20VC: Cursor Acquired for $60BN by xAI | Anthropic Hits $1TRN in Secondary Markets | Did Anthropic Just Kill Figma, Adobe and Canva | Rippling Hits $1BN in ARR | Salesforce Goes Headless: Smart or Stupid | Cerebras IPO 2.0

I'm not sure they're buying them for $60 billion. If you stock as value at 100 times revenues, you can buy things that are trading at 10 to 15 times revenue all fucking day long. I think there'll be $100 billion deal in the next 12 months. I think it's as well stand as the high water mark of private M&A for a decade. This is 20 VC with me Harry Stabbing since my favorite show, The Week, Warrior Drisco and Jason Lampkin, analyzing the biggest news in tech. Now this week on the agenda, my god, breaking news, cursor acquired by XAI or SpaceX, otherwise known for $60 billion with a $10 billion break clause. Tim Cook announces he's stepping down from Apple after an epic run and Thropic turns down $800 billion funding offers and crosses the trillion dollar mark on secondary markets. And then, Anthropic launches Claude Design as if it wasn't eating everyone else's lunch. Now it's going after Figma, Adobe, Canva. This is an epic one. As always, we did not full short of banging news to cover. But before we dive into the show today, let me tell you about Omni. It's an AI analytics platform and it solves a problem every scaling company hits. Your team needs insights, not just data lookups, the stuff that really matters and is critical to get it right. Like can't pay back periods and net dollar retention. For AI agents to act on your company data, they need your business context, your definition of your business, your logic, your permissions. And that's what Omni's governed context graph provides. Your data team to find it once, then anyone, your obsolete, your CFO, your PM can ask a question in English and get an answer in seconds. Perplexity, Mercury and DBT run on Omni and 20 VC listeners get a free three week trial, three week, very specific, not a month, but three weeks. So to Omni.co/20VC, that's Omni.co/20VC, after Omni helps you find the right customers, check out helps you close them. Over the past 15 years, Guillem Puzzaz has led checkout.com through what he calls the velocity years, a period of hyper growth with relentless product building. The lesson, high growth is a gift, but it demands ruthless focus. As his mother put it, play the game you're good at. For checkout.com, that game is digital payments, obsessing over data, chasing basis points, and compounding learnings over time. And that discipline is paying off. 2025 checkout.com processed over 300 billion in total volume, up 64% year over year, and return to full year EBITDA profitability. They now support over a thousand enterprise merchants globally, including 63 that process more than a billion annually, with brands like eBay, Vinted, Amax, ASOS and T-Moon. Guillem's message so, it's pretty clear. They've earned the right to win anywhere. Now, they're investing in innovation across marketplaces, issuing financial experiences and a jantic commerce. If you want payments built for what's next, talk to the team at checkout.com. That's checkout.com. While checkout powers the moment money changes hands, invisible powers the people behind the work. Why don't we hear more real AI success stories from big companies? The models are insanely good, but implementations the problem, it's really, really hard, as data all over the place, there's legacy tech and manual workarounds. It's a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart. Meet invisible. Invisible trains 80% of the top models, and then adapt them to the messy reality of your business. Take the Charlotte Horners. NBA team. Invisible to years of game tape and analog scouting notes to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and some elite championship win in weeks not seasons. The data in order first and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise. If you want AI that hits the PNL, go to invisible tech.ai/20VC. You have now arrived at your destination. Boys, we recorded yesterday and last night some very big news happened. I messaged this morning saying, I think we should actually do a little segment this morning and discuss this because it is so notable. And so last night it was announced that Kersa was, Rory, you're going to correct me whatever I say. So I'm just going to do it and you can correct me. Kersa is being acquired by XAI SpaceX in other words for $60 billion with a break clause of $10 billion by the end of the year. Rory, please correct me on. It's too early on in America. We shouldn't have a thing. I mean, basically what it is, they have an option to acquire Kersa and if they don't, they pay $10 billion for the world. But it amounts to the same thing. Listen, it's very interesting because first of all, this is an epic deal, right? If it happens, $60 billion in about three years from seed funding, I mean, we thought Wizz was big guys. I mean, when we started the show, we were talking about wind surfer. That was $2.5 billion. Now it's $60. I mean, these are numbers that we have not seen in $3 billion from founding. Now having said that, we haven't read whatever the deal is, right? There's a lot of stuff going on between these companies. When your engineers have already quit and gone to XI, it appears that Kersa may be at least notionally the largest customer for GROC for coding. Their market share has fallen and they've already committed to using a lot of the million GPUs that SpaceX, whatever we're calling it, is in Colossus. There's a lot of stuff going on here and what this call and option is and how much it's tied to Kersa having enough of a state of the art model that they're worth buying because an ID isn't enough. There's a lot up in the air and it's probably why the deal is structured like this, beyond the fact that SpaceX is going public. Would you add to the complex? There are a lot of moving pieces here, so I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't close because I think there are a big milestone that needs to be hit. The Kersa needs to make progress and maybe I'm wrong. Wow. Such a lot to unpack. But I'm in no particular. I want to actually cover all this, but first of all, you add the first sentence is, this is the biggest private acquisition ever in venture. It used to be Wiz at 32. Before that, it used to be WhatsApp at 16. I mean, individual private check before going public. Now it's a 60 billion dollar outcome in three years. So, if they steal closes in three months, this is the biggest ever privately held venture acquisition period, full stop and a story, an amazing result. So you write Jason. Before you get into the noise, that's the venture takeaway. Jesus. I know. And we'll come back to who we want. And then in the 20 years, like most of our funds take, this was certainly too much. A big picture here, guys. It actually makes sense. I mean, I was actually thinking last night of doing like a little cute tweet before I got your note, Harry. It's like, you know, you got these guys called Kersa, walking down the street saying, "Hey, good news. We got an exploding business. A couple of billion dollars in ARR. But bad news, we have shitty gross margins because we need our own model and we need compute." And then someone goes, "Hmm, hold that thought. This is a guy walking around with a whole bunch of compute, a reasonably good model and literally no revenue. It's like a marriage made in heaven." You guys, I mean, because no, let's get real here. It's one of those deals that makes sense for both sides, which is why I think it'll close, which is different than saying it makes full financial sense. I'll come back to that. But if you think about it from SpaceX's perspective, all the narrative has been, your SpaceX is amazing. Starlink is amazing. WTF with this x.ai, why did they stick in Twitter and x.ai, I know Elon loves the AI, but it makes my head hurt. Because the truth is, they'd spent 20 billion plus or minus on the most amazing data center, the colossus data center with literally hundreds of thousands of GPUs, but they're not doing a very good job of selling them. So they have relatively little business, right? Which, you know, all other things are the bad place to be. Now, you know, capacity is scarce. So I'm sure they could have found kind of, you know, white label work selling to, you know, one of the hyperscalers, but instead they found this company that's in the model load, the mother of all AI markets, which is coding that has customers has revenue, but has shitty ghost margins because it doesn't have yet a full standalone model and massively needs compute. So they put this on top of their thing and the vertically integrated thing just looks a lot more attractive. You literally have a company at spending, but making three billion in revenue and spending three billion on gross margin, and you have another company that's burn and 18 billion, you put them together and the three billion gets canceled. And at least they have some revenue. It's still not enough to cover the X.AI nut, unless they can grow this thing, but at least looks like a business now. And I think what's really clever from SpaceX's perspective is they couldn't do it before the IPO because you can't close that deal. It delays everything. It's actually a very clever structure. So they're basically going to be able to say to the public, you know, you love Starlink and you love our space business. And you didn't like this other thing, but we got a plan to fix it. Once we close for $2 trillion, we'll exercise our option, we'll buy this thing and suddenly we'll be a $4 or $5 billion revenue. AI Frontier Lab, which my Claude Coder Quirsel has called Cursor and I actually have the rest of the stack. And there I told you I make a good business out of this. Which is an important note just for people to understand it. This is not a transaction closing stay. This is in six months post going public and it's a very strategic way for them to do it because they can't do it now just before we're in public. And that's why it's called, that's why I think it was an option. And you write Jason, there's been some commentary that said, maybe this option is in part, Elon do and a try before you buy. Let's see if the model works on our stuff, advice of our son, if it doesn't, we'll just pay you 10 and walk away. I don't know. I'm not going to guess. And there's probably some of that. But fundamentally, it's costing you nothing today because you're not writing the check today. And what you're basically, what Elon's basically saying is, if my IPO happens and it probably should, and I want to buy this thing, I will because I can. And if it doesn't, I'm promising $10 million that I don't plan to have to give unless God forbid the IPO doesn't happen. So kind of mentally says, I haven't fixed this story today, but I have a plan to fix it. You can see the plan to fix it. So stop bugging me in the road show about X.AI. Let's talk about rockets. I think listen, Elon walked away from the Twitter acquisition. So he'll walk away from a bad deal. Don't get me wrong if things change. But you don't, you don't promote it the way SpaceX did all over X. If you're not basically saying this deal is going to close, right? This isn't a change. Otherwise, if it's just vendor financing with an option to buy, you bury it. You bury it because it's round trip revenue. So someone will use some one will use our our colossus for a for a for a model training, right? You'd hide it if it was just a vendor deal, right? I mean, even though I don't think the whole, I'm going to say something weird. Even though I don't think the whole business effort here makes sense. Well, I try to enter this market, you know, trying to be the third or fourth foundation model player, you know, as X.ai/SpaceX. I don't think it'll make any sense. But once you've decided to do that, this deal makes sense of the margin because you've incurred all the negative parts of being a sub scale, hyper scale, with 20 billion in burn. And now at least you have a business. So I'm with you Jason. I think they're I think they're pushing this because they like, oh, this makes sense and actually solves a problem for us. And obviously solves a problem for cursor, you know, mix the P&L and other business look very different. And therefore it's a win-bought size and a closus. If I push you, who is getting a better deal that expected to finish year at six billion. So this is only 10X end of year revenue. Seriously, we just talked on this pod before about Figma, 20 billion and about out. You just said, to, to, to Nvidia for 20 billion and getting to be not to be a public company CEO was the second best gift to sales off selling for two billion. This is a gift. They don't have to do the hard work. They've only been doing this for three years. Tony. I was watching some images of like, what's Michael's last name, the CEO. True. Okay, I was watching something on Twitter with him and Gary Tannie year ago. Okay, Gary Tann's got a big job, right? Gary Tann looks like he's aged eight years since the video. Michael looks the same. This is the time to sell because you don't listen. I, this is, maybe this is a little meta, but what I've learned as a founder is you don't get, it doesn't hit you until around your four to five. This is just the way humans are, okay? And he's young, but look at founders you've invested or met with around your four to five the weights there. Okay, you can see it in the bags under the rise whether they're 21 or 61 and you got to double down at four to five years old. You got to sit around and say, do I want to sign up for another tour of duty? These guys don't even have to do a second tour of duty. This is pretty good deal, Harry. If you're 10 or 15 years in, you know what to do three years in. You go, you got to go home. There's no guy's got to go home after three years for 60 billion, three years, three years after 60 billion. Can I help you on this? You asked which of the two is getting a great deal and the answer is the boat getting a great deal. You got to give one name. No, I'll tell you who's losing. There's two reasons they're getting a great deal. Everyone's getting a great deal. The first is it actually industrially makes sense. The two things go together well. There's like some business logic. Whether or not the SpaceX Elon team can manage these kind of researchers over time. That's TBD given how the X stuff is unfolded so far. But it makes industrial sense for these two companies to come together. Why are they both getting a great deal? You're missing the point because there's a third player in the game here that you're not mentioning. The future SpaceX public shareholders are valuing a $20 million revenue company. That $2 trillion, which is 100 times revenues. If you stock its value at 100 times revenues, you can buy things that are trading at 10 or 15 times revenue all fucking day long. As long as SpaceX is worth $2 trillion, then if Elon wants to scratch an edge to clean up a bit a subsidiary of SpaceX that isn't quite working out and he can chuck $6 billion on the table for context. There is 3% of SpaceX's alleged market cap in return for $15 to maybe 20% of their total revenues. It's not even material. When you have a high-priced stock, you can buy any pretty things that you want. And what happens to the amount that you should? And you should. Well, you should. Because it may not last, right? Yeah. Exactly. This is the opposite. When we did the other versions, we were talking about how so many public software companies, if you're now trading at $10 billion, you can't even spend $1 billion to buy a couple of kids, right? Right. For Elon, this is immaterial to SpaceX's market cap to Royce Point. At the margin, at the margin, it helps that he doesn't care if he makes them billionaires. It's a micro-learning, but there are issues in making targets billionaires. It is issue. As long as SpaceX is worth that kind of multiple, it's revenue-ocreative, story-ocreative, and another reason it makes sense to cursor is the number of people who can write a $60 billion check for a roughly great even gross margin business can be counted on the fingers of one hand, removing at least one or two of them, right? Offset thing, right? Of those acquirers, most situations would be unable to do so for the DOJ. This is the only game in town. It helps to be found or led to to write a check like this. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to Google again. You're like, I know he did whiz at $32 billion in his question now, but we want to buy cursor for twice that. I mean, it's a 10-s board discussion, right? If I'm an investor in the business, what does it mean for me? I wonder why you get my cash? What are my LPs getting back? You're getting a lot of money. I mean, look, you're getting your cash if this deal closes, I think, in six months, which is, you know, back end of this year, assuming the IPO happens in June, you're ecstatic, it means. And I'm getting cash or I'm getting SpaceX. Well, you're almost certainly getting stock. The IPO is 75 Bill. So then the second order questions are, is it registered? If you're getting that stock in the restricted period, is that going to be restricted too? Is the whole, the dynamics of the SpaceX lock up, given the size of the round are going to be one of the most interesting parts of the whole transaction. Let's talk about, as you say, employees getting out early is also to be fair. Talk about some shareholders being held in for much longer because the combination of a tutorial, I mean, it's going to make a difficult problem among float management slightly more complex because a 75 billion ways on a $2 trillion valuation is a teeny tiny float. And you're going from there to the other 97% of the company being freely traded, well, in six months just doesn't work. So I'm sure there's going to be a convoluted float management thing. And then this stock will probably go into that. So I wouldn't be surprised to discover that as investors in cursor, congratulations, you are now investors in SpaceX. You know, you've got that fluctuation risk for six months plus or minus, but, you know, on the other hand, you are getting $60 billion shut up. Do we know if the two billion, 50 billion happened that round happened last month? We don't. I don't know. And then do we think together? Well, they're tied together. That's what I'll, I don't know all the machinations, but I guarantee they're tied to their time. And so one said, can I start? I think I saw one that said it's not happening because this obvious the need for it. Because if you think about it, they probably had reason, I'm just winging it here, but they probably had pretty good cash on the balance sheet, but they knew they had to spend a lot on compute. And now one of two things is going to happen in September, October six months. A, you're going to get 60 billion and you have all the compute you'll ever need for me on. And B, you're going to get 10 billion in cash, in which case you can buy some compute then, so they can probably do some forward contracts. So if the round hasn't closed, it probably won't close now because there's no point to it and no one would want that stock. Because that's the space like buying SpaceX and prefer to just wait for the IPO. If I'm in, if we get a stock back and we were locked up for 12 to 18 months or whatever that is, how my feeling is an investor, am I still ecstatic? Again, if you're in the Figma IPO and you're locked up 12 to 18 months, that's been brutal. But in recent all in on the on Elon anyway, right? If you want to that action, you got more of it. And if you don't want that action, you're going to bite your nails. Look, I mean, you've got a blank check to Elon for the take private of Twitter. Of course, you're going to go long on Elon now, right? It's you're doubling down on the same founder. It's not even, I don't know the cap tables, but for Andreessen, it's almost like merging two portfolio companies at a meta level, maybe not accurate, but it's like that. Right. But as you know, you are right. And look, this is where the beauty of being an early at a low basis. If you're in, I mean, I looked at the, if you're in at the B, which is where the A was Andreessen and thrive. The B thrive led basically the C is roughly a 5X. The B is a 20X. I can't even calculate the A, but it's huge. And then the most recent runs are 2X. If you're in to SpaceX at 2 trillion and that's only a 2X, you're scared because there's a lot of volatility in that stock. So that's a thing you could end up, I mean, I'm going to say something here is you could end up breaking even good. IPOs do go down apparently at times. I mean, Facebook went down plus or minus, I think 40% from the IPO price in the first six months before 10Xing subsequently just as a reminder. So you got risk in that deal. On the other hand, if you're sitting there at 20 times in the case of the B are 50, 60 times in the case of the D, you're like, oh, well, so if my 80X becomes 40 X, it's still 40 X, I'm fine. So you can roll that dice. You know, it's almost a defensive move. If you're like Andreessen, you've added value to your net asset by combining these on paper, right? Your shareholders in both you have an IPO. It has a risk. You through this crazy asset in there that's very immature where the debt is exploding, right? Your balance sheet has been blown out. How can I de-risk my IPO for a couple percent delusion done? I think you're correct in your analysis though. My comment is the entire sentence implies that Elon consulted with anyone. My sense is Elon solved Elon's problem and everyone else is along for the ride. So they'll get the shareholder consent and the docu sign and they'll say thank you very much so in sign. But you're right. If I'm, if I'm, if I own a lot of SpaceX, oddly enough to say it succinctly, I'd have been pissed at the X.A.I. merger because I didn't need that delusion. But having done the X.A.I. merger, I'd be like clever deal with cursor dude. You had this negative thing, now at least you've got a full on full stock story, isn't the best story. you ever know would I prefer, understand the loan foundation model lab bet would you prefer to own and tropic then X dot AI plus cursor plus the Frankenstein of Twitter. Yeah, you would. But at least it's a full stock story now. This is a clever deal. Again, enabled by the 100X valuation you have or at least allegedly have, but at least 50X. I mean, even at the low end, I mean, if you play it out here, even if SpaceX trades shark horror at a trillion, which is a 50X, we have any multiple. And even if cursor gets to six billion by the year end, so it's a 10X we have any multiple SpaceX is still buying stuff at 10X with stock that's trading at 50X. It's a great country. Those arbitrage are real. You really should do a deal or two in those moments in time because they don't, one way or the other, they don't last, right? At the risk of stating the obvious there is a lot more fucking differentiation and putting rockets in the sky than there is making, um, forking an open source IDE and running it on top of cloud code. So I think the boys and the folks at SpaceX have done a much harder task so they deserve a higher revenue multiple. But nonetheless, it's why you can write the check with such gay abandon. And look, if the next deals at 120 billion, all is good. I think we need the next exit to be at one on 20 billion, right? Going to your point, Adi, they're worried about it. It's like, where's the the other thing is just amazing. It's like the scale is not like a little bit more. It's double where is give or take. I mean, let's you 32 versus 60. I was thinking about this this morning for arguably a much less defensible business. And I think the truth is this it's why venture capital is amazing. If you, it's the, it's the highest. Don't play small ball. If you play in the big markets, if you lean into the risk in the part of the cycle where the big guys want to win and want to catch up and want to be relevant in the space, then this kind of exit can happen, even if the fundamentals aren't great. And a gross margin sequai, who might think of the dyane of the whole industry, always say we hate negative gross margin businesses, right? This is a break even gross margin business, but it worked because the overarching comment is AI is the biggest story of the last five years. And big tech wants to be a player and cursors a player in the biggest markets. Don't ever think it. You know, it's like the SAS model who dares wins those guys dare than they won. Now the minute the tide goes out, you know, we saw this in 1992, you know, once the tide goes out and people like scared of dot com or scared of dot AI, you know, all these high burn high growth companies can get a real hit. But what you're selling now, what they were selling is a ticket to matter. An X dot AI wanted the ticket. So to your comment on all the other guys, the factories of this world, there are 10, 20, this is where Jason's point is why there's 10 or 20 other companies that are staring at a relevance over the next three to five years because they're all part of the old software development life cycle. Maybe they can't pay 60 billion, but they're going to all have to buy themselves a build themselves into relevance. So I think a lot of these can still have these exits. It allows right. You should be thinking about this. But I'd prefer to be in something like factory leaning in than in some old school code development tool. It doesn't matter anymore. Another way to flip it around on the one end, sure, you should sell. On the other hand, there's six leaders with market caps above two trillion, right? And we're adding SpaceX. So it'll be seven, maybe above two trillion. They can all afford to pay a hundred billion dollars. Yep. Five percent of their market cap plus or split it with some cash to not fall behind. But Jensen stressed about Taney and he can spend a hundred billion. Right. He already did a small deal, a 20 billion dollar tuck in. Nvidia Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, all can buy a startup for a hundred billion. And I remember back in the day at Sastraniel, Ryan Smith came at Qualtricks had just been acquired for seven billion and our jaws dropped back then. That was a lot for a software company. And I asked Ryan, will this ever happen again? He's like, I don't see why there won't be one for 14 billion next month. He's like, it's just getting good. And he was right. It kept the party kept going to always point until it ended. I think there'll be a hundred billion dollar deal in the next 12 months. Which one it is? I don't know. But you have to. You have to do. There'll be a hundred billion dollar deal. This is going to be one of three. That's my prediction. And I may be wrong. And I may be wrong. But there's seven folks that can do it. Do a hundred billion. I think this will stand as the high water mark of private M&A for a decade. They will take this one. This clip is it's going to bearish you, Rory. Because I just think it's anomalous. In the sense of it's a combination of the absolute amount and the revenue multiple, the number of the number of people who can write a check for less than 10% of the market cap that's greater than 60 billion is by definition people about 600 billion. There's only eight or 10 companies above a trillion. So it's a very finite group of people who can do those kind of deals. Everyone would e-lawn trades at under 10 times revenues plus a mind. Yeah, it's pretty much mine. So they're not going to do a 60 times. So if you're going to be worked, I might actually contradict myself in a second. Watch this. If you're going to, with the exception of e-lawn, because he can overpay because he's trading at a hundred times, at least plants will be trading at a hundred times. I want to spend a little time on that in a second. Everyone else trades some 10. So you're not going to buy anything greater than 10X, which means to pay a hundred billion, you have to buy something worth 10 billion. As I did that, I realized, hmm, and at that point, a privately held company has to be done. Let's say let's round down again, five to 10 billion a year to be worth 50 to 100 billion a year to kind of meet the JSON criteria of bigger than this. If JP Morgan wanted to buy Stripe, you actually would be right. So I can imagine a few circles that I can have. And then you also have the DOJ stuff, which is obviously suspended for a while, but there you go. So you're not impossibly wrong, JSON, but I just think I think this is such a special circumstances. It's a combination of companies. One is it's a company trading at an amazing price, feeling and imperative to execute a transaction in an amazing space where there's a company willing to transact like that. The other thing I was thinking about is one of the bigger highs on this is Elon is so risk-on. I would use the expression in poker when you're on tilt, when you're just, it's not going well and your response is to double down and double down. If you look at the whole Twitter X transaction, unlike SpaceX, which has been a work of genius from day one, it's been, I bought Twitter, I didn't want to do it, shit, now I have to do it, that's $44 billion. Well, if I'm going to do that, then I'm going to want to do the AI thing and I'm going to spend 20 billion on CapEx there, got no revenue. Let's put them together. That's not work and let's flip them into SpaceX for 250 billion. It feels notional, but whatever. That's not great. So let's buy cursor for another 60 billion. He's basically going to keep doubling down until he wins an AI. Estonishing, it's terrifying if you're a stairholder, but that's the game he's playing and it's his company. Let me just tell you why you're why you're wrong about the $100 billion Euro, just process wise, okay? And I think your math suggests I might be like I hadn't even thought about GP Morgan's stripe. That literally could happen tomorrow, like we could open up our our our our accounts. It would make some sense, right? What am I going to do? Here's what happens when times are good, but of stress, which is what's happening with all the leaders, okay? Microsoft, Google, the one thing I have been that I don't think you guys have been, I know Harry even I've been a senior VP on the other side at a big tech company during moments of change. And what we talked about all the time is who the hell can we buy to get ahead? And so I will tell you in all of these boardrooms, especially Zuck, you could already imagine in your head, they are saying, I want to buy something that is going to actually F and move the needle for us. I will do some tuck-ins you guys can all have a chip. You can go buy a little thing for 50 million, 500 million, maybe even a billion, but I want something that will move the needle in AI now, bring me to candidates and they will be debated. But if it is above the line, those deals will get done for 5% or less of your market gap. I guarantee the discussion. Because I was there, it happens every week. Even though I disagree in the number, I 100% agree on the description. That is exactly what happens. You wake up as the leader of this big company, you've got your $2 trillion market cap to defend. There's a technical thing that could make you obsolete. If you can spend 5% and de-risk that, you do it. So I totally agree. And a large part of why venture makes money is every once in a while, you find yourself with companies that are kind of in the to-do list for corporate America and they just write huge checks. So I do agree with you. I was pushing back on the 100, but do I think it's kind of like the overt and window, a 10 or 20 billion dollar acquisition from Zuck tomorrow morning. People wouldn't even blink. They're like, yeah, of course, he's going to do that. So I do agree. I was just being, as you know me, anointingly precise about 100 billion, but I agree with you. Every other CEO is looking at going, what do we do now encoding? The other crazy thing that happens, I know it sounds crazy, but it is true. On the other side, on the acquirer side, big company, right? Once certain numbers are breached, it doesn't mean you also get 60 billion. It does not, like you can't walk in the meeting saying I'm better than cursor, but it does psychologically change the break point for what it, because when people go into deal mode in big companies, as long as they can afford it, if they identify the perfect target. Like remember, it's minor, but remember when when Ben Aff was willing to give his next first born to buy LinkedIn, he tried everything they could every share every piece of debt. He couldn't get 30 billion to buy LinkedIn. That's a hundred billion dollar deal today. You exactly wise. Ben Aff could get a hundred billion to buy something to change the face of Salesforce. The LinkedIn of AI, he would do it tonight. I guarantee you, because they're going to try to do it with LinkedIn. He will do a hundred billion if he had it. All these guys have a hundred billion. So you go in a meeting and I saw it Adobe as cloud took off, like people's views of price changed in my 10 year as a VP. As soon as you see a cursor deal, we don't give a shit. It's we're not the founders. It's not our money. It's not even our delusion. We don't care. What does it take to buy the next cursor? 68 million done. Boys on the corporate dev team, stepings and lumping on the corporate dev team, close the damn deal. When you're fighting for relevance and defending an existing business, as you say, and even if I don't think they get to a hundred, the fact that someone's done something at 60 means something at 10 or 15 will seem like, yeah, that seems like a good idea. Let's get it done. It's expanded the overton window of doable in M&A. Last thing to say is there's great outcome for the VCs. Great. I mean, as we're mind the everyone, San, Bankman, Freed, did the seed, poor San, they, and they lick with their did his job and sold it for a 1x that it could have been a couple hundred x. Open AI did the A, I think, actually, open AI did another seed. In recent and thrived at the A, then thrived, let the B and doubled down the whole way through. I don't know what the returns are on the A, but on the rest of it, I think they put in a building and got 800 million and got roughly a 4x. You know, great outcome of everyone. It's a great venture story. All credit to the founders. I mean, this is pretty good three year run. The two best deals that thrived at Amazing are this one and Open AI. And you know, the aggregate return and Open AI, I think there were four x, maybe 5.2 x, I can't remember which, and on this, excluding the A, I saw the announcement, but excludes the A, which is bullshit, because the A's got me a 58. On the rest of the money, it's a 4x. What it says is there are small numbers of growth funds that can deploy masses of capital, hundreds of millions of dollars and get a high end, you know, kind of venture return of a 4x, which is a good return, which is a, if you're doing an A or a B, that would be a, yeah, that's a high end of good outcome, not yet great. You want a 10x plus and your best stuff, but the fact that you can do it on a billion dollars is what makes this special. It's not that you're going to outperform some little seed, like NIO. If you want to, again, it's the classic thing, Harry. It's actually why even though you think it's simple to one-dimensionally measure venture return, it's actually not, because if you have only one dollar to invest and you can give it to NIO and get a 16x, or you can give it to Thrive, go out and get a 5x, you give it to NIO, right? From that perspective, you just rank on pure return, but if you're sitting there with two billion dollars to invest, it doesn't matter what you do with NIO and Thrive have proofs that they can take two billion and turn it into six billion, and you're like, give me that net to the limit and like, give me that product all day every day. From a personal network perspective, if you run the math as being the, you know, the lead GP on Thrive, it's not to be remarkably good business. Well, probably find that these products aren't even the same products even more. No, okay. Because they were never the same product, but if I can put 5,810 million into an emerging GP, and they don't expand into a multi-billion dollar fund, it is irrelevant to a large endowment, unless you've got a little chunk of guys that are just doing emerging managers and they'll put in the work or they'll put in the time or you're a smaller LP, and as the numbers get bigger, it just doesn't matter making 10x on your NIO, if it's irrelevant to your portfolio, right? It's irrelevant. Different products for different folks, but I just got to call it to the last company on Thrive is, if, quote, all they'd done was the late-state stuff and gotten that four or five X blended, that would be wildly impressive. But the fact that on top of that, they were in the A alongside at recent, is almost proof, you know, the typical wrap on only doing latest, you don't need doing late, you can't get the early round. It's very impressive to have shown up for the A and doing, then stuffing the money in like a foie gras from the B and beyond. I mean, that's really, that's the best way to play that growth stage. If you have enough ground game to get in, even under the tent for the A, and then you can stuff a billion dollars in from there on in, that's the way you get the best of both worlds. You got some action on the table with a 40X or a 50X, with my guess, on 10 million, yeah you? Maybe 20 million, yeah you? And then you got all the action in the world on the table of 800 million at an aggregate of a 405X and that feels great. Don't mind you, you will be sweating that SpaceX lock up. You will know the day and the hour when it expires. All right, boys, onto the next bit of news. Tim Cook announces he's stepping down from Apple after one of the greatest runs, 350 billion to four trillion. John Terminus will take over his new CEO 24 years in Apple for him. He's been in hard by before. How do we read this news, boys? Is this what we expected in terms of replacement? How do we fail on the one hand, he's 65, right? It's obviously the board has been talking about this for years, right? They found their successor inside. They didn't go through the chaos of shot new, resigning from Adobe when they still don't have a CEO, right? They did it all the right way. They did it at the perfect age optically. But the big question along with Reed Hastings and shot new and others is like folks turn over every year and I'm sure Roe is going to say that. But are they all leaving because they don't have an AI strategy? I don't think Netflix has one. I don't think Apple has one. I don't think Adobe has a great one, even though they have AI. Actually, I learned this week AI and Illustrator is great. AI and Adobe Illustrator is a 10. But it hasn't changed the trajectory of the company, right? So what would you do if you take an Apple from whatever, 12X its market cap, successfully, Shaperone, the jobs agenda to Epic Heights, and AI is changing the. This show gets stale less than a week. We got to do like four of these a week. I just don't know if this is normal retirement or deep down. Folks are like, Jesus, I'm not up for this. Because I think most CEOs I work with are not up for it. Is the truth. Most pre-AICOs are not. They're not up. You guys know this too from your portfolio. Not all, but most are not actually up for the massive amount of what's more than 996, 12, 12, 8. I don't know what it is, but most humans aren't up for it. I think as a general comment on kind of AI terror for lack of a better word and the feeling that you need to be on top of this or get out, I think you're right. I think on the specifics of Kirk, I think it's. I think he's been operationally excellent the whole way through. He was operationally excellent taken over the job. He's run an excelsie for 15 years. I think he's operationally excellent on exit. And the proof of that is the stock barely budged. The stock is not always right. There's some fun examples of people thinking positive things are a term and then totally wrong. But the fact is that resigned, not unexpectedly in the aggregate given in '65, but unexpectedly in terms of media timing, the stock moves less than 0.5%. It's basically that says, organized, well managed transition. And I think he was smart. I think you get out in a high. We've seen quarter's great. As you say, three or four X, the revenue, three or four X in 15 years, three or four X, the operating income. It's 12 X to market cap and just as a reminder, because they buy back shares, it's 20 X to stock price as a holder of the stock throughout that entire period. God bless you. Just a great run and handing over internal successor, which as you say is proof that you had to shift together and you had a couple of options and they went with this option. One of the other guys have pulled back recently. I think getting out in a high is not to be underestimated at '65. I think it's a home run the whole way through. And so I just give credit where credit is one of the great ones. I mean, second comment, there is still some pending, do you have an AI strategy? But honestly, Jason, I'm going to commit heresy now. If you look at the three countries you named Netflix, Apple, Adobe, I would argue that Adobe has to have an AI strategy. It's existential. Apple is somewhere in the middle. Yes, it's pathetic that series is not good. But you can continue to build the hardware platform that everyone kind of gets AI on. I think for a long time to come. I don't think they're going to be replaced by the open AI mobile phone anytime soon. And Netflix, I think it's the least AI-centric problem out there. I mean, they have interesting challenges. Didn't get that big acquisition done. There are media companies. They have media challenges as Benedict Evans says so well. So it's in the middle in terms of AI terror. Well, look, for what it's worth on Netflix, Blackbuster. Peaked in 2004 with 994 stores. Six years later, it was bankrupt. I think what's happening when it happened with Netflix. And I'll tie this together to a macro theme that Harry brought up on Twitter and others. I think all that has to happen is for these leaders to be maimed or for there to be stealth churned. I'll give you an example. I've paid for Netflix. I'm embarrassed to say how many years I've paid for Netflix. I think since it came on flash drives or CD-ROMs, I've been paying for infinity. It's price has gone up, but it's not worth my life to churn, right? But I watch so much YouTube. And on YouTube, it's becoming more and more AI-generated content. I've stealth churned off Netflix. I'm still paying. I may pay for another year. But as more and more folks, stealth churn off Canva because they're using AI tools. As we stealth churn, you know, Amelia was looking. Now that we've moved to Clod, she hasn't used OpenAI in four months. So we're paying for OpenAI because it's $100 a month. But she's stealth churned. So my caution is, and I think this is why so many leaders at risk is stealth churnes everywhere. If you're like, and not to rebel, but I used to think as a B2B guy, "Mouse and Wows and Dows were the dumbest metric." I'd get an investor update with hooray. Our wows are up and I'd be like, "I know Mammu used to cheer that at Slack, but that's a sign of a struggling startup." I want, show me the revenue, right? Show me the money. Now I want to see the Mouse and Wows. I want to see your usage of your illustrator of FigmaMake, of Netflix, of Canva. I want to see those going up faster than revenue. This I think is the ultimate B2B test or anything. Is your Mouse, Wows and Dows growing faster than revenue? If so, things are probably working for you in the AIH. If they're declining, just like net new customer count, right? If it's declining, you're hiding. And I think Netflix just bought Ben Affleck startup for like 300 million bucks, right? Or something like that, Harry? Like, they're not, they're well aware. Folks are watching AI-generated Star Wars content on YouTube and not watching Netflix. So, I don't know, I would step down too. I just might. Speaking of Amelia hasn't used OpenAI in four months. Yeah, so deeply in transition, how it works with Claude. Anthropic turns down $800 billion funding offers. I just came back from an LP, literally 10 minutes ago. I said, "What's your biggest challenge?" They managed the money for some of the largest families in Europe. And they said, "All of our families just want one thing, Anthropic." And the challenge we have is they don't want anything else, but they all want Anthropic. And that's the only thing they want. Every dollar wants its home in Anthropic right now. And it's caused secondary market prices to surge to a trillion dollars for Anthropic. implications or the suggestions are there is a clear market belief that they have won the enterprise race and they've Supposed open air now with 850 with their latest. How do we read that? How do we reflect on that? The fun thing in all of this and I put fun in air quotes is it's so fluid. So Sam just said Codex usage is 50% in one month as we're taping this open AI is gonna launch autonomous agents open-clone steroids 24/7 Okay, three I've run my I've done an experiment over last week. I've run my own workflows through both APIs I don't care so our ability to predict what we thought two weeks ago when there was turmoil Executive turmoil everyone was using the Anthropic API. It's just better clawed when we started the show I was the only guy that used clawed you guys probably thought clawed was ridiculous like what why is this weird guy? It's less than 1% of the market now everyone's using clawed, right? I don't know what 90 days is gonna bring but everything could change in our development environments in a week and Open AI could win in agents and autonomous agents were just starting agents are just getting autonomous all these goofballs on X with their O with their Mac minis and Mac macros and 11 of them stacked in their closet look what have they shipped nothing? Okay, it's performative art, but autonomous agents are what we all are gonna live with we built some and they could win I mean literally they're shipping it today could be the best thing in autonomous agents clawed has a few now - I mean Anthropic but that was just started. It's just started so I can't honestly predict 30 days out So does this does a trillion feel like Anthropic did that feel like a good deal on our last show? Yes, am I sure it will three shows from now? I don't know. Maybe they'll invert and if Jason is correct Look, I believe both of you are correct. You're correct in the sense of you know AI is the biggest story out there and Anthropic has in the last six nine months being credit as the new winner in that space So by definition you're gonna have huge form of that stock you're accurately representing the facts You know whether or not that will prove to have a Overall holding period returned from here that outpaces the S&P 500 adjusted for the risk is something entirely different It's hard to do in venture. The trajectory from here is actually pretty straightforward Which is when you've got this level of white heat you go public because up until now as I think Seven three weeks and leave there's just been no way if we had an entire Life cycle of a technology explosion would very little access to it in the public markets, right? And it's hard to imagine going through the entire cycle of a boom and bust without letting the retail investors lose their money as part of the show So that's clearly the part that's coming up So my assumption is Anthropic will go public and it will be a fabulously successful IPO Which is different than saying I got a trillion dollars. You'll feel very great about holding it six months later It can be in a me it can be an amazing company. It can not be worth a trillion dollars and it can trade or a trillion dollars for a period of time All of those things can be true. What price does it go out at rory if you were to make a guess? Your job as an investor is to tell you what something's gonna be worth four years from now, right? Your job as a banker is to tell you what it's worth today And those are some different skills one is about projecting the future The other is about valuing the now. I'm not gonna try and project the future on this now My guess is I can weather lower number But your LPs write about the present today if it went public today You would be fighting them off at a stick at a trillion dollars You would have a fabulously successful IPO and because those guys are wildly smart You know really nice profile of the CFO recently and because the other thing that's happened is the big counter attack on behalf of open AI Has been you know computers the ballgame these guys don't have enough compute My guess is the and drop it guys are saying hey, we got the better software How do we get as much compute as possible it takes money? This is America Janssen will take a while to provide a given cash and therefore go public So my assumption is these guys are gonna go public as we said October two four time period if they can as soon as it's humanly possible Which is of course why they're not taking the 800 billion valuation. I mean why even pause for breath I mean especially if it gives any kind of rights which actually at this point I doubt it does they are you know I assume heads down Preparing to go public because as long as this mood lasts you will probably raise money in the public markets for that stock at a price You might and see three years from now with three years of execution. They should go after the IPO What are they going to do are they going to do massive secondaries? Are they going to do pipes are going to do weird debt hybrid equity prefer deals because this isn't the last chance They're going to need epic amounts of capital right and so maybe it's minor But we're talking about an IPO like it's a it's an event which of course it is but the ultimate I think the meta question is where is it easier to raise ongoing capital like perpetual capital is it is it really easier public than private For these guys not traditionally the answer is of course, but for these guys is it yes I think I'm going to say again being opinionated on this and yes I think it will be even though so far it hasn't been I mean so far the most stunning fact so far is the biggest IPO in history is talking about raising 75 billion dollars on the biggest private round in history raised 122 billion dollars What that says is the biggest private round is bigger than the biggest IPO that is bizarre And we've kind of gone accustomed to it to the point where we don't even focus on that fact But it is of course absurd Given that logic you would say oh stay private you can raise more But I absolutely don't buy that as you know I said I mean yes I mean yes I hope it could get one more round done But the truth is the big liquid markets are public I think they go public you raise a big slug of equity out of the gate you raise more You obviously expand the capital base over time and then you have access to a whole bunch of other things You've access to convertible preferred You probably can do more compelling debt structures You become a viable player for more people to lend against So if your business model is as they think perhaps insanely But whatever I need to raise 200 billion 300 billion dollars And at some point you have to go public Why do you go public when the formal is at its peak when you're relative kind of desirability is at a peak It would be hard for me to imagine a better moment to go public If you're on topic then like this minute But I'll give you this account argument that I might be wrong on That I admittedly I might be wrong on Which is Figma and the need for capital So if anthropic does not need any more capital Go public tomorrow to your point right or Q4 when you're ready Go public go public at a trillion A trade up like Figma did to two trillion and write it out But Figma is down 87% from its trough Imagine for some reason something like this happens anthropic It still grows I mean what's Figma is still growing at top 5% rates right? But the market has fallen out of love with Figma What happens if anthropic IPOs at the perfect time for a company that does not need capital But the markets fall out of love with it They get worried like the construction costs go up Those space centers were arguing over don't work as well Rory was right about the space centers And it falls 87% like Figma just what happens to capital raising Yeah okay respectfully no If everything that you articulated happens Then the person whose public wins And the people who are still private are existentially screwed The Figma has soundbite which I hate Of the 83% decline is more accurately represented as follows Figma priced at 35 with sensible people Idiots drove it up to north of a hundred bucks a share Then the same idiots sold it down and set one factor But then second factor at the same time Figma was at the tail end of a 20-year cloud software boom Where the zeit guest switched to the AI boom And the world fell out of love so that took it from 35 down where it is now which is 20 That explains Figma If there is a world where the AI zeit guest goes out in the next I think we're at the start, we're not going to hit a stage in the next year or two Where the people are saying oh my god the story is dead we've moved on to the next thing You're closer to the start than the finish of the zeit guest I think there could be a hit to the stocker or come back to that in a second But I don't think it's the same as Figma where literally it's like I mean what's happening at Figma is everyone saying Your operational results are amazing but we're in love with someone else So we're just not even going to talk to you If I'm sure I'll be going to go out and if the stock were to go down It would be because oh my god it's overvalued and this this revolution is going to take 20 years not five So maybe you're overpriced and in that case you'll sit there And I've been in much smaller scale on this when you go What's really bad or stock is down on the other hand We've got 50 building in cash and our head-to-head competitive still losing money and private we win So no there's no argument for overstaying you're welcome in the private markets at this point None Jason you brought up Figma and you brought him into the conversation A tiny now to what we're talking about and the topic launches Claude design For those that don't know it's kind of their competitive product to Figma very bluntly Obviously Figma as a result were hit and price was hit significantly As was the dobes Jason you actually did a light for like and you've tried Claude design Excessively I'd love to hear your thoughts What were your reflections? Does it compete with Figma in a very meaningful way and how do you leave feeling? I leave with a lot of anxiety over Figma and others But not for the reason the Yahoo's on Twitter said two things about Claude design if you haven't used it one It is definitely better than the design tools that were in Claude the day before You've always been able to design a website that looks exactly like every other website Built with Claude artifacts and purple gradients and the same they all look the same Okay half of demo day looks like it was built in Claude artifact at most Okay, you can smell them in 60 seconds But design was always there it just wasn't what a lot of designers would call design But you could always design a website now Anthropic did something which is important. We'll see where it goes They didn't just improve it they built an application Claude design is an application There are only so many Anthropic and open AI applications There are skills. There are workflows. There are prompts. There are little things you can do They want you to travel to build a design application that works Whether it's 50% better or 200% better than the day before You can design better websites better properties in Claude than you could before Does that mean you can build what you can build in Figma, let alone Illustrator? No. So a lot of the Yahoo's are like, the other thing Yahoo said on Twitter is, of course this isn't a threat to perfect design, to taste. 'Cause we're all about taste now in AI. Taste, we have no threats because of taste. The combination of taste and motes means we're unassailable. So will your typical, you know, hoping to afford tickets to Coachella designer that takes two weeks to respond to a ticket, to develop an asset, are they gonna switch maybe not, right? They're not gonna switch from these things. But it means normal people can design stuff and get into production much faster. So I think it is an existential threat. It will maim and nibble at Figma more and more, because like if the three of us wanted to build an app together and we don't wanna wait for a designer to turn it around in 30 days and give us a Figma file or a still, what the hell do you, I even do it with a Figma file, I can stick it in a replet. Now I can just do it myself. So we will bypass designers more and more. That's the risk, not that, but I do not believe Anthropic will ever build a direct Figma or Illustrator or Adobe Committer. I don't have to to maim them. So yeah, is it a design tool? Maybe it's designed to production, like some folks call it, who cares? If it maims you, it maims you, right? And I think people are missing the point. The meta question is that no, I saw no one talk about it. It is an application. It comes up as a full application. It has sharing, it has users, it has hierarchy. It can save assets. I do not believe there are many other applications that Anthropic or OpenAid have built. And this, if you look at what the public markets are, they're scared about a lot of things, but we make fun of vibe coding. Oh, we're going to vibe code ourselves, horse. But what if they start building a tier applications? Not just prompts, not just outputs. Like, it is something to reflect on. And I'll just start a rambul, but I'll give you one last story to compare. So the oldest piece of software we use is Marquetto, okay? Terrible email marketing service. About two weeks ago, it started to violate the Can spam act. We started, I started to see things on tweets. Jason, how come I can't unsubscribe to your Goddamn Saster newsletter? And they ping me and get, I don't know. And then you get more of them, right? So that's when a bug's been introduced in the system two weeks ago. We flagged it for Adobe Marquetto. They said it was unfixable. Can spam violation, okay? This was a week ago. Then they said they would only help us if we got on the phone with their engineering yesterday. We did. They did nothing but blame Salesforce and said they could not commit to a fix. So my point is, this is what old software looks like, okay? And if Anthropic and OpenAid are going to build applications, sell them all as a bucket. Like keep the gems, don't get me wrong, but they're coming for old software. They're coming for old software. This is an application. This is not a prompt. But nor is it going to main figment next quarter. Like there's just, but those both can be true. Those both can be true that we won't see it in figment's numbers next quarter. And that over four, six, eight quarters, it will main its growth. We won't want to use grandpa's software anymore. Honestly, I want to ask a lot of questions because one, that's what we do here. Two, you've used both products. And I tried to look at some demos today, but I just don't have a question. So it's like the Emerson quote, if you understand one thing, one man, well, you understand every man. If you understand one competitive market, well, you have a kind of framework for all these markets. I just want to drill down on this because it's the same question in every market. So a couple of things. One is, how do you think it impacts, I mean, the Canva design engine is at the heart of what they've done on Claude. How do you think this impacts Claude Canva versus figment? First of all, Kudos to Canva, if you use Anthropic, I mean, Claude designed it, exports to Canva. So you can import from Figma, and you can export to Canva, right? The shoot you choose to. But what's happening is product teams and engineering teams are already, okay, if we go back 12 months ago, you had design, okay, back in the day when I worked at Adobe, there was a design group. We weren't allowed to design anything that was public facing. You'd face a ticket and 60, 90 days later, you'd get a PDF of what your website had to be look like, okay? Then your product team would have to figure out what to do with that PDF, argue with your engineering team, and months later, that's the way software used to work until not too long ago. Then as everyone started working in Claude code toward the end of last year, product and engineering teams just started to work in the code together. Product teams first would vibe stuff and replin and lovable on their own, right? Now a bigger and bigger deal is they're committing to the code base. Product teams are able to do this. And so these PRD teams are becoming more cohesive and then design still way out over there in their own hipster land. As these combine, everyone's gonna want to work directly onto codex and Claude code. It's not gonna be this designer enforces a collaborative hierarchy on Figma. Like the, because the designers hold the PRD organization hostage, they hold them hostage before AI. It's the worst. Yeah, it's worth just pointing out of the high level comment here. When you're saying design, implicitly what you're saying here is it's the Figma digital design, websites and apps world. Software part of design, not the part of Canva that is printing out real world pictures, posters and, you know, leave the physical design where it's the couple from software. You're right, design's such a confusing term, right? It's a bigger threat in the short term to things like Gamma. It already makes slides like Gamma. Okay, it's not a threat to Canva today, but every single thing you do in Claude designer that you don't do in Canva or Figma or Gamma is a threat to them. Even if it doesn't kill them, every single thing you do. I think the smallest thing Jason always says, "Rory, which always sticks with me." It's just the element of maiming, which is quite hard to deny. If it takes 20 to 30% away because you're already there and it's easy, that's very meaningful. It is meaningful. And again, I'm not diminishing that. I always thought one of Google's interesting strategies for a decade and a half was to start with G Suite. It was email, you know, an effectively a darks and a spreadsheet, which just nod away at the bottom end of the Microsoft Office suite. And if you fast forward a decade and a half, you get both sides of it though. Basically, they could spend a billion dollars yanking Microsoft's chain on a $40 billion business. It's exactly what Jason says. "And messing with your head, I'm maiming you, and it's not core to me, so I don't have to win here. I just have, you just have to lose." On the other hand, 15 years later, your office is still a plus or minus $40 billion business lower growth rate. So there is a range of outcomes from, it nods away at the low end, takes away a lot of users, but only 5% of the revenue to, it bites 30% of the users, 25% of the revenue, and it really impacts. And those are big differences in terms of value creation. We'll have a maim meter in board meetings. How much have we been maimed to this quarter? And it'll go from 1% all the way to 50%. And our agents will decide, we don't let the founders decide, because they're always at 1%, or they're the overactive 150. This is Q for the Monty Python, it's only a fleshroom sketch. It is, it is like that. That's all you're doing, it's only a fleshroom. I lost my arm in my leg this week to claw. There's two things you said that was in it. One is, anytime someone can give away something at the margin for free that takes away some of your load, there's just an impact to that. Bundling is a bitch, and they're effectively bundling here. The other thing that I think is more important that you said is, and I hadn't internalized this, but if the design flow is a preamble to a technology build workflow, and the technology build part of that workflow is already automated using code, so on code, then you write the incentives, where you get scary as a standalone company is if the other guys have a better together story, and you're right, to the extent that design, product, and engineering can all be in the same tool, there's probably a whole bunch of embedded efficiencies there. And from the perspective of the company building that product, it makes sense to, because the thing that often happens in these deals is, let's be opening ideas in a ton of these. Now, if you look back on the, it's just fun to do it now, the GPT store, the GPT plugins, every single time Twitter goes all excited, this is the end of everything, X, Y, Z company is screwed, and it turns out, you know, two years later, no one even remembers that, the thing's been deprecated. But you're right, in this case, if you think of design as not as a standalone category like Canva, but as the front end window into product and the engine, if you think that software is the mother load and software coding is the model load of enterprise adoption, then you probably get enough effort behind it to build a credible product. That's what you're saying. I mean, put bluntly, at some point, even when Ewan Antwapik has to start allocating resources at the margin, implicitly you're saying, there'll be a big enough team here to build, as you say, all the app features to make it a viable competitor. Yeah, and not only does it export to Canva, it exports to Cloud Code, they're integrated. So if we're moving quickly, we're not gonna wait. Listen, I still want my human designer to deliver my amazing homepage of my app, my amazing splash screen, my amazing assets. But we're shipping features every day, guys. I don't have time to wait anymore. We're gonna do it in design to go straight into Cloud Code which we already run our company on. We already ship on, right? It's fully integrated. And if the humans have time to redesign it later and make it better, great. No one's saying it's pixel perfect, don't have time. I don't have time. So the only reason I think they want it, they want entirely banded, is it's part of the core. It's part of the Cloud Code core. And it is something you can already do in Cloud Code or even just Cloud just crapily. So they're improving, the closer it is to the core, the higher the chance they'll maintain it and it's not a dalliance, right? Not only are the decliner's stress, not only are Dylan and Mike Kendall brick stress, they're stressed at lovable and repel it in Versaille and Gamma too because the rate at competition is like we've never seen before, right? And they're, and I will say, one thing I know from all these founders, I mean, they're brutally aware of it. The older CEOs are hiding from it. Oh, our next agent will catch up. Oh, we'll catch up later in the year. Oh, you haven't seen our next, this is what I hear from pre-AI founders. We'll catch up in the next release. They say so confidently, right? As they go off to complete their triathlon. The AI native CEOs, they're freaking all over this, okay? In 60 seconds, you get a slackback. They actually know that, what's coming a month later that all their competitors will launch and they're already all over it. They're already I hate the 40 chess game, but if you don't play 40 chess, if you're at the core of AI, you're going to lose. So they're all playing this game. It just gets harder every week. Excel adds four billion leaders fun to follow into hot AI growth rounds. So core four days ago raises $7 billion growth fund. Is this just further compounding what we said, which is that is the game today and the leaders see it. It's definitely the game today. It's definitely the leaders see it. Obviously the question is as correct, but yes, do you think it's correct? I mean, direction. Yes. People are saying private longer outcomes are bigger. So capitalism is doing what capitalism should do. It's raising money to put into these companies. I mean, the thing about growth is this. When growth is sexy and attractive from a fundraising perspective, it tends to be hard to make money at. And the way growth makes money is either overall valuations are down like 2022. Are there some insight that the growth investor has that the wider market hasn't figured out yet, like Chatchee PT really matters and you should buy open AI. So both of those conditions were two in 22 and 23, which is why those funds are going to be awesome. If you have a situation where capital is plentiful for those rounds and everyone understands AI is amazing, then by definition, you've eroded the two things that gave you access returns. I'm not saying you still won't make great returns. It won't be as clear or as compelling as it was when it was unpopular. The other thing is there's room for the capital. And what I mean is if you look back at 20 VC fund, one $10 million fund, right? I'm speaking for history for Harry. Back then, the strategy was to get into hot seed or a rounds where he could ride a 50 K check, 100 K check. There was always room. And that to some extent, it's still today. It's just those hotter checks are at much higher valuations. Fast forward to today. If you're a relationship builder, if you drop by and meet with Dario, if you schmuz was Sam, there's room in the round. Like you get cut out. Don't give me wrong. People are getting cut out of these rounds. But if you're Sequoia or Excel and you're a good schmuzer and a people person and you show up to poker night and you do all the right things, most of these rounds you're going to get an allocation. You may be the fourth name on the press release, but you're going to get an allocation. And so, in a way, the fund's don't even sizes don't even sound that large. If you get 20 or 30 checks, they're not even that big. And that's totally fair for five or six. You're exactly right Jason. Is that when you're raising $122 billion? Right. It turns out this room for everybody. Even when you're raising a mind, so only 30 billion dollars in the last on topic one, you're like, there's room for everybody. Well, people get cut out. They're desperate to get into unthropic. But if you have the relationship and you really build it over a period of time, when they look at the spreadsheet for the round, they're going to put you above the fold because we like Rory. He's great on the 20 pot. He came by the office. He loves us. We're going to, well, fine. We'll give 20 million to Rory. It's no, did you disagree, Harry? No, he doesn't because his first sentence, his comment was, if you're going back to Harry's LP, who's not so tropic and nothing else, what I like about Sequoia, they're not going to make money, right? They're like, let me get to straight. I have a good relationship with these mega companies. I'm a name that they'll want even at this stage. And I got a bunch of piece. I mean, the only thing I want is this. And I'm in the middle. Hmm. Let me think about this. I should take their money and give it to these guys and charge my percentage and call it a day. As long as that works, the marquee names who can do that are going to do it. Some of the package pricing on these SPVs for anthropic has just been the most egregious face ripping I've ever seen. I mean, like 8% up front. Crazy. One that I thought was fascinating was Wittling crossing a billion, growing 78% year on year. Is this the new bar for a great B2B IPO? Let the step back, give it one level beyond the IPO. I think what this sentence is true. And you never know, but I believe it to be exposed as the whole SaaS is dead. Memes bullshit. Low growth SaaS is bad. And high growth SaaS is good. This is a market where we can talk about the reasons why if you're doing a billion dollars going at 78%, then collapse of the entire discussion about, you know, SaaS is going away. SaaS is bad. What's it worth? Right. What it really points out is the real objection to these public SaaS companies is not, oh my god, you're a SaaS. It's that your market is now top stop than your growth rate is 10%. If Wittling is growing at that rate, that's amazing. It's compelling and they'll get an excellent IPO. And they're accelerating. The crazy thing is they're accelerating. So if they were at less than 500 11 months ago, which I do know, right? And they're at a billion growing 70 something percent do the math with me, or they're acceler, it's not just 70, which is enough. They're accelerating, right? And you can say that's great for SaaS and it is, right? As Parker said to me, not bad for a SaaS company, right? Kudos. And we can talk about what that means. I'm not even sure what it means, but not that many are accelerating like this. So this is not good news for anybody not accelerating at scale. Right? Let's not, it's not even 70%. It's accelerating from like under 50 to 70 year. I mean, candidate for CEO of the year, not to disparage deal, but candidate for to drive that level of acceleration. I don't even know how to do that. It's less as people buy, less as people buy in tokens. I don't even know how to do that in today's world. I mean, bold kinds of CEO of the year. I mean, yeah, respect for you. He's going to be a competition, Jason. Yeah, but like they've just launched their agent driving that level of acceleration without a massive AI tailwind just blowing your phones up, right? You know, bring them on. We'll talk about it. I don't know. I don't know how to do that without AI, right? I think you've got that referred to in sporting terms as a win against a run-of-play. Against the odds, you're playing the SaaS game where everyone's walking around saying the world is dead. Yes, on top, it's putting up six, seven hundred percent growth, but you put that 78 percent growth and acceleration up in a category where most ill-informed people were saying you can't do that. Maybe the better, more clear expression is highest out performance relative to quote unquote market expectations. I think that's a clear example. I mean, it's better than Figma by the numbers, right? It's better than Figma by the numbers by far. I want to just serious come what it just says is does markets where the entire agentech AI drive-coding discussion is rubbish. And one of his financially related stuff and paywall. I've run a business and you guys book one businesses. You can screw up on a lot of things. You screw up an employee payroll and you pay them at three o'clock. They'll be in your office at three o'one. You can't get this wrong. You're not interested in vibe coding it. You're interested in having it right. You've got legal and statutory obligations that carry criminal penalties if you don't pay your taxes. You're like, I want to outsource this to someone wildly competent. Have them take responsibility. And no, I don't want non-deterministic processes you moron. These are entire businesses that you might have some impact at the margin in terms of agentic efficiency. But this core business will be there in five, ten years time. It'll compound because payroll is not us. Not everything is, we're actually talking about this a lot internally. What gets eaten by AI? What doesn't get meat? My AI? What's defensible? Parallel is one of the best examples of this is just something you do. You might build a software better using AI, but the core value proposition is something that it's just orthogonal to AI and it has to be done right. So big category. It'll go public. It'll be a great outcome. Good for him. I think the same with a lot of the ventite players that we see today. You know, your RAM, so your stripes, so our wallets, this is the world. I'll not call it a site. You know what, though, I know it's not to harp on the main episode. The mode is stronger. It is less impacted by AI, but everything I view now in terms of its how well it works with our agents, how well it's API and workflow works with our agents. For example, after Sastra annual in May, we're going to build our own AI VP of finance. Okay. And the number one thing we're going to do is automate collections. Okay. So we've been on Brax for six years. You know what the first thing we're going to look at? Which API works best with our agents? I don't care what ramps dashboard looks like. I don't care what it's office of the of the of the, you know, the GDP. And now I don't care. I care how our agents work with its API. And we're going to pick the best one. That is just starting, but it is a BFD. And it also means that folks that seem to have a huge moat. It may weaken when, and I'm not just, I'm not just being a Yahoo at X. We're going to build an AI VP of finance and he don't care what the UX is. He don't care. What's wrong? You write. You absolutely write. And therefore the payroll and and kind of AP collectibles that have the best API will win. But I'll tell you something. You're not going to build an entire fintech stack. So someone will get those dollars. You write. There's someone, but it could be a new vendor. It could be a different or it could be a different vendor. You're right. I mean, this gets to the cell for the, there are three or four vendors of AP related stuff. You've got ramp. You've got bill. Well, we're involved. You've got rampant brecks, whatever, right? Whichever of those doesn't have an API forward product will lose market share. Whichever one does will gain market share. And if all the mud dominoes not to do it, then a new vendor who says I'm an API first product will get your business and all the people like you. So I think you're correct in that, which is a platform shift, which is what we're dealing with at this level, has implications for everyone in the tech stock. But if you are doing something like what, you know, ram, brecks, bill, all these people are doing, the core thing you do itself won't be replaced in a way, for example, Figma might be right. My point is those degrees of change here. But it, but it, but the dream that was just the comfort that were protected, you know, ramp has asked us to switch from brecks for for seven years. I bet we finally switch over the summer. And it's only because of the agent. If it wins the bake off, we will switch in one week. We will switch and we'll never go back to brecks. Same with Marquetto and HubSpot, by the way, like we're leaving Hub Marquetto because of this drama, the crappy API, there can spam. We will leave Marquetto this summer for whoever has the best API, and it probably won't be HubSpot, which is why we should pause here to the point. Salesforce just announced a whole and entire headless API strategy. What are your thoughts? Well, while while we debate where to move our Marquetto data, we're already using headless Salesforce to move all of our Marquetto data, agentically over to Salesforce, it'll be done in a couple days. That's a great story because give them credit, give Benny off credit, it's like if you can't beat them, join them, I'll say say, you know, all right. I mean, remember, it's less than a year ago that was talking about we're going to charge your ape, you know, we're not going to let you have your data. And now we've gone to getting ahead of us right out the door. So you're an example of where you're going to be. He's taking share from the adjacent companies like Mercado, just 'cause of doing that. And that's your point. - Well, starting, the only thing I will say, listen, we're already living the headless vision, right? We don't log into Salesforce, it's our hub. But this is a lot of stuff that's gonna run on MuleSoft in a couple of months or six months. This is also with love. This is also a classic B2B, you know, and Thropics drops a design tool and we can use it in an hour. This is something that will be dribbled out in classic B2B fashion over here. It's just like, it's different worlds. - Can we provide some context also for those that haven't heard in terms of just banning off the move with headless, he announced. So we set the scene there 'cause I wanna ask questions. - Sure, I mean, traditionally the Salesforce app, it really had two parts of value. There is the user interface that every sales rep, or every in the organization uses to input and output information and effectively record the work they're doing. And then at the back end, you have effectively this massive database and workflow that records all the information and allows you to track customers, leads, pipeline, all that well of and stuff. So there's two components of value. And by offering a headless offering, what he's basically saying is, if those people who are doing the work are replaced by agents doing the work, then they don't need my UI anymore, right? Because the people aren't there anymore, they need a totally different agent-based UI. But what I'm gonna do is the leader of Salesforce is I'm still going to allow them to access the database side of my product, which means I keep my value even in a world where most of the selling other customer support is not done by humans typing into the Salesforce UI, but it's done by agents proactively going against the Salesforce backend. So he's given up trying to drive perceived pricing to preserve long-term value. 'Cause I think he correctly has identified the real long-to-Jasons point. He said it as a negative, but it's also a positive. The real long-term value that Salesforce has is, it's taken us 10, 15 years to get all those integrations in place, all that data in place. If you make it easy for Jason's agents to work with Salesforce, then he might get around to killing you for the longest time. So that's the big move they made in the last few weeks. - I think like Cloud Design though, everyone completely misunderstood what Headless Salesforce is. Salesforce is already headless. Salesforce is, and this is actually pretty crazy, really Mark and Parker to their credit, JFC, in 2006, they launched an enterprise API when this was seen as not possible. You could not build, allow third parties to integrate into enterprise offers, to risky, to problematic. They opened this platform up, and they have 20 years of it getting better. And I will tell you, all the APIs that our agents use, are AI, VP of marketing, VP of customers, Salesforce is the best. It is the best API out there. It crushes everybody. This includes all the new guys, everybody. But it's because they built this for 20 years, and because the APIs are so good, the agents can work with it, like it's not a problem. What Headless is, and that's what marks out there, I mean, the greatest marketer in B2B, right? But it's already done this since agents started, what he's really pitching, which is the bigger threat to these leaders, and the bigger opportunity is an agent fabric, is the layer that manages all your agents. If you really look at what this is, it's about Salesforce says, we are gonna be the fabric to manage all of your agents. Your 20 agents, your 50 agents, 100 agents, some of them will be built on Salesforce. A lot of them are gonna be built on NealSoft as it crazily it sounds, their platform, which has been renamed. It will be in their data platform, but we will be the layer to provide the context, the guardrail, the management, the security, the everything. And this is the biggest issue for 2027 is agent fabric. People are under discussing this, they're all talking about evals and this crap. This is what really matters in the enterprise is agent fabric. You can't let these crazy agents run a muck. - I'm sorry, I'm just getting back. When you say agent fabric, you're saying agent orchestration, management. - It manages everything, all the governance, all the security, it knows, here's the key part. It knows what every single agent is doing in real time. That's the fabric. That is more than orchestration, okay? It literally knows every data, every operation, everything that's happening through 200 agents running 24/7 in parallel with multiple sub agents in them. Who's gonna go to the, to pour Jacob O'Driskel at CIO of wherever that if there's any security breach, he loses his job, it's his worst job. He wants a trusted agent fabric to manage these crazy agents his team is deploying. And he can't be done on at a chat GBT. They can't be done out of base 44. G's at JFC, this is a security nightmare, right? I mean, even this week and I don't want to get into it, two leading vibe code platforms arguably had massive security issues this week. I don't want to talk about them, but this is only gonna compound. And as mythos comes out and finds every security breach in nanoseconds, I need an agent fabric. I could trust not someone that came out of YC and claims they have an orchestration platform. But I don't know if Salesforce can deliver it because it's so often complicated. But if you're in their ecosystem, if you commit to everything, when most folks hear about Salesforce, they think it's CRM, it's 14% of their revenue, okay? If you commit to everything, e-commerce, marketing, data, analytics, Slack, and you run it, your whole business on Salesforce, this is the old SAP Putch, we will give you the agent fabric so you can accomplish everything you want. This is an agentic platform you can trust. This is the big bet coming and this is all the warm up phase for agents. The enterprises need an agent fabric they can trust. - Agreed. Because you're empowering these software agents to do things, to change things in your systems, to upgrade things, to approve orders, to make commitments. How do you audit what's going on? How do you know, how do you keep control of it? That's exactly right. That's going to be the issue. - I've got 300 agents doing a council receivable. I've got 200 updating our documents. I've got all of these interacting at our autonomous customer success agents or economist data analytics agents who's going to manage all this. Orchestration is the nerdy term, but most folks talk about orchestration. It's just a limited dashboard on top of a couple easy APIs to connect with. It's fine for a startup or a team that has human resources but how's an ordinary company going to manage these agents? How the hell is an ordinary company without a team of agent deployment experts going to manage these agents? They'll go rogue if you don't manage them. - This analogy may be totally useless since only because I've been doing it a long time. I remember in the late 90s when online commerce took off and people really started getting a meaningful percentage of their revenue from online commerce. Right? And you have all these executives who were retailers to core. And what do we tell executives to do anyone on their what's going on? They go walk the floor. They want to know what's going on in the shop. And even if you're running a 50, 500 persons chain like Walmart, some Waltees to walk around, touch the merchandise, see what's going on. And suddenly the whole thing's going online and you just don't know. People are clicking. That's all you got. You saw a whole wave of companies doing analytics around how do you track your website? Because the big guy just wants to know what's going on. That was the value proposition. We didn't have genesis. We didn't have much of it in a lot of money in that space. And the value proposition at its core was you've moved to this new way of doing business. Senior people who want to know what's going on. Frankly, AI is way more powerful than that. Because at least in that, you had very deterministic. I'm selling stuff at a certain price for a certain thing. And even then you wanted to know you didn't do anything dumb. In this case, you've empowered your agents to make decisions. Now you're the executive in 2026. You're going to know what's going on. Because I think about it. Even what's gone? Gone is all about listening into calls to understand what people are saying. Once you have AI agents doing all this stuff, you're going to want to know what the AI agents are doing. And I think just in your exaggerate, this is going to be the huge thing. How do I think about what my little automated bots are doing in my business? My question was, are sales force best place to be the agent fabric or is someone else better placed? If that's the whole holy grail. Of course, they're well placed. It's a bad analogy. But just like in the end, Google Microsoft at all were well placed for the last generation of AI. If they can get their rears together, the leaders are well placed. Sales force, Shopify, data dog, data bricks. If they can execute faster than they've executed the last 20 years or eight years, how are we really are? Of course, CIOs want to buy from Salesforce. Of course, they do. But it's much bigger than buying one agent force agent. They want this whole agentec fount. So-- and here's my meta point to folks. It's an opportunity where you have time. It's just not infinite. It's like if you're not building up that whole fabric, right? That's why I'm a fan of Mark. This may not get there. It is a bigger vision than it looked. It's not just headless, like all the Yahoo's said. OK? This is a complicated vision. And maybe they won't get there in time. But at least he's driving the right vision and forcing thousands and thousands of people to deliver against it, right? I'm much more worried about folks that it's more performative, right? You've got to work as harder, harder than Mark to do it. But I don't mean to be repetitive. But the saddest thing is when you have an install base and you're not delivering the agentec solutions they want. This is the tragedy of 2026 and 2027. I have the customers, but LaGora or Repplet, or who picked any application you want. What's the AAL one you invested in? Harriet, what's it called? Harriet Peak. Peak. Yeah. HubSpot launches their thing and it's a dud. It should have been Peak or the other one. Like it's just a tragedy because HubSpot has 280,000 customers. It's a tragedy you did not deliver them the best in class AAL. It is a tragedy. It is not just a tester of miss. And I just-- so that's why I think Salesforce is extremely well-positioned. And we are right to be stressed. Like everyone is stressed that they will achieve it on time. We're right to be stressed. It's really interesting that they've had inbound people by so many people. And Eli Guilts say tweeted a load of predictions. And one of his predictions was that a load of these AI companies should actively sell and try to sell. Do you guys agree? The whom? To HubSpot. To Larry Sellers' House. Literally, Harry Hatt was on the phone last week with the CEO of a $20 or $30 billion market at public company doing massive revenue. And he's like, I get these-- and we're talking about M&A a little bit. I brought it up. He didn't bring it up. I'm like, well, go buy some of these kids. You have the base. He's like, well, everyone wants a billion on $5 million in revenue after their last round. He's like, it's almost a waste of-- I have a corp dev team. but I haven't seen a single one. one that I'd want to buy that will sell at a valuation that makes sense. So Google can buy them, but what's Hubsbots' valuation is we record this in the teens of billions. They just can't afford a billion dollar for every YC startup. They don't have the money. Yeah, I would say try harder. Stay close. There's going to be plenty. Plenty of exits. How many whizzes can Google is Google really going to buy the right? No, I don't buy those connections. I think what's that? 12 billion Hubsbots. So they could afford 50 million, right? To take a risk, right? Not a billion. In fact, and you know, I like this space, but I someone told me that is a G2 crowd said there's like 250 AEO, GEO competitors out there. Maybe you can't afford numbers one to five, but somewhere between 10 and 250 it's going to be one that has a good product. So I think it allows entirely what? But isn't a lot saying sell at a billion, I think is implicitly what he's saying. Yes, and if you can, right? So now for an easy billion, right? I'm optimized for a hundred billion dollar outcomes at my fund, but sell for a billion now while you can. Honestly, that's what I think you saying, right? I would agree. His other point was you should have an exit discussion every year with your portfolio companies, right? I'm going to have one tomorrow. It's a great tip. He's super smart. I just wonder where the billion at five million are exits are coming from. I want their number. Give me their WhatsApp or their text because I'm going to send them a couple deals before this, but right after we get off this show. And my point is this. In May, I was about to point you saying, "When you listen to my Jason says about the public markets and the dilemma they're going through, they absolutely should be looking to acquire some of these things to get some of this technology." And maybe what we're really saying is the biggest rate limiting factor is not their unwillingness to do it, but the prices of which the venture crowd think we're going to get for them has made it hard to make those transactions. It's been my experience that if that's the case, in the end, things true up. But you know what's tough? I picked on this HubSpot AEO product, okay? And I love HubSpot, right? I picked on it, but I didn't know they bought that company for 30 million like months ago. So everything just gets stale so quickly. I'm sure HubSpot sat around and said this, "We need to be in this place, it makes sense, we need to be in AEO, what can we afford?" Well, Harry just funded this one. We can't buy that for 30 million. There's the other one in the US, we can't afford them. What is available we can afford? And I think in five years ago, that was a good strategy, right? Because the world moves slowly. Now you buy something that, let's assume whatever they bought, this company was competitive four months ago. It's just not competitive at today's pace. I don't mean to pick on them, but it's why M&A is tough, right? Who wants to buy something that's going to get stale? Look at poor TBN, we can't even see it on our feet anymore. It's disappeared since the acquisition, right? Gone. So why even buy any of these things? If they instantly become stale, you do these tuck-in acquisitions, which used to be, go back to Corp Dev, you had the best strategy was the barbell, just starting to like investment. Buy something small for 50 to 80 million for product, a couple million revenue to PrivatWorks, and rebuild it over a year, rebuild it natively on Salesforce, or HubSpot, or go big, right? Because you got scale, but it's tougher today to find the gems that want to sell with product market fit cheap. I don't think you're saying it's tougher to find them. I think you're saying it's tougher to manage them and preserve the urgency and the speed. I mean, even OpenClaw, that dude's just on the Ted Circuit now, right? OpenClaw is maybe obsolete in a couple more weeks. Listen, the two more for me is Snap and Sirie Brus. Yeah, I think you have to do Sirie Brus first. I just have a predilection for good over bad. Okay, that's good over bad. Sirie Brus files for IPO. It's the second time. Some of the concerns that were brought up last time in terms of a dependence on G42s revenue and the revenue concentration they had have been resolved. How do we feel about this? It's going to go out well. They're now at where are they? 510 million revenue in 2025, up 76% from 290 and 24. They've done a great job. I absolutely, that's why I wanted to cover it. I think it's a great classic venture deal, credit to benchmark our credit to Steve at foundation, credit obviously more than anything to the team. You know, this is a 10 year journey. And I think in a way that wasn't true a year ago, they got the elements of success in place. I mean, you know, you look at the P&L, it's a little noisier than at first glance because you at one point said how it's profitable. It's not. It had some weird reversal of liabilities. At the operational level, it's still losing money. But the bigger part is they've, I mean, if I did, they've done exactly what it takes. They've proven the product and stepping back. This is a semiconductor company, potentially one of the very few startup semiconductor companies in the last decade and a half. The product they make is a way, is a big ass way for scale chip that really good for inference because it's really fast. And obviously it's very optimized for AI. And if you read the founder letter, it's been optimized for ACE, they found it in 2016. What they've done really well is, this is a very hard step back. This is a very hard market to enter. No, no, not how good your chip is because only a small number of big buyers, right? Obviously the hyperscalers, right? And you know, some of them have their own chips, some of them might want to trust you. These guys have done a couple of things to kind of parlay their way in. They've done some big deals in the Middle East with folks who've been willing to use the product. They started to offer a cloud offering and one of my companies has used it whereby they are effectively saying our chip is so good and so fast, they will offer inference services on a cloud basis. And when you use it, it'll be like, oh my god, this is really fast. And as I said, one of my companies had that experience. It's really fast, low latency. It's a great product. And those things allowed it to prove that the ship worked. And in the last three months, they signed a deal with OpenAI and AWS, right? And the OpenAI deal is for the usual $20 billion of commitments who the hell knows what that means. But the point is they've gone from niche to mainstream and they've clawed their way into the mix. So I just give them huge credit because you know, that's a long journey, it's a hard journey. And you know, a year ago, it was easy to snare and say, yeah, you got a bunch of investor contracts in the Middle East, it's all bullshit. Now you've got the inference business, you got the service business, you've got the incipient contracts with two of the largest players in AI. It's a quite a lot of play. So I think it gets done and it gets done well and it deserves to get done well. And you know, now I'm on my soapbox. This is just great. It is just great to venture those this kind of thing, a 10 year journey to finance a new chip for a new use case. It's complex technically, complex business, and they pull it off. I hope they make a ton of money. I agree. Really, like Andrew Feldman to the CEO, he's a really good dude. What does this go out at? Groxel for 20 billion. Does the benchmarking of Grox enable this to be a 25 billion dollar opinion? When things are valued on a PE or an earnings basis, you can have an opinion, a meaningful opinion on where they should trade. In this case, it's going to be so much now to have based, it could go well above that. I mean, again, we talked about this a while ago. It's a, if the reading player was worth $5 trillion, and then the next two leading players after that are kind of in, well, you got AMD and then you got in-house silicon from Google and Amazon. This is the only other standalone play you can make, right? I mean, you know, do the math here, 1% of Nvidia's 50 billion. If you just think of it as a call option on some percentage of a $5 billion market, you can see a very big outcome here. No, you can squint the other way and go, oh my god, they're never going to, it's a high bet away. Again, it's back to what we said. In these kind of huge markets, you're way out there on the risk continuum. But when risk appetite is on, and risk appetite is on today, high-risk, high-return stories go at a premium. And this is a high-risk, high-risk, high-return story with a big market. So in today's market, in today's environment, that could price extremely well. It'll create an interesting case story with GROC, who has the better, I mean, I know there's such an annoying investor thing, but who has the better outcome risk and time adjusted, right? Both took huge risk to start their companies, both started ahead of the curve, right? It's a reverse, I guess, even more, right? Would you rather take 20 billion in whatever, I don't know, combination of cash and stock with weird taxes you got from Nvidia? Or ride the up and down an emotional roller coaster of running a public company for a decade and trying to get liquidity and seat of Morgan Stanley will give you a loan against your stock. We're all on different journeys, I don't know. I can tell you, I'd rather sell to P, like sales lofted for $2 billion in peace out. Well, that's a different journey altogether, right? (laughing) I'll sell it. You guys, you're doing the hides. I mean, yeah, look, equally say, you know, I'm think they're pretty glad they didn't sell Google to Yahoo for, you know, billion dollars, whatever it was. Look, when it works, you're glad. What about Figma and Adobe that didn't happen? That one, I'd be pulling, if Dylan's better than I may, but I'd be like, Farts. Yeah, Farts, Farts, Farts, Farts, Farts. I don't mean to be political, but man, that was a rough stretch there. Yeah, but maybe they like what they're doing. I mean, maybe, you know, lots of folks do, actually. Maybe they've heard that. You do, but it's just, it's tough when the teams RSUs are not worth what they were, and the options are struggling and people are leaving to go to Tenthropic. It's just, it's not a fun and like, no matter how great it's just not fun to run those companies. That's right. But my point is, when the momentum turns against you, you wish you'd sold and want to mend, I mean, you know, Jensen's glad he didn't sell Nvidia on the top of the way. When it works, you're glad you didn't sell and when it doesn't work, you wish you had. It's as simple as that. It's a derivative of E lot's guild's point, which one are you, right? Be honest once a year at the board meeting, be honest to R.O.E. are we in video? Or are we, which one are we? And then, you know, it's easy on Twitter to think that you're Jensen. We used to think we were Zach, right? I'm the CEO, B, right? Now we all pull on our leather jackets and think we're Jensen, right? - If you're going to be Jensen, I hate to tell you, we just got to be willing to eat a podcast of a breakfast once a week, 'cause oh my God. - I was gonna bring this up as like, and what did you guys say? I'm sure we both, we all watched the "Dwalking" actions. What did you think? - Where I thought he was excellence, his comments, I'm, you know, we don't kind of have this preferential status. We're here to sell chips. If you wish us a PO will sell you chips. You know, his relationship with TSMC, all that stuff, I think, was super grounded. And you just go, wow, that's a world-class executive who shipped 'Cosillions of chips. What you're really talking about is the argument about China, correct? But Dorkish and he and Dorkish got into it. And it was a little bit, - Yeah, yes, and when he was saying, "Bunny, when you look at two of the largest front-to-mortem, providers, neither of them trained on your chips, and he bluntly provided a pretty cagey response at best, and that admitted we should have invested in them. Well, I think there's a lot of things lumped into that. Opening identically trains in part and then video trips, and topic another's clear on what they trained on it. I've had mixed comments on that, but whatever. I think he's common and not investing in traffic, well, he couldn't do it at the time because he didn't have much mixed sense in 22, 23. He went into the business of riding 30 billion dollar venture checks. I thought he was very rational there. He said, "Made a mistake, didn't have the capital of the time wish I had to just bring him closer to." I didn't think that was bad. I think the problem with the China discussion is there was two priors that neither party agreed, and when you have a discussion and they're talking past each other, and you don't agree on the ground truth, it's just the ways to time. And two things are one is how big an enemy thing China is, is it just a competitive training, partners, competitor in the way that Microsoft and Apple compete all the way from there to it. Is it the new Russia? And we got to not give them a single thing because we're scared they're going to nuke us. And then the other thing that I think is the drawkish clearly thinks that frontier models are as dangerous as uranium and jensten clearly thinks that's bullshit. If you don't agree on those two things, if the question is, shouldn't we make it easy for China to build frontier models by selling them in video chips, which was the question? If you don't agree on what you think about China and you don't agree on what you think about frontier models, you simply don't have a useful discussion because neither of the nouns in the sentence have been defined. So once you internalize that, you're like, oh, there's two people talking past each other, and one of which just doesn't give. And it turns out, yeah, and that's what that part wasn't that useful, but it was kind of funny. It was like, it was a cloud, it reminded you what semiconductor executives were like. When I started investing, you know, a lot of business with semiconductors, just hard-headed guys, you just say, no, no, I enjoy it. So I enjoyed it that level. It was a little bit of a culture clash of generations that it was fun, but I thought he did, like, you can't argue with a guy. No, I just told him for the first time ever, it wasn't an easy interview. No, it wasn't easy. And give Dr. Schraddard, he tried to punch, and it's really hard to punch someone who A talks his book and B has 30 years of knowledge when you were 25-year-old podcast. And you know, I think one of the things I like about it's about where you come from, the text, how you approach it. We're doing this in a spirit of inquiry because to some extent, we're all trying to figure out what we think and talking things true often helps. So I often find out, revise my priors based on the discussion. But I'm not here as a CEO of a five-trillion-dollar company. He's here to talk his book. And let's be clear, 30% of the entire market is in China. He wants to sell those guys in video chips. And there's simply no argument on God's green earth that's going to convince him that he shouldn't get that $40 billion of revenue from ship and chips to China. He spent time with the president lobbying to be allowed selling video chips. If he's had to do whatever that takes, and I shut up to think in terms of sucking up to be allowed sell chips to China, he's not going to roll over and play dead because some 25-year-old said, maybe he shouldn't. He do the same to you, have he? Be the straight handoff right in the face. It's like, thank you, but no big guy. And did I think he won the argument? No. But he knows how to fold his corner. Sorry, it was fun. I listened to I worked out and listened to it. I was like, whoa. Boys, is there any other topics that we haven't discussed that we should discuss? We ran out of time to cover Snap, but I just don't care. I mean, and for anyone who's Snap, cut a thousand jobs, 16% of the workforce, and the stock popped 11%. They just need to figure out a converging business model and they haven't. Amazing company at the start and now it's just drifting around and needs to figure it out. Master of stock-based compensation. Yeah. I mean, it's going to look, it's going to be an advert for the dangerous to some extent of dual-class votes. And I used to agonize about this, and now my perspective would be lucky. You had a chance to buy two social media companies with dual-class votes. If you bought Snap, and if you bought Facebook, you're 50% down on Snap and you're 10X up on Facebook from the IPO, shut up, take the check, move on. Yeah. Turns out, on Tramble Power has good outcomes and bad outcomes. It might be a super model, but it's not all downside. You know? The positive night. I don't worry. I hope everyone has happy marriages there. That's great. Okay, I have one last one over at a time, but I want to get Harry's thoughts. So the other thing Elon had retweeted something that went around many times. 91% of all AI unicorns are now in the Bay Area. Thoughts from London on this? Nice one. Yeah. How many? I want to in particular, how many are in Marleybone, but 91% of the Bay Area project Europe. How do you thinking about that from from London? This increasing concentration of AI unicorns in the Bay Area. This is from this week. I think some of the best AI minds or the majority of the best AI minds want to be in Silicon Valley. Quite rightly. You're seeing the recent realising of power back Silicon Valley. That said, I think you can still build unbelievably great AI companies as we have done in London with them. It's indeed mine to am with you know, Mattied 11 Labs. And I think it's easier to be in Europe because with your 91% you also have 91% of the capital and every other person on the street being venture capitalist. And so I think you see this gluttony of cash combined with the gluttony of companies, which makes detection harder and makes winning harder. And so I agree with that. Sure, the majority of great AI companies are there, but I also think it's harder. And I think for me being one of the top three brands in Europe, I would rather be here with much less supply side than there fighting against benchmark and founders fund in Andreessen and everyone in between. Well, I've two comments on that one. Yeah, it's the old Caesar quote. I'd rather be first in a village than second in Rome. That's really what you're saying. Though of course I went out. He was a killer psychopath and really, you know, not a good man. But the more point is, the evil that would do is that we can let it. We can go back to Shakespeare, but we won't. I think the real point, what you're saying, it's interesting. It's 91% in the Bay Area. What this says is companies are in the Bay Area to the point where the marginal advantage of being in the Bay Area is less than the marginal advantage of being in Europe and having access to a talent pool. What it says is the equilibrium point for indifference is now roughly at 90%, which is another way of saying, yeah, to a landing area, it's, yeah, Bay Area wins, but there's still some wins in Europe. And I think actually trying to be a startup stay recruiting and maintaining that team in the Bay is next to impossible unless you have an egregious amount of money. No doubt, right? And I wasn't, I was just curious as the last point where you thought of this from the week, right? I don't have an opinion on this. Certainly you can argue with the talent question, right? But it's just, there's just a lot of complexity here as everything concentrates, right? Everything's concentrating in everything. Andreessen, just like the competitive funding landscape, I do not mean this arrogantly, but there is just one-tenth of the competitive elements in Europe that there is, I have so much respect for Silicon Valley, the early stage of mess is, God, it's fucking competitive. It is. And again, back to Andy Equilibrio, we'll be reestablish when the costs of being here are equivalent to the advantages. Look, I think really what happened is for a couple of years. And it gets back to, I'm trying to pick and everything like that is that in that period when they just first cracked the code at OpenAI, what could be done, the closer you were to knowing what was happening, the bigotid advantage you had. And it was intrinsically a local thing. So, I mean, you know, you'll look back and go, yeah, 10 years after, you know, 22, knowledge will be widely dispersed, but there was a period of two or three years where the knowledge was available triply in Hacker Houses in San Francisco and wasn't available widely across the West of the world. And that's why you had this campaign in explosion here. It's a point in time, just like the start of the internet. But yeah, great companies in London. And just to be clear, I'm not a, was it a psychopathic zero killer? Was that true? Yeah, I know, you're not, I know you're not. It's highly mediocre, moderating, but not a killer. I mean, remember, it sees her killed a million goals. I mean, let's just keep score. We're true. It's not quite as good as Paul Paul, but you know, up there in the baddie category. Yeah. Okay, awesome boys. Well done. But before we leave you today, let me tell you about Omni. Your team needs insights, not just data lookups, the stuff that really matters and is critical to get it right, like cat payback periods and net dollar retention. For AI agents to act on your company data, they need your business context, your definitions, your logic, your permissions. Your data team to find it once, then anyone you're obsolete, your CFO, your PM can ask a question in English and get an answer in seconds, perplexity, mercury and DBT run on Omni and 20 VC listeners get a free three week trial, three week, very specific, not a month, but three weeks. Go to Omni.co/20VC, that's Omni.co/20VC. After Omni helps you find the right customers, check out helps you close them. Over the past 15 years, Guillem Puzzaz has led checkout.com through what he calls the "Valocity Years", a period of hyper growth with relentless product building. As his mother put it, "Play the game you're good at, for checkout.com that game is digital payments, obsessing over data, chasing basis points and compounding learnings over time." And that discipline is paying off. 2025, checkout.com processed over 300 billion in total volume, up 64% year over year, and returned to full year EBITDA profitability. They now support over a thousand enterprise merchants globally, including 63 that processed more than a billion annually, with brands like eBay, Vinted, Amax, ASOS and Teemoon. Guillem's message so it's pretty clear, they've earned the right to win anywhere. Now, they're investing in innovation across marketplaces, issuing financial experiences and a gentick commerce. If you want payments built for what What's next? Talk to the team at checkout.com. That's checkout.com. Invisible, invisible trains 80% of the top models, and then adapts them to the messy reality of your business. Take the Charlotte Horners, NBA team. Invisible took years of game tape and analog scouting those to go from uncertainty to a draft pick and summer league championship win in weeks not seasons. Get the data in order first, and suddenly AI can do almost anything for you in the enterprise. If you want AI that hits the PNL, go to invisible tech.ai/20VC.