20VC: Anthropic Wipes Billions Off Markets | Citrini Research: The Ultimate Breakdown: Agents, "Ghost GDP", Consumer Spend etc. | Figma Earnings Beat & Four Public Stocks to Buy | Jack Altman Joins Benchmark

AGENDA: 03:55 Anthropic Security Product Wipes Billions Off Public Markets 11:17 Do Agents Turn SaaS Incumbents into Valueless Databases 22:07 Anthropic Secondary Sale Makes Hundreds Decamillionaires 23:20 Citrini Research Piece: Everything You Need To Know 26:04 Will DoorDash Be Replaced by Agents 34:22 Will "Ghost GDP" Soften Consumer Spending Power 42:46 Why No Public Company Has Created a Good Agent Product 47:19 Is Tech Private Equity and Thoma Bravo F***** in this Market 51:05 OpenAI Massively Increases Spending Plans: Analysis 56:24 Figma Fights Back: Earnings Through the Roof 01:02:12 Momentum Versus Value: Four Public Stocks to Buy 01:09:30 Jack Altman Joins Benchmark Capital

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Maybe the Pentagon is wrong and they need to buy more Anthropic and just point it at the enemy. It'll bring China to its knees. When you are priced for perfection, anything less than perfection will be a kick in the nuts.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  If you look at all the publicly traded B2B companies, there's only one that has a competitive agent. It's Palantir. I'm going to say we're going to produce 100,000 Decamillionaires out of these AI leaders. Almost all the B2B software we use today is terrible now.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  If the only thing that's impacted here is the B2B software industry, my suspicion is the rest of the world will go, yeah, I'm willing to lose those guys.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Here's the greatest dislocation if I look at the public stocks, right? Klaviyo versus Shopify.

• 0:38Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, it is my favorite show of the week with Rory O'Driscoll and Jason Lemkin. This week, we analyze the biggest news in tech. What do we cover? We cover Anthropic's security release, which wiped close to 10% off some of the biggest security stocks. We cover Figma's earnings breakdown. And of course, we cover the Citrinia Research piece, which wiped billions off the stock market. But before we dive into the show today, are you a founder working nonstop to raise your next round? Are you an investor doing all you can for your portfolio companies to help them stand out? Funding and scaling a vision is challenging. Banking should not be. HSBC Innovation Banking caters to tech and healthcare founders all over the world who need a really

• 1:20Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:11Harry Stebbings?

  building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off, 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/20vc for 30% off. Framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. Boys, it is so good to be back. We're going to start this week in Anthropic with some news on Anthropic, surprisingly. Security review feature wipes out 20 billion from cybersecurity stocks. Obviously Anthropic released their latest security products or product, and it massively hit some of the biggest players, CloudFlare, CrowdStrike, to name a few.

• 4:53Harry Stebbings?

  Is this a dramatic overreaction from public markets, or is there underlying truth to this?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you the interesting thing to me. This is kind of shows where the markets are and where our mass panic is, although I think our panic is well grounded. I think we should be panicking. But most of this already exists. You can go to Claude Code today, and I literally did this on the plane flying back last week, okay? I did it inside of Replit, and you can say, "Run a detailed security audit on my code", and it will already do it. It will already run a total static code review. And if you're live, if you're on Replit or Lovable or Versal or something, it will actually do penetration testing and everything for you. Like, literally, it will do everything. It can already do, I think, a better security audit and testing than a mediocre board engineer will ever do. So obviously, the pace at which things are getting better, like, it's, I mean, each week, we can't keep up,

• 5:44Speaker 01

  you know, on this show. But it's also interesting that, conceptually, just like reviewing COBOL code dropped IBM 10%, it already existed. Like, we're panicking about features that have already been in Claude for months in many cases. Now, is this a sign that it will go more aggressively into the space? Of course it is. But I just want to point out to folks that aren't doing it, so much of the stuff that we are panicking about, I think, is worth panicking about, but a total nothing burger in the sense that if you're paying attention, this is months-old news in some ways.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. First comment, just general comment is Anthropic markets itself as the nice AI company. And for a nice AI company, it sure creates a lot of damage and kills a lot of stock portfolios. Maybe the Pentagon is wrong and they need to buy more Anthropic and just point it at the enemy. It'll bring China to its knees. This is an astonishingly destructive thing.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Incredibly destructive, incredibly destructive.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Conference clipped 20 billion or something. But let's do security. First, because in this case, from a technical capabilities perspective, no surprise. Second, from a adoption in the enterprise perspective, I don't see Anthropic eating up CrowdStrike's business. I just don't see that. People are going to have a security layer. And there was a great, I think it was an HSBC report out today after the Citrini madness, which we'll talk about in a second, that basically said, software is the means by which AI will diffuse into the enterprise, which I thought was a wonderful quote. And I think it'll be true for security also. In other words, these capabilities, like code scanning, will diffuse

• 7:19Speaker 00

  into the enterprise, probably by means of companies like CrowdStrike and other companies like them bringing it to bear. And that's A, no new news, and B, it shouldn't be such a big panic. But, and this is the big but, unlike some of these other sectors, CrowdStrike and the security companies were effectively trading at a price that assumed nothing could ever go wrong. Even on Friday, after the correction, you know, I went into look, I was stunned. It's 22% revenue growth projected, 31% cash margins. It was trading at 16x revenues on Friday, after the first hit. The thing is that when you are priced for perfection, anything less than perfection will be a kick in the nuts. And that's what's going on here, right? I mean, it's entirely separate when you're dealing with the companies that were

• 8:03Speaker 00

  priced at six times revenues and have gone to four. That's a separate discussion we'll have later. But I think what's happening on some of these super high-priced stocks is the occasional reminder, when you're priced to perfect, literally any little thing, any increase in tail risk of you not being the winner, logically, corrects pretty substantially. So I think that's all that went on here. I don't think CrowdStrike's obviated by this. I think it'll totally be fine. It'll continue to be a business. But when things are priced for, at extraordinarily high prices, it doesn't take a lot to knock the narrative off kilter.

• 8:36Harry Stebbings?

  Would you say that CrowdStrike with the repricing is now fairly priced or underpriced?

• 8:43Speaker 00

  It's actually a very good question. And to make it more general, are you saying, do you prefer the stories where the AI disrupts? Is perhaps a little remote, but the values are still pretty lofty like CrowdStrike. Do you prefer the ones where, you know, there's some of these stocks that have corrected to six, seven and eight times 2026 EBITDA, where you go just on a value basis? That's wrong. I mean, I was looking, thinking about companies like Toast. I was thinking about one of our own DocuSign. At eight or not seven or eight times revenues, these things are absurdly cheap, which CrowdStrike is still not yet cheap. It's just margin less, but it do have, probably has more clarity on the way the world is going. I probably, I probably err to a bit of value.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  In other words, I just say to myself, buy the things where you, yeah, the cash flow alone makes it easy.

• 9:29Harry Stebbings?

  Would you rather have your money in CrowdStrike, which is still priced well? Or Monday priced at one and a half revenues?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  I'd like a basket of one and a half times revenues, not an individual stock. Cause I think at the level of individual stock, it's hard to say, cause it's very idiosyncratic. At the level of the basket, if you buy 20 stocks at an average of three times revenues, eight times EBITDA, I think you'll do just fine.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. Just last week, you kind of mocked me and I can take it like it's good. You mocked me for saying Shopify is at partial risk of disruption. And I said, it's not at total risk of disruption, but the fact that whoever builds the agentic layer, more and more value is going to accrete to them. Is you only have to have a partial deceleration to your numbers. You only have to have a partial risk. You only have to see more of the value of HubSpot or DocuSign flow to an agent, right? For these stocks to do worse. Look, I'll give you an example for E-sign. I know, I know this space, DocuSign, right? It's a great company, great CO. And a lot of folks were saying, oh, this is going to be destroyed by Claude because all you're doing is creating an image of a signature.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  No, this is a very complex enterprise workflow system that also is, is, is a partial system of record. Someone has to say these contracts are true and valid. And someone has to route it through a hundred steps and transformation and negotiation and all this stuff, right? That is not going to be destroyed inside of a, of a, of a Claude chat. But some of that can be done by. And an agent that truly auto contracts for a business. Okay, let's say it does all of your commercial transactions. That could take enough of the value away that these companies are maimed. And I think, and I even think it's logical for CrowdStrike. Obviously Claude Claude Code Review is not doing endpoint security. But can anybody be maimed by Claude?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  It just launched entire enterprise agent solution today. This is how I think about it. Claude is like inverse. Sorry, what's the game where you land on the, where you fall out of the sky and onto the, onto the island and it keeps shrinking? What's that game called? The video game where it keeps shrinking, right? And so like your territory keeps shrinking. Claude keeps consuming more and more of you. And you're stuck in this smaller and smaller island that you've got to own more and more market share of. Are sure, almost everyone that's public, your surface area is shrinking because of Claude and AI. And the question is how much? And so the impacts are accelerated. And that's why Anthropic today had to publicly say, hey, guys, their head of AI said, listen, guys, on the one hand, things are accelerating, so it's bad for software.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  On the other hand, we're best of friends of software on the day they launched enterprise. We're best friends, we're enabling them. But the pace of change is so fast. So I want to believe there are these safe islands. I believe the agents are going to own enough of the value that just owning less of the value in your space can create terminal decline, terminal decline.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Put me down for a strong disagree.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  You're going to come around, just give me the rest of the year. Literally on the plane last week, I did a security audit in Replit, which is using Claude code. It's, it's, I mean, some of that is Replit, we could talk about it. I don't want into the details, but it's great. And I literally sent it to the Replit team, the entire technical team. Cause I'm like, do you see how good this is? And they're like, we didn't even know it was this good yet. We didn't even know our security audit had become this good last week. It's so good and so much better than before. And they didn't even know. To think that we're in some sort of static world for the rest of the year. I don't even think, literally, I, I, we could delete some of our podcasts from four weeks ago. They're so dated.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  So let's, let's try not to be like that. So comment here, intelligence will infuse all software over the next decade. That intelligence is. Generated by foundation models like Claude and like OpenAI. I think that's a given. Agreed? So what we're really saying is, how much of that do they do themselves? That intelligence has to get to the enterprise. There's probably four ways it can get there. Lay them out. One is they buy it from Claude directly. Everyone buys all the software from Claude. The second is, they build it themselves. They construct, every enterprise construct its own agents. The third is they buy it from existing incumbents who integrate AI. And the fourth is they buy it from gazillions of new companies,

• 13:46Speaker 00

  all of whom are leveraging at, you know, the Harvey's, the Goz, all these companies who are building on top of foundation models. You founded Post 22. And you have to figure out which of those scenarios you believe in. And actually, the post I read, and I actually agreed very much, is I think it's three and four. I don't think enterprises are gonna, are going to build their own systems on top of Claude directly. And I don't think Claude's going to build all these focus systems for everything. So I think there's going to be this software mediation layer between them, and that's the opportunity.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but here's the thing. If you look at all the publicly traded B2B companies, there's only one that has a competitive agent. It's Palantir. No one else has seen a single ounce of revenue acceleration due to their AI agents. And yet, and yet, the companies we talk about each week have jaw-dropping acceleration. It's not just Anthropic, because they have built the agents that matter in their space. It is not sprinkling AI dust on top of their analytics software. There's not enough value there.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  But you would also agree, but let's talk about that kind of fourth category. You would also be that there are many privately held, recently founded companies exploding in revenue also. Let's talk about, like, do you think it all goes to the model companies? Or do you believe any of these companies, like, you know, that are raised? I mean, you guys talk about Replin, Lovable a lot. Do you believe that's defendable? You talk about, you know, Law, you talk-

• 15:02Speaker 01

  They even might not be defendable. And the rate of, because Claude Code, just last week, just since we did the last show, Claude Code launched the ability to see apps inside of Claude Code. So for a lot of product people, you don't need Replin, Lovable anymore, as of last week. Now, you can, you can change Claude Code and visualize your app inside of Claude Desktop and inside of Claude Code. Don't need to do that anymore in a third-party app. But my real point is, sorry, and Harry, you're the boss. I've talked to three founders over the weekend of like public and near-public companies, and they're all, this is the advice I gave them, your agent is not great. You're being disrupted by the agentic layer. I hope that that service now builds these great agents, and I believe Agent Force has a shot, and I believe others. But they're all being disrupted in real time.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  And that's why the folks Harry interviews on 20VC are stressed as F. They are stressed as F because no matter what they say, they know they are not, they do not have the dominant agent in the space, no matter how many LLMs they stick inside of a feature. When I see what leaders of top, public and private, and our 100, you know, nine-figure unicorns are saying, it's lip service. I see it on LinkedIn all weekend long. I see we're adding AI to our email feature. We're adding the ability to process emails more efficiently. You're gonna go out of business. And you're not gonna fail because your customers are gonna renew, but your growth is gonna fall so far that you become irrelevant in two years. And I'm gonna buy my four stocks, don't get me wrong, but I'm already changing my mind since last week because of things continue to,

• 16:30Speaker 01

  the panic is overdone and real at the same time.

• 16:32Harry Stebbings?

  So you made a very clear statement that we have not seen any of the public providers make great agentic use cases work and have a meaningful impact on revenue. I'm very naive. Why? Toby's a brilliant CEO at Shopify. Mark is trying with agent. Why have they all failed so far?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Well, I'll give you two reasons if you want. There's a long list of reasons, right? Two practical reasons. One is it's a lot of work, man. And no one wants to do this at these companies. Every agent, here's the problem today, and this will change in the next two years. It is not true today. Every agent is essentially custom. Okay, every agent needs to be trained. Every agent needs to be onboarded. If you want it to be great, okay, every agent needs its data cleansed. This is a vast amount of work for organizations that already think they're overworked and working too hard. There is huge institutional momentum to overcome. The second is what I just said is true. You need a massive amount of forward-deployed engineers and trained workers that are techn-

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Enough and smart enough to train and deploy an agent. One, the workers don't exist in most companies. Your average customer success person that shows up with a green, yellow, red light dashboard cannot train and tune an agent. And two, then there's a meta-challenge for the Shopify's, Monday's, HubSpot's, and Toast's and others, which is you can't afford the human to do it. At a niche level, we're seeing it with startups, we're not seeing it with Publix. Hyper-niche agents work really well because they have a small set of things to do, okay? As soon as you get to spaces like Shopify, or even worse, Monday, where you have 100 verticals, right? Or it's very, very hard to build a very specific agent automatically

• 18:14Speaker 01

  that does everything that churches need, and basketball courts need, and refrigerator businesses need. They're not all the same needs, and so the agents aren't good enough. And in fact, a lot of these leaders that I just described, they're in beta. They have six people using them, 60 people, because it's too hard for them. So they're going to get killed by the startup that does it. They're going to get killed.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Ah, but that's the key, that a startup that does it. What it's not going to be is the foundation model directly selling to the church, directly selling to the thing. They will provide the raw intelligence, but there will be software opportunities to build compelling software companies in most of these verticals, just as there was in SaaS. And so maybe we're more in sync than we think. I think intelligence-led applications are the only applications that are going to sell and grow quickly over the next 10 years. Non-intelligence-led applications will at best be flat to mild growth if they're not obviously disrupted by intelligence, and at worst, be down. I'm picking on Toast because I'm not an investor, so I have no emotional connection. I think that's a good one, because I don't think there's a ton of agent work to be done,

• 19:17Speaker 00

  and it's a lot of payments and restaurant kind of organization. It strikes me as fairly durable, we can argue, but yeah. Whereas something like Monday, it's very knowledge workery. I can see much more disruption story. That's the incumbents. I think we're now in sync in saying is that those opportunities can be grabbed by standalone companies, perhaps built, you know, started, founded '21, '22, leveraging directly on top of the Foundation models, what you're not saying is all that revenue just accrues to the foundation models, correct?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  No, I think just people are going to be maimed even more than they think if they don't own the agents in your category. You've got to own the agents in your category. And whether those agents are owned by a startup or whether some version of that agent can be done inside of Claude, they're going to maim you and it's accelerating.

• 20:02Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, I want to be very direct with you and you'll give me a direct answer. You're better at direct than Rory's sometimes nuanced answers. Will Claude Code make Replid and Lovable weaker in a 12-month period? Like, do you think they will meaningfully enter their space and take market share?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I think it will do everything that it can do. Going to Rory's point, anything that can be done either inside the browser or inside the desktop, Claude will do. That's what we've learned this year, anything it can do. Right now, if you go to design something in Claude Code, you'll laugh. All the crappy Claude Code websites look the same. They have the same artifacts, the same icons, the same purple color scheme. You can laugh, but can all of the design, all of the parts of Figma that are designed be done within the code? Of course it can. So I believe it will aggressively attack parts of Figma this year, even though they're key partners. Replid and Lovable, it continues to do more of them. Now, will Claude Code want to host entire websites?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  The only thing that ultimately will protect them is this is all their teams do. And that I don't think they want to build databases and build production websites and host domain names. But if they change their minds, there's no reason they can't, they can't license Superbase or Neon or fork their own Postgres. They're pretty good there at Test Company. They can build their own database. They've already got plenty of servers. They can spool up a few more to host websites if they want to, they can. And I just think Fortnite's the game. You know, at the end of Fortnite, the circle gets, and so if I'm at Replid or Lovable or even Figma, I would be worried. Figma, like, the circle's just starting to shrink. But I think at many companies, that circle's shrinking. And I have two investments I made last year. I love them.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Those products no longer have a reason to exist today because of Claude. But these were standalone investments last year. I'm not going to go into it, that were great, that blew Up in the early days and they just have no reason to exist today in that prior form, just no reason. When we turn around and all of a sudden you can preview your entire app inside of Claude, which you couldn't do last week. If I'm any of these Figma, Repet, Lovable, Versale, all of them, all of them I love, that just the Fortnite circle is shrinking. So you know, you gotta like, you gotta do something about it, right? And will it stop? Like at the end of the game, it does get pretty small though, right? It's stressful, but, but the flip side is if you nail the agent, look how much revenue these guys did building essentially an agent on top of Claude code. They built a billion

• 22:26Speaker 01

  dollars of revenue building the agent that didn't exist. So that's the flip side. That's our job is to build these billion dollar agents. If you can do something that is extremely high valuable, that could not be done before, you can close millions of revenue your first week. It's never happened before in the history of software, right?

• 22:43Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree and get that. Before we move on, I do just want to stay on Anthropic. And I wanted to discuss, they've lined up five to six billion dollars for an employee share sale at a $350 billion valuation. Obviously, there's people queuing up out the door for this, following obviously OpenAI doing the same a couple of months ago. Have we ever seen liquidity at this scale when we look at the number of millionaires minted from OpenAI, soon to be Anthropic? When we look at the Nvidia millionaires that exist already, is anyone going to be able to buy a house in the valley?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of things that seemed silly in AI 12 or 18 months ago, but if Nvidia has 20,000 Decamillionaires, right? I'm going to say we're going to produce 100,000 Decamillionaires out of these AI leaders. Okay. And Rory's better at the math than me, but Nvidia already has 20,000. So if that's the case, that would be great if everyone was at full employment and we were all full of companies with six-figure employees making money. The worry is that we do see this concentration of wealth at the same time as everyone else gets leaner. And will Jevon's paradox create more employment in tech or not? I believe we will need more engineers than ever. Like when we talked with Michael Cannon-Brooks, I don't know if it will create more employment. So.

• 23:57Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, the knock on effect of that is bluntly what has shaken markets. So much when you look at Citrini or however you want to pronounce it, 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, which was a piece written kind of forward looking or predicting kind of the state at 2028. And I broke down kind of some of the core elements there. I think we can start with actually one that you kind of mentioned there, Jason, which is kind of ghost GDP disconnects market from the real economy. So you have AI boosting productivity and corporate profits and market caps of companies, inflating headline economic figures, but actually consumer income doesn't scale with market cap and enterprise value. How do we analyze and assess that?

• 24:38Speaker 00

  I'm gonna call bullshit here. I love the Noah Smith descriptions, Substacker I follow in economics a lot. He called it basically scary bedtime reading, right? I think if you want to have a conversation about it, I actually think the way you need to break it up is to, I'm trying to say how to have, because I knew we're going to have this one, right? And I saw your seven points and it's too much detail, Harry. Big picture, I would suggest we approach this in the following fashion. The first thing you have to figure out is micro macro. At a micro level, for each of the things he says are going to happen, do we believe they're going to happen? In other words, is AI going to replace coding? Is AI going to replace DoorDash? Is AI going to replace Amex, right? In other words, and the wonderful thing is, I think that's something this group is well equipped to do,

• 25:22Speaker 00

  because we're all investing in venture companies who are the tippy point of the spear in terms of adoption. I'm allowed have an informed opinion on question one, which is micro level. Are these changes going to happen? Then the second big picture question, lumping all the other things into it is, what are the macro consequences of this? In other words, if you assume that there's a high level of AI adoption over a short period of time, then everyone, and that's, as I say, what we can talk about because we understand, then everyone gets to pontificate on global macro, which is what you were starting to do there. And I'm fine coming back to that, right? But I think jumping straight to the, oh my God, the GDP is ending, with no thought process to, I even believe that, basically, he was hypothesizing

• 26:04Speaker 00

  a two-year adoption cycle of almost everything, such that everything from ServiceNow to DoorDash to Amex. Gets rolled over in two years. And I think if you believe that's happening, then you do graduate to the global macro question. And I still think he's wrong about that. But if you don't think the adoption is going to be that quick, you can literally ignore the rest of the piece. Does that make sense as a framing, first of all?

• 26:25Harry Stebbings?

  Why don't we start with the micro then, where you think we are seasoned and responsible enough to have an informed opinion?

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, let's break it up. I mean, there was, he had points about software development, about SaaS apps, about companies like DoorDash, and then companies like Amex. In other words, interchange, right? Let's do the stupid ones first. DoorDash. The idea was you're going to want to delegate to your agent purchasing of an opt, you know, optimizing for, there's going to be six different versions of DoorDash and your agent will do between them. And the only reason that you don't do this today is because, quote unquote, friction. And if it was automated, you'd let the agents order your pizza. And I just call bullshit on that. I mean, at, at, at the consumer level, when you're buying pizza on a Friday night, you're talking to your wife and you're saying, honey, you know, we had the fricking kimono last time. I say we go with the pepperoni. She was like, no, I don't like it.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  I told you we want to stick with the two salads on the pizza. It's not something we want, no one wants to delegate to an agent how to decide what food they get and then have the thing come up. Good news, I save you two bucks. Bad news, you like the high-end pizza, but I got you the crappy little pizza dish.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Rory, can I add just one thought? Here's Andy Fang, CTO of DoorDash. We strongly believe agentic commerce will be transformative to our industry. He believes this. I believe it has, I have a, a large investment exposed to the space and I can see agents and AI ripping through it. I think the examples we think are safe, this is CTO saying, we need to earn the right to service customers, agents, end to end, discovery, ordering, delivery and support. We need to earn the right in the new world. So to think that these spaces aren't just, it only has to be maimed. The idea that we're going to vibe code our own DoorDash is stupid, right? It is, it is stupid. And he's trying to get people millions of views, right?

• 28:11Speaker 00

  So the whole idea he started with is stupid, but keep on extrapolating.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  The threat that, that an agent can decide for you here.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  The CTO says it's real. That's the threat.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  But he didn't say, okay, you caught me. I'm going home. If you want to make more automations around a recommendation, say, hey, there's three different pizzas. But do you really think it's going to be? I mean, I just think the level of customer inertia on the consumer to have this vision of five different DoorDash competitive companies being enabled in this world, I just don't see it. DoorDash is a combination of a huge amount of logistics, a huge amount of customer aftermarket service, a huge amount of starting up restaurants, right? They beat off four or five other big competitors to now have some kind of stable oligopoly with Uber order and there was one other smaller player in the US. What in software is going to allow a new? Talk me through the new competitor emerging

• 29:09Speaker 00

  and taking market share in a high fixed cost business like this.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the most simple one is that a new competitor can decide whether Uber Eats or DoorDash is the right thing for you. Uber Eats, DoorDash, or Direct. You have three options in the US, okay? There's nothing else really exists, right? The agent may make that decision. In fact, I would prefer that because I don't want to figure out which one to use, DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Direct. I would prefer that Uber Eats knows my favorite. And I'm just picking one example, but this is a real threat today. This is what Andy's saying. It's a real threat. We don't need to decide which is the best place for us. The agent decides which is the best deal between these options, which is the best source for me, which is the best for my family that makes the decision. It only, the agent is who we go to. As long as the agent is who we go to rather than the first party, it just risks disruption.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  It doesn't destroy the company. It doesn't destroy it.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Tracing through the unrealistic statements there. Let's go on an existing example today. Netflix.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm right about DoorDash because Andy Fang said the same thing. Why are you dodging the one that everyone thinks is free from disruption when the CTO says the ground is shifting underneath his feet? He literally said it this week, the CTO.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Okay. No one's going to say when the CEO of a public company, I don't believe that stuff. They're going to say, we're on it. Because that's the message you got to say. But I don't think they're saying, oh, my God, three more companies are going to displace me, right? Our job as investors is to be. Kind of analyze the facts and try and come to our independent conclusions. So I'm just going to take, I think two of the most personal things at the consumer level are the food you eat and the TV content you watch. Now, the good thing about Netflix, about the content you watch is we've had 10 years of AI already. The Netflix recommendation engine, let's be clear, it is a massively useful tool to them because at the margin, it helps them predict what people want, right? So I do agree there is core value i- i- in knowing people's preferences on the aggregate.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  But how often, what percentage of your content viewing do you base entirely blindly on the recommendation engine when you sit down at Netflix? 5%, 10%? I think it's light.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Sorry, but what, DoorDash is barely in B2B. What the, the, what Netflix point is, I'll, I'll answer your question if you want the answer, but I'm missing the point. Do, do I think AI can disrupt Netflix? Netflix thinks AI can disrupt Netflix because we're all watching short form content. And as of the last 45 days, you can watch an incredible short on YouTube that was entirely AI-generated, where you can watch Star Wars stories that are better than the crappy last three movies that are AI-generated. That's utterly disruptive to Netflix. They're so panicked, they have to buy a studio.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  I'm breaking it apart into two separate things. If you can general, and I think that's actually useful, if you can generate content using AI, that's very disruptive. I was trying to focus on recommendations because the idea was, I'm just looking at the idea of, the idea is for consumer preference, you will entrust your decision-making to an agent who will quote unquote, "know what you want." That's what you're saying about DoorDash. And we're trying to prove something that hasn't happened yet. So I was making the point, content is another thing that's quite personal. Netflix has had this agent running for the last 10 or 15 years, the recommendation engine. And at the margin, it does a good job of predicting on aggregate what people want. But you, if you had two choices, one program that gave you exactly what they recommended,

• 32:26Speaker 00

  and then the other program that allowed you to pick. I'm going to tell you, you're not going to go with the recommendation engine. You're going to say, I didn't like that recommendation last week. I'm done. In the same way, I don't believe I want to entrust my eating decision entirely to an agent. I think we're just caught up in this. Anything could happen, right?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  But dude, YouTube is the number one way we consume video. And it is entirely based on a recommendation engine. And it is the best recommendation company on planet Earth. There are no channels on YouTube that matter anymore. Followers don't even matter anymore. Nothing matters. Every day I log into YouTube and it gets better and better at knowing what I want to watch. Every day, it is epically better than anything else on the planet and utterly disruptive to how we view things.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Good argument. I'll give you that.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Everything is, everyone is stressed today. It's a good thing. The further you go, the more folks are at risk of being maimed by AI, just maimed. Except Georgia CrowdStrike. He's fine, but everyone else is at risk of being maimed by AI. Even if your growth goes from 31% to 20%, that's a big deal.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Agreed. But do you really believe that you want an agent to recommend you food?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  I have the data. I have an investment in this space. I already know the answer is yes. It's not my opinion. I have data from over 10,000 restaurants. I know the answer is yes.

• 33:36Harry Stebbings?

  Right. If your agent, all the historical context on every pizza order you and your wife have made. And you know the price point, the location, so you know the delivery time that you're estimating. And it can also analyze every TikTok, Instagram review as latest food trends and tell you about the latest within that price band with that crisp topping that your wife likes. Because it already knows that because you left a review or because you said it in a WhatsApp. So it's got open claw and was able to deliver that to you. I think most people would. I'd love it.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  I think that I, but how at the margin, yes, I'd be sitting there on DoorDash going. I get a 5% extra satisfaction rate and selection rate from this. But do you think AI is so disruptive that it can warrant the creation of an entirely new company? That says, basically what you're saying is all the investment you made in restaurant relationships, logistics, the app are as nothing because this new thing is disruptive enough just because the recommendations are 5% better.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  If, if all these SaaS apps become dumb databases and Toast just becomes a POS system, they're not going away, but they become commodity. More and more commodified and the real issue is they don't capture enough of the incremental value. It's the incremental value.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Jason, I wanted to deal with the easy ones first, right? Do you really believe that there will be a direct competitor to DoorDash enabled by AI?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  No, listen, we all, we all agree that that is, that is clickbaity. Okay? And so is all of it, but listen, even if, let's talk about ghost GDP for a minute. I admit I'm living on the bleeding edge. Okay, let's concede that I'm a laboratory. But we have gone from 12 people to two people on my little team. That not only does investment, it generates eight figures a year in revenue. Okay? And that is ghost GDP. Those folks that are gone, that value, the profits that are left go to two people. Well, three people.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Define ghost GDP for me.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  GDP is that this productivity is not going to human workers that then spend it. That's the fear that we are creating this productivity, but it is not going to any, there's no, there's no humans to spend the money. It's great that I can spend more money, but that doesn't, I don't think that's great for the economy. If I get a little bit richer, like we lost eight people on our team.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  First of all, I agree. We're now doing macro because, and I, in this case, we can do macro because we agree. We can only do macro once we've conquered micro. And in this case, you've conquered micro. You've said it has happened. I had 12 people. Now I only have two. 10 people no longer have jobs. Is, what does that mean?

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Or at least, at least whatever, they have other jobs, but the value that we're creating, right? This eight figures of value, it's, it's accruing to fewer and fewer people. And there aren't as many people to buy handbags and to buy shoes and to buy T-shirts and to buy Netflix. Even just to buy Netflix, there's less people, right? That was the point of the ghost GDP in this inflammatory, annoying article. But I don't, I don't think that these things are wrong. I think he's just trying to claim everything's going to happen in 18 months that, that it's not going to happen 18 months.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  But, but implicit in that, and you have to. Be logical. Implicit in that is productivity gains, which have been the engine of growth for the last 200 years, are bad. There's some embedded statement here is that it is bad that Jason is now able to do something with two people that he was hitherto for only able to do with 12. And I'm going to say something. Across the arc of the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, productivity gains have been good. Because the other 10 people, let me finish. The other 10 people who used to be wasting time writing slop for Jason can now do other things. And the sum total of human achievement will contain the extra work that those people do. In the long term, I don't think you can argue but that productivity gains are good.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  We used to have 80% of people working on farms. We now have 10% of people working on farms, or actually 4% of people working on farms. And we sell so much food that we're all fat. And those other 85% of people are doing other shit. Across the scope of history, productivity is frickin' awesome. It's the only thing that's made us rich. I want to say that so clearly. Because then all these arguments, these macro arguments that I was hoping to ignore are basically some version of even though productivity is amazing in the long term, because you can't disagree to that, something bad is happening in the short term. And then the onus is on you to say what that is. What is it? What's so bad about constant change and the fact that jobs go away and new jobs emerge? What's going to happen that's so bad?

• 37:52Harry Stebbings?

  A softening of consumer spend. With a concentration of wealth to fewer people, there are less people to spend money across different parts of the economy. And that impacts a large amount of people. And to your point on how does productivity actually lead to a worsening in the economy, you only need to look at Japan in the 1990s and the need for abnomics. And actually, you saw massive productivity increases in the 1990s with massively improving mechanical infrastructure that they brought in. And actually, it didn't disperse to a huge amount of the Japanese population. So there's very recent precedent, actually.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  If you want to see a sad, a dystopian version of this, go to Japan and meet with B2B founders. I was at a dinner last November with all from IPO, 20 million and up only. It was a VIP dinner put together. It was great. It was the best of the best, okay? And they're all talking about how Apparently their seat base shrinks. This is not just the AI topic we're talking about today about seat based risk. This was last year, all talking about how just each year their seats shrink because their economy is shrinking, right? It is, uh, just to Harry's point, it is a, I think in the short term, this is all great for us as investors. It's terrific for us to get more productivity. Well, we're going to get, we're going to make money out of it. And we should put it in the bank and flee to Miami or Monaco because I don't, but I'm not sure it's good for everybody.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  I'm going to call bullshit on that. There's, there's two or three different things with disaggregating the seat based comment. Are you making a comment on Japanese depopulation, which I don't think we can blame on AI. It's been a trend for 30 years.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  I just think there's a, a loose parallel to this ghost GDP idea to Harry brought up of the depopulation. Well, there's different ways you can, you can depopulate a worker force, even if the humans are still there, right? But it is, it's a similar, it's, it's a structural headwind, right? To folks buying stuff, that, that's the, our, our, our 10 agents at Saster generate millions of revenue, but they buy nothing. Our agents buy nothing. They, they work all weekend long, reply, arty, qualie, money. They're good kids. Okay. They, they, they create a lot of noise, like they're a lot of work, but they buy nothing. Nothing, nothing, except, except, except tokens. That's the only thing they buy are tokens and they, they buy millions and millions of to. For real, for, for real. That is a little different than the past.

• 40:02Harry Stebbings?

  Productivity increases are only good if the consumer wallet is dispersed and they are able to spend money. If that shrinks, that is not a good thing.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yes, but the, but, but so what do you do? Ban productivity increases? Good news, we're all doing fine. Bad news, we're all 1790 and we're all, you know, one bad harvest away from starvation. But yay, we're all fine as long as nothing goes wrong, right? It's not a credible argument. At a very micro level, you could argue if, and this is why we actually have to go back to the micro. If the disruption happens extraordinarily quickly and people don't have time to adjust. Then in the short term, you will have some element of structural dislocation that will result in some form of, definitely some form of recession. GDP slowdown if those folks can't be digested in new jobs quickly.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  So I do agree. So my point is this, in the short term, you can articulate a thesis you're just saying, right? If all the, you know, if all the forty five year old programmers are let go at the same time, and there's six million programmers on the street and there's no other work for them and it happens in a month, then in the short term, there would be this GDP hit. While I'm still correct, over the medium and long term, GDP growth builds us all out. So that's why it does go back to the micro is do you think it's all going to happen so quickly? Do we think that all these things are going to be displaced extraordinarily quickly?

• 41:25Harry Stebbings?

  I I don't know. When I look at Kapathie talk about the evolution of how much of his work has gone to AI in the last six months, I I do question it.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Okay, what do you mean by that?

• 41:36Harry Stebbings?

  I think more and more of labor will be replaced by AI. We will see the concentration of value to a fewer people, and fewer consumers will have money to spend in the economy, which will lead to problems and a shrinkage of that economy.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  There are a hundred and fifty odd million people working in the US, right? So what's your estimate for displacement? I'm just trying to get a sense of it.

• 42:00Harry Stebbings?

  It depends on the time horizon, but I'm not feeling that great about it. I mean, if we look at the most obvious, which is, you know, customer support, legal, bookkeeping, that doesn't look great. If we want to add in Waymo and what it'll do for self-driving within a four-year period, gosh, I think you could see thirty to forty million.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, again, Waymo's a good example. I mean, you look at the projections ten years ago when people talk about self-driving, and you can find all the, you know, the Citrini articles of then saying it's all going to happen in four years, it's over. Here we are today, and even though I think Waymo is amazing, they're doing three hundred and fifty million dollars. I think they have single-digit thousands numbers of automobiles, you know, in a few cities, steady rollout, starting to increase. I don't know how many years you're talking about before it gets to kind of further mass scale. So all diffusion takes longer than you think, right? I think we massively overestimate the pace of adoption here.

• 42:52Harry Stebbings?

  Does it ever take shorter? Because everyone always says about the pace of diffusion and they use the, you know, industrial revolution where you had to buy machinery. Transport it, train, when it's Nano Banana Pro and it removes an entire industry.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's shorter. In my life, it's my life, it's shorter. The thing that is stressful on this, and it's, and it's a way to make money is the stressful thing is that, and again, I don't want to endlessly talk about vibe coding apps, but I have so much experience, right? I'm shocked. Everything is faster than I would have ever and better than I would have ever expected. We started this about security, right? If you told me when we started this podcast that today I could just talk to a vibe coding platform and it would do like an A tier security audit while I was on an airplane and I didn't have to do anything. I would have said, guys, it deleted my whole database. There's no way it's going to do a frigging enterprise grade security audit, yet here we are. Then we turn around and everything, everything Anthropic can do this year is faster and better and bigger than we thought.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I'm not saying that some meta level, everything isn't slower than we think, right? Certainly that dumb article, right? DoorDash being disrupted by, by Base 44 next week is dumb, but God, this acceleration, it's, it's just, it's hard to, it's so fast. It's so fast.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  In practical terms.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  I'll give you the top, the practical ramification. Almost all the B to B software we use today is terrible now. It's terrible. I can't talk to it. I can barely bring myself to use to WordPress. I can't change anything in WordPress. All these products are terrible. A lot of the ones that, that we, the founders we love that Harry talks to, the products are terrible now because AI software is so good. Blow your brains out to input data for two hours into your system, right? It's terrible. If nothing else, that is accelerating so quickly that the leaders cannot keep up with the fact that their products are so dated. They're so dated.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  I think that's broadly true. And I think when you narrow it, that's why I said, when you narrow it down to the micro of the impact of AI on the million to a million and a half workers in the US in the software and tech industry broadly defined could be way more disruptive, right? And I think that's actually a useful conversation, but it's worth pointing out that, you know, plus or minus five, seven percent of all jobs in the US are disrupted every year. You know, this is 1%, less than 1%. Maybe one, one and a half percent of all jobs. If the entire software industry got nuked, it still wouldn't be the same as losing the car industry 10 or 15 years ago. So my point is, again, differentiate the micro discussion of are B2B software companies in trouble and how much are they in trouble is a really good discussion.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  And if you make your living investing in B2B software comes, it's the only thing that matters, right? But jumping from there to saying civilizations, we know it ended is just, as you say, Jason, clickbait and we should just ignore it. I mean, I'm going to put it even more directly. We didn't bleed in Silicon Valley when the car industry went down the toilet. Don't hold your breath thinking they're going to come for us and say, if the only thing that's impacted here is the B2B software industry, my suspicion is the rest of the world will go, yeah, I'm willing to lose those guys. But then I think you're right. The question is, who wins, who loses in the 2% of GDP software business with AI? And I think that is the question. You're right, is all that software, so do you, all that software is crap and looks outdated today.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  A lot of it. Well, and also one other point, and we talked about Toby before from Shopify is about the best of the best, right? And I think Shopify is on top of these things. It has the same number of employees it did three years ago. It has not added a single net headcount in three years and has grown 50% at 12 billion in revenue. At a meta level, that is a decline too. It has grown its revenue 50% to 12 billion and not added a single net headcount. That already is an economic loss to the tech lifestyle we lived just a couple of years ago, right? And I was literally talking with a group of B2B CEOs at scale the other day. And I made a statement that everyone thought was a joke at first until they thought about it. I said, one of the leaders in the next 12 months is going to do an Elon Musk and just cut half their team. In one day, they're going to lay off half the entire company.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Elon, we thought Elon was crazy at X, but it stayed up. And one of these folks that is not making a big transition to the new world, right? Is going to realize they just, they're just going to go from 4,000 to 2,000 employees and be fine. So this trend could accelerate, even if Shopify is the same for three years, right? And yeah, listen, for, just for fun, then we could break. I asked Claude, who isn't that crazy guy on Twitter trying to get views. Going to my point, what would happen if with AI, we were able to reduce tech headcount by? Fifty percent, just reduce headcount by fifty percent because of AI. Claude said the short version, six hundred billion to nine hundred billion in GDP impact, four to five million total jobs lost, including all multiplier effects, and local economic devastation in five to six cities where tech is concentrated.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  It would be one of the largest economic shocks in US history outside of a world war or pandemic. I'm not saying it's true, but I just asked Claude to parse the data if we lost half our headcount. Now, here's where I'm not smart enough. Even in some ways, not growing headcount for a decade is losing headcount too, right? Because the revenue will grow so high, right?

• 47:53Speaker 00

  Yes, but go back to your thing. I think you are right about one thing. I think the number of companies will do that kind of dramatic headcount reduction. And I think the most obvious place will be all the levered, PE-backed, highly levered SaaS companies. Because if you're not levered, if you're public, if you have time, you can do the Toby thing and just hold headcount flat, rely on growth. You don't have to do traumatic surgery. You'll just be able to become steadily more efficient. If you owe six times EBITDA on debt and you bought the thing for eight or nine times and now it's trading at four times, you have to start paying down that debt and there's no growth. So I think a lot of those guys will look at very draconian expense management structures.

• 48:39Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, it's a good point. If you are a Tomo Bravo with Cooper and Anna Plan, I'm not picking on, I didn't mean to pick on that. I'm using them as an example. So please, your answer is not dependent on Cooper and Anna Plan, but that ilk. And you're growing at twenty percent with no founder CEO, so hired CEO, PE, run. What do you do?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I think Rory's making a more brutal and cogent point, which is there's folks like that are growing six percent that are out of massive debt leverage, okay? They have no choice but to shrink, right? The math doesn't solve any other way, right? Twenty percent, at least you have options. You can probably do the Toby playbook. If you're north of twenty, probably the math barely pencils out at that level, right? That compounds to enough growth over four to five years to pay off your debt. But in the single, these, all these Blue Owl and friends, they're just upside down on this debt. They can't pay it off.

• 49:27Harry Stebbings?

  What happens?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  I mean, I think if the debt is upside Die down, hence the Blue Isle thing, then the equity is gone. I think a lot of these folks, they're not just going to roll over and die. They're going to do exactly what Jason said. They're going to try and cut expenses, knuckle down to a very, you know, the debtors will extend the debt because they won't want to crystallize the loss. The equity will run the business and try hard to pay down cash. They will reduce headcount dramatically. They'll be much less attractive place to work. They'll be much less attractive vendors to supply to you because they won't be investing in R and D. But, and this is the sad comment, the inertia in a lot of software contracts is such that it'll take a long time and die. So it'll just be a steady nasty grind. I don't think it'll be the cataclysmic, all going wrong on Friday kind of thing.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  I think it'd just be a long five-year grind.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  But yeah, my guess, I don't mean to go off topic. My guess, I'd be here, Rory, you've thought more about this and probably you have Harry, is my guess is we will end up seeing more and more of five to six to eight startups at 50 to 100 to 200 million in revenue, mashed together at nominal prices of two times revenue or less. They'll just be all mashed up. Everyone knows it's not the best idea. Everyone knows that the 11 companies Clary has bought do not have perfect synergies, right? But it's the best idea we have for these companies at 2X, one and a half. I know it's probably not even an AR multiple, but one and a half to two times. People will just say enough already, it's time. One and a half, one to two times revenue will capitulate and you'll see these, these sort of Frankenstein B2B companies that have, they're many constellations or whatever,

• 50:58Speaker 01

  but it's the best play left, right? And you'll bring in professional management that will have 20 products, right? We'll see 20 unicorns merge into one thing that will IPO in 2027.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Agreed, except the last sentence. They'll try and IPO in 2027, but you're right, Jason. It is, I think that's a great, it's the best idea they got. You've got this $50 million revenue thing with no acquirer. Maybe if you had five $50 million revenue things in roughly the same market, you could build a $250 million thing that would be profitable enough and or get some growth at scale. It'll be a miserable way to consolidate all that debt. Those are going to be the most impacted by this kind of. The decline in the perceived value of recurring revenue companies.

• 51:43Harry Stebbings?

  We can either talk about Figma's earnings or OpenAI's spending increases next. Which one do you want to do?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I don't know. I want to know from Rory when he thinks the OpenAI gravy train ends. I mean, what is it? Another 100, needing 110 billion? We've all had this board meeting, guys, you walk in, there's good news and bad news. The good news is we're making up more hardware and other revenue three years out. The bad news is I need another 110 billion to get there.

• 52:08Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, let's ground it in numbers. And OpenAI is doubling spend to 665 billion by 2030, but they're upping their revenue forecast by 27% to 280 billion, based on products that mostly don't exist today, hardware, ads, everything else. Rory?

• 52:26Speaker 00

  At one level, it's been interesting just watching the conversation that Claude now gets the benefit of the doubt, and people believe it can kill everything. And OpenAI, which was the darling, now gets no benefit of doubt and almost like it's a clown show. And I think the truth is probably no one is ever as good as bad as they seem. It's very straightforward. OpenAI is still the clear winner in the consumer space in terms of mind share. I think what they're grappling with is how ambitious can they be in these capital markets? And they clearly still want to be ambitious, and they're still getting funded to be ambitious. But you're right, it's that when you run the math out and it's the consumer product that does exist, then you add on to it the enterprise product that exists but is not doing as well as Entropic,

• 53:09Speaker 00

  and then you add on to that agentic products that don't yet exist yet, and then you add on that quote unquote consumer monetization beyond subscription of 30 to 77 billion, which is basically ads and other stuff. What you recognize is you're spending a large amount of current real dollars that Nvidia and all these other people think they're going to collect in anticipation of a whole bunch of future anticipated dollars, which are entirely credible to believe, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of leaning into the future here. And so far, going back to the Citrini memo, as long as these companies are perceived as so powerful that they can destroy everything, they will be able to get money. Because the truth is, if you believe you're the thing that can kill

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Everyone else, then the only rational response as an investor is, oh, my God, if the models are going to take over the world, I better get me some models. So all this fear mongering is good for both of them.

• 54:00Harry Stebbings?

  I guess the question is, do you think Sam is right to be as aggressive as he is being on all fronts? Hardware, ads, discovery, codecs, health? Or will it be a better play being much more focused in the Dario mindset of enterprise coding? He's expanding more and more as we're seeing, but it's still enterprise focus, more specific.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Jason had said this, but just pragmatically, you've got to say that if you were 10x ahead of a competitor and now you're only 3x ahead of a competitor, at some level, you did allow them to gain market share. And the objective of the game is to beat the other guy. So you've allowed the other guy some room. So you'd have to say it wasn't the right play this year or last year to allow Entropic so much space in the enterprise. And maybe doing all the things you were trying to do took your eye off the ball and winning the two or three things that you must win. Now, you also got to say this team and this man has created the single most valuable, exciting AI company on the planet Earth. So I'm not going to sit here with a little minnow criticizing him.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  But as yet, what you can say pragmatically is 23 and 24 were good years for OpenAI and 25 was a good year for Entropic. If it's a 10-year race, two years up, one year down, you know, bring on the next year.

• 55:16Harry Stebbings?

  Rory, don't put yourself down. You're a GP at scale, okay? You can take some.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  I do think I'm confident, going to Rory's point, I'm confident that, I mean, Sam's got one of the best benches in the world, right? So I'm confident the bets they're making are the right bets to make today. Given the fact that they've committed to an insane growth number, right? That they need to raise an additional 110 billion of capital, I'm confident it is the right plan. And also, honestly, if it doesn't work out, he can dump the hardware business in a heartbeat. He can dump all this stuff. This is, he can dump anything if it doesn't work. And they will ruthlessly dump it if it doesn't work. They're not committing everything upfront today. So you got to pick your three to five best bets at the start of the year. Maybe in the age of AI, you got to change them every week, but these are the best bets. It's just, the funny thing is, it's just. And granted, the OpenAI slides were leaked to the information, right? So it wasn't presented publicly.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  It just feels so much like a startup board meeting you see where you walk in at the start of the year and someone's got these things. It's there's a stacked chart that looks beautiful, but three of the colors have never been done yet. They're aspirational. And so the good news is Rory and Harry were raising our forecast 30%. And we just need another 80 million to do it. It just felt like that on steroids. But I think he was, I think those slides were for the believers, right? So the believers, the soft banks and others will give them more money. I think that's the point because you're not going to believe on those that the revenue from hardware and ads and research are real unless you want to believe. If you want to believe, you'll believe it, right? If you're a skeptic, you're gonna like, you're gonna take your marker out and just delete those bars.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  But man, it felt like a couple of board meetings I was in in December.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Yes, except as you point out, with three X's zeros attached to every number.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  We just need another 111 billion.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Again, you got to say, these are the two fastest growing companies in history. That's just a statement of fact.

• 57:02Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, you said last week that essentially lovable and Rappler's rise was a fault on Figma and their ability to do, you know, 300, 400 was a take from Figma.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Maybe just a missed, a theoretically missed opportunity in their sweet spot. Just theoretically missed, yeah.

• 57:18Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, a theoretical miss. Figma came out with their Q4 2025 earnings. They were very good, accelerating growth at 1.2 billion ARR, growing 40% year on year versus 38% year on year in Q3, so up there. Amazing retention of $10,000 plus customers, 97% GRR, 136% NDR. This was a great quarter for Figma all around. The stock up 15% after earnings. How did we see these numbers? Talk to me through this.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Super interesting because this is a company whose leader is clearly saying, I know what I gotta do. I'm not in any doubt. I've got to add AI capabilities. I gotta go from design all the way to to coding and I gotta add that and make it happen. And they seem to be getting decent adoption of it, right? This is what winning looks like in SaaS in a sector where it's very credible. Very credible, perhaps more credible than most, that an AI-native product could disrupt you, right? I would argue something like accounting, you're five years away from AI-native being disruptive. In something like, you know, design and co-gen, creative and co-gen, it's here right now. So this is what fighting back looks like with a generational talent

• 58:28Speaker 00

  entrepreneur, a company still at its peak, i.e. not stale, and clearly trying to punch back. If this was a boxing lineup in Vegas, this would be one of the marquee headline events. In the right corner, Dylan Field, heavyweight champion of the world. In the left corner, lovable, Replish, ringman, Jason Lemkin. So what do you think, Jason? How's the fight going?

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Look, I think it's tough because Ding ding. Ding ding. It was a great, there's nothing to not love in the quarter. It was epic, right? Epic company, epic quarter. We've just given up on the present. We're all panicked about the future and you get no credit for a great quarter, right? You get no credit. You know, I read one analysis of Monday, who we all love, and the criticism of Monday was, you're constantly beating and then, but then lowering. Like, we want, you have to constantly be beep beep, everything. We're looking for 10 quarters of AI dominance. And so it's just tough even on Figma. I guess at a meta level, it's a race. I just, listen, I'm not as big an expert in Figma as I am, say, in DocuSign, but there's a similarity between the DocuSign and the Adobe Sign and Figma, which is that their products are much more workflow oriented,

• 59:34Speaker 01

  they're much more systems of collaboration, and they're much more or less just about getting pixel-perfect designs created. But I would just be shocked if at some point in the next eight to 18 months, a Claude Code can't automatically make designs that are as elegant, as beautiful as a designer can. Because you already can in some custom LLMs for images, you can build epic images. You could, you literally can mock a website that Claude Code would build from a design perspective. I find it hard to believe at the end of the year, we're going to mock it. I find it hard to believe that every GPU on the planet Earth can't create genuinely custom, artistic, artisanal, beautiful designs. I would be shocked if that's not possible at the end of the year. I'd be shocked. And what does that mean for Figma? Exactly.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  I mean, that's why it's hard to be, that's why I'm, I'm gonna make our bets, but it's hard to be bullish on anything right now from the past. It's hard to be bullish. It's, I know it's the job, but man, it's just, it's stressful. I would love to know how stressed Dylan is. Maybe it's a two, but I'd be stressed. Most of the CEOs I talk to are pretty stressed, right? Some of the executive teams aren't, they're checked out, but most of the CEOs are stressed.

• 1:00:39Harry Stebbings?

  I sit in the investment committee this week and I said, well, yeah, there's two areas where I'm finding value in security. It's one where there's deep integrations and partnerships which are difficult and they'll never do. We're an investor in Airwallex, we've discussed before. They have hundreds of banking relationships and partnerships with Southeast Asian Indonesian banks that no one will ever have in terms of anthropic open AI. And then the second is, you know, where there's deeply technical, complex coordination challenges like Fuse Energy, another one of our investments, which own end to end from energy supply and creation to delivering it to a consumer's home. So that's where I put my bets. So there is areas of secure value still.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  But I think you're talking past each other because of course you're right, Harry, because the two examples you cited are a financial company and a physical power company. And right, even the most deluded AI believer doesn't think that they're going to take over fintech and doesn't take over, they're going to take over energy. So I agree. Let me be clear. You can invest comfortably in those two areas and not have to spend a ton of time about AI. I think when Jason says it's hard to be comfortable in anything about the past, perhaps the more precise version of that, which is the core question, it's hard to be comfortable with anything in the past in core B2B software, maybe in core software.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  I mean, it's funny, when, when Adobe tried to buy it, yeah, at the time, it seemed like they were overpaying because it was a big drop at the time, right? But at least they're buying a 20-year business. Okay, Scott was, Scott Belsky was paying twice what anyone else would pay to get shit done. Kudos to him, actually. Kudos to him for putting his job on the line, overpaying, but so what? You were buying a 20-year position like Creative Cloud and Photoshop. You know, you fast forward today, Figma says one of their biggest growth drivers is integration with Claude Code and Figma Make, that it's natively integrated. And if you go into Replit, and I'm sure it's too lovable, you can Natively integrate Figma too, but, but it's like Fortnite. Like what if, what if the native integration, they just, it just overlaps more and more at the rest of the year.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  And then sometimes I'll integrate Claude Code and Figma, but you know, some other times I'll just have Claude Code do the whole design. It's getting pretty good. It has ingested every single website and mobile app on planet Earth. It can reproduce an iterative version of that. That's just as good. Why can't it?

• 1:02:49Harry Stebbings?

  So Jason, I'm going to push you. Would you be a buyer or seller of Figma today?

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  If we finish this bet, I've decided, and listen, I'm terrible. I'll give you, I'll give you an example of my incompetence here next. And it'll partially resonate with Rory, but I thought about this and I actually vibe coded something to help me make the decision. You know, I think I'm only going to bet on the winners right now. I'm going to do the Andreessen version, the Thry version. And Figma may make it because I'm looking, what are, what are the stocks that are actually up? Okay. And there are ones you might not want to buy, but they're basically Palantir, Figma, Mongo, Cloudflare and Shopify. Those are the only ones that are up over a year. Those are the only five that are up over a year, right? You can find other esoteric ones, but these are the core ones. So those are probably the ones I'm going to buy. So I, I don't know, maybe 18 months ago, I decided I was going to, I was going to go bargain shopping on public stocks.

• 1:03:36Harry Stebbings?

  But that seems paradoxical where you said that you would see Claude being able to make and design in the same way that many are using Figma to today. Then you would buy.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there's so much uncertainty. I'm going to be a momentum better investor here. There's just so much and so much uncertainty. I'm going to bet on the ones that are winning because I believe success will beget success. That the best people will continue to go. And in an age of uncertainty, I don't want to bet that the ones that are down. I mean, GitLab is a great company. It's down 59.62% in the last year. I don't want to make that. That's for somebody else. I've already made those bets in the past. I lost money on all of them.

• 1:04:10Harry Stebbings?

  I just don't want non-founder like companies.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  I know, but I just, I, I'm going, I'm going momentum.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  I actually think, Harry, I actually think Jason's answer was utterly coherent in a sense, other logical. It is, you, I see what you're doing, Jason. It's the, you're exactly right. It's a momentum play, right? And all the data says, and I always struggle with this, in the short term, over kind of six months in a public market, six months to 18 months. Momentum plays work, value plays don't. And over a five-year period, value plays work and momentum plays advantage goes away. And of course, the trick is to figure out when you're transitioning from one to the other. And you're effectively taking that risk. You're calling the market right now as a momentum market. That's what you're doing when you do this. And so far, you've been right, to be clear.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Or at least I'm saying when everything is in a state of just flux. I'm going to bet on whoever has the gravitas. And momentum is gravitas because momentum, at least for a little while, does build on it. This isn't just fake hype of marking up around. This is real momentum.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  So what about this comment? Because I wrestle, I mean, it's now we're getting to genuine, actual investing because it's actually been the right play. Right? It's been the right play in the public markets, it's been the right play in the private markets. The companies that had good rounds have good follow-on rounds. Right? So you have to ask yourself, that logically is not extensible forever. Because, you know, trees don't grow out of the sky, as they say in Wall Street. Right? So let's take Palantir, right? Massive momentum play. As yet, over the last six months, it's been hit not quite as hard, or last three months anyway, not quite as hard as the boring-ass SaaS stocks. But it's been stomped pretty effectively over the last three months, correct?

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, it's down 27%.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you're a momentum player, how do you respond to that information? Because at some point, something that's trading at 40 or 50 times revenues, I mean, it's down from 70 to 46 times revenues, has probably got risk of blow up in it. How do you think about the risk of blow up versus wanting to still be in the momentum play? Just to make it really practical.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I just decided for me, a year is the right measurement point. There's all different, if you do year-to-date, three months, one week, one hour. I feel like a year is, shows the durability of this, at least looking backwards. I don't know, I'm going to pick from those five. It would have been different than last week where I would pick favorites and try and find dislocate. Like, here's the greatest dislocation if I look at the public stocks, right? Klaviyo versus Shopify. Klaviyo is essentially a derivative of Shopify. It's essentially just a derivative, like almost 100% revenue attached. Yet, in the last year, Shopify net is still at least up last year, 2.63%. But Klaviyo is down minus 58%. And so if I'm a bargain hunter, I'm going to go to Klaviyo. I'm not going to buy Shopify, I'm going to buy Klaviyo. It's got to be a bargain.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Interesting. I think actually funny enough because I often can tend to value but in this case I would argue your instinct is correct. Bringing it back to the CEO of Shopify. If Shopify is going to thrive and that guy looks like he wants to thrive, he has to build agents on top of his stuff. And fundamentally, he has to take the market cap that currently is accreted to Klaviyo.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  That's definitely a risk. It's definitely a risk. Yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  And so I actually think you're right. In that case, I mean, again, I'm genuinely trying to seek knowledge here, right? I think in that case, the bargain hunt would be a mistake. Because the adjacent competitor, namely Shopify, who is less dislocated than you. He probably has to kill you in order to survive. And provided they execute well, they're going to take some of your revenue.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Okay, what about this one? Palantir last year, even with its ups and downs, last year up forty one percent in the last twelve months. The worst performer, one of our personal favorites, Atlassian, worst performer of last year, down seventy four point eight five percent. I mean, Atlassian does not have the the direct disruption risk that Klaviyo has with Shopify, right? I could still argue it's oversold, Klaviyo. I could argue it's oversold, that disruption risk. But minus seventy four versus plus four, this is the greatest bargain. This is the delta is over a hundred percent here.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  This is actually very illustrative and this is something I've been thinking about a lot. I want to. What you're doing here is momentum investing. You are just looking at the price action. Independent of the valuation and you're saying, do I go with the, yeah, the momentum? What you're not saying is, is there a price at which you own Atlassian? And by the way, this is not a criticism. I think in the short term, momentum has been the only play that worked, both in the publics and the privates. I believe we've been in a momentum market in the private side also. It's too hard to find new shit. Just find a shit that's working and pile on because the next round is going to be in six months. And it's going to be two X the last round, independent of value. So to be very clear, I think that if you said to me, should you buy the stock that's up forty four percent? Or the stock that's down seventy one percent? If I'm a momentum player, the answer is buy the forty four.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  If I'm a value player, the correct answer is I don't know until I see the numbers. And then I got to look at the value relative to growth.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Well, Atlassian is accelerating. A year ago, it was growing twenty. Now it's growing twenty three percent at six point three billion revenue. It's accelerating and yet it's the biggest decliner of the entire. And it's accelerated. This is not down to single digit growth.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  That's my point. So therefore I might argue, perhaps wrongly, that you'd start to nibble at that one versus being afraid to catch in the one at forty three times revenues, even though it's had the momentum. But I'm also humble enough to say the momentum plays what's worked. That's why this state is hard. The problem with perfectly priced momentum plays is it doesn't take a lot to knock you off kilter.

• 1:09:23Harry Stebbings?

  God, I need to get thinking about these picks. I love Mike, by the way. I think he's awesome.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, as an armchair, if we're if we're abstracting away from everything else, this is the best pick on the list because of the ones that have been beaten down the most, it's the one that's accelerating. None of the rest are accelerating. So if you had to be simplistic, what's the greatest dislocation in the market? Stock price down the most, but with the most revenue acceleration that's still above the fold per our conversation. As armchair value investors, you couldn't do better than Atlassian. You literally could not find anything better that's accelerating and is beaten up.

• 1:09:53Harry Stebbings?

  Also, if you're concerned as revenue durability, you know, the increasing portion of multi-year contracts with large enterprises relatively answers a lot of those concerns.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, if there's any humans left to buy the product, of course, but you're right.

• 1:10:05Harry Stebbings?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:10:09Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I want to finish on on one, which I think is very interesting from a venture perspective. We saw Jack Altman raise last year two hundred and seventy five million for Alt Cap. He's a wonderful dude. I'm sure everyone loves Jack. No one in the valley dislikes Jack. He made the move to Benchmark, very big move, leaving his firm or kind of shutting shop on his firm to join the great GPs that are at Benchmark today. How did we analyze this move? Is this symbolic of the further consolidation of venture? What did we think about this move? Because it was a big surprise to the ecosystem.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  I think it was a clever move by a very shrewd firm. I think it's been their MO for fifteen, twenty years, which is we have a very compelling offering to make to any GP. We'll make you equal in a very successful partnership with a lot of autonomy. Therefore, you can have your pick of proven talent. You're not in the you're not in the growing talent business. You're in the picking talent business. And in general, you can make people a compelling offer that most people inclined to take. This is just an extreme version of that.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, to me, the more interesting thing at a meta level is that if he really took his last fund, he raised like 400 million in two years. Okay. And if he took his last 250 million dollar fund as an essence of solo GP, forget how it's structured. It is him. It is all it is him. And he gave it all back to the LPs. That is not a minor give. And even if you're made whole, because I was offered to be made whole a couple of times in the old days. It's made whole with asterisks and daggers. You got to stay. You got to deliver. And and maybe it's made whole no matter what the Lord brings. But so if you're confident you can triple 250 and retain massive economics in it in terms of carry and fees. What the interesting thing is, there's so many GPs who would love to have what

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Jack had. There's so many folks stuck at venture firms, stuck working for people. And they're like, my God, if I could have 400 million in two years to invest when whatever the F I want. And Jack gave up the dream of 95% of folks stuck in venture.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  I think, again, Jason, you're on a roll at the moment. That is the other interesting point is that most people are swimming, which, by the way, is an implicit and embedded complement to benchmark.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think it might be more than that, though, because you have to ask yourself why he would do that. But I remember on the old days, and I'm sure Harry got similar offers in those many more. But in the old days, I got a mega firm that I didn't even know what that made that offer to me because I just raised my first fund. And they said, well, we'll just make this come here, do SAS, we'll make you whole, we'll make you everything. And they're like, and honestly, you've only raised 70 million for your first one. That's like, nothing. We can guarantee you, you're going to make $10 million off every exit we have. And we'll pay you two to $3 million a year. And you don't have to do any like, why we'll make you whole. But I'm like, who do I have to work for? I didn't sell my last company to go work for somebody. It wasn't even like a 10 10 minute conversation. It was like, I can't even get it to work in my head.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jason has enough self-knowledge to know he is destined never to work for another human being again, and humanity is grateful for that fact.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  For someone that I'm in love with, I mean, not, not, I mean, I don't mean personally. I mean, if I so, so respect the CEO and they would let me work in my box, it's not true, I would do it, but it has to be in that special, you know, special situation, right, for someone that you just respect so much. But so he gave up a lot. That's just the interesting, he gave up a lot, and that it was worth it to him to be part of this entity, this brand. And I just think, I don't know what it says, but it says a lot about 2026, that you would give up the dream of 95% of venture, that you would give it up, right? Worst case, not to be tacky on this pod, but even if, as a solo GP, even if you just manage the fees on 400 million, it's like not terrible lifestyle. You can still afford to eat at a pretty good restaurant from time to time. You might even be able to rent an apartment in Harry's building.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  I think people that successful aren't into, correctly into minimizing the downside. It's, I mean, I'm sure the attraction is work with a great group of people, build a great fund. And yeah, you're right, I still wonder, most people would say, many people would say, I'd prefer to be on my own, especially if you've already gotten on your own, but you know, it's a compelling offer.

• 1:14:11Harry Stebbings?

  Jason, would you leave SaaS to a 500 million fund with me and Rory?

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  I wouldn't do it because I don't, I don't think I would be successful.

• 1:14:18Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Look, everybody's, this is a very niche industry, right? This is as niche as it gets, right?

• 1:14:23Harry Stebbings?

  I could paint the picture to you, Jason, that actually this is, could be the next greatest five years of your investing career. The insights that you have as an investor today, because of your proximity to it, make you better than ever as an investor, I would argue, and I think Rory would probably agree.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  It should be. I think you're right, it should be, it should be, right? Whether it will be, remains to be seen, right? It should be.

• 1:14:44Harry Stebbings?

  And so you should be more aggressive than ever, not less, would be my argument to you.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  I just don't know if I could sit in Monday partner meetings again for four hours. I don't think I could. I see you out there, Harry on the road, with all your portfolio companies on LinkedIn and celebrating their series. Like, I am the most loyal person, the founders I invest in, but that's not me anymore. Like, I've done that ass. I, I just not, I can't do it, I can't. I told my LPs and COVID, I'm not doing the, I'm not doing any more AGMs. I'm not standing up there with, like, here's the numbers, I'll go talk to you, like, I'll drop by your office, but I'm done with this performative, all-day circus of an AG. Not that I think there's anything wrong with it, I actually think AGMs are very important. I'm just not going, I'm just not doing one again. If you want to work with me, as long as I don't have to go to the AGM, maybe it's okay. But if you're going to do something like this, you have to be sure,

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  especially if the person has a perspective, or you have to be able to leverage their strengths and backfill their weaknesses, right? So my particular strengths are deeply know everything around this Agentic go-to-market and have a large group of founders that I've helped that believe in me. People do trust me, as Harry knows. You just had a conversation about it, right? But I'm not good at some other stuff. And most ventures kind of, going to Harry's point of benchmark should be five flat partners. There's this certain genericism of most adventure that if you don't fit into those things, you might not thrive at different entities, right? There's still a little bit of solo hunting and meeting on Monday and weird consensus-driven outcomes where everyone's not that happy about Rory or Jason's deal, but I gotta do it because

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Harry wants to do his deal. There's just, it's just a niche thing. And I think if you want certain people that are talented, you gotta let them do their thing and nothing else. That's the key. And I think in venture, it's harder to do that than in Anthropic to tie it all together. Anthropic, they're going to find you your niche if you're off the charts, right? Although even there, I wonder. Boys, it's a wrap, baby. I so appreciate you guys.

• 1:16:40Harry Stebbings?

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