today.

• 15:00Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I have no idea what company you're even talking about right now. I hope it's a good one.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  It's a good one, yeah.

• 15:07Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, good. Then fantastic.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  But you gotta let it go, right? And.

• 15:11Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, I thought it was incredibly nuanced commentary, by the way, from you on that. I was very impressed.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  The interesting thing for this, everyone's so biased on this issue. I've never seen more crap, more selfish takes on Twitter that are seen as generous. Like, you know, I'm only a pure seed investor. I don't need pro rata, right? And then you see other folks who are like, this is the most important rights is under the constitution of venture capital investing. You peel the layer back, everyone's biased in the answer they give. It's just, you can't, you can't get a straight answer on this, right? The only thoughtful answer I ever heard, the last time this issue came up a couple of years ago, I remember what Keith Raboy wrote, which was, I thought a simple answer. He's like, you could get rid of pro rata, but it's core to our business model is larger funds. Maybe it was at Founder's Fund at the time, right? And he's like, I just have to pay a much lower price then, worst case, right? If I'm investing early with an expectation I can deploy out later, I'm comfortable overpaying

• 16:01Speaker 00

  in the early round for my pro rata. I'd have to pay like half the price I'm paying otherwise. Are you comfortable with that, founders? And the crickets, no one set up, I'm willing to raise at half the price for no pro rata.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yes, you can value an, you're exactly right. Keith's right. You can value an option and deduct it from the price. You're exactly right.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  It has a value, right?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  You know, and it is one point, as I said, and you said it, Jason, all the people, even the mega funds who are coming in saying, you guys should waive your rights, ain't fixing to waive theirs, which should be a clue about the real value thereof.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  You waive, but I ain't waiving mine.

• 16:33Harry Stebbings?

  Moving swiftly on, we, I love the bromance and partnership that is Zuck and Alex Wang. I just, it's like uplifting in ways, they're cool to see together.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  I like how they match. That's my favorite part, the outfits match.

• 16:48Harry Stebbings?

  Did you see Zuck drinking the Guinness in the cheeky pint? And then he pulls away and it's like clear that he's never tried Guinness before and he hates it. But Meta is back at the frontier with a new model, Muse Wonder, just shy of Opus 5.5 on independent index. Let's start there. I don't want to add too much. How do we think about this, guys? Another meaningful movement from Meta into the model layer, even more pros for Zuck?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  It's a zero.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  It's a zero.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, because there's no API, we can't even use it. It's only for internal use by Meta. So who, this is the most performative eval I've seen to date of a, of a never ending spiral of performative evals. I'm not saying they're not nominally true. I'm not saying that you don't want to celebrate the team, congratulate the team, you do want to do it. Clearly the team has done good work at some level, right? I'm, for the show, I'm like, okay, look, I'll hook it up, you know? Oh, it's only, you can't use it. You can use it if you're in Muse. So what's the point of a model that allegedly has parity for the same price, it's not even cheaper and you can't use? This is, this is the height of a, of a performative evals.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  It's available in Muse code, it's set on an API as well. I didn't check the API. You saying it's not up yet?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  You can't put it into your own app, no.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Okay, got it. That's a fair comment from a business impact, but nonetheless, you have to give him credit for getting, you know, at the risk of sounding like someone we all know, back in the arena, they were competitive early on with open weight, then they kind of faded back way to the back of the pack. And now they're up front again, notably with closed source models. So we've decided that if we're going to spend $100 billion, we at least be able to charge for the damn thing is the takeaway. And, you know, it'd be interesting to see if anything comes to the enterprise business, but at the very least, the Muse instinct war will now be powered by a super modern model. But yeah, I thought that's the takeaway. And yeah, $12 billion got you more than you thought a year ago.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. And to the body language thing, got him a right hand man.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And great tweets.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  That's what I saw on the cheeky pint thing. I think Zuck's had a lonely stretch. I think it's been a tough job. No, no, it's hard being a founder CEO. It's been lonely and I think it's been lonely since the beginning. It's been lonely before the IPO. I think he had Sheryl Sandberg back in the day, he's had others, but clearly he, you know, having, it's not easy to pay someone $10 billion and have them stick around and work that hard. Like, it's easier said than done and it's even harder to find someone you can truly trust in that body language. It's key to making this work, right? I know he's got all the other folks, the Nat Freemans and the Daniel Grosses and all these guys, but hard to get a right hand person. It's hard. So I think that's, that's the untold story. To Roy's point, this may be, been a great deal for scale. It may turn out, we kind of almost laughed at it when it happened, not literally, right?

• 19:27Speaker 00

  May turn out to be the next WhatsApp or Instagram. But I, you know, the more interesting thing, I wasn't that impressed with a model I can't use. Hard, hard for me to get too, too excited, right? The fact that, you know, it just going to make the Muse app better though is super interesting. The world changes so fast, but I think there's a material chance Meta has just a monster AI product on its hands. The amount of investment into it is so high, the capabilities are so high, the autonomy is so high. I mean, now you're going to make it 10 or 50 times more powerful. I mean, this could do better than the ARVR, the goggles stuff.

• 20:01Harry Stebbings?

  The amount of Muse and Instant competitors right now is pretty astonishing. Okay, big tech goes shopping, baby. We have two rumors that are circulating. Obviously, we don't deal in rumors, so I'd love to start with the first one. Reflection, which, for those that don't know, is a fantastic team building open source models in the US, backed by Sequoia. I think the last round was at $25 billion or so. And the rumor is that Nvidia is buying them at a $30 billion price. This is on the back of them buying Poolside for $12 billion, which is in the open model game as well. Guys, how do we analyze Janson further going into the open model space?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and by further, just to be clear, you're reminding us that they already bought Poolside. They already have their Nematron existing model. And I think the answer is, as we've discussed several times, if you're in the chip business and all, you know, and you've got, some of your biggest customers are close source model companies zooming out. If you've got a pile of money that's going to go into that collective pool, it's in your interest that more of it stay with you and the chips and less of it stay with the model companies, right? So by definition, you love open source model and only one chip provider. Just like on the other side of the table, the model companies love close source models and everyone having their own chip provider. So it's, you know, we're friends, we're the best of friends, we lend each other $100 billion or so.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  But we're watching you closely and we want to be able to fight back if you get margin greedy. So it just all makes sense.

• 21:30Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it'll go through, Rory?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  When you've got $5 trillion, if you want to buy something for $30 billion, you can buy something for $30 billion. Whether or not there'll be that whole pushback after the Grok thing, will the structure of an Aqua Hire work now or will there be pushback? Who knows? The world is pretty busy right now. It's not like these next two months are going to be idle time for the US government. So who knows? But I think that-

• 21:53Harry Stebbings?

  Rory, if you're on the board, would you say sell or would you say reject?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Oh, I'd hit the bed. Because they're amazing companies, but the standalone business, you know, if you have an open weight model, you know, you're relying a lot of, the monetization is inference, are you in that? I've always thought open weight is really exciting, but how does it work monetarily? You know, if you're getting these kind of excess prices, the value to the acquirer is very high. And the market cap of the acquirer is very high. This might be a moment in time that doesn't come back.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  It's also, honestly, I have been on the other side of it. It's very stressful to say no to Nvidia, knowing that they're going to directly compete with you and promote your competitor. If you, like, we're doing this, we're investing $50 billion, $100 billion in our own open weights model, US-based open. We're going to continue to do it. This isn't a one-off and you have a chance to take seven or nine million. But if you don't, you're going to be a bigger and better competitor. It's not, it's not a simple, you can say no, but it is a little scary. It is a little scary when you say no and they're going to buy other people and get bigger and bigger. It doesn't change the game, but it, as a founder, it certainly weighs on you when you get that build by our partner sort of threatened with a smile message, right? Yeah, so I would take it, unless you're confident. You've got to have the winning hand.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  And, you know, we don't know where it's going to go, but, you know, Salesforce announced they've got their own models that are built on Nematron and built with Nvidia. You've got to predict where this is going to be in 18 months with Nvidia putting all of its software engineers and all of its team behind it, right? This is a software company, not just a hardware company. You could imagine that the moat here between software, hardware, model is so powerful that in 12 or 18 months, why would you want to use any other sort of open weight, open model other than Nvidia's? Like, today, it doesn't, it doesn't seem logical, but I could imagine it being the case in 18 months. It's such a perfect combination.

• 23:36Harry Stebbings?

  Does it make Thinking Machines more or less attractive at $44 billion, which is the round that they're raising now?

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Do you get prorata rights in the round? Do we have a sense? Do we know?

• 23:47Harry Stebbings?

  Very good question. Let me just check my Quinn and Manola-

• 23:49Speaker 00

  I'm lowering my price substantially to Keith's point.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  As long as there's either a large acquirer to get paid more or an obvious clear business model. I mean, there's examples on both sides of the table. There's companies who were last and made a ton after all the early guys sold and there's companies where the early guys made a ton of money and then everyone after that kind of sorry they're still in it. It's also situation dependent. It's useless to have an ironclad rule. You know, you've just got to know which the game here is. And again, I go back to, you know, I believe Thinking Machines has grown nicely in revenue, but you've got to have a lot of clarity on revenue and revenue visibility to make that call. Now, you know, we're just going to see, I mean, it's interesting with recording on Tuesday, publishing on Thursday, and on Wednesday Anthropic's doing its investor meeting.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And I assume the Q3 revenue numbers will leak within 24 hours. So, you know, it's not like there aren't big revenues attached to these businesses. They're the biggest revenues ever seen, but the only question is, you know, how will it shake out? How will it shake out for, you know, one level down like Thinking Machines?

• 24:50Speaker 00

  The sort of Poolside, why we're selling memo that we just couldn't get enough compute, we just couldn't afford it, we could not keep up with the arms race. I mean, it does sort of, it's not as simple as $44 billion versus whatever. Can you even get the compute to be competitive? Like, I don't know, I don't know. You need someone that's even closer to it than I am, but my gut is no. My gut is you can't get enough compute to be competitive. Everything's being taken, right? Even Anthropic's reaching out to Muse, seeing that, Metis, can we get some of your computes, right? Maybe they'll give it to Thinking Machines, I don't know, but that war has just begun. You can't, you can't even get memory, let alone compute. It's not as simple as software, right? So I don't know.

• 25:28Harry Stebbings?

  It's time for investment committee. Jason, on the agenda for today, we have Jev and TypeSafe, the parent company, raises an $870 million Series A at a $7.5 billion valuation weeks after launching Jev. Andreessen-led Sequoia participating, one of the largest Series A rounds ever. Jason, will we be participating in this round at $7.5 billion?

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Well, listen, obviously, we're lucky to get into the second close because there's plenty of money that wants to get in at 10, 12, and even 15 today. So I recommend, we can't even get our full allocation. I recommend we put in the maximum amount we can out of the fund because it's already valued more than this, right? That valuation is several weeks stale. And Jev usage has quadrupled just since Andreessen actually shook hands on the deal. So we have no choice. We have to be all in and get every share we can. I'm asking that we can get all the, the early investors to waive their prorata. That's my only requirement, but we want to put in every share we can. Are we worried about competition? Are we worried that it appears that Cloudflare already has a competitive product? Are we worried that OpenAI appears to be having a competitive product? Are we, are we worried that Anthropic could even give this away for free? Are we worried that Amazon has suggested they're, they're building their, their own version of Jev?

• 26:39Speaker 00

  We are, but growth like this is the point of venture, boys. And if we don't do this, we should just stay home. We're raising new funds every 12 to 13 months. These are massive funds. We have to deploy it into winners. And to be clear, and we have years of data on this, not every winner wins, but you can only win by being in the winners. This is a winner. Will it be a winner in a year? I don't know. It is one of the massive breakout winners today. We're still getting to invest at 7.5 billion. We can probably do a paper mark up to 15 and tell our LPs we're geniuses. I'd say we buy every share, block the prorata, and do as much founder secondary as we can.

• 27:11Harry Stebbings?

  The terrible thing about that parody is it's accurate as hell.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Totally. It's not a parody at all. It makes you realize, yes, you can do this job in three minutes, how much?

• 27:21Harry Stebbings?

  Can you paint the upside for me on Jev? How does this become a wildly successful, massive company? Where's the $500 billion?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  I'll tell you though, just at a tactical level, at a builder level, right? Which is that, you know, no, no models are particularly, going back to the evals and the meta, whatever, the Muse, Turbo, none of these hit 90s or 100. All these models make many errors and many issues, okay? They're not reliable. I could tell you endless issues from this week. You know, Jev is a classifier, which, we're now in classifier 2.0, we're like in, and it works. And it's, maybe it gets 70% to 80% of carefully prompted matches right. Will the Cloudflare team keep putting as much effort in as a standalone team? Will Amazon, will OpenRouter, will all these people try as hard? Or will these be niche products with not enough revenue that they don't have time to invest in?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  And that these guys at Jev just make classifiers do something they couldn't do before? Get incredibly high resolution rates and then they can expand it. You know, right now, you can ask relatively complicated questions, but you only get binary outputs. That's why it works so well, right? Rory or Harry, who's my better investor? Rory, Harry, Rory, Rory, Rory. They're going to get better and better and better. And I don't know that even if the Cloudflare, Amazon teams can catch up today when it's easy. It's easy to build what OpenRouter was six months ago today, right? But are they going to maintain that investment? I think as VCs, we have to make this stressful investment that a core team that is very strong out of OpenAI, that is doing nothing else, will pull ahead from the seeming parity you can achieve today.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  I'm actually willing to make that bet because I'm using Jev a lot. And I can already see that if it never changed, maybe I would swap it out, right? But if it gets better than the rest, there's no way I would change. Even just somewhat better on its evals, you would never use anything else. So I would still make that bet today that this, this team will do nothing else. And I don't think the inference costs are going to destroy them. I think that 750, this is, this is a low inference model. I don't know the training costs. I think 750 gets you pretty far in this space, for real. I think it gets you further than it gets you in Thinking Machines. It might get you two or three years to runway. So I'm cautiously bullish that a focused team, rather than four smart kids at Cloudflare, can, can maintain its lead and get to accuracy levels, to summarize, that were never possible before.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  That's the unlock. Jev is super fast and super cheap, okay? And it is accurate enough to use for maybe 10% of your AI use cases. If they make it hyper accurate, it changes the game.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And that's the theory. And then just to get back to the numbers, if it's 20% of your total, we decided, I think, two weeks ago, if total AI frontier inference is a $200 billion market, which it's better be in a year or two, we're all in trouble, then 20% of that is $40 billion. And if the price of that goes down by, you know, 80%, you still had $8 billion. And $8 billion, and if they get half of it, that's a $4 or $5 billion revenue company, which is probably worth $50 billion. That's the case. Every one of those sentences is credible. And then the biggest question is, you know, the other competition, but to Jason's point, the business is there.

• 30:18Harry Stebbings?

  What worries me in every justification for a lot of these prices is, wow, the Lick pref's only a billion one, and it's such a strategic asset with a good team, that the downside protection is they'll just get bought by a great acquirer. I just hear this every single time. And maybe that's true, but not everything has a downside protection of being acquired, does it?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it does until it doesn't, and that's meant to be glim. But in a world where you've got 12 companies above a trillion dollars, all of whom are acquisitive, all of whom are in a wild tearing hurry to build companies where time is money, and especially if the legal window is open, then there's going to be a lot of acquisitions. And the logic is true. If the market slows down, then all this stuff will go in a bad place at the same time. So, you know, it'll be true until it's not.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  I think it's overstated. I will say today, it feels like a liquidation preference in Jev is much more valuable than 1,000 liquidation preferences than 1,000 2021 unicorns. Many of those will end up being worthless. So, we overstate the value of the liquidation preference, right, to get the deal through the committee. But they have real value today, right? It's just, I'd rather have this lick preference than quite a few from 2021.

• 31:28Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, you said 2021 there, Jason. 2021, there were 34 Decacorns. We now have a record 42 startups that have become Decacorns in 2026.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  As they say in the Simpsons cartoon, that's 2026 so far, right? What a quarter to go. Yeah, there was 34 Decacorns in 2021, right? So, in other words, it's more Decacorns than the last time things went horribly wrong. That's the first obvious description. In other, because if you look back at those Decacorns, Mirror was a Decacorn in 2021, you know, Airtable was a Decacorn. I don't think they'll be the same, but just worth pointing out. I think the more funny statistic is this. There are, in the public markets, a grand total of 98 Decacorns ever. And if you look at them by decade, there's a scary word. It's like, and you take the private and the public Decacorns as of the start

• 32:22Speaker 01

  of this year, we roughly generated 20 plus or minus Decacorns per decade for the last five decades. And we generated, what did you say, 42 Decacorns in less than a full year of this decade. Now, there is some, obviously, market caps continually go up, all those things point in your favor. But it is stunning to think of 20 to 30 Decacorns per decade, and then 42 Decacorns in less than a year. Hmm. And, you know, that does only 98 public companies, I just said 98 above 10 billion, another 30 above 100 billion. So, 130 companies in total worth 10 billion or more since the dawn of, in tech, since

• 33:04Speaker 01

  the dawn of American capitalism, and further 42 this year.

• 33:08Harry Stebbings?

  Scratching the obvious itch there, you're basically saying that we're in a bubble.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'm saying, you're trying to make me say I'm in a bubble. I just think that, well, we got the pref, as Jason points out, so we're all fine. But what you can say for certain is the production rate of Decacorns is higher compared to anything we've seen before, including five decades of data in the public markets. It definitely, I mean, either this is the most economically transformative event since the Industrial Revolution, or we're getting a wee bit ahead of ourselves. You pick.

• 33:41Harry Stebbings?

  Which would you pick, Rory?

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Maybe the better answer is this. I'm actually going to go back to the pref answer, right? It's kind of funny, because you have to remember, all these private company valuations, that valuation is set by someone who does have a Lick pref. And once you have a Lick pref and you believe it exists, you can say to yourself, unlike a common stock where it trades every day, you can say it's a 1X plus option value. And the thing right now is, option values have high value, because there's a lot of vol. Some, apparently three companies in this decade will become worth a trillion dollars, many will become 100 billion, even if it's 10. It's rational to say there's some non-zero probability this company becomes fricking amazing, and my downside is a 1X. To make it concrete, I

• 34:24Speaker 01

  don't think all these stocks would trade at 10 billion or more if they were all traded on the public markets.

• 34:31Harry Stebbings?

  That's not giving me an answer.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  I think it is.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Well, we're all, we're betting this is true, right? I mean, Menlo had some math when they raised their last fund, it was, I think it was a $3 billion fund to deploy the next 12 months, that they're betting they'll have at least four $25 billion plus exits to make the fund, right? That's just the math. It's not complicated, right? That they can do that like clockwork. That's the bet. The AI spend and the recent exits of the last X months justify it. Historical evidence makes it suspect. So, are you, are you, are you living the moment, or are you living as a student of history? I just don't think in venture, there's a lot of upside in being a student of history, even though we have one starring on the show, which I'm grateful for, but I don't know if it gets you the huge carrychecks.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  And in fact, as I looked at this data, which one of my colleagues was doing for something else, I think what you, what I actually realize you need to do is then you say to yourself, okay, if you extrapolate, what level of growth are you assuming to make this math work? Because yes, Jason, you are. In other words, because every year, I mean, every decade, it looks bigger than the last decade, with the exception of 1970s, because stocks go up. But the question is, I mean, you made a comment, four $25 billion plus outcomes. And in a world-

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Per fund.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Per fund, yeah. And there are only 130 above 10 billion ever. So, there's probably only 70 above 25. And so, you got to get four new ones. It's doable, but you can't miss, you can't miss a lot here, dude.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  But that's what Andreessen got so right. People, when we started our investment, well, maybe pre my investing career, but people mocked Andreessen in the early days for overpaying and doing this wrong and saying, we have to be in all the winners. And they just did the math. Yes, you have to be in all the winners. And even a lot of the winners you won't make money in because you'll overpay. But the super winners will make up for all of it. It's just basic, and everyone, all the yahoos mocked them, and they were completely right. The price of overpaying for a winner is being in the super winner.

• 36:18Harry Stebbings?

  Well, talking of super winners, Jason, do you want to come back to the investment committee? We can do a deep mind. Damis Hassabis, the legend that is Damis Hassabis, raised at about $10 billion, give or take, from Thrive a matter of months ago. Now, Isomorphic Labs, his company, in talks to raise at between $40 to $50 billion price. We gonna do this?

• 36:41Speaker 00

  I mean, generational talent has generational prices today. As much as I believe in the Jev teams and the Type Safe teams, he's going to pull together a team like's never been seen since the dawn of mankind and artificial intelligence. Maybe he fails. Maybe he's had enough of it. Maybe he's enjoyed life in London too much, too many posh clubs. But I think I've seen the fire. It is a scary bet. We have our liquidation preference, and no one will be able to assemble a set of talent like this. This is the next and last chance to cherry pick the best of the best of the best, and this is the job.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  The interesting thing about this company will be that unlike the vast bulk of the revenues that come from the foundation models, where it's, you know, intelligence automation, where the value capture is replace labor, here, the value capture is not replace labor. It's actually make science discoveries. And the way, because, you know, when you discover it, when you do a molecule, if you automate the $500 million of science spend that you pay science wages to, that's not really going to cut it. What you really want to do is, you know, when you create the $200 billion drug, you want to get 10% of that on a royalty basis. So, it's kind of the, as the models devour all the knowledge worker dollars that are available to them in terms of direct replacement, at some point, they're going

• 37:55Speaker 01

  to have to monetize via creating whole new things with their intelligence. And, you know, it's a lot more credible today, just given the math, the recent work they did on math, which, as one mathematician correctly pointed out, you don't actually get paid a whole ton for solving Stokes-Navy or whatever it is. But if you can discover the next GLP drug, that's a winner, because those things do money. So, it will be interesting to see. I have in the past said, it's hard to get the drug companies to extract meaningful royalties when they still got to do phase one, phase two, phase three. And many of these companies end up being drug companies down the line. It'll be interesting to see what happens here. But it's a big pile of money if you can extract the value, not just from a labor percentage.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  No, no, I think we're all going to be on 10 GLP-1-like drugs in a few years. And I think, you know, we never really got the full story on Anthropic's wet lab. I think the potential here is even greater than is let on. I think the potential for drug discovery is probably massive. And, you know, we're going from weirdo's microdosing to finding out we're all going to have a set of drugs that dramatically extend longevity and quality of life. And they can radically accelerate it, own the IP, and have other people do the hard work. Maybe AI really can reboot the entire industry fairly rapidly. Of course, not all of it, not the trials, not the rest. But man, if you could get a GLP-1 out five years faster.

• 39:11Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, do you actually buy that? I don't mean that cynically.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  The drug stuff?

• 39:15Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, only very recently did I buy it. I thought it was wackos and Brian Johnson's and people selling crap.

• 39:21Harry Stebbings?

  What caused you to change your mindset?

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Because the medical evidence for GLP-1s is so, it's so profound. It's so, for heart disease, for so many other things. And I think our ability to tailor drugs to extend longevity is the massive market. It's better than inference. You know, if you, and if you talk to any, just physicians at the cutting edge now, they're all saying to anybody, like your hip or whatever, just don't hurt the other one. Like, just get there, like, in another couple of years, the amount of longevity we're going to be able to achieve is so much higher, that I just think the wackos and the microdoser's of SF and Brian Johnson made me skeptical. But just the overwhelming evidence of the benefits that almost everyone should be on a GLP-1, right? And the fact that we're going to get better and better at figure all this stuff out. I mean, we're just walking sets of cancer

• 40:07Speaker 00

  and heart disease and other things that having material impacts will radically extend longevity, radically extend longevity.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  There's a whole sequence of steps before you even have adequately good molecule identification with some understanding of how it works. And then you still have all the different bio phases. So as I say, I do believe it'll be harder to capture value than you think, but I'm really glad they're trying.

• 40:28Harry Stebbings?

  Guys, I want to talk about one which may be a little bit earlier than usual, but we had Meta, which is the Macor or the surge for robotics data. Physical world data that can be implemented in most often robotics raises 60 million Series B from Sequoia. The reason I wanted to bring it up is that, you know, we have Micro AGI in Europe, which has posted race to 100 million very quickly. There's Meta, which is well over 100 million in ARR. There's another provider that I'm forgetting the name of, Exsoft or Exosoft or whatever it is, that's again over 100. And we just see the sheer volume of data providers over 100 million. What should we read, infer, analyze from this?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  You can infer from data in general that, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI spend a large amount of money on training data, as do the other three wannabe foundation models. And there's an entire industry that suffers to take care of that. It's an interesting business because you only have five or six large competitors and they all obviously want to go on and sell to enterprises. But the vast, vast bulk of the dollars comes from a relatively small number of enterprises. You know, those companies have grown very quickly because, you know, the foundation model companies want, want data, they want it now, and they're willing to spend big to get it. So they've been able to go from zero to hundreds and in the case of some billions very quickly. And the interesting thing in the foundation model case is there's clearly an end revenue source that's paying for that.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  In the case of robotics data, it all makes sense. It's the same analogy. There's a bunch of companies, really interesting, doing various forms of models for robotics. It's obviously early in its deployment lifecycle. So, you know, you've got the early burgeoning spend, you've got the 10 million and the 100 million dollar deals. And you can get that on venture dollars from the robotics companies and from, yeah, and foundation model companies too, because they want to be in robotics. I think what's going to scale that to a billion or 2 billion is when the deployments happen, and that's still unproven in terms of timing. Because, I mean, the humanoids, I saw at GXO, which is a logistics company that one of my companies deal with, they sent me a post, one of the guys there did it. It was the summary of the post was 42 POCs of humanoids, zero deployed.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  And then there was some thread about the BMW relationship with Figure, where again, we talked big game, but the humanoids aren't out there. So I do think there's a deployment issue in robotics, which will filter back upstream to ultimately spend on data business until such time as the unlock happens at the deployment level. But for now, you know, definitely making hay while the sun is definitely shining.

• 42:58Harry Stebbings?

  Are we doing Meta from our?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  You have to do the second half of the Sequoia round, that the regulatory 20x step up or whatever it is they deem to be appropriate. So, no.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Well, it's just, listen, I'm not smart enough to really know. I do think it's an interesting play in the sense that obviously the current level of interest in robotics is beyond an all time high, right? It's, and they all need trading data, right? And you can be skeptical of some of these folks, but the demand for high quality training data, even if it's just paying people to wear sensors and do work, it's just off the charts. I met a founder at YC Demo Day, he wasn't in this class at YC, he was just there that I knew from Saster stuff. And he tilted his company into doing just, you know, a very niche version of training data. And he did 30 million in 60 days. And he said, the problem is they just don't want to do all the stuff he's asked to do. He's like, we have 300 million of demand. It just takes so many specialized humans in so many countries to do this niche product.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  We don't, we're turning away 270 out of 30 because we don't want to do it, right? So if you could nail that two by two of being able to provide the data labeling, the humans and the everything, you have the right one. Maybe I'd rather do this than invest in a bunch of robots that are gonna, you know, throw Aunt Bessie out the, out the door or smash their fist through, through my kitchen. When they're trying to grab the pots, I'm certainly skeptical of the residential ones. Maybe this is the safest place to put our money.

• 44:18Harry Stebbings?

  Oh my God, I would way rather do this than any robotics company.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  But the absurdity of that is you can't, these things aren't going to exist unless the robotics companies are successful. So I disagree.

• 44:27Harry Stebbings?

  Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, because I'm saying I don't know which robotics company will be successful. I don't know what form factor, I don't know what vertical, but I believe that robotics will be. So I want to be in the infrastructure that allows any of them to be.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  But pushing back on that, that's like saying I want to do scale AI, which is a Mercor, which are great companies instead of Anthropic. If I had a choice, I'd do Anthropic. If you can pick the winner, pick the winner, right? Because the model companies are by definition bigger than the companies that sell to the model companies.

• 44:53Harry Stebbings?

  Sorry, I don't quite understand that analogy. It's a bit like saying, I want to be in scale, not Lagora. Because I don't know who's going to win the application layer, but I do know that models are going to need to get better. That's a better comparable, which would be understandable, I personally.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  What you're saying implicit in that is you believe, there's a statement in that, that each robotics company has its own foundation model. And the company's like, we're in the journalist pie and skilled. Like if journalist pie and skilled become the dominant foundation models for robotics, then it is equivalent to my foundation model comment. But if every robotics company has to build its own specific model, then yes, then it becomes a very fragmented market at the model layer. And I don't know. It's definitely one of the areas where I have a fair number of robotics investment and the least amount of clarity.

• 45:43Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, boys, there's a lot else. Guide me in terms of where you would like to go. We can talk about Anthropic cutting the price of Haiku by 90% as the price war with OpenAI further intensifies. Jason, I'm relatively intrigued to hear your thoughts on that, given how intensely you use them.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I know we've talked a lot about this kind of stuff on the show. I will say it's under discussed. These models, Haiku 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, they're, they're great. And they're really, from my perspective, the first thing that's actually been deflationary with LLMs and AI. Nothing else has been deflationary, because no matter how many, you talk about token prices falling, we've been consuming so many more tokens, we're not getting the benefit of it, right? And none of our portfolio companies are seeing their cogs fall in AI, are they? Not really, right? We've all consumed so many more tokens and used more and more of the, of the state of the art frontier models that we haven't seen inflationary benefits. These, to me, are the first ones that, yeah, that are deflationary.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Haiku, basically, you know, since the beginning, since before the show, there's always been the N minus one model, which isn't quite the frontier one. And you get the last year's, you get last year's Cadillac and Fins for this year's shining. It was sort of worth it. But now Haiku 5.5, which is a joke, I mean, developers would laugh at you if you used Haiku 5.5. It's almost as good for a lot of use cases as Sonnet, and it's a 10th or the 20th the price. It's like shock. It's so cheap. It's almost, Haiku 5.5 is like the first reasoning model, and you can dial up how much reason you want, that you can almost not care about what it costs like Jev. We haven't had this before that worked for me. We haven't had a reasoning level model where you didn't have to stress every token, every dollar.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Because it is, it is a 10th the price of what Sonnet 4.5 was. It's a 10th the price. So I think it's disruptive. Sonnet 5.5 is interesting as an aside. It's basically, you know, it seems, at least in the testing that I've done, it's almost as good as the Opus models before. But what's interesting, it's only about 10% cheaper than the previous on it, but it's twice as fast. And these evals don't talk enough about speed. Like this is why a lot of these things are useless, like Grok and others, because they're too slow or they time out. Speed, like if you can have your chat go twice as fast, it's a big deal, right? And Sonnet 5.5 is twice as fast, 10% cheaper, not that much, and better. Speed is also deflationary because you can do more and more quickly. So for me, these two plus Jev, the first time we've seen deflation.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  And yeah, you're going to have your Jevens paradox, and we're going to use even more, of course. But this is the first time you could literally go in, swap out models and have much more speed and pay a lot less, like in a week. It's exciting, and I think it's most exciting for like B to B stuff, where we're all still, we're all still making these trade offs for a lot of B to B apps, right? We're making, how much, how good can we make the resolution? How good can we resolve this issue? How good can we do this workflow? If it's twice as fast and in some cases a 10th the price, we sure better see a lot of results at the next board meeting. No more excuses, boys. It's the first one at a practical level I've seen this deflationary.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  And I think the next interesting thing will be, you know, call it Jevens, call it price elasticity. Because price elasticity simply says, you know, for a proportional reduction in prices, does the net dollar spend go up or down? And the bet obviously they're making is it's highly elastic and it goes down and you end up spending more. And we'll see. That's obviously the bet. I mean, you would not want to be cutting prices in a demand inelastic product. Because then you'd have the classic problem of high fixed costs, low demand expansion and lower prices, which is terribly horribly bad. So the bet here, as you see these price cuts, is in fact that this stuff is very elastic in terms of demand.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I assume we'll see it in the, in the S one soon enough. I assume, listen, all the accounting for these LLMs is going to be interesting, right? But I assume you can, when you, when you're using Haiku or Sonnet, when you're using essentially the N minus one or N model, the only cogs is going to be inference, right? You can basically write off the training costs because you can assign that all to, to the frontier models, to Fable and Opus, right? Assuming that's the case, it's sort of a win win all around, right? Because I believe that Anthropic's inference margins are quite high, right? Before, I believe it. But I believe their real world gross margins are still pretty crappy because of training costs, right? So I think it'll be interesting to see how they break this out, right? But I think it's, I think it's exciting. But yeah, we'll just use more. There's going to be a lot of stuff where it's, it's like, you know, it, taking a 20 minute shower when you don't have to pay for the hot water, you never get out, right?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Just as a reminder, and I agree we will, and I agree with that assessment, but when you cut prices by 90%, we're going to use more doesn't cut it. We got to use 10 times more. Otherwise, demand elasticity is less than one and you actually, revenue goes down.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  I do think we'll use 10 times as much because what's going to happen instead of sampling something, you'll just, you'll just do it all.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  That's what my colleague said on using Jev. You'll use it in every row of the database.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Everything. And the key is speed, Matt. We don't discuss speed as much. Jev is so fast, right? And Haiku 5.5 is actually slower than the one before, but it's not even comparable. It's sonnets twice as fast. You could just use more of it because it's faster. If it's slower, it doesn't, it doesn't really, you can only use so much in parallel. But yeah, I agree with your part. You just use it for everything.

• 50:44Harry Stebbings?

  What does this mean for open source in US enterprises? Does this make it inherently less attractive where you're like, hell, I can get Haiku and Anthropic for 90% less? That really reduces the attractiveness of open source.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  That's why I thought I said on the, I don't know whether it was Dev or Jack, but I said, you could imagine it would all flip around next year and then the whole open router thing would, would change and people are not loyal. No one wants to use, right or wrong, no one wants to use at least China-based open weights models. No, no one in the enterprise wants to use them. So when you have a domestic solution, ideally from a vendor you are, that's already been qualified and trusted. I'm not saying it will happen because there's a lot of smart people working at DeepSeek at all, right? I mean, some of the best of the best, but you could imagine that this being a moment in time. And in 12 months from now, they're, they're niche models that are not, that are, that are used by some companies we invest in. But really in the enterprise are almost non-existent. Again, I think Salesforce making Finn rip it out before the deal closed is telling.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  It's a moment in time. Maybe that won't happen, but I just, some people don't want these China open weight models. They just don't want them.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  But, but they'll have reflection.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, they may, that's why the open router could, maybe if Nvidia buys reflection, then reflection plus poolside, plus everything ends up being, you know, 50% of the usage and 15% of the revenue. It wouldn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me at all, right?

• 51:59Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, what else tickled your fancy from this schedule?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, I almost don't want to bring it up, but bending spoons laying off basically all of Airtable. Not a surprise, right? But man, I mean, I wrote this when it happened and no one cared. I'm like, guys, everyone's talking about the money and the ARR revenue and the, and I'm like, you realize almost everyone's losing their job? I didn't see anyone care, give a, give a rat's arse about the fact everyone's going to lose their job. I'm like, everyone lost their job at Vimeo, everyone lost their job at Evernote, everyone's going to lose their job at Miro. And I barely saw a tweet about anyone giving a rat's ass. And, and I'm not even judging because this is capitalism. But man, when you, as, when you sell your company to bending spoons, you just got to realize your entire team's going to be gone. And do founders owe anything to their teams?

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Do boards of directors own anything to their teams or do they just owe their best returns to Cedar Sinai, right? Do you have any moral obligation to sell to someone that's going to lay off 80% of your, of your team within weeks? They are stakeholders, especially if you're cash flow positive and growing like Miro and Airtable, right? They're both have hundreds of millions in the bank and growing. Do they matter? Do they matter legally? Do they matter ethically? Do they matter at all? Or is this just part of the startup game? I wouldn't do it. There's no way I would sell my company and have 80% of my team laid off. I just would never do it.

• 53:11Harry Stebbings?

  But just pause, Jason, let's just stay on that. You have a fiduciary responsibility to your board and to your shareholders, if you're Miro, say. And that is the best and only offer for you. What do you do?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  I think Rory can help remind me. I do think legally you have an obligation to your shareholders above your employees, right? I believe, I, I'm mixing up my Delaware law. I'm pretty sure that's true, right?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  For a public company, it is the only obligation you have, and they're extraordinarily clear on that. And even if in your mind, you're thinking about something else, you never say it in a public company board because it just lays yourself open to shareholders. Your sole job when you went into an acquisition period is to maximize value for shareholders. So yes, that's there. I actually don't know in private what the actual.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Right?

• 53:55Harry Stebbings?

  So Jason, would you not sell if you're Miro, which is a private company?

• 53:59Speaker 00

  No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't. The people that work for me so hard, I wouldn't, I wouldn't let them all be laid off the next week. No, I wouldn't do it. Life's too short.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Pushing only on that, I hear you. And obviously if you have another alternative that even if it's going to make you less money, you might well choose to sell to them. The question is if you're locked into a forever march where, you know, over the next two years, a lot of them are going to leave anyway. Right? Because when you get on the forever march, as you know, retention is the problem, especially for the best people. There's a little part of me that says, accepting that, having that kind of talent repurposed is actually just better for everyone. Go into the bending spoons deal, but cut your deal on your employee economics upfront. So know what everyone's getting into. Cause I do think that the debt march will get old pretty quickly. You know, you'll try and do the noble thing for your employees and then over the next two years, they'll all peel off anyway.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And you'll be left with your even more empty husk that's now one times revenue. So I hear you and I'm normally the softy in this group, but sometimes resolution is worth it even for the employees.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  It's complicated.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  It's complicated.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  I just don't think that there's an acquire you can be more sure will have, will lay off all, the vast majority of your team than the bending spoons.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  The, the mission is clear.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  You don't know what Vista's going to do. You don't know what Tomo Bravo is going to do. You don't know what Francisco Partner, but you know what the bending guys are going to do. They're going to just axe almost your entire team, right? To a next level I've never seen before, right? Maybe Constellation does this. I don't know, but I've, I've never seen it before.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  For what it's worth, I think bending spoons has an, I mean, they all are very efficient. Bending spoons has a, a bigger centralized component. I think Constellation's argument is everybody runs on their own, but we don't spend a ton of money in sales and marketing. And you got to have 40% EBITDA. I don't care how you do it. I think bending spoons argument is all of the above, plus all your GNA is centralized, all your people are centralized. So you just need even less. So it's variations on a theme of lean and mean and even leaner and even meaner.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  I'll tell you the other one, just on the theme, and Harry, you can cut me off if you want, but I was thinking about this. And I put this, I'm very sensitive of this. As we had on the Dev Podcast, I'm confused what loyalty means in the AI age, right? I've got many flaws. Loyalty isn't one of them. But, uh, you know, CloudFlare is an interesting one because a lot of folks are doing little layoffs. Netflix, 5%, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. HubSpot, 7%, you know, get. CloudFlare earlier this year crushing it, had a great year, the whole year, right? Even during the SaaS apocalypse, Matthew just came in and said, I'm laying off 20% of the team, just doing it. He did it in one day and they beat the quarter. They've, they've accelerated growth even more. The stock price is up like 80% this year. And it's not, it's not bending spoons. He didn't decide to gut CloudFlare, but he made the right call. He's like, we're not failing. We're an AI beneficiary, but we are too slow.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  We're wasting too many times on a lot, too much effort on folks that aren't going to get us there. I'm going to do one 20% cut, not because we're struggling, but because we're to grow even faster. And they've re-accelerated, you know, I think bending spoons, it will, I don't know, but some of these are just too small. That's when I see these layoffs. I always think on, as, as much as I care, I'm like, they're too small. CloudFlare did 20 and it worked.

• 56:58Harry Stebbings?

  The hard thing for bending spoons now is it actually has to find large enough companies that it can buy. There's lots of smaller companies, but it needs to find large enough revenue-based companies that it can actually buy. That was what was really interesting when I spoke to them.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's 3% organic growth. So if you want to grow 80% like they are, you got to buy big stuff, right?

• 57:16Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, Jason, the churn on these companies when they buy them though, I mean, the numbers are just, you have to price increase to the max just to keep this, these businesses going. While we were talking, it may be uninteresting to you, I might've been a user of this company in the past. Bumble has announced that it will be taken, Rory, Bumble, if you don't know, you probably don't. Being a happily married man for so many years, but it's a dating app where young men can find young women. And I think there's a professional network as well, where you obviously have a dating app and they are being taken private by Mr. Ravi Gupta in his new firm, Ithaca Holdings for $1.3 billion, I believe it is.

• 57:58Harry Stebbings?

  It's a pretty cool bit of news, a holding company taking Bumble private.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was market cap was like 500 million before the deal, right?

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:06Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Good premium, man. VCs have always hated it, right? The churn, the, the problems with the customer lifetime value. They've always hated it, right?

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny because you know, given the percentage of people who meet on the apps now is 56%. But if you think about it, there's a business that provides the most basic human need, which is marriage, et cetera, dating marriage. Like literally the thing that people care about the most. Just look at the number of pop songs about it versus everything else. And all you get is a few lousy billion bucks. I mean, you're solving the needs of half the Western world and all you get is a couple of million bucks. It's a funny world, billion bucks.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Listen, I could be wrong. I'll give you the bull case on Bumble, right? Just, just as a builder, right? And this may be, this may be wrong. Having built a matchmaking app for our Saster community, having thought through this in AI, you can do so much more with AI than you could do before, right? I haven't used Bumble, no criticism, right? But I can only assume the matches are at best mediocre, right? They're visual and you have a fairly small amount of data to grab from, right? If Bumble can, Bumble has massive historic data. If you can get other data and you can use AI to make dating better. And if you have a data science team that can do this better than others, everything's competitive. But I could imagine it being, the, the outcomes being much better with AI, right? Much better with deep analytics across lots of data.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  I mean, this isn't, this is Captain Ivy. It's obviously not new to the team. But I would imagine there's a bull case where someone could, could actually make much better matches. Charge more for it, right? Raise prices because it's much better, right? Instead of going on 20 horrible dates or getting a bunch of creeps, you have five great ones, right? You know, the old, old eHarmony idea, but it actually works. Anchor High and Quintuple or 10x the value of this business, that that would be the bull case to me. But they're not the only guys probably thinking about it in this space, right? How to use more data and AI to make better matches.

• 59:51Harry Stebbings?

  And also actually how to use synthetic versions of yourself, AI avatars to represent you. And then you can go out and meet 100 different people without actually spending any time meeting anyone. What a wonderfully antisocial way to date.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it might work, but it might work.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  In the end, I do believe the object of dating is at some point to make contact in the physical world, as I understand the mission. So for a while, but at some point.

• 1:00:16Harry Stebbings?

  That sounds terrifying. We sit scrolling, which is why we have such a good business.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, but AI should get to know you. If AI can reduce the friction, the wasted time on dating, the wasted time and money, the ROI is really high, right?

• 1:00:30Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  What's a date cost? 200 bucks? A good date? You know, I put that, I put 150 on Bumble AI. I'm already 50 bucks ahead.

• 1:00:38Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, any final ones? Because Rory is not going to give me a suggestion.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  This one is barely worth talking about, but because you had it on the list. It's just worth reflecting on as we, we're in Q4 of the year. Do I have this right? Yeah, we're in Q4, right? Reflecting on the SaaS apocalypse for a moment, right? And I really don't even want to talk about it in 2027 because 2021 is so far behind us. But I think the SaaS apocalypse is still here. And I think about this a lot. What I mean is the SaaS apocalypse of when, when we're, you know, earlier this year was in part a short driven thesis that we would vibe code our way out of all these applications, right? The market feared that growth, growth for many leaders slowed at the same time, which seemed to self reinforce the fact that we'd vibe code the own app. And, and we reached all time lows in like March or April, something like that, right? And the markets roared back, right? Nasdaq's up 22% this year.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  I have a sastra.ai index, you can see a sastra of those, I think it's up 28%. The world cloud's up 25%, right? So nominally, the SaaS apocalypse was a joke. And Marc Benioff made this point at the low that this, this too will pass. And nominally it did, like that, that fear passed. But I just say two things. Here's what I think about this. One, it passed for those well above a billion in revenue.

• 1:01:50Harry Stebbings?

  Agreed.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  I think it only passed for those with massive scale. And I think everyone without massive scale is living a worse SaaS apocalypse than in March or April. Because no one wants to buy software. I think we need a new term, but everyone's breathing a sigh of relief. I don't think we should be breathing any sighs of relief.

• 1:02:05Harry Stebbings?

  Agreed, because if you think about, all that happened is it's a mature consolidating industry now. And what happens in mature consolidating industries is that the market leaders have scale, they have market cap, and they have a leverage and they're just going to start, you know, you're seeing Benioff doing it, you're going to see acquiring companies and the ones that don't acquire, you can grind out. Because you're right, Jason, if you're already at 40 billion, you're money good. You've got cash flow, you're good, right? If you're at 100 million, you're trying to get to 300 million in a SaaS product, it's really hard today.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I wonder if we even, when we started the show, it seemed like 500, you could IPO at 500 million. I'm much, I'm not sure after Orin, friends, that's even true today in the SaaS apocalypse. I don't know that 500 is durable or safe any longer, right? You might need a billion and a half or 2 billion of ARR as a software company to have a safe IPO. And that, outside of Jev and friends, that has a lot of implications that the SaaS apocalypse is worse than we thought. 500 million isn't good enough anymore. Now it's got to be one to 2 billion in ARR for these companies to go public. And the math gets harder and harder. So I don't want to talk about it forever because it's a new world, but you know, the only thing that is safe is scale.

• 1:03:11Harry Stebbings?

  And credit to the few who were able to transition pre plays into post plays of the pre AI play to the post AI play, like an Intercom did. One of our businesses last week, I'm not allowed to say how much it sold for, but it sold for a very large amount of money, not billions, but hundreds and hundreds of millions. Tech Wolf to SAP. And it was, it was a pre AI enterprise software company in the HR space of all spaces. And it was able to transition into an AI first company and sold to SAP for a big amount of money, the biggest ever for Belgium, which isn't particularly saying much, but still big. And so I think there is still room.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  But I don't think, in all fairness, like, congrats to the Tech Wolf guys. I remember actually I forwarded that to you in 2020 here, but I just didn't get the HR thing. Or, or even Finn, like, like, okay, I don't think they count. And Intercom and the team is great. I'm a minute shareholder, Rory's a shareholder, but that's not true scale. That's not a billion north in recurring. So those deals are great for the founders and they're fine for, for the VCs. But I don't think they countermand this point that the SaaS apocalypse is as bad as it ever did. Kudos to the Intercom for building an AI native reboot of their company to nine figures in revenue, but that's very different than building to a billion growing 50%. And so I don't think it countermands that, right? It's, and these exits, Menlo, Menlo's point is we need three $25 billion exits per fund. Tech Wolf and Finn don't count.

• 1:04:35Harry Stebbings?

  Well, not, not for Menlo, but for my fund, they returned 24.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  It made a difference to Harry. I mean, I think there's two separate points. One is, and I think we should disaggregate them. One is, who does the $500 million exit count for? Who doesn't? Yeah, if you're a mega fund, it doesn't count. If you're a normal sized fund, you really can make good money there. It's not to be sneered at when the check hits. That's the first comment. But the second comment I think is more interesting one you're implying, Jason, which is post SaaS apocalypse, there's just not going to be as many of them. Because let's just say there's 200, 300 of these similar sized SaaS companies. Big tech can only buy so many at a time because it's a distraction. So they're going to get hoovered up at the rate of 10 a year. And that's like infinite time. That's the real issue, which is, is that because there's no probability of getting critical mass and scale and an exit, you're just done.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  You know, and not done, but you're just destined to be one of hundreds of midsize companies trying to compound your way to something that matters. And you very much have to proactively get AI native, try and drive to an outcome, try and be important to some other company, or be happy running your company for the next decade and, you know, taking a dividend. Because, you know, I mean, you, you could cynically say the same is true in AI apps. There are way too many apps relative to the likely number of half a billion or billion dollar outcomes. But in an expanding market, all is forgiven. What is product categories look like, company categories, everybody expands, just like SaaS did 20 years ago. It'll all be great until you hit the tipping point again.

• 1:06:01Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, guys, I don't want to be Mr. Negative or finish on a negative, but Flock Safety had some problems with privacy backlashes previously. We touched on it very previously in an episode. Now they're cutting 270 people, 18% of staff. Is this a company in real trouble? Is this?

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  I thought, I, you know, I saw a tweet, you know, I prefer the crime to the surveillance. Personally, I'd prefer the surveillance to the crime. I'd prefer the surveillance was actively controlled. You know, we talked about that a while back. The problem here is a bunch of, you know, renegade, you know, off limits use case for law enforcement, not doing it in the right way, or not even doing it for law enforcement at all, but checking up on personal, their personal lives has now damaged the brand. I won't say irrevocably, but yeah, it's a pretty tough problem. You know, you wouldn't want to be Flock right now, trying to, you know, position this because, you know, whenever red and blue America vote hates you, you got a tough thing going. And again, I defend that the other side. I do think the crime deferral is really worth it.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  I think in the improvements in crime in San Francisco, you know, they're just awesome. And it really expands things. So I'm, I'm not a hater, but it always sucks when the public has you, you know, when everyone has you like that. So I don't know, I'm sure it bottoms out, but it's a tough, not just a comms problem, it's a tough business problem too.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  But I'll tell you my, my concern, which is, this worries me with a lot of startups, is I don't know that they have a strong enough engineering team. And I think they cut too many corners because the security issues they've had are unacceptable. They've had cameras just streaming unsecured across the internet. They were using dated versions of Google on old Android tablets to save money that were no longer supported or had security patches in the last year, year and a half. This is unacceptable from a company where security has to be at its core and paramount. And it's happened multiple times.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Interesting, because I was more focused on the unauthorized use, but you're saying there's also been access. That, that sucks.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  I'm saying they cut, start, all startups cut corners. It's how you get off the ground. It's something we don't, we under, we don't like to talk about too much at board meetings. But when you are ultimately a security company like Flock, maybe the police departments don't understand the corners you cut. And maybe the VCs don't want to probe, but there are certain companies where you can't cut too many corners. And I worry Flock cut too many. It's just didn't build safe hardware or software. And if you're not investing in the hardware and the software, what about the rest of the team? What about all their vulnerabilities up and down the stack? It's culturally consistent. And so I don't want to pick on them because I think they've done a lot of social good. But, but I wonder if they cut too many corners and now they're reaping what it comes from it. Stored images unencrypted. The cameras sent credentials in clear text.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Pressing the button on the back of the camera would open up a wifi any attacker could get into. The police interface didn't require any authentication. This is not, this is pretty bad stuff, right? Security patches stopped in June 2018 for many of its cameras.

• 1:08:55Harry Stebbings?

  Ouch. Those are not good facts, I will admit.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Not good. And so it's, and is it ever just that? It's always more when you pull on the string, right?

• 1:09:03Harry Stebbings?

  It's a very valid worry, to be fair. And actually, I didn't, I wasn't aware of the security vulnerabilities there. But on a theme that Rory loves, Jensen Huang's just announced that he's going to invest 2 billion more into European AI companies. So go Europe, hey Rory?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Go, go, go Europe. Yeah, that's about, that's about the right ratio.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  How much money is that for Nvidia?

• 1:09:22Harry Stebbings?

  It's about a coffee, about a coffee. Maybe, maybe a coffee and a croissant, you know, 2 billion.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  I think the cash flow is 150, 160. Yeah, so it's, it's 1% of cash flow. Yeah, don't, don't spend it all at once, kids.

• 1:09:33Harry Stebbings?

  I did debate bringing it up because I wasn't so confident about the rebuttal there.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Jensen is just going to spend that money wherever he can to fragment this market. Okay.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  Well, probably also, Harry is much closer to this than I, I'm not an expert, but anything you can spend to deflect any anti-Americanism is worth, is probably worth the money up to a certain point, right? Keep your head down. Don't be associated with any anti-Americanism. A couple, a couple billion here and there to mitigate it is probably a great investment, right?

• 1:09:58Harry Stebbings?

  You know what, boys, no one's talking about that. They should be, it's like the downfall of France. I mean, Jesus Christ.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Harry Stebbings?

  You talk about a failed ecosystem in Paris.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's really good of them to step up and make the UK look great.

• 1:10:12Harry Stebbings?

  I know. Do you know what? Genuinely, yes. Thank you so much, France, for making us look like.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally, yeah.

• 1:10:18Harry Stebbings?

  The peaceful, orderly society.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  I did enjoy, you know, the, I don't know why we're getting on this, but I did enjoy the fact that the Greeks now borrow at a lower interest rate than France or Germany. It's just pleasing, you know, after what we all went through, you know, a decade and a half ago. There you go.

• 1:10:32Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, Italian politics resembles stability. That is a worrying state of Europe.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Yes, yes.

• 1:10:40Harry Stebbings?

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