20VC: Anthropic Files S1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO | Instinct's Rumoured $30 Billion Fundraise | Microsoft Laysoff 27,000 While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95 Billion Capex Spending Spree

AGENDA: 04:00 Anthropic Files S-1 Ahead of $2TRN IPO 14:50 Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000 Employees 20:45 Zuckerberg Taps Equity Markets for $95 Billion AI Spending Spree 23:00 DeepSeek Raises $15 Billion as Chinese AI Faces US Backlash 34:45 OpenAI and Wiz Uncover Decade-Old Security Flaws 37:05 Instinct's Rumoured $30 Billion Valuation Divides the Panel 45:30 Invest Committee: Put 20% of the Fund Into OpenAI at $1.25 Trillion 49:40 Palmer Luckey's War Dog Startup Hits $1.5 Billion Valuation 55:00 Zuckerberg Threatens California Exit Over Billionaire Tax

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As crazy as this may sound, I think folks are almost underestimating Anthropic. Never has such a successful startup maimed itself so poorly that I can think of as OpenAI. To pay for all this infra, to pay for all these GPUs and infra and inference, we gotta get rid of the people. I think that the Chinese open weight models are pretty much over in the US. How much money is there for the instincts of the world? It feels infinite now. I think we should put 20% of the fund into OpenAI at the $1.25 trillion round.

• 0:26Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Sebby. This is my favorite show that we, Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, the news that matters. And let's be clear, there is one story that matters more than any other this week. Anthropic, they finally dropped their S1. This show, we break down what you need to know, the questions that really come from it, and what we can expect when it comes to day one. And will there be the mega pop of all pops? Then we have more news in the form of Meta going to equity markets, needing $95 billion to fund more insane compute buying. We have Microsoft offering to buy out about 60,000 staff members. And then we have some serious private rounds.

• 1:09Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:57Speaker 02

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:01Harry Stebbings?

  Boys, we are back. It is my favorite time of the week, and we have some big news to start with. Anthropic files its S1. It's the moment that we've been waiting for. 16.3 billion of first half revenue. I just want to hand over to you, Rory, because whatever metric I give, you're gonna say it was the wrong one to cite.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  No, I'm not.

• 4:19Harry Stebbings?

  So which ones were you drawn to? And what is the takeaways for us from this?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  It was a great S1. Frankly, all the haters and the worriers, at least for now, have to go pound sand. I mean, the burden of proof is most definitely on the side of the naysayers. In other words, the S1 was great in almost every dimension. It'll be wildly well-received. I mean, it addressed a whole, I mean, there's some pending open questions still. They didn't give the Q3 revenue number. The overall revenue numbers are known, but they were amazing. It was great, better than expected on margins, op income, even op income after stock-based comp. It was great on customer concentration. It was great on compute efficiency. It was stunningly great on cash and cash balance sheet. You know, I mean, it's just on every dimension, it looked really good. I mean, you have to struggle to find questions.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  And there are questions, and we can come to those in a second, but it was a really top-tier performance.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  As crazy as this may sound, I think folks are almost underestimating Anthropic because five years to IPO versus 24 for SpaceX. It's not just something we've never seen before. We'll see hints of it with OpenAI's IPO, right? It might be worse, it might be better, probably slightly worse, right? Based on what we know, right? Less capital efficient, slightly slower. But JFC to get here in five years from a spite startup, it's just beyond unprecedented. Time value to liquidity still matters. I mean, it's, markups are fun, man, but getting out of the greatest IPO in our lifetimes in less than six years to distributions? I mean, I know Rory will roast me for it, but you gotta think, why would I do anything else? Why would I wait?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Like, these seed deals are like 18 years to full distributions, right? I could get to six years in full liquidity at Anthropic? And why would I waste my time with anything that's 10 to 12 years to IPO? But, you know, it's just one deal in the fund, another two years to distribute, you know? It's just versus five years?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  No, I won't roast you, Jason. I mean, I think that, you know, I saw a tweet that basically said the same thing. Every founder and every investor is looking, why am I bothering with anything else? These are such stunning numbers in terms of size, scale, and speed. And you're right, it's going to dominate the results for, you know, for a long time to come. And everything else just seems a lot more work for a lot less return compared to us. And, you know, all credit to the founding team, all credit to the investors who got in early. It's just a great way to make money. Things going up into the right faster than anything else in human history for five years to add up to a trillion dollars. That's as good as it gets in venture.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was funny watching Byron Dieter from Bessemer on the TV shows saying, this is the greatest investment in the history of Bessemer. I think Bessemer was founded in the 19th century or something like that. I don't know what the fund was, right?

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  And their greatest investment and their largest checks, right? So to see that all happen now after 100 years, that's the end of, that's the whole story, right? I mean, greatest investment, biggest check, fastest time to liquidity. Why are we doing anything else?

• 7:14Harry Stebbings?

  Rory, you said about questions there. There are always cynics in the audience. There are always people throwing peanuts. If you were to present the alternate view of, oh, here was a striking number or two, is there any that?

• 7:26Speaker 03

  The interesting one, you know, 80% of the revenue comes from models that are less than six months old. And then separately, you'll note they didn't give you a gross margin, an actual gross margin calculation. They just didn't lay it out that way because you can do that in accounting. You can just put all the compute costs in the one place. And then they kind of gave a footnote breakout that kind of 70, 80% of the compute costs are for training, not for inference. In other words, the models are wildly expensive to build. Once you build them, they're fairly wildly profitable to serve. And you only get to serve them for six months, and then you gotta invent another one. It's this kind of, it's so not like software where you're on this kind of, you know, you build something and maybe you can sell it for 10, 15 years.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  In this case, you invent something, you get most of the revenue from it in six, 12 months, and then you have to continue to invent masses of money to build the next one. And, you know, then your question is, so what do you make of that? You know, because the funny thing is that that's the facts. And you could look at it one way and say, oh my God, that's totally scary. If you miss even once, you're screwed. And on the other hand, you can say to yourself, that might actually be great for Anthropic because they're best in the position to build new stuff, and they want to build new stuff. And they said that very clearly, we want to build new stuff. And if all the time, you know, very few people are gonna be able to compete with this. But very few people, like, if the next turn of the crank on the model, I mean, they spend $8 billion on compute, you know, year-to-date, June 26, and they're gonna spend, I don't know, $16 billion next year. There's very few people who can write a $10, $12 billion compute check.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  So they can continue to invent these new models, get masses of revenue from them. And then, you know, yeah, maybe at the back end, other folks have it. So even though that statistic was kind of weird and scary, oh my God, the shelf life of your amazing product is six months. It's actually, I would argue, an advantage if you're the kind of leader and you're willing to just be aggressive on it, right? But it does point to, so therefore, what looked like a negative vision, it just points to the incredibly dynamic and scary nature of the game. This is a game where you have to spend like billions and billions and billions of dollars just to play.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  That was Elon's point, that most of these Neo Labs are just gonna die after this, right? They just can't, it's not possible to raise the capital to survive, right? I thought there was one bad metric that wasn't in the S1. I thought the worst metric wasn't in the S1.

• 9:41Harry Stebbings?

  Go for it.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  The worst metric was that Broadcom had to bail out this debt issue so that Anthropic could buy its chips. That the market was saying, it doesn't get much, it doesn't get any better than Anthropic. We just read the S1, right? It doesn't get any better. But they weren't able to get this debt for this semi-circular deal with Broadcom. And Broadcom Had to come in and guarantee most of it and they had to pay even higher interest rates than expected. It's not that it's terrible, but it certainly suggests that going forward fundraising, even for Anthropic and OPI, and even if it's somewhat indirect, it's getting harder. That combined with the fact that it's getting harder and harder for the banks to lay off and sell the NeoLab debt. I think that's the real, the only one to be nervous about, that the debt isn't, is exhaustible here.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Pushing back on that, because I do hear you, because I would actually, I think the fact of, I think the amount of debt the banks are digesting has hit the limit. But I actually think the interesting thing about this week and about the last few weeks has been, we're equitizing the issue. In other words, it was all debt. But if you look at it, Anthropic's about to issue plus or minus a billion, $100 billion of stock. You know, Meta issued $70 billion of stock. Earlier this year, Google issued about $80 billion of stock. Obviously SpaceX did their IPO, right? What you're seeing is that there are a class of companies that has, that A, have cheap cost of capital and B, are willing to take equity dilution to make it all happen. So my aha from that is, at the macro level, it's just going to keep on happening. This trend is not

• 11:10Speaker 03

  stopping. And the people who want to have it happen are willing to take equity dilution to keep going. So the spend will be there. You're right, Jason. I mean, Elon's doing his thing of, you know, cutting off the oxygen from the, from the other people. It's like, oh, you people who just have debt are screwed. You're going to die. I, on the other hand, have the world's, one of the world's most inflated market caps. So I can issue equity and, you know, get access to all the chips I want. So it was very much a kicking someone else while they're down move, which is very vintage Elon, and you got to respect.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  But they'll have like 200 million of total cash on the balance sheet or something like that after this, after this, Anthropic will. So that is, that's a lot of cash.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  I mean, let's be precise. I think it is out of the first or second largest pile of cash in all corporate America, which is astonishing.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  I read it was the second, but it doesn't matter which one it is.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  This is a company going public. I mean, this is a company going public where it already has more money than every other company in America bar one, at 110 billion on the balance sheet today. They've done a masterful job of raising 130 and only spending 10 or 11. Masterful.

• 12:08Harry Stebbings?

  Do we think it's going to have an amazing reception?

• 12:11Speaker 03

  I do. I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, hell, I don't know, you know?

• 12:15Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, we're in the predictions game, Rory. Go for it. Go for it.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  I think, I think it should. I mean, I think it's an amazing company. You just can't argue with it.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I mean, doesn't it, like a SpaceX, almost instantly have to go into the S and P 500?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Not the S and P 500. If it's, if you're listing on NASDAQ, which I think it is, I didn't check, you go into the QQQ index, but the S and P index takes, there's a profitability metric or something like that. So it takes some time. But yes, they will be in some index funds pretty immediately. But I don't think this is going to need that lift in the same way arguably SpaceX. And I think this is going to be just a stock people want to own.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  But even just getting indexed into everything in the net is, is just a retail boost, right? It's just, it's hard to bet against. They're not going to miss a quarter, whether it's 900%. I mean, within a range, like, it's not that I don't think they could disappoint, right? But within the next two quarters, with, you know, and I, you know, I think we have to be careful to use NRR as a, as a metric here, but it's still true, right? With 900% NRR, even if in reality, it's more like 300 to 400% because it includes like pilots and trials. I just think that plus the brand, plus being in the NASDAQ 100, it'll probably have a good retail run. Plus SpaceX, I, you know, why would you bet against it?

• 13:25Harry Stebbings?

  If for Sam Altman reading this, thinking about Q1 going out himself, do you think he takes away anything from it, changes anything as a result of it?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  You can't change the past. I probably think if you were the CEO of OpenAI, you would look at this and go, decisions that you made, you now regret because you've let these guys get away from you and do better. If there's any self-reflection, there should be a ton of that going on. Nothing you can do about it. You just got to get your business together and converge and get out yourself. And in the meantime, obviously compete aggressively on price to try and screw up their Q3.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Never has such a successful startup maimed itself so poorly that I can think of as OpenAI. I mean, it would have killed almost any other startup what they went through, right? With the CEO drama, all the other nonprofit to profit drama, despite startup doing better than them, they basically let Anthropic control part of the market for almost a year, which is like five years or 10 years in AI time, right? There is a certain amount of parity with Astra and the open weights models today, the best, but Anthropic owned the, fucking owned the playbook for the chessboard for almost 12 months. There was no point in using any other coding solution. And coding is the killer app, as Rory said 100 times. The math is true. They literally, letting Dario walk out the door rather than build it in-house, and then firing the CEO and bringing him back

• 14:39Speaker 00

  over the night of long knives. I mean, my God, I mean, it's all going to be okay. But talk about, talk about own goals, right? I mean, every startup's full of them. This is just, these are some epic ones.

• 14:50Harry Stebbings?

  I had the joy of having Sachin Adala on 20VC earlier this week. Great show. It was a fantastic guest to have on. What an honor. Microsoft had some pretty big news that they were offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 of its 223,000 employee base. It's an enormous amount of the employee base to get this offer, roughly 27%. Jason, you've spoken before quite vociferously about this topic. What are your thoughts?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  First of all, Rory may have observed more, more of these than I have, maybe he hasn't, I hope he hasn't. But it's not like all 27% are going to take it, right? And they've already been through, I think they already went through a 10% layoff round, right? So they've done, it's, it's, it's a, some sort of interesting game theory here where you want to offer it to everybody you don't want to have, right? And then you got to figure out what the yield's going to be, right? But it's brutal because what, it says one thing, no matter what the people are going to say on LinkedIn, these 27%, we don't want them.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Whether 7% take it or 2%, we don't, and it is, this is a worse scarlet letter than a layoff, than a pure layoff. At least a layoff, you can kind of wave your hands. This is 27% of the country that said, do not meet our minimum, but we, we don't want you. And I bet it could have been higher, but, but I bet they got this done in a week. It's, it's so damning that Microsoft doesn't want 27% of its people. That, that is the age of AI. They don't want them.

• 16:08Harry Stebbings?

  Why would you do that if you're Microsoft though? What a culture killer. What, so you stay and then know that you're not wanted? Isn't that awful?

• 16:14Speaker 00

  I think we're trying, I want to get Rory's, I think you're trying to do this in a humane way. And I think what we learned is there's, you know, when layoffs started like in late 22 or so, right? Everyone was fried for doing them on Slack or by email. Oh, it's so inhumane. Go meet with people, right? Everyone was, it's not that more humane to meet, have you seen Office Space? Like, it's not more humane to meet with someone in HR and get fired. And then they're like, don't do it over the holidays. So they fired people on January 1st. That was no better. There's just, so this is a way to like, make it more humane. It's, it's great for folks that were thinking of leaving anyway. It's great for them, right? It is great for the folks that are at the, either at the tail end of their career, or they want to check out of the workforce. And that's why this is so hard to do from a game theory perspective, because you might get all the, the folks that were

• 16:57Speaker 00

  going to leave anyway, right? But Microsoft has so much cash, who cares? But it's an attempt to be humane. And I just, I've been on the other side, it's been a long time since I've been on the other side of a layoff. It's just hard to, it's hard, you try to be a good person, but you can't, it's hard to make it humane. It sucks no matter how you do it. And I think this is the suckiest way because 27% of the company has just been issued a scarlet letter. I think this is the, in attempting to be humane, this is the least humane way to do it. Just fire another 9% in one day, do it on Teams and move on. It's rough.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  It is rough. No, I think you're right. I process the same thing. You've been told to go, but you decide to stay. The only winners are, as you say, the people who've got another job lined up and now have a call option on a severance package. But yeah, no, it is interesting to think they can do without, you know, if their take rate is 10 or 20,000 people, it's clear, it's interesting they can do, you know, they have around 200,000 employees. So they think they can do without another 10 or 15%, which possibly is true. I mean, you wonder how much of will be AI efficiency, how much of it is just you never needed them. It would be fun to find out. These large companies, as the depreciation bill for the capex comes due, you're going to have to find it somewhere else. And we've talked about this, you know, frankly, earnings this year, 2026, are in that golden

• 18:07Speaker 03

  period where the people who are selling the semiconductors are booking the gains, but the people who are buying the capex aren't booking the depreciation. So everybody's winning. But I think if you start to look to 27, that depreciation is going to start hitting in Microsoft and Google and Meta, in places like that. And, you know, to keep the operating income up, you're going to be really pushing on headcount. And this is, this is when the bill for AI comes due, and this is how it'll be paid.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  It's the brutal, in a sense, it's, it may feed the anti-AI frenzy because it, it, it's the direct narrative of the story, right? We're going to, to pay for all this infra, to pay for all these GPUs and infra and inference, we got to get rid of the people, right?

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  And so you think 2027, we're going to see that really crystallize even more?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Yes. Intuitively, as time goes by, you know, everyone's trying to call when the hyperscalers start kind of going down the other side of this. So yes, as, as the depreciation bill mounts up, so far, even though free cash flow has been kind of going the wrong way, everyone's operating margins have been, you know, operating income has been going up. And yes, that'll get harder now. So yes, this will be the problem. This will be the issue.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  I'm just surprised that the CloudFlare layoffs aren't more discussed, because I think it's case study 101 for CEO MBA, right? CloudFlare Matthew comes in, epic year for CloudFlare. Every quarter is growing faster, but on May 7th, they lay off 20% of the folks, bam, we don't need, we're too big. We don't need these folks. We are better off with 80% of the people than we were before, and it keeps accelerating. Every CEO that's arguing about this should just look at, I mean, you can say at Microsoft, some of it is the old company and it's, and we've got to pay for the, for all the AI, but CloudFlare is just like, this is just holding us back. 20%. It wasn't 8%, it was just, boom, we're just going to do 20. And no downside to the business that is apparent yet.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  I think it's just layoffs 3.0 or 2.0 is just going to happen. And it's, and part of it's to pay for the infrastructure and part of it is just enough already, enough of the performative AI, enough of this. And we just, we just, think about every board meeting you've been in over the last week, or if you've been in every, no matter how well you're doing, it's just stressful. Everything is moving even faster than the last board meeting. There's even more competition in every space. We just can't, we just can't carry folks any longer. We can't, or we're going to die. We're going to be killed by that new company Harry just funded or Rory just funded. So there's no stability, you know? The thing, the tough part about the Microsofts and the Salesforce's and the SAPs and every SaaS company back in the day, is we were all predicated, we would get to a level, a plane of stability at some point, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 million of, of AR, we could kind

• 20:34Speaker 00

  of breathe. There's no planes of stability at all. Maybe, maybe north of 10 or 20 or 40 billion, they just don't exist. So I just think layoffs are just going to accelerate because we have no choice.

• 20:43Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of having no choice and where cash comes from, matter goes to the equity markets. Zuck needs $95 billion. And this week on Monday, it launched a raise of up to $95 billion. 35 common and preferred, 60 at the market program. And a thing to take from that, in combination with the fact that chips lose 200 billion in a day. And public markets in bloodbath as Neo clouds shit the bed.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  No, the short answer, Harry, is no. I think there are two separate points that you merged there. And I'm just dealing with each of them in succession. I mean, I think the meta thing, yeah, was what we talked about. This was the first quarter where their actual capex dipped below their free cash flow, right? So they're a free cash flow negative, right? Because remember, their core business is one of the best businesses on the planet. It spits out money. It's awesome, right? So they have 33 billion a year cash, a quarter of cash flow. It's a great, great, great, great, great business. This is the first quarter they went negative, so they just did some equity. So that's that, and it's totally unrelated. The chip thing, first of all, yeah, I mean, chips moved last week, but let's be frank, since the Anthropic, and I don't know where they'll be when this show comes out, but since the Anthropic S1 hit,

• 21:52Speaker 03

  chips have been bouncing up because the consensus is that looks good. One thing that the S1 was good for was chips. So those stocks are actually up. In fact, DRAM today is way up, which is the, you know, the definitive, the one I keep an eye on, just the list of the, it's the index of memory chips. And yeah, that's why Korea is up 10% today, SK Hynix, right? I actually think the news is, if you're in the semiconductor capex business, it's been a good back half of the week. It was scary two weeks ago with CoreWeave. But you know, CoreWeave is a, I don't know, 20, 30 billion dollar company, and Anthropic's a $2 trillion company that has $200 billion when this deal closes and they're going to spend it all on chips. So chip be happy.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  The only slight counterpoint not to get off chat, it's all, it's all green, green, green. But it is just, I know it's a different ecosystem, and I know it is apples and oranges. But the Star 15 China, which is their version of, is down 40% this year. We do have interesting markets that are out of sync here for AI, right? Because China is just as gangbusters in its own way, but it is interesting that that one's down 40. Different market, weird liquidity, while ours is on fire.

• 22:59Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of China being on fire, DeepSeek raises about $15 billion, largest ever private Chinese round, by the way. Largest investors, battery maker, I don't know how to pronounce it, Catel and Tencent. Anything of note here?

• 23:13Speaker 00

  I think that the Chinese open weight models are pretty much over in the US. I think it's the beginning of the end. DeepSeek, it's great that it raised this, but it's beginning to be banned across all federal agencies. And there was a horrific thing that happened this week that was oversensationalized, which was this Cohere Quen thing. I don't know if you guys saw it. It's pretty terrible, but it's terrible on a number of, but it's not as bad as it looks.

• 23:36Harry Stebbings?

  What happened, Jason, for people who don't know?

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Well, listen, Cohere is now a fourth tier LLM, right? Fourth tier player that has only sovereignty on its side, as near as I can tell. Harry, you're welcome to correct me, Rory, right? But it has sovereignty, and sovereignty is, if you talk to anyone at the enterprise, it's in the top five list. They found that over, that Quen, Alibaba's existing Quen model, was calling to Alibaba servers, both in China and in Singapore, pinging them and uploading data to them when it said it wasn't. When it said it wasn't doing that on the internet. It's everybody's nightmare in the US that our data is being uploaded to China. Now, I think Cohere was more careful about how they did it, even though they're talking their own game.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  You can't really trust anybody in AI. They're all talking their own game because this is good for, good for them. There's no evidence this is a backdoor, like social media thought, like this is built in. This is probably a training mistake at some level, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if one out of 100,000 times your data, your confidential data is being uploaded to Chinese and Alibaba servers in Asia, in China or in Singapore without your knowledge and without your consent when it's been directed not to, what CIO or CISO is going to approve this model? I can't imagine anyone would. And if this keeps, and everything, this is, you know, it's just, it's a junk to Black October and all these cybersecurity issues. This is, and if this happens multiple more times and Alibaba said nothing,

• 25:03Speaker 00

  you just lose your job if you use these models. You're just going to lose your job. You're just going to lose your job. So it's pretty crazy, and it could, it could have been much, much worse. This got some press. I'm surprised it didn't even get more. It might be subtle. But again, this is everyone's nightmare using these open weight models based in China is that your data goes to China, and it did.

• 25:24Harry Stebbings?

  So what happens to the stack when the Chinese open source market shrinks? What happens to the gateway providers, the routers, your open routers of the world? What happens to the inference providers that thrive in large part because of a variety of models, often Chinese? Your modals, your fireworks, your base 10s? What happens to the stack if that Chinese model landscape shrinks?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Well, what goes, as Dev said when he was on the show, what goes up that quickly with developers can go down that quickly. Will change in a week.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  There's going to be, there's, I saw you some US open source options, right? The question is, given what we've seen about the expense of building, the compute expense that it's taken Anthropic to build their model, and the fact that 75% of that compute expense actually goes to building, you know, training the model. It would be interesting to see how advanced a model a US company like Nvidia can build and make available on an open source basis. But because someone has to, if someone doesn't do it, then all you have is a closed source providers, and obviously their economic leverage goes way up. And you should buy even more Anthropic in the S1, in the IPO.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  I think it's bullish for Anthropic that this happens. I agree, it's bullish.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely, no.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  I think you'll know the moment Elon's able to get Cursor off these models is, it's a tipping point. If he could, he would. He just can't yet.

• 26:41Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Because Grok isn't good enough.

• 26:43Harry Stebbings?

  Yes.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  And he already kicked OpenAI partially out, right? But he can't, he can't yet because, you know, he's got, this, this bet has to work. But the minute it can, and he said when he bought Cursor, part of the reason was he wanted that team's DNA to make Grok more competitive, right? So there's multiple benefits here, right? But there's some deep irony that a $60 billion core acquisitions running on China open source models primarily. It's not going to last, right? I mean, again, Salesforce forced Finn to rip out theirs before the acquisition closed. But Salesforce can tolerate a little bit more in Finn than Cursor can because Cursor's got a, it's in the most competitive space there is, right? But as soon as he can rip it out, he's, he's going to rip it out, right? It can't run on Kimi forever. It's just, it just doesn't, this is not, it doesn't make any sense if you think about it. It's a temporary.

• 27:29Harry Stebbings?

  But it's not just like highly illogical. If you, if you download and you run it locally, the security risks are limited to none. I understand that CIOs are CIOs.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  How is it limited to none when it's dialing China and uploading your data? And what if instead of a 404 or whatever it was, there was a prompt injection sitting there, very easy to do? And that prompt injection just uploaded your data. People that, this has been here for several iterations of the model.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  I think the question you wrestle with, Harry, is what can you know? How much can you know with 100% certainty as to what the model's doing? You know, and then obviously, separate from what the model does, you can try and to some extent block it, sandbox it from, you know, to prevent it doing that. But there's a, it's like having a recalcitrant and difficult employee who's actively trying to subvert you. Once that happens, your head hurts. You know, if you had an intern and you knew that part of their, you know, that there was a risk that they would try and actively leak your guest list and your shows to your dreaded podcast competitor, you know, it would just get in your head. But it gets to this whole question of what can you know about what the model is doing? And if you read the S1 for Anthropic again, one of the risks they say is basically the models will lie to you.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  The models will tell you they're doing, not doing shit, and they're doing it. So, you know, you get into this thing, what can you really know? And once you get to that point, it's really hard to, you do worry a lot about a Chinese sourced open source model. So there will be that pushback, I think.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Quen lied. It says, I'll call no tools. And Clyde will lie, and Astro will lie too, right? It said, I'll call no tools. And what did it do? It called servers in Beijing and in Singapore and uploaded data. It said, I won't do it. So you really have to go deep in these open weights and really test it. And depending on how you test it, like nominally, what happened with Cohere only happened one in 100,000 calls. So a bunch of folks tested it a few times, and they sort of found this issue a couple of months ago. But you had to run it at scale. But at Saster, we run 40,000 API calls a day. It doesn't take very long to get to 100,000. If you're GE or whoever in the 4500, you're running millions and millions a day. That could be every hour, every 10 minutes it's uploading data.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  And again, this doesn't appear to be even malicious per se. This appears to be a training error in a sense, right? But who cares? Like if you're a, if you're a CISO, who cares if it's a training error? Or if it's a spy, or even worse, if it's a training error and some other actor exploits it, which is the job of all of our intelligence services to exploit these things, right? To have pagers blow up. I don't believe Alibaba itself, it doesn't look like the engineers did it as an exploit, but the government could take it over or force them to. There's just, it's, why do you want to have this meeting? Let's just use Haiku 5.5. It's pretty good. Guys, your budget this month's $5 million, and just, I just, and Anthropic, if you, the other thing, if you look, Anthropic is, it's on the GSA list or whatever it's called. Again, it's back in the government's good graces.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  It's across all the GSAs with a 40% discount. That means a couple of months ago, they were persona non grata. Now every government agency can use it with a 40% discount, and it's already pre-listed. Why would you use, why would you use Kimi? Plus, I also think, and again, listen, these are great companies. I also think the fact that you have to pay Kimi, what is it, 30% of your gross, of your revenue to use it at scale for the inference providers, there's just a lot of complexity here. It may not be worth it at some level. It may not, the juice may not be worth the squeeze for many people.

• 30:39Harry Stebbings?

  I'm just trying to understand though, last week, we said that Modal at 15.7, oh my God, yes, you buy. And then you're saying, no, no, no, Chinese open sources not is going to decline significantly. It's great for Anthropic and OpenAI. That is inherently bad for Modal.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's bad for fireworks, Modal. I don't know how bad it is for OpenRouter. I'm just not sure, right?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  You're making a fair point, and I didn't participate in the investment committee because I don't. But I think to say, Jason, the, you know, the assumption is that there is demand for an open weight model, which is obviously the demand that inference providers primarily meet. And you just got to believe that there's a bunch more, that there will be some US alternatives. And there also will be people whom China's okay. And there will be people for whom they want, you know, the poolside slash Nvidia one. And provided, provided something exists in the US, that business is fine. And I do agree with you. I think you, it's not as clear a run as, you know, you have when you own your own close source frontier model. But there is a role for inference provision, just because there's just so much

• 31:45Speaker 03

  raw demand for an alternative other than the frontier models.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  To answer the question, I think Harry's got a good point. I think both are true. A while ago, when Rory brought up that there probably won't be another deal like Manus, right? Which was a direct investment. I mean, I'm paraphrasing you, right? But after that one got unwound, no one wants to do that deal again, right? The sort of direct investment in an Asian startup. This isn't investing in a US-based folks running open weights, but not open source models is not the same as Manus. But there is risk. And I think if 24 months ago, most VCs would not want to take that risk because it's a clear risk. You don't have to fast forward to today with the Cohere Quinn issue to know it's a risk. It's just the reason on the IC thing, the growth is so phenomenal that we're taking risks today that you wouldn't take if we didn't see growth that was jaw dropping. And

• 32:30Speaker 00

  that's the job of venture today. And it's okay if it blows up. It's okay if fireworks or whatever goes to zero in our portfolio at IC because we have other investments. That's the job. And we're taking risks. We wouldn't take this risk if it was a triple, triple, double, double. But it's not a triple, triple, double, double. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that the risk level didn't just go up in the last week a lot. And these deep seek being blocked by the US government and this whole Quinn thing and dialing home and Anthropic being on the GSA schedule, these are negatives. These are negatives. I think what we may look back is, and I still, I still believe in the IC, we may, this is just my sense, I think there's a 56.3% chance, we look back on OpenRouter, and this was just a moment in time. It was a moment in time, going back to earlier in the show, when

• 33:15Speaker 00

  OpenAI stumbled. So Anthropic was the only alternative for state of the art coding. And then the Chinese open weight models got really good at coding. That's what, that's what Elon said. Like, it's really good. But and he even said they'll catch up to Fable by the start of next year. So there was a gap that these models filled. And now OpenAI and others are going to fill this gap. And the low cost models are going to fill the gap. Like, they each now have a much cheaper model that's much better. And we may see these open weight models go from 60 something percent of OpenRouter to 10% in six months. And that would not be an extraordinary amount of change based on what we've seen. That would not be, this is not sticky.

• 33:50Harry Stebbings?

  It wouldn't. But Jason, you've talked very well, I think, in the past about maiming markets in terms of kind of the fortnitification, the shrinking land that's available. And to Rory's, I think, eloquent point, there will still be some companies, and there'll be some companies that want reflection and poolside. But it is a maiming of an open market.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  I think you ought to look at the side. I understand the point you're making, but I think you've just got to look at it. The inference market is still so big. I mean, we added up all the competitors, and they're only at $5 billion. And, you know, we just agreed that the closed source two frontier models are $100 billion already. So as long as there's, if 10% of the spend is willing to kind of put up with the brain dead of open source to save real money, and you do save real money, then there's going to be demand for that. Does it get to 30 billion? I don't know. When the overall market is so big, 10% of it is still big. And that's the big Ohio. This is, it's the mother of all markets. So everything else works.

• 34:43Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, you teased it Black October, but I do think it's significant. OpenAI models and Wiz found two very critical PHP flaws, hidden for more than a decade, that have been exposed thanks to where we are in the cycle and the sophistication of AI and some models. What do we take away from this, Jason? How do you respond to this? What should we know that we don't know? Help me out here.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Well, look, I mean, I mean, we said months ago on this, I said, everyone's going to be hacked. The biggest change is, you know, back in the old days before the models got good, I remember my CEO said, the only reason we haven't been seriously hacked is no one cared. Now anyone can be hacked in seconds. That people attempt to hack Saster every day. So everyone's going to get hacked. And this PHP thing actually is worse than it looks because there's so many websites in PHP that no one's going to update. It's great that a lot of stuff runs on WordPress or that Replit and Lovable and others immediately ran like gateways or barriers to protect you. I mean, they're not all running on page, but they immediately ran. And there's a lot of stuff that went up and people, people released patches and updates. But, you know, a lot of government and other sites and non

• 35:48Speaker 00

  pro, they just took their websites down. And who's going to fix it? I mean, PHP still like 40% of the internet, right? And I bet it's more of old crap. I bet it's like 80% of old crap. So like, this is like Mr. Robot Live. Like, all these old websites are running on PHP. No one's patched them since this happened. No one cares. The IT team was laid off three years ago. They're not vibing nothing. And we're going to find our way into all this. It's just going to get worse. Everyone basically, including Sam, just said it's going to get worse and worse and worse and worse, right? And I think we're still grappling with the fact that everything that is a threat vector will be exposed, almost in real time.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Agreed. Because if you're not up to date with the latest stuff, you're way behind. So there's just, you're right, there's going to be a year or two years of this. It's just inevitable.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  I think the only thing that's going to save us is there's only so many people that can pay large ransoms. And there's only so many systems that control dams and other natural resources. People are going to give up on putting too much energy if they can't, if they can't make money or debilitate something, right? So it will actually, it may actually decline for a while when they realize hacking the 20 VC sub stack only gets you so much money, right? But anything that can be stacked, hacked is going to be hacked. But, you know, ransomware is just getting more and more, it's getting more and more professionalized. It's just, it's just the next level, right?

• 37:03Harry Stebbings?

  There were a number of large private rounds.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 37:07Harry Stebbings?

  There was Legora raising 550 million and 8.8 billion. We've spoken a lot about Legora versus Harvey in the past, and passing 200 million in ARL. Just in the last 24 hours, there were rumors, and we obviously never, never comment on rumors, do we, Rory, of Instinct raising at a $30 billion price.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:25Harry Stebbings?

  Which we can go into, we can have some fun with that one. Because a lot of people are suggesting that is peak, peak, peak. Because the revenue multiple for Instinct is the same as it is last round.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  Which has someone said, I mean, the valuation didn't go up. Yeah, no, exactly.

• 37:38Harry Stebbings?

  We have others like the ex OpenAI research chief, Bob McGrew, with Arda hitting a billion five, raising 232 million.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  I'll tell you, can I ask one question on the Instinct thing? It's a question to you guys, because you guys would know better than me. We can make fun of the 30 billion at token revenue, right? And say it's a sign of the times, which perhaps it is. The question I just kind of wonder is, when will we exhaust the equity here? We just talked about equity versus debt for the public players, right? In a sense, the 30 billion doesn't surprise me. They need the capital to pay for, for the inference, right? They need the money. They, what are they raising? I mean, it's rumored, let's say they raised 3 billion, right? They need it. Forget about the rest. This isn't just a vanity raise. They genuinely need the capital to compete. But even if you're getting every dollar that every sovereign wealth fund has, that GIC has, like, how much money is there for the instincts of the world? It feels infinite now, right?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  A lot more.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. But how much is it? I just don't know how much it is. When that merry go round ends, we just have a structural issue in this late growth phase. We just have, because right now, it's game on, man.

• 38:41Harry Stebbings?

  I did an Instagram on Instinct, and I had over 1,000 DMs, and over half of them were asking to invest.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah. Look, why are we surprised? We've just seen the most successful private investment in history take place. Four years ago, you know, Spark brilliantly put money into a pre-revenue deal that's now turned into, you know, hundreds and hundreds of times 75 million dollars. Everybody reads about that and says, oh, that's easy. When you have that kind of tangible evidence that's going to be, everyone's just going to look for the next, you know, ticket. And everyone's going to conflate, everyone's going to think, because it's always true to say, whenever you look at one of these deals, you say, well, it could be huge. We all have that sense. And that's going to be true of every one of these things.

• 39:20Harry Stebbings?

  I actually, this is why I would unwaveringly do Instinct at 30. If I was coming into the IC, I would unwaveringly do it. For years, we've been promising a super app for the West, a WeChat of the West, which handles your finance, your identity, your security. And finally, we have that with Instinct, where I'm not saying it's got, but there's a small chance that it is the super app.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Here's why, unfortunately, Harry, I've got to override you on the, on the IC.

• 39:46Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely not.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  I rarely do this. And I'm going to put my little black pebble in, in here. It's not that I don't believe your argument. I do believe it, Harry. I've just, at this point, I need, I need three to four months of data. There's not enough data at Instinct. There's not enough data to prove to me for our fund, for our fund, given our reach, which is substantial, but not the same as our friends at Andreessen Horowitz. I need three to four months to believe there's, this momentum is real. And I'm not saying this isn't an exciting play. I just want, and I'm not looking for moats, but I am looking for evidence of that 900% NRR at Anthropic that is slightly durable, that is slightly durable. And I'm just not seeing it at 30 billion. And so I'm sorry, I've got, I've got to veto this one. It's not that I don't, I don't believe in it. And actually, I'm just tired of doing growth rounds with one month of traction, Harry.

• 40:33Harry Stebbings?

  For me, it's like, they'll have raised $4 billion. Your lip graph on that means that given the quality of the team The strategic nature of the market, you'll definitely get that back. Microsoft will buy this in a heartbeat. So would several, I think, other hyperscalers, including your matters of the world. One, so your downside, I do think, is protected. And I think your upside is really, as we said, the super app of the West, a movement into a subscription business, an ads business, a transaction business on all sales and e-commerce. I think it's one of the most no-brainer deals for, if we're an Andreessen of the world, Jason, for us to be putting money. Again, we've just raised a huge fund and we need to get it out the door in 18 months. Amen. I want to do this deal.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  I hear you. And listen, I don't want this to break our relationship, but I feel like for our growth rounds, we need 100 days of traction. I feel like we need this rule. We need 100 days of, I'm willing to do the multiples. I'm willing to roll the dice, but I want 100 days of traction for a growth round. I just feel like we've had too many, too many stumbles when we do a round with two weeks of traction. I just believe there's too many, too much risk.

• 41:34Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, what would you, what would you want to see? Because I think the cohort data would be incredible. And I haven't seen it, so I'm not commenting, but the usage will be incredible. I mean, I've heard it's unlike anything any investor has seen before who is doing it. And so what would you want to see? There's no revenue data for you to see. Usage data? Well, what do you want to see in usage data? DAUs, MAUs, replacement of ChatGPT? Help me.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  I just think with no revenue and an unclear business model based on travel, I just think we should unfortunately pass at 30 billion. I just want to see 100 days of something besides negative gross margin growth of a fungible product. That's just, that's just me on the IC. It's just, if we lose the 2 billion, it will name the fund. And I'm not convinced of the liquidation preference here. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying you're wrong. I just, this one might be a bridge too far for me.

• 42:26Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, you don't get it. If we lose the 2 billion, it was Rory's deal.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm comfortable with the fireworks at 40. This one at 30 just makes me nervous. Fireworks has met my 100-day rule. It's got 100 days of compounding genuine growth that I don't believe is durable to our, to our earlier point, but I believe is, is truly measurable and bankable.

• 42:45Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. So you'd rather durable growth where you don't foresee it being better than not having that data, but where you do see it being better. That's, that's an interesting.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  I still think it's a better investment than hopping, but I'm not comfortable with this, with this consumer negative gross margin bet. I'm just not comfortable.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Look, you asked an interesting question, Harry, stepping back. You're right. What you're basically saying is how do you compare known markets, solid growth, growing nicely, you know, not nicely, it's understated fireworks. A ripping market where, you know, inherently it's not magic pixie dust. There's going to be five competitors where, you know, your upside is real, but it's capped at some functional level because there are five competitors. And you're comparing that to, how do you think about this thing where if it becomes everybody's thing, it's a $200 billion, everyone uses instinct. It's the replacement for iMessage plus, yeah, it has that potential to it. And you're right, is that there is more uncapped upside in instinct.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  And how do you weigh up, you know, what, what does your, you know, you got to do the three-way payoff matrix, you know, if it's amazing, if it's good, if it doesn't work and look at the two. And it's what kind of action are you looking for on the table? I suppose is to some extent the question.

• 43:54Harry Stebbings?

  Every big fund should be fighting their ass off to put as much money in instinct today.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 44:01Harry Stebbings?

  So I'm voting for it. Okay. Next one on the IC, Jason. You've got Kevin Wile leaves OpenAI Science to launch Warp Science with 215 million. It's a very early pre-seed, so you may not be comfortable with that because there's no data. You've got the OpenAI Research Chief, Bob McGrew, where he raised the 232 million Series A. You have Legora's 550 million round.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Odd things to put together. I mean, I was trying to make sense of this thing, right? There's a plethora of deals this week that I would describe as absolutely proven executive, big opportunity, hairy technical challenge, but big opportunity if it works. And that's to some extent, it's the flapping airplanes thing. To some extent, it's Arda, which is the Bob McGrew's deal. To some extent, I don't know as much about Warp Science, but it feels like the same thing. Big idea, talented executive. And there's just clearly a wild appetite for that, you know, fairly high prices with relatively little de-risking. And that's just one whole, four or five of those kind of deals here. And then the other type is the, you know, late-stage, you know, known good company, doing really well, you know, maybe Legora, maybe in a different way.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Bedrock, where, you know, it's not as binary based on a person. It's just how do you price these late-stage companies, right? Which is easier. I mean, at some level, it would be easier to get you to figure out your head on Legora or Bedrock than it would be to do flapping airplanes, Arda or Warp Science. Where all you know is the executive in question is talented and the opportunity, if it works, is amazing. Welcome, welcome to the game.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  I'm going to take a radical approach for, for the IC, Harry. I know, I know it might make you uncomfortable and you should veto it too. Like I, I want to veto instinct. But I think there's moments, and I know you don't totally believe me, but I believe in even in many best startups, sometimes there's dislocation moments where the, where the market briefly struggles. And I think we should put 20% of the fund into OpenAI at the 1.25 trillion dollar round. I think that it is mispriced. It is a moment when there's a little market panic. Anthropic is on fire. SpaceX has done well. The models are wildly competitive today. OpenAI has closed all the competitive gaps. It is a well-run machine. It reminds me a little bit of that Anthropic round at 183 billion or so, when, when it was, when the valuation made no sense vis-à-vis OpenAI. It was a dislocation. A lot of people made money on that round.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  This is a dislocation moment. This is folks misunderstanding their thinking. OpenAI is struggling when the numbers clearly say otherwise. And we can fart around with these little 20, 30, 50 billion dollar rounds. I think if we put 20% of the fund into OpenAI at 1.25 trillion, at least we can return the fund with that. And then we take our upside with our, with some of our other exciting bets.

• 46:41Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you say that? What is the upside on OpenAI at 1.25 trillion?

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Well, look, these are both going to be 10 to 20 trillion dollar companies. Just look, look at the growth and the scale. Look at Anthropic. It's only 0.1% of the Fortune 500 budgets today. Clearly it's going to be in the 2% to 3% range, even by the most conservative estimates that us and Coat Together and Iconic have done, right? So going from 0.1% to 2% to 3%, I need Rory's help here. That, that's significant growth ahead of the investment. So getting, we, you know, getting, we need, if it's 20% of the fund, obviously it needs to 5X, dilution aside, to return our fund. There's a clear path to a $10 trillion outcome. 20, 30 trillion, the rest of the fund doesn't even matter. It's got a discount to Anthropic that I don't think it's going to deserve. And so worse, just like worst case with some of your investments, you get your lick preference back.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Worst case here, we double our money. Worst case. It's not that bad to double your money, worst case. This, and that's what you get from these, from these dislocation moments, you get to double your money. When ordinarily these rounds like Inflection or Instinct are priced to perfection, OpenAI is not priced to perfection. And that's rare. And that's why I think we do 20% of the fund because that's the limit under our LPAC. And we just tell, we just tell the LPs because we can do that without LPAC consent. We just do the, the maximum without consent. We just let them know on Monday.

• 48:01Harry Stebbings?

  The other thing is the quality of codexes today is so significantly better than it was in a prior generation. I know every coding team that we work with has switched from call code to codexes in the last three to six months.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  That's why we should put 20% of the fund in. People aren't getting it. They've achieved parity. This is when you go all in, but the markets don't see it. The markets are too, are too superficial to see it. 20% of the fund, but nothing smaller. It's not enough. It's got to be 20% of the fund.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Interesting. Not crazy. I must say, Jason, it's like, you're right. It's that Anthropic will price, it'll be a 2 trillion and maybe a pop. You know, if you knew that this was the last private round and the trajectory of OpenAI was converging, I mean, you'd want to know that they kind of got religion and wanted to do something like what Anthropic has done. Yeah, not crazy. If they continue to say, we're going to spend, you know, we're going to burn forever, forever, then you wouldn't want to do it if there's another private round in it. But not a crazy idea because risk adjusted, it's probably less risky than some.

• 48:54Harry Stebbings?

  I love that as an out there suggestion. My only comeback to that would be, could we not do Instinct and OpenAI and actually hedged? It's not a bad risk profile. Do your point.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  If you, if that's your definition of hedging, please don't ever run a hedge fund.

• 49:07Harry Stebbings?

  Why? My friend Leo told me that was how you did risk management.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  In all seriousness, this, this may be my weakness. I, my scar tissue is I want 100 days, whether it's seed or growth, I want 100 days.

• 49:17Harry Stebbings?

  But Jason, you're just not, I'm, I'm, I agree with you, dude, but you're just not getting that, say.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  I might not be. And I don't want to lose you from the fund, even though it's, it's Stebbings and company. So if, if we have to do it to not lose you, I don't want to go all while got y'all. I don't want to go all while got y'all here. We'll do it, but I, I just, I'm going to use, if I can use one black pebble this quarter, it's going to be on this one. And I'll, and I'll take the hit when I'm wrong.

• 49:39Harry Stebbings?

  Any other rounds that we think are worth bringing up? As we said, flapping airplanes, I thought was an interesting one. They're building models that learn from.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  How about Super Dogs at a billion and a half? That one I need a little help with. The TAM, I need, I need Rory to give me my TAM analysis for, for, for Bionic Dogs at 1.5 billion. Or it's just, it's just another Elon bet, like he's going to make it work.

• 49:57Harry Stebbings?

  For, for context, Warhounds is a startup co-founded by Palmer Lucky, the founder of Anduril, that is essentially, I mean genetically modifying dogs to be next generation conflict war machines. Would be an apt description. Put a valuation of 1.5 billion on it because Palmer Lucky, he deserves it, to be honest. Discuss.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I realized that I had zero value to add on that. I genuinely saw it and said, wow, I mean genetically interesting. I mean, how do you price that thing? I mean, you know, yes, I saw some analysis of the number, the number of dogs the military used, blah, blah, blah. But you're all just, you know, moving paper around. I think, I think the investment memo probably wasn't one, but to the extent there was one, it's wow, that's a cool idea. Let's put in 50. I think that was the summary investment memo. Let's genetically engineer these dogs to be savage so that they can be better war dogs. I mean, what can you say?

• 50:52Harry Stebbings?

  And is Paul Malucki, you're like, yeah, okay.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Go team. Not, not, not, I won't be doing it, but who knows? Once you found it and, you know, I didn't really say it on traffic. Once you found it under a, you know, once you're the sword of the West, you can do what you want.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's, there is a connection between this and his other startup. He just started this, this laptop one, Blue Chip, right?

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  He's both solving sovereignty issues where, where key national security things are dependent on vendors outside the U.S. The dogs come from Europe, apparently. I didn't know this, right? I certainly know that almost all the rugged laptops, which probably you can sell for 10 grand, right? Or much higher margin. Those components are almost all entirely from outside the U.S. How big these models are, I don't know, but he's such at the core of this, of this, of this industry that he's, he, he wants to plug these, the white spaces he thinks are important. And maybe the Taps are small, but the models make sense. Like he's, he's right there and he has the channels to sell these products. Like he could get 100% of all the mill spec laptops as soon as this thing launched. It wouldn't surprise me, right? So to get 100% of the, of the, of the bionic dog market.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  And these are real markets where he has visibility into them that other founders can't penetrate. It's just, you know, whether they're worth it, I, I don't know, but I guess if you're Sean McGuire, your, your returns are so strong and consistent, it almost, you just do, you just back them. People were mocked in that discovery when Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen gave Elon blank checks to Twitter with nothing. They just said, what, tell me the price? How much do you want me to send? And he was mocked when he wanted to get out of that deal, but in the end they're making money.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. No, yes.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  So maybe I'll have to merge the dog startup into Anduril or something, but maybe it's okay.

• 52:27Harry Stebbings?

  Haven't you seen the brilliant graph where there's like, you start here, you go up here thinking that you know a lot about the market, thinking you know a lot about the market, and then you just come down to where you are.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Yes, agreed.

• 52:37Harry Stebbings?

  And it's like founder, founder. And it's like where you are in your career. Zero years, 15 years in the middle period where you think you're an intelligent investor. No, no, no, that really just is the fact.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I'm very familiar with that. Yes.

• 52:49Harry Stebbings?

  It's so, so true. Any others, Jason, that you'd like to bring to IC this week? We're a very busy committee.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Well, 20% of the fund is, is, I, I think is enough for one week. I mean, we can't do that 50. What is 20 times 52? What percent of the fund is that? Help me.

• 53:02Harry Stebbings?

  It's so interesting though. Yeah, I speak to so many LPs. We just had our AGM. The single most common piece of feedback that I hear from all LPs is every mega platform went out to raise, they raised bigger, they spent faster, they're coming back next year.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, look, yes, because it's where, I mean, we're Pavlovian creatures. And, you know, if you put money into Anthropic three years ago, it feels amazing. And most of the platforms did at some level, so they feel amazing. So we're going to do other things over and over again until it, and it's not going to stop until something goes wrong. So yes, there's going to be these big rounds. We are risk on until, until we're not. The public market's oddly enough, let's be really technical. Interestingly, on a 10 year PE, they're, they're at an all time high. I mean, objectively, they're at an all time high. Interestingly, on a forward PE basis, they're actually quite cheap because the market, you know, oddly enough, earnings have been so amazing in part driven by, you know, one-off gains from privately held investments in the public companies. On a current PE basis, you know, stocks like Nvidia on a forward PE basis look cheap.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Now, you're going to have this long discussion on cyclical blah, blah, blah, but the aggregate market isn't hurting. Now, you know, what is true is that 450 out of those stocks are hurting. It's a really weird, I mean, a better statement, Harry, it's a really weird market right now. There's 40 or 50 stocks that are working in the S and P that are primarily associated with tech and AI. Everything else is quietly subpar. And oddly, and then despite that, there's haven't been a ton of IPOs because everyone's been waiting for this trillion dollar thing and the whole world is in suspended animation. So that's where we're at, which means that, just to draw to a conclusion, which means that it's a perfect time for these platforms to put a whole ton of money out on private companies because there's a big demand for money.

• 54:38Harry Stebbings?

  Any other stories, boys, that I've missed this week?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  I mean, there's a lot. I mean, the interesting thing is, I did appreciate, it was odd because I thought you'd come in with Anthropic and nothing else, but there's like, there was a whole bunch of finance things we talked about. You know, you've got the continuing SpaceX Tesla drama, which is going to run and run and entertain everybody for hours to come. And then you're right, there was a ton of really interesting companies.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  I had one that was under discussed. I didn't fully understand. I should have done more research on it. There was much more drama with Zuck and the board about leaving California than was discussed. It was, it was clearly a high stakes drama. I mean, they, Zuck hired lawyers, the lawyers negotiated with the board, the board was not his ally. He had to threaten to sell all of his homes and leave in one week if they didn't give him the equity that he wanted to stay in California. There's a lot of mechanical things happening there with the billionaire tax and others, but the fact that it had to go with lawyers for months and threats to sell, I, I get it, but it's certainly the opposite of giving, of the era where founders are controlling everything, right? It's a, there was a lot going on.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, the one thing you can control is you're on comp. And I get it because, you know, even Elon has to do that because if you're the board members and you do this without kind of CYA a hundred different ways, you're vulnerable to being very second guessed. I, my, my guess is even if they're perfectly reasonably amicable, everybody should lawyer up so they have protection and, you know, they have a process because process is your friend in these things. But then on top of that, you know, it was super interesting. I don't know the detailed dynamics on what was the voting, but yes, the billionaire tax is up and we'll know in a week or two, but people who think there's no impact from that have never met a billionaire when you tried to take 5% of their money away. It turns out they take it really badly, especially when you want to take 5% of their money away. And, you know, there's some voting criteria on it when you have more voting control than anything else.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  So it's more than 5%. And especially when the legislation says, you know, we can do it again soon.

• 56:30Harry Stebbings?

  I thought they'd already given it all away. Isn't this the point of the Priscilla and Mark Foundation that we have a tax efficient structure?

• 56:36Speaker 03

  It turns out that people like to give it away, but they don't like it to be taken away. It's all about agency and control. But yeah, no, you're right, Jason, that was, that was probably much noise under the circumstances. And, you know, it looks like whatever happens on this billionaire tax, it's been remarkably successful in driving out enough billionaires that you will have an ordinary income tax hit. So go team.

• 56:54Harry Stebbings?

  And do you know what I'm excited by with this show, boys? It's obviously recorded on a Wednesday, a Wednesday night. It's, by the way, it's a Wednesday, Rory, just.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, whatever. Yeah.

• 57:03Harry Stebbings?

  So there's not going to be like 24 hours before release. And so there's no chance that there will be some massive news announcement really with a 36 hour period.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Actually, just to remind you, I think Microsoft and Google, Alphabet are reporting tonight. In theory, you could have anything, but who the hell knows? I'll be shocked to discover that they're going to spend more on CapEx. Are we good, Harry? Are we done?

• 57:23Harry Stebbings?

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