20VC: Anthropic's $10BN Fundraise: Have They Beaten Cursor Already | a16z's $15BN Fundraise: Is the Middle Dead in VC Today? | How OpenAI Could Go to Zero and ElevenLabs at $11BN: Buy or Not?

Roel O'Driscoll

In the early stage, you're taking uncorrelated business risk, and in the late stage, you're taking 100% correlated valuation risk. If the growth is there for one more year, it looks cheap. I would be nervous if I was a $27 billion pre-Cursor investor.

Jason Lemkin

We've ascribed the odds of a downturn to less than zero. I think OpenAI has existential risk. It is a bet that the best of times lasts at least a decade. It's pretty interesting that Andreessen Horowitz not only raised the most capital but, on a 2-by-2, I think has the strongest founder brand.

Roel O'Driscoll

They've won, and they've won really well. You can be promiscuous at the A if you have enough late-stage stuff to cover it up.

Jason Lemkin

Can you still find a $10 billion gem outside the boundaries of this system or not? Now $100 billion doesn't feel like that much, does it?

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. This week, I'm joined by Jason Lemkin and Roel O'Driscoll, and we have a lot to cover. We're going to start with 2 monster rounds. It seems the only thing anyone's talking about right now is Anthropic, raising $10 billion at a $350 billion price. Is this the last round before they go public? How do we feel about the price? Over to you.

1. Anthropic Defends Its Valuation

Roel O'Driscoll

Probably yes on the first question, because they've stated they want to, and it feels like they can. If someone says they want to do something and it feels like that thing is doable, then logically it should get done. So, yeah, I think it probably will be the last round before the IPO.

And how do you feel about the price? Look, when they raised at $160 billion, I remember internalizing it. We talked about it, and frankly, we talked about it in our partnership. You kind of go, “Big number. Wow, that's the second- or third-largest private-company valuation ever.” Then you look at the market traction and the revenue traction, and you go, on a revenue-multiple basis, it's cheaper than some of the stuff we're doing at $200 billion and $100 billion pre-money.

This is a company that's gone from—I remember the numbers for Anthropic because they very kindly did them in round units of 10—from $100 million in 2023, at the end of the 2023 runway, to $1 billion at the end of the 2024 runway, to allegedly between $9 billion and $10 billion at the end of 2025. So let's assume those numbers are roughly correct. They 10x'd 2 years in a row.

I don't know—next year, do they... Let's just say they only, quote-unquote, “only 3x,” so they go to $30 billion. A rule of thumb is—and I'm going to go now from ARR and runway at the end to GAAP revenue for the year—take the opening ARR and the closing ARR and calculate the average. $10 billion and $30 billion average to $20 billion. That says they do actual GAAP revenue of $20 billion next year, so it's 17 times NTM revenue. It's a much lower revenue multiple than Palantir. It's kind of comparable with Cloudflare, for God's sake, in the public markets.

You do that math, and if the growth is there for one more year, it looks cheap. It's the old rule: It turns out you really, really can pay up for anything that goes 10x year on year. That's the bet, and the guys who did it at $170 billion 3 months ago are feeling pretty smart now. They're at 2x in 4 months. Calculate that IRR, Harry.

Jason Lemkin

The fact that they're only raising $10 billion is actually a sign that the unit economics are probably healthy.

Roel O'Driscoll

That's a good point.

Jason Lemkin

It's not that much dilution, right? Anthropic's been clear that they believe their unit economics are strong. They own not just enterprise, but code creation and application creation. They own building everything we've spent our lives working on.

If you're building with these tools, I know it's the trite VC thing to say, but it's hard not to believe we're in the first inning and just getting going. It's literally hard not to believe it. How that works out on a spreadsheet—how many tokens, how many trillions of revenue—is complicated, but qualitatively and subjectively, it feels like the first inning.

Jason, do you think they have the enterprise market at this point?

2. Claude Wins Enterprise

Jason Lemkin

Everything that I see at the API level—I mean, Claude has won it. Nothing is perfectly stable in AI. We should not feel that anything's perfectly stable, but the reality is that so far, nothing's dented that. It's birthed Cursor, Lovable, Replit, Harvey, and LangChain. I mean, these all... Even Cursor—Cursor is just a derivative of it. There are other models as well, but it's tough to stop this train.

Roel O'Driscoll

Yeah, I agree, and I think you should break the enterprise market up into—I would've said 2, and as of yesterday I'm going to say 3—and I'll tell you what I mean in a second.

There's the enterprise API market, which is basically selling your product to other ISVs that are building on top of it, or to enterprises building on top of it. They've been the premium product there for the enterprise for a long time. Because you're, quote-unquote, “just an API,” there's always a risk that as an ISV is building on top of your product, they might try to use cheaper open-source models for some of the more commoditized stuff. But to the extent that you need the high-end part of the product, that's been the business that Anthropic and Claude have been able to get.

That's where they started, obviously, at the API level. One of the biggest customers for that was the coding companies, like Cursor. Then, within the last year, they've said, “Hey, coding is probably the single largest use case for what we make. Let's build a coding product.” So they have Claude Code. That's allowed them to win at the enterprise level. I'm taking your “win at the enterprise” comment.

Now they're winning not just by being the API but by being the app for coders. It's not a 100% win. They're competing with Cursor, they're competing with GitHub, but they're grabbing more money.

Instead of maybe being 50% of the revenue of a coder, because you've got a gross margin of 50%, you're getting 100% of the revenue because you're selling the product. So that's a second category in which they're clearly, quote-unquote, “the winner.” I mean, my sense is their enterprise share of coding revenue is plus or minus comparable to Cursor and GitHub, maybe a little lower, but growing nicely.

3. Claude Expands Beyond Coding

And then the third thing is they announced a product yesterday. Caveat: I haven't been able to use it yet because I'm actually here at an offsite, and it's early in the morning. My coffee hasn't kicked in. The product is basically Claude for non-coders. It's the ability to do knowledge work within Claude. It's kind of an ability—Claude Workspaces, I think it's called. Don't quote me; I could be wrong about that.

Basically, the idea is that if you're doing other knowledge work besides coding, can you do it within Claude? The world, I think, has been going in this direction. We talked a little bit about Manus last week, and companies like that. There's a number of others. We have one, Obvious.ai, that has kind of launched a product, and that's just starting now. But Claude Workspaces is obviously the dominant one.

The idea is that if you're building PowerPoint, if you're manipulating data, if you're doing all the other knowledge work that those of us who aren't coders do, instead of bringing the AI to the Excel spreadsheet—which is what Copilot tried to do at Microsoft—you bring all these tools into the Claude space, into the workspace, and maybe it'll be more efficient. Now, I've read some preliminary reviews. Some of them are like, “Yes, this is amazing.” The people who've used it more said, “Yeah, it's amazing, but it's a bit janky.”

But the idea is there, and clearly the reason I mention all this is that the direction of travel is: don't just be, quote, “the chatbot for enterprise,” the chat interface for enterprise like ChatGPT is for research. Be the place where you do knowledge work for the other knowledge workers who aren't coders.

At a high level—and this is a zoom-out comment—but it's a scary one if you're Microsoft. Every single knowledge worker uses the Office suite. You get PowerPoint, you get Excel, you get Word. What is the AI version of the Office suite? It's a kick-ass product for Microsoft because every knowledge worker buys it.

Can you imagine turning up for work and someone saying, “We're not going to give you a spreadsheet, a word processor, or a PowerPoint product”? You're like, “What the fuck?” The idea that for every knowledge worker there can be some product like this, some bundle like this, is a huge-ass idea. And I don't think this is it yet, but the idea is clearly that, to the extent that you are doing knowledge work using AI, you probably will need some space to be in, and that's the game they're just joining now.

My job is to ask provocative questions. When we look at case 2 there, you mentioned the potential impact that Claude Code has on Cursor. I speak to many CPOs as part of 20 Products, and I ask them about tool usage internally. Everyone I speak to instantly says Claude Code, and the proportion of people who say Cursor has gone down dramatically in the last 3 months. Would you feel nervous if you were Cursor or a Cursor investor?

4. Cursor Faces Platform Risk

Roel O'Driscoll

It depends on the price I got in at. I mean, I wouldn't feel nervous if I got in at the $200 million pre-money valuation, because it's not going away. Again, there's an element of a horse-race drama here. We like to get caught in the— You call it provocative; I might call it getting lost in the details.

There's no doubt that Cursor has got 2 large competitors, both of whom can bundle with adjacencies: A, Claude Code, where they have a strategic dependency as well, and B, GitHub. So, yeah, I would be nervous if I was a $27 billion pre-money Cursor investor, but they've created something amazing.

What I always say to my CEOs is, the best way you know you've graduated from one league is when you start competing with people 1 league up. It's like you're in Division 1 of the English Premier League, and suddenly you graduate to the top division, where the champions play. What's it called now, the Premier Division? I'm so old I remember when that was Division 1.

But anyway, you get to play against different competitors. Cursor is now up against Microsoft, and it's up against their own supplier, Claude. So, yeah, they're playing in the big boys' leagues. But are you a little scared? Yeah, but you're damn glad to be playing there, because the other 10 coding agents aren't even going to get to play.

Jason Lemkin

For sure. If I were an investor, in the age of AI, I've given up on this nervousness about competition and disruption. Because what can you do? I mean, none of these products even worked a year ago. How nervous can you be holding a large position in a product that didn't work a year ago? You can only be so nervous or quit the game.

But even little things like Anthropic cutting off xAI's access to Anthropic this week—it is easy for me to imagine the business model switching. Right now, it's great for Anthropic to get an extra $1 billion or so a year from Cursor. It's a great deal. It's free money. They package the product, and I don't believe they have to sell it at any discount whatsoever, while getting another distribution channel.

Should that change, as Anthropic crosses $2 trillion and $10 trillion in revenue, it's easy to imagine that, 1, they could cut off access. That sounds aggressive, right? Or they just might limit access to the top models. They just might limit access. They just might degrade it.

There's no reason to believe that—what's the expression?—that the scorpion might not sting the frog. Who's the scorpion taking across the river?

Roel O'Driscoll

The frog and the scorpion. It's in his nature.

Jason Lemkin

Yeah. There's no reason that Anthropic just might sting Cursor just before it gets to the other side of the river. I think it would be naive to assume otherwise, right? There are many ways that the scorpion could sting the frog. The simplest way is to limit access to models. They've already done it on a limited scale with xAI and others. They could simply copy the product. How hard is it to build an IDE that's just the same as Cursor? It's really not that hard. They can build Replit and Lovable, too. These are not the greatest challenges of mankind.

Roel O'Driscoll

Yeah.

Jason Lemkin

So all of them are at risk of the scorpion stinging the frog. But—

Roel O'Driscoll

Yeah.

Jason Lemkin

I would still invest.

Roel O'Driscoll

It is worth pointing out that when the scorpion stings the frog, the scorpion dies too, in the old Aesop's fable and in The Crying Game, if you remember the movie. But, yeah, I love it, Jason, because the first thing you said I think is really so true. It's very helpful for me, because of the comment on being scared.

If you're going to be uncomfortable being scared, you need to just go home. I'm scared all the time, because these things change so much. I mean, I think we've said this before: in SaaS land, you could compound for 7 or 8 years. Now, there's existential risk every 6 months, and if you can't live with that, you probably need to find a different job. So I think you're spot on there.

If we've got to be comfortable being scared, to what extent is Apple choosing Gemini for Siri over the prior relationship with OpenAI a massive deal versus a temporary moment in time where Gemini is proving to outperform?

5. Apple Chooses Gemini

Roel O'Driscoll

It's a big deal. The big-deal comments are these. 1. Google and Apple obviously have a long-standing relationship where the money moves from Google to Apple for placement of search, because search monetizes with advertising, so therefore it's valuable to get real estate. They have a long-standing relationship, so it kind of makes sense that you'd go with your default relationship to make it happen.

The odd thing is that, for this relationship, I'm not clear on the money movement. Because there's no advertising model, maybe the odd thing is Apple might be paying Google for Gemini, I don't know, while at the same time getting paid a lot more by Google for placement on search, which is why the 2 products are slightly different. That could flip. If OpenAI had a model, for example, that had ads in it, then maybe the dynamics of the money move could flip.

But, yeah, if you're in the distribution business, you want to be on 1 billion phones. I mean, the proof that it's worth something is that Google pays—I used to know the number, I don't—$10 billion a year. Some absurd sum of money just to show up on the phones, because it's the best distribution on the planet.

So, yeah, at the margin, you're sad. It's not like OpenAI blinks at bad economics. Those guys have an economic indifference curve that would make your head hurt. So, yeah, I think at the margin you'd be bummed not to be on it.

Jason Lemkin

Certainly today, Google feels like a far more stable partner than OpenAI. It's just the reality. OpenAI is not the only game in town anymore for Apple.

If you're OpenAI, are you not slightly nervous? You're being eaten away by Anthropic. You have headwinds against you, seemingly like you haven't had before, and incredible model performance. Then, on the consumer side, you've got Gemini outperforming, you've got Nano Banana being incredible, and the tailwind of Google and the machine behind Google.

It feels like you're being eaten at every angle, combined with very high SBC and high churn. It feels precarious.

Jason Lemkin

Well, luckily you're a nonprofit, so whoever wins is great for the global economy, right? You don't have to worry about it as a nonprofit. It's all for the greater good.

Roel O'Driscoll

You're not a nonprofit anymore.

I'm being serious.

Roel O'Driscoll

Stop. No, hang on. Stop.

Oh, whoops.

Roel O'Driscoll

Hold on, Roel.

Whoops.

Roel O'Driscoll

No, no. Hang on. First of all, just to be precise, you're not a nonprofit anymore. Your largest shareholder is a nonprofit. So, to make it even more complicated, if your economic value goes down, the biggest single loser is this wonderful nonprofit called OpenAI Nonprofit, which has actually already made some interesting donations.

Which was very clever, by the way. Once you got that deal done, start dispensing some money as a charity to show it's a charity and to separate the two. So if OpenAI's value goes down, the largest loser is the charity, the second-largest loser is Microsoft, which will survive, and, as you pointed out, the third-largest loser is Masa.

So the core question is, precarious is a little strong a word. You feel angsty and driven. That's why they're at code red. But, A, to Jason's point, anyone who's not feeling nervous doesn't understand the game. So, of course, they're feeling nervous, because you have to play the game.

But look, I saw something—I mean, actually, I saw it in The New York Times this morning, and I could be wrong. Sebastian Maltby, who I think wrote the book on venture at one time, was kind of, "Oh, I think OpenAI goes to zero." And I think that's absurd. There's huge value here.

We all default to the fact that they have 800 million users. They'll find a model. I mean, I think there is a model there. They have subscriptions, they have a business. It's not going to zero.

The way I keep score is that the relative value of Anthropic to OpenAI is kind of the ratio of, let's call it, management success over the last 3 years. The truth is, it's gone from, you know, 8 or 10-plus to 1 to much more convergent. It's now only 2 to 1.

So if you were in a race, the objective measure of success over the last 3 years is something like you were in the lead 10 to 1 over the other guy. You're still in the lead, but he's now only 50% behind you and coming on fast. So are you nervous? Yeah. Are you bummed? Yeah. You're still in the lead; don't blow it.

I think you've got a differentiated business. For all the Gemini talk, I still enjoy the ChatGPT experience more for the kind of research I do, for example, to go on this pod. So they've got something amazing and compelling there. They just need to, frankly, focus, knuckle down, focus, and make it work. Realize its potential.

Jason Lemkin

That's a stupid statement, Roel, because they have made it work.

6. OpenAI Could Go To Zero

Roel O'Driscoll

There is a very simple bear case for OpenAI, though. There is a very simple bear case that it goes almost to zero, which is that the shelf life of an LLM is less than 100 days. The half-life is very short. Something happens: there's a macro disruption, and OpenAI can't raise the capital it needs.

All of its competitors—we just talked about how Anthropic has much superior margins; Gemini has massive cash flow; xAI is crazy, but it'll get a trillion of Trump contracts. OpenAI is vulnerable to—you know, we joke about macro disruptions. Every portfolio company that didn't hit its Q4 numbers blamed macro disruptions. But it easily could happen.

We've had systemic shocks in our lifetimes. If this was 2007–2008, or whenever, OpenAI could almost die in the sense that it could not evolve when its competition could.

One caveat: I understand your comment, which is why the old Bill Gates rule was always, have 2 years of cash on the balance sheet, like opex cash. The only way you could get into a really tough situation is if the world went to shit just when you needed to raise more money.

They're smart people. If you're the CFO of that company, your mental rule of thumb should be: raise like crazy—you've got the world's best fundraiser—and never have less than 2 years' cash. With 2 years' cash, even if the world changes, you can tweak the thing enough to converge more quickly. You just dial down your ambition and dial up your cash flow focus.

Jason Lemkin

But how do you do that if Gemini and Anthropic can keep going? How do you do that if your competitors can keep going through that? That's the thing. This isn't Workday spending a little bit less on making sure that the Windows 98 integration works properly. You die if you don't have the capital. You die.

Roel O'Driscoll

But I suppose you're right, Jason, but I rejected your first comment, which is that this is the kind of user base that churns at 100 days' notice. I think that there is a large degree of, and an increasingly large degree of, consumer behavior and stickiness.

Jason Lemkin

No, no, wait. Hold on just 1 second. Just imagine, okay, OpenAI needs $100 billion in the next 2 to 3 years. That is more than it has spent to date, okay? Its spend is accelerating. Let's imagine it can't raise that and it's frozen in time.

ChatGPT is essentially frozen in time today. Would you use ChatGPT from a year ago? Would you use Claude from a year ago? NFW—you wouldn't use these products from a year ago. There's no way you would use them in Cursor or for coding. There's not a one-in-a-million chance any developer would use a year-old model today. They were so terrible.

Roel O'Driscoll

I understand.

Jason Lemkin

This company would deteriorate so badly. It would be like Detroit—it would still exist, right? Or it would be like AOL and dial-up. You'd still hear the shrieking because some people don't know any better. Grandma's fine with ChatGPT from a year ago because it helps her with recipes in the kitchen, but the rest of the world's moved on to broadband.

Roel O'Driscoll

Two comments. One is, yes, it is astonishing that someone just traded AOL and it still has cash flow. That was the funnest fact of the year. Literally last year, someone was like, "Wow, that thing's worth a billion bucks still, 20 years on."

I don't agree with what you're saying. I understand the point, but what you're saying—in other words, imagine a 2-by-2, where macro conditions are good and macro conditions are bad, and the other side of the 2-by-2 is scaling laws still working, so improvement is vital, versus scaling laws slowing down.

You're right. In a world where scaling laws are still massively working, so the next model is infinitely better than the last model, and where macro is shit, so they can't access the capital, then in that corner-case scenario, you're right. You could paint that scenario, because you can always paint a bad scenario. That's what you learned. I think it's just the lower-likelihood scenario.

Jason Lemkin

Yeah, but let me just add 1 more point, and I don't want to take too much time here.

Yeah.

Jason Lemkin

You're the boss. I think we have returned to a moment in time—it feels like late 2020, 2021, or maybe, Rory, you can pick some other times in our careers—where we have ascribed the odds of a downturn to less than zero. In venture, in everything.

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Calacanis

We are raising funds.

Agreed.

Jason Calacanis

We are deploying capital, we are doing up rounds weeks after the last one. Underlying that bet, essentially, is a 0% chance of things not continuing. We see it in data center use, in power use, water use, and RAM.

And that's fine. We're not paid to mitigate downside in venture startups, but I think OpenAI has existential risk. It is a bet that the best of times lasts at least a decade. And I think you can tell me the history of downturns: they're usually shorter than we think, but we don't know. A 10-year cycle would be a long one historically, right? Ten years with no downturn.

I also have to say, I do think on the consumer retention element, I think you're wrong, Rory. I think people are a lot more promiscuous than we give them credit for.

Rory O'Driscoll

Speak for yourself.

Since the latest Gemini models, I definitely am. I'm a total slut for a new model.

But since the new Gemini models came out, you've had a 22% drop in ChatGPT usage.

Jason Lemkin

My son dropped it. He pays for Cursor, and he uses Google because Google is free for him. He doesn't want to pay $20 a month for ChatGPT. He pays for Cursor out of his own pocket. Out of his own pocket, he pays for Cursor, but he doesn't pay for ChatGPT anymore.

Remember, invest in whatever your kids do. This is how you get into Snap and all these hot deals. So if my son's off ChatGPT, Rory, we've got a short. Let's get on Kalshi and just short this baby. Come on. It's to Harry's point: the next generation is fickle.

If you ever read failure analysis of things like airplane crashes or anything like that, what you always discover is that any crash is always multifactorial.

Roel O'Driscoll

There’s always more than one cause. I think what you’re saying is correct. If macro goes to shit at a point in time when they don’t have a ton of capital, and at that time the market for this product is still incredibly fluid at the consumer level, then if all those things happen at the same time, you have trouble. So it’s not a stupid comment to say it can happen.

It’s just concatenated probabilities that I think are fairly low. I think it’s much more likely that you have to moderate your ambitions, execute in the consumer space, make it happen, and build a world-class business on that.

7. Andreessen Raises Fifteen Billion

Speaking of moderating ambitions, there’s one firm that is not moderating its ambition: our dear friends at Andreessen Horowitz, with $15 billion for the new funds. I believe it was 22% of all the dollars raised from venture in 2025 going to them with this fundraise. It’s enormous. How did we react to it? And a subsequent, really underlying question: do you have to go mega-big platform or tiny boutique to play the game in 2026?

Jason Lemkin

Listen, on the one hand, we’ve been talking about this since this pod started, right? We’ve been talking about massive funds, and all you have to do is look at the Databricks and Anthropic rounds, and it’s pretty easy to see why you’d want to do that playbook. I would say it’s pretty interesting that Andreessen not only raised the most capital but, on a 2-by-2, I think has the strongest founder brand. That’s hard to do both.

It’s hard to do both, and it has evolved. I’ve been around long enough to remember vaguely when Andreessen started, and it was cool from day 1. Now, it wasn’t what it is today, but I remember I had a subtenant. Marc Andreessen came into our office to meet with them, to fund them, and it was a God moment. “Oh my God, is Marc Andreessen in the office? I mean, he sure looks like Marc Andreessen.”

They have invested in that at many levels on the brand, and I don’t know how they’ve done it in some ways. It’s gone a little bit up and down. I remember I had one founder who was pretty hot, who was bummed that he got a term sheet from Andreessen and not Sequoia, but that doesn’t happen today. That was the 2008–09 version of Andreessen. That was a brief moment.

And you have returns. The returns were published. The returns are top decile—or quartile, whatever, top tier—which used to be a knock, and founders love this brand. Whoever was talking about fund versus firm or platform, it’s hard to do all of those at scale. Founders love it. It’s defensible. So you might as well hoover up 51% of the capital and then just shut down your competitors.

Roel O'Driscoll

Agreed. I’ve thought about this a lot in terms of the question you asked, and I have a lot to cover on this. Just a heads-up. I’ll give you the summary: they’ve won, and they’ve won really well, and the only thing that might impact them at this point is mis-execution internally.

Now let’s unpick this, because the first question in your little notes, you said, is: can they make a 3X or a 5X on $15 billion? That’s the question you asked, right? Everyone always starts with that question. “Oh, there’s just not enough exits to justify that,” is what they say. It’s the wrong way to think about it, because I think you have to break it apart and say: first of all, is the industry at a stage now whereby that amount of capital can earn a return in total?

In other words, the total capital going in. Remember, if the total capital going in can overall earn a decent return, it doesn’t matter from the industry’s perspective if that $100 billion of invested capital goes all to 1 firm and they invest it all, or it all goes to 100 different firms and each invests $1 billion. The first macro question is: is the overall market in equilibrium such that you can get a decent return here?

Then the second question is, given that—again, going back to if it is in equilibrium—how much of that total money can these guys take and profitably deploy? In other words, are there diseconomies or economies of scale, and can they execute it well? Fast-forward to my 2 comments on this: A, I think the industry is roughly in equilibrium, so they can do it, and in fact, the numbers are moving in their favor.

The second comment is, for the argument on employing it at scale, I think it can make it, right? So let’s do the first. They raise $15 billion, but they do 20% of the total, so it means the industry as a whole raised $75 billion. Everyone goes, “Oh, there’s not enough exits for that,” right? Well, rough and tough, 3X.

The value of exits this year, which wasn’t an amazing year for exits, including healthcare, by the way, was around $300 billion. So, not perfect. That’s not all owned by venture, but you’re kind of roughly there. Presumably next year, if it’s $300 billion this year and then Anthropic alone goes public, next year is $500 billion of exits.

So the industry raised under $100 billion this year. If they really raised $15 billion and they really are 20% of the total, that implies $75 billion of venture raised. It seems to me that’s a kind of number that can be digested and yield a 3X return overall. So it’s not like it’s stupid, the amount of money.

It’s actually getting better, because in the last couple of years, venture has deployed a couple of hundred billion a year and only raised about $60 billion to $80 billion a year. Some of that is because some of the capital being deployed is nontraditional venture, but it’s getting harder for newer funds to raise money.

So if you move on to the second question, can they deploy 20% of venture successfully? The macro trends are moving in their favor because they’re raising more money at a point in time when other people are raising less. So they’re in a nice position, provided they can deploy it. I think overall the industry is getting into equilibrium.

Then the second question is, how can they put it out? They raised 20% of the money last year, right? But you’ve got to think it over 2 years. If they raise every second year—though, interestingly, they raised in ’24 and then ’25—let’s just say every 2 years. That implies it’s 10% of the money on a sustaining basis, agreed? It’s like you’re putting out 10% of the capital.

So basically they’ve got to get 10% of the exits, they’ve got to get 10% of the Series A’s, et cetera, et cetera. Interestingly, the work that we talked about way back last year—the one the partner from DST did—showed that over the last decade, Andreessen did roughly 10% of all Series A’s that became $5 billion outcomes. So it’s kind of their market share. They’ve got to get 10% of everything.

They’ve got to get 10% of the great Series A’s, they’ve got to get 10% of the great Series B’s. Provided they could execute that all the way up the stack, they make it happen.

Jason Lemkin

That’s a great way to summarize it.

Roel O'Driscoll

And what I realized when I did that, Jay—I literally did it this morning, because I’m getting ready for our offsite, so I’m looking at exit data—is there are 2 risks, and we’ll talk about them in a second. But you look at it and you go, it’s not crazy.

As you say, it’s in part because they’ve done it in the makeup. I read the Packy McCormick article and all that. I think a lot of us come into this business as investors. I think they came into it as engineers and as company builders, and they did a great job of solving the system, right?

There’s a lot of leakage along the way. One of the things that was interesting in that article is you deal with a lot of negative knocks along the way, but it doesn’t matter, provided the model works overall. Again, I repeat: they’ve got to get 10% of everything, right?

Now, there are 2, maybe 3 things that go wrong. Maybe 3. The first is, when you get bigger, if you have to do 10% of all Series A’s, it just becomes a lot of deals, which means a lot of people, which means: is the marginal investor any good? Can you stay good when you have 20 people writing checks versus 10? It’s just hard. That’s a management problem. They’re good managers.

The second thing is, the funny thing is, you say you’ve got to get 10% of all exits, right? The total value of all private companies right now is about $3.6 trillion, which, pleasingly, by the way, if you say 3X on invested capital, that’s $1.2 trillion over 10 years. That kind of says it’s got $100 billion a year creating $300 billion a year of value.

If you chop off just the top 3 deals, you’re down well north of $1 trillion. You go down to $2.6 trillion. So the bigger the firm, the more capital you raise. The math all works, but it’s very top-dependent.

I can make my math work and not get any top 10 exits. You simply can’t make this kind of math work without getting those top exits, and you don’t have to get in at the A. You don’t have to do the A of SpaceX. But you better show up on the cap table before they hit $1 trillion, because that’s a trillion dollars of value that you’ve got to get.

That’s the mission for them. They’re doing it. And that’s why they’re the best—

Jason Lemkin

But that part, to me, seems the easiest part, Rory. You simplify it in a great way, which is they need to do 10% of Series A’s that matter each year. That’s doable if you have a top-2 brand, I think, and you have the right team.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yes.

Jason Lemkin

You just meet with every deal. The job is to meet with every deal. I don't think you can do 10% of every pre-seed deal. I think even YC can't. That's a different question. It's doable.

Then, if you have one of the top 3 brands and a large enough team, even at Insight, I learned this from Teddy back in the day: you get fired if we don't see every deal. It's a different question whether we win it. We get fired if we don't see every deal. If Insight can do that and Vista can do that, why can't Andreessen see every single deal?

Because they have relationships with every seed manager that matters. They're out everywhere. They're close to Garry Tan and the rest of the world. Why shouldn't you see every deal? There'll be some from left field, right?

Rory O'Driscoll

Totally.

Jason Calacanis

Agreed.

Jason Calacanis

Of course. But why shouldn't you see every deal? If your brand's strong enough, you should still see them. The interesting question is, why can't this scale? This was the question a couple of years ago that I remember Andrew Bialecki from Klaviyo asking. He's like, “Well, why not 90% market share? Why can't Andreessen have 40% or 50%?” There are conflicts, of course. Let's put conflicts aside, though. Why can't your math scale to 50%?

Rory O'Driscoll

It's actually an interesting question, because if you think about where I started, you're right. One of the examples in my investment company—you can tell that, deep in their heart, they believe that even if 1 other venture firm has $1 billion, they're like, “Why are we letting them have that?” We'd really just prefer it to be all us, right?

Going back to the total equilibrium column, if every year the technology industry's entrepreneurs give the venture guys the chance to turn $100 billion into $300 billion, the entrepreneurs, at some macro level, don't care if that's done by 1 firm doing all of it or half of it versus 100 different firms doing it all, right? There's no obvious economic reason.

Jason Lemkin

Especially if there's no downside to Andreessen. If all I get is upside, I don't get any drama if I sell my company, I don't get thrown under the bus, and they do my pro ratas. The worst case is I'm treated well and I get to go to these cool events. That's the worst case. Why would I not take their money?

Rory O'Driscoll

So you're right—exactly right. It's an interesting question. If they can do 10%, why can't they do 20%, right?

Jason Lemkin

50%.

Roel O'Driscoll

Yeah, exactly. I think there are really 3 things that could go wrong, and it's an interesting spec. One is, as I say, I think you should assume that when you have that cap, you see all the good deals at the Series A, but remember, you also see all the bad deals. The more pickers you have to have to do more of the deals, the harder it gets to have all those pickers be good. Your mistake rate goes up. But you can cover for that if you do enough of the A, right? So that's the first thing.

The second thing is, as you get later, you have to concentrate in the winners, right? You can be diversified as shit at the A. Going back to the comment, if it's $3.6 trillion of total private value and the top 4 companies now—if SpaceX really was worth $1 trillion—you could argue the top 3 companies are now $1.8 trillion. You just gotta make sure you concentrate down on those. If you slip on missing one, it just gets harder to execute. That's the second big risk: you don't concentrate on the 1 thing.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, but you have to have a find every 2 years or every year.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yeah, no.

Jason Calacanis

You can. I think your job is to get good at concentrating. I think Andreessen should target—Ben and Mark actually did not WhatsApp me on this—but I think your math, Rory, is so powerful to me: 10% of Series As.

Combine that with Andrew Bialecki saying, “Own 80% of your market or you're a failure as a founder.” Own 51% of venture. I believe conflicts are a super-solvable problem for founders. Law firms figure it out. You just isolate it. We have 3 teams, and Andreessen becomes known as the gold standard. There are no conflicts.

You can have direct competitors of Andreessen, and they have solved this. There is no leakage. They have solved this problem. This is traditional VC. Even Sequoia has the issue. We don't do conflicts, right? I remember in the early days when we met, we referred some stuff, and you guys were like, “No, HubSpot's our winner. We can't have any conflicts.”

I think it's a solvable issue. Then you get 51% market share. Then Sequoia and those General Catalyst guys get the scraps. If you wanna build a firm and not a fund, this is what I challenge my friends to do: 51%. I think you can solve all the other issues. I genuinely think you can solve them. Andreessen hasn't had a fund below 4X gross. It hasn't had a fund below 3X net.

Rory O'Driscoll

What I like about doing this with you, Jason, is that I can go in expecting to have to make 1 set of comments and end up on the total opposite side. I was expecting the “Oh, they can't make the math work at 10%” argument, and clearly I convinced you they can, so now you're like, “Fuck it. If you can do 10, why not do 50?”

Jason Lemkin

Why not? You're a wimp not to try it if you can access the capital.

Rory O'Driscoll

Well, that's actually an interesting caveat. I think there are 2 or 3 risks. One is, if you're doing Series As, the more you do, the more people you have to have, and at some point it becomes unmanageable. When you're deploying more capital, you only have 1 of 2 moves: you either do more small deals or fewer big deals.

If you're doing 60 Series As a year instead of 20 Series As a year, you need X number of GPs. I think quality goes down at scale. Let me give you proof on that. Andreessen's market share is higher than Benchmark's in terms of the great Series As, as a percentage of market share, but the hit rate is much lower. As you get bigger, you get more done, but the quality rate goes down.

At some point, not only does your hit rate go down, but you probably therefore have a lot more fails. If you scale from 5% market share to 10%, your hit rate goes down by a couple of points. If you go from 10% to 20%, now you have the next 10% being written by less-good investors. The pressure to do deals goes up. My guess is your hit rate goes down over time.

That's the way it happens on the Series A side. I think there is a natural limit to this, because if you look at public investing, index investing is a scale business. Stock-picking is not. We can talk about whether indexing is the right answer, which is why all the big money managers of the public markets are indexes. But stock-picking, in general, gets hard when you're trying to be smart in a room with more than 5 or 7 people in it. I think there are inherent limits.

8. VC Middle Is Hollowing

If you are Index and Sequoia, Index reduced the size of the fund they went out and raised to circa $1.5 billion. Sequoia actually has quite contractually constrained fund sizes. I think the seed fund is around $200 million, and they don't have billions and billions per vehicle. Do they have to embrace scale and say, “Fuck it. Andreessen has set a precedent. This is a money-wall game”?

Rory O'Driscoll

There's no doubt that you can pursue a really great seed and Series A strategy with plus or minus $500 million—maybe $500 million to $1 billion. There's no doubt about it, right? Index can do it, Sequoia can do it, everyone can do it. The math is clear. You can have 5 partners doing deals.

Maybe another way to ask the question is: to be successful in the Series A, do you also have to add this adjunct product called a shit ton of money for your growth stage? You use that money to do 2 things. One is to help you win Series A deals, because you can say to people, “Not only would I do your Series A, but I have a wall of money for later,” right? That's the implied thing.

The other advantage it gives you is that you seem bigger, so you get more of everything. That's the question. Benchmark has proven you don't. Andreessen has proven that it can be great. I think the real truth is that there are multiple ways to play that Series A game.

One of the ways that wasn't true at all 15 or 20 years ago, but now is clearly true, is co-attaching a big late-stage fund to your Series A firm, provided you execute on both of them well. It's a way to increase your profile. It increases your value to founders. It increases your personal net worth enormously. Provided you don't shank the late-stage part of the business, it's one way to play it, but it's not the only way.

Jason Lemkin

I don't believe—no matter what VCs tell founders in their spiels and pitches—I don't believe founders highly value the fact that VCs can fund you through every stage. Every big fund tells you that. Every Index, every Redpoint, everyone comes in and says, “The good news is, if we deem you worth it, we can shovel cash into you if we believe you're 1 of our best companies.”

I don't think founders go skipping down the street from South Park or Sand Hill when they hear that. They just think, “That's not my problem, right? I need help now and the capital in the amount and on the terms I need.” I just don't think that is as defensible as winning all the As. That is just an output of a combination of pro ratas and winning the right to do beyond your pro rata.

Roel O'Driscoll

Put me down for a no on that, because I think there are 2 ways it helps, Jason.

I hear you. I don't think it's dispositive for the founder, but I think it helps at the margin. For a couple of reasons. One, it helps you tell the founder a story: “Oh, look at the last 2 years.” Lightspeed do a really good job of that.

“Look at”—what is it? “Navan or—oh, look how much we owned at the exit, ’cause we were there the whole way through.” Andreessen tell a good story with Databricks: “Oh, look, we're there the whole way through.” And I think at the margin that helps, right? More money's better than less.

Jason Lemkin

I don't think an average Series A founder is picking you because you diluted the founders of Navan to 5%. I don't think that's the most compelling story I've heard at a founder pitch.

Roel O'Driscoll

Oh, that's harsh.

Jason Lemkin

They're picking me because I believe Mark and Ben and team are going to help me build a $100 billion company.

Roel O'Driscoll

Yeah. The second argument—because I think the third argument's the important one—I'll give you the second argument: one, you can use all the growth-stage fees to fund all the platform stuff, and you can decide how much or how little you believe in that. I think the third argument is the really compelling one. Watch this. It's when I have a late-stage fund, I can decide I'm not clever enough to be like Benchmark and pick just the good ones.

Fuck it, I'll just do more of them, and some of them will be great. Even if I make errors at the A, I will be able to get so much money in my winners that I can cover for my mistakes. And I'm not saying that's what any of these firms are doing, but it's clear in the math. The more scale you do, the more errors you make, right? Therefore, the only way you can make more errors is if you have a way to come back from them.

The easiest way to come back from it is just to know that if, to get one good Series A, I'm willing to get 3 or 4 of them wrong, because in that good Series A, I'll do the B, C, D, and E, and the other stuff gets lost in the noise. That's actually the real power of the late-stage fund. It's clean-up on aisle 5. Yeah, we made some whoopsies, we made some misses, but we'll just clean it up, right?

The other 3 Series As that went bust? Cost of doing business. You're down $60 million, $20 million on each. You have $20 million in the good one. You put $1 billion in, and you just 2x it, and you've covered your nut. That's the real strength. You can be promiscuous at the A if you have enough late-stage stuff to cover it up. That's the argument.

And it gets back to the core thing. I think it was Insider. I think if you approach your business as an investor—and I think Benchmark is superb—but I'm trying to pick the best, and I naturally gravitate to that. I think when you approach it as an engineer, those guys said, “How do you engineer an overall system such that it works?”

And you say, “Hmm, I can take a little loss rate here, provided the overall system can cover for it.” It's just an approach.

Well, for me, the truth is the ballooning of your growth assets means you have ever-increasing price elasticity on your early assets. For us, playing the early game, they can just come in and bid $300 million when we're bidding $150 million. It doesn't fricking matter, because David George is going to put in a $300 million check at $3 billion or $4 billion.

The more you have here, the more elasticity you have here, and that's the real alpha that you get from this. That was my point, which Alex Rampell said on the show that we released on Monday: very simply, the middle is dead. Every other asset class that matures, you see a boutique specialist and you see a very large platform play, and the middle hollows out.

I mean this in the nicest and most loving way, Rory, because I think you're utterly brilliant. Are you not the middle, and how would you respond to that?

Rory O'Driscoll

I think, first of all, yeah, in that context, you are the middle. But if you're going to do it crudely on AUM, I do think there is pressure when you have firms that can raise $15 billion. That definitely creates additional pressure, and you'd be a fool not to say it. I think you have to focus, because I think the word boutique doesn't just mean small.

Given the stage we invest at, we can only do 20 to 30 deals per fund. We can only focus on enterprise software. We don't do consumer. We don't do crypto. You have to be good at something. At the stage we invest at, we couldn't be a $250 million, quote-unquote, “boutique,” because at your Series A and Series B, you're going to have to be writing $20 million to $30 million checks with 50% reserves.

So what you have to do at a minimum is focus on a specific set of areas and be the best at that. So, yes, let's examine what Andreessen Horowitz does, right? Enterprise, consumer, fintech, crypto, defense, blah. If we were trying to cover all those grounds, we'd be doomed.

It's interesting that Alex Rampell says that. But on the other hand, it's very noticeable that they've split the fund up into 4 funds roughly our size, to put it right at you. American Dynamism, roughly over $1 billion. Fintech and AI and apps is about $1.5 billion. Infra, $1.5 billion.

Because implicitly, by the way, I think it was a brilliant strategy. Very Alfred Sloan, if you read the founding of GM. What they're doing is saying they're recognizing you couldn't run this as a single thing, because I think you see deterioration of investment quality. What they've done is they've given Martin Casado his sandbox. They've given David Ulevitch his sandbox. They've given Alex Rampell his sandbox.

Each of those funds is a fricking boutique fund at $1 billion, just like us. So, no, I don't buy that. A focused $1 billion fund. What they do have with the $15 billion that you don't have as a $900 million fund in the same market as their $1.5 billion AI and apps fund is the air cover of the brand, and they have the cleanup of the $5 billion late-stage fund to cover for their misses.

So, yeah, that's the advantage they have. But I think to just simplistically say everyone else goes away is not just interesting as a comment; it's belied by the way they've structured their business, because that's what they've done. But you have to be damn good, because you have to get up every morning and say you're competing against someone who will see almost everything, who can really lean into what they want, ’cause they have it, and they have the brand and the late-stage money.

You have to get there earlier. If you wait till it's consensus or anything close to consensus, you're probably going to lose. I mean, it's the Peter Thiel question, because I always think if you look at the 2 biggest entrants in the last 30 years—really since Benchmark in ’95—Andreessen Horowitz figured it out as founders who were engineers, and they systematized it.

And I think Founders Fund, even though the name is Founders, figured it out as founders who were incredible investors and figured it out from an investor perspective. So the lens is: they thought it through, whereas Andreessen Horowitz engineered and managed it through. They're both, obviously, the 2 successful scale entrants.

I think the Peter Thiel comment is: What do you know that no one else knows? If you're doing a quote-unquote “boutique” or a focused firm, you have to know something and have an area that the more general funds don't have, otherwise you're toast. Exactly. You have to see things earlier. It's hard. It turns out to be hard to make money.

Did you hear that spoiler? That was Rory saying the next fund's going to be $1.5 billion. Coming soon.

Rory O'Driscoll

Absolutely not.

Jason Lemkin

I mean, it's all true, right? Obviously, Andreessen down to YC will squeeze out a lot of players. You can't argue with that. The meta question is, can you still find acorns? Can you still find diamonds in the rough? Are there any good startups that don't go through YC? Are there any that Andreessen won't see the A?

Anthropic is on fire, but one of the co-founders said the very first time they tried to raise money, 22 out of 23 VCs said no. Now, almost instantly, everyone put money in. Can you find that moment in time? If the markets are so efficient in venture, from the bottom end—from YC to South Park Commons to HF0 to Project Europe—if those have become so efficient in discovery that the only thing left is inception, there are a lot of VCs that have been doing this a long time who think the only thing left is inception investing.

You can't compete with YC and Project Europe and HF0 and South Park Commons, because they've all locked up the market. So inception's— Maybe there'll be a new fund, pre-EF, that locks up the pre-inception market. We'll go to middle school or grammar school. So there is truth to that.

Here's my way of thinking about venture. This is the only thing; otherwise, I would quit. Can you still find a $10 billion gem outside the boundaries of this system or not? This is the meta question. If you cannot find a $10 billion gem, then this is all a game of fees or riding the downturn of the industry.

If it is still possible, and your fund or firm—that differentiation Andreessen makes between fund and firm—can actually still find one of those outside of the boundaries of this system, then you can make an insane amount of money. But if not, it's all performative. It's all little checks. It's all $25,000 checks into hot YC companies, and it's all a lifestyle joke on Twitter.

That's the question. Will this market, as it matures—and it has, goodness gracious, matured a lot in the last couple years—ruthlessly create discovery for all asset classes to inception? It's certainly all down the path to doing that, right? Here's the question to Garry Tan and friends.

Can you find a great startup that won't go through YC and friends? Can you even find one anymore?

But I think, just to pose it in 2 ways, there are 2 founders. There's the ones who are young and want YC, and then there's the serial entrepreneurs who want money at a good price and people who won't get in your way, which is Andreessen. Naveen Rao, Databricks, multiple rounds before anything came public, all swallowed by Sequoia and Andreessen.

So the question, just to add to your question, is: can you find any founders that don't go through either YC or Sequoia and Andreessen, with big money very early behind the scenes because they're in those insider networks? I don't know. I got in trouble last week because I tweeted, “The worst place to be investing is Series A. You either need to be pre-seed or pre-IPO today to make money.”

Jason Lemkin

There is one segment that will always exist in venture, I think. When I look back, this is where I've done a lot of investments. We used to call it a second seed. You can call it whatever. When there's a glitch in the matrix, when they stumble a bit, or when no one sees the reacceleration, it's hard, right?

But there are moments in time where someone is the hottest company at YC, it has a couple of great months, it reboots, and all of a sudden it reaccelerates 6 months, 12 months down the road. I just invested in one that, because of Anthropic and friends, reaccelerated 2 years after YC. It can happen. That is a niche, but it's a narrow one. I mean, it happens all the time, right? But it's a narrow one still.

That's a hard investing ground. I credit you, and you're brilliant at it, Jason. But doing the glitch in the matrix—seeing what others don't—that's tough.

Jason Lemkin

Yeah. Owner was a glitch in the matrix when Redpoint didn't see it and I did the seed, and then they came in and put in every single round since. There are a lot of glitches in the matrix. They happen because the progress is not linear in the early days, right? But if progress is linear, man, I don't think there's any hope for boutiques and buddies.

It's not, but it almost is today, and that's kind of the weird thing with AI companies and progress—

Roel O'Driscoll

It is almost—

You know, guys, comment here. First of all, a lot of that is true. Yeah, and just to cite some numbers, Y Combinator companies—I think roughly 20-something percent of unicorns have gone through Y Combinator, so 80% haven't. And then on your question, is it all going to be done by, quote-unquote, the good investors?

We track this by round. I mean, typically, we're taking 10 names as being impressive, hard to beat, as I'd call them, where you kind of go, “Hmm, if I'm up against Marc Andreessen, I might lose,” right? We have a mental list of 10 hard-to-beats. At the A, it's 40% to 50% of total deals. The interesting thing is, it climbs steadily, and by the C, it's about 80%.

In other words, let's call it the Rory hard-to-beat mental list. By the time you get to the C, 80% of the time, they have one of those names in the cap table. So the market is pretty efficient, right? As you pointed out, venture does a stunning job of missing the turn.

I mean, if you're taking the 2 actually big turns of the last 2 decades, Salesforce struggled to get a dime from venture and didn't. And Anthropic and OpenAI, with the amazing exception of Khosla, didn't get venture either. I mean, the first venture round at OpenAI was $23 billion pre with Thrive, and the first venture round at Anthropic was $4 billion pre with Spark and Menlo Ventures, right?

So we're sitting here saying, “We have structurally solved all our problems. We're amazing. We got all this coverage.” But in the end, it turns out picking matters, and it is newsworthy and interesting how many of the dominant companies, because they were unusual, struggled to get venture acceptance. So it's not just a given that, if you cover enough ground, you get it.

I mean, Coinbase, I think Andreessen did either the B or the C. Union Square did the A very thematically in 2012, and I think Initialized and Y Combinator did the seed. So there is an element of picking here.

There's only an element of picking if you believe that company growth is nonlinear and will continue to be. If you believe that company growth has changed to being linear and signals are clearer than they've ever been, then picking becomes less important.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yes. If it's incredibly obvious to everyone, and then you rank-order on, for lack of a better word, a beauty-contest basis, you're probably going to rank lower than some people who have $15 billion and the guy who invented the product. Oh, well.

And you're right, there is a little bit now. It does feel like a time when it's, quote-unquote, very obvious. Generally, my observation is: be very nervous when you think everything's going to work, just as a comment, because that's usually when you're—

I just look at the best in Europe, which is Legora, ElevenLabs, and Lovable. I think you'll probably say those are the 3 breakouts right now.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yep.

And the growth has been entirely linear. There's been no faltering in execution or growth, and that is different from years gone by.

Rory O'Driscoll

Which actually will segue nicely to—remember I said there's one other risk here about all these strategies? These strategies involve excellent early-stage investing as part of your overall strategy, but then a huge number, maybe 4 or 5 times that number of dollars, going into the growth rounds.

9. Late Stage Valuations Face Risk

The risk in that strategy is that even if the execution is good, the pricing bet is still the remaining, as-yet-unresolved question here, right? In the sense of... My comment is: when everything becomes obvious in terms of market and business opportunity, valuation expands to fill the vacuum.

Put it another way: when it's obvious, people pay up because the only risk left to take is valuation risk. So broadly, even though, yes, the best firms won the beauty contest, they win at the top price. You don't get a mega-discount. Lovable is not saying, “I'll take $6 billion when I could get $8 billion from someone else.” The best firm might win the round, but they pay the market price.

The remaining embedded risk here—in all this—is that all these late-stage valuations are 20 and 30 times, and the growth persists. And if you were to do the postmortem 3 or 4 years from now, and if many of these assumptions were wrong, right? I'm not saying it's going to happen; I'm simply saying, what would that look like?

You said yourself, all these growth rates attenuate just a little bit, and multiples come down a lot, and you're just in a different place. I'm going to pick, in my view, one of the best companies out there, Databricks. It's doing $4.5 billion to $5 billion. It's got a growth rate of 40% plus. It's cash-flow positive. It's a superb company. It's one of the top 4 companies out there.

You know, what's the current value at a huge—$100 billion? It's 25-ish times revenues. If growth slowed to just 20%, across the last 2 decades, 20%-growth companies with cash flow positive trade around 6 times. Six fives are 30. So they grow 20—six sixes are 36.

That's the big risk in all this math. All the math here is predicated on these kinds of valuations, and if the growth stays, I think the valuations stay. If the growth slows down even slightly, then you have a dislocation to the downside, and I think then some of those strategies could feel a little painful because you're taking this—

Jason Calacanis

Yep.

Roel O'Driscoll

—utterly correlated. What I'd say to people is: in the early stage, you're taking uncorrelated business risk, and in the late stage, you're taking 100% correlated valuation risk. And when it goes wrong, it's going to go wrong for all of them, and that's the embedded assumption that you're assuming will just be fine now.

Yes, it's clear, obvious, and linear. But if it's not—because it's been so clear and obvious and linear for 3 years—everyone's leaned in so far that if it dislocates even slightly, the pain impact will be magnified.

Jason Lemkin

Hey, you want to hear a small, fun example? You talked about the best ones in Europe being Legora, ElevenLabs, and Lovable, right? So I started using ElevenLabs for real this week. I vibe-coded my favorite thing today. It's a game for founders. It's called Founderscape.ai.

It does everything from picking your accelerator. You can join YC. You have batch mates. You struggle. You build the team. You go public. It simulates everything: fundraising, team-building, and the whole process. It simulates the whole thing. A couple hundred folks have played it. It is kind of addictive.

So this week, I wanted to go to the next level. Your CTO joins you, and I added ElevenLabs. Your CTO talks to you the whole game: “The team's struggling. Get your NRR up. Do this with your product.”

I added ElevenLabs, and it was awesome. Your CTO talks to you the whole game, okay? It's so effing good. It's a 99 out of 100 product. And I burned through $30 in credits with just a couple of people in 3 days.

So imagine thousands of people are playing this game. Even I don't have those resources. So my point is, ElevenLabs ended last year—they just said it. Mati is such a great CEO on so many levels, right? So charismatic, so good. $330 million of revenue from nothing, right?

But for my game, if I could do something at a tenth the price or a 50th the price that was close to as good, I would have to switch.

I burned through $30 of credits on ElevenLabs in 48 hours with 20 or 30 players. How does it help? Rory’s so good at math. Imagine I have 10,000 people playing this game for hours on end. I need a lot of fees to support that, right?

Everyone watching this, let’s make Jason have a massive ElevenLabs bill.

Jason Calacanis

The fees do come down at scale, in all fairness, right? But my point is, it both shows why these companies are so explosive and also why they could be fragile. It is hard to predict, right?

10. ElevenLabs Faces Substitution Risk

Jason, would you invest in ElevenLabs at $11 billion?

Jason Calacanis

I wouldn’t. At $11 billion? No.

They’ve gone to $330 million in 2 years.

Jason Calacanis

I know. And listen, I’m not a late-stage investor. I’m not Andreessen. I don’t have the funds. Would I invest in the CEO? Abso-effing-lutely.

If you were at Andreessen, would you invest in ElevenLabs?

Jason Calacanis

Mati is the kind of guy I would just want to bet on no matter what, right? Even if the ship went down, I would bet on him, okay? If that’s all that matters—if price doesn’t matter, if market dynamics don’t matter—I’m in. I would have loved to invest in any round just to be on the journey together.

But at $11 billion, I’m not smart enough to take it, because I already want to substitute it out. In less than 1 week, I don’t even care, Harry, for the most part, what my Replit bill is. I don’t even look, and I spend a lot on Replit. But I was already like, “Maybe I need to find another one. Maybe I need to try the cheaper ones,” in my first week.

That’s why I wouldn’t invest at $11 billion without more work. I think there’s an underlying fragility to it, and I think that’s why you said Mati’s such a good CEO: because he knows this. He knows there’s risk, and he’s going 1,000 miles an hour to destroy the competition and not be a replaceable product in 24 months.

Jason, I’m pushing you. Is there a 3–5x on ElevenLabs from $11 billion?

Jason Calacanis

Yes. If the whole world uses voice the way all the VCs talk about it, and they can maintain some of their unit economics, of course there is. What people don’t get is that ElevenLabs lets you have conversations like we’re having with AIs. That is a massive accomplishment, and anyone who wants to build an app that lets you talk to a restaurant or talk to a game can use it. It’s brilliant.

The API is beautiful. I implemented it literally in 90 seconds. It’s such an elegant product. If you believe in voice for AI, which at least all VCs do, of course you can make the math work. It’s $330 million in 1 year. So what’s 100 times that? A lot. We’ve only scratched the surface.

But I do worry. This will be the year—probably the back half of the year—where we have to take substitution risks seriously in AI. This is the first time I’ve done it. We talked about these risks before, but they haven’t impacted us as investors: substitution risks. At some point, we’re not going to want to pay all of these AI fees.

I can give you another example. The other thing I added to Founderscape is that Replit includes free single sign-on and free login. It works in 1 click. So does Lovable, so does everybody else. But none of them are as slick as using a native Google product.

I went to buy Clerk. Clerk and WorkOS are 2 of the hot products out there that use it. WorkOS was out in the desert for years and blew up this year like there was nobody’s business, because it just works for vibe coding especially. I used Clerk, and it’s pretty good, and it’s $30 a month.

Is that a lot of money for a product that 100 engineers probably built for a decade? No. But Replit is only $30 a month. So I was like, “Should I use the native one?” When Replit launches a product as good as Cursor or WorkOS, I’ll immediately delete it. I will immediately delete it as these platforms expand.

My only point between ElevenLabs and WorkOS and SSO and Clerk is that we just haven’t had to deal with any substitution risk. Like Legora and Harvey, there’s no risk we’re going to substitute them for a cheaper product. Or ElevenLabs, or even Claude Code—no risk. Cursor, we haven’t had to deal with substitution risk.

I think as we go on this year, we have stress in the system. We will genuinely—Mark Benioff will actually be right—we will rotate out for cost.

Roel O'Driscoll

I think you will. I think you see some of that, though. It’s funny because, circling back to ElevenLabs, we’d looked at another company in the voice space 5 or 6 years ago. Way back in the day, we were investors in Nuance in the late ’90s, so we’d made money in Speech 1.0.

Yeah, I know, Harry. I like to occasionally remind you of things that were around before you were born. We looked at that. We did a bunch of reference calls, and all their customers, especially the bigger ones who were spending $2 or $3 million on this other speech company, were like, “Eh, we’re going to swap it out.” So we didn’t do the deal.

You fast-forward 5 or 6 years, and they’re all still on the platform. They never got around to substituting it out, right? Which is just an interesting learning. At $2 million in spend, I don’t think people bothered. The question is, at $10 million in spend, they probably would.

And therefore, going back to your ElevenLabs, it’s a stunning company. I’m so bummed. I wish we’d seen it. I wish you’d been in it. I like that market a lot because we’d considered some of the others, and they’ve just killed it.

But a couple of things. One is—I’m just going to try and take on the question in real time. I haven’t done any preparation on this. At $11 or $12 billion, you want to make a 3x, so you have to be worth $30 billion. At $30 billion, at scale, you’re going to trade at 6 or 7 times, because that’s the way human life is, dude. Get over it, right?

So that’s $5 billion of revenue in speech. That’s a lot. Microsoft Office is—I used to know—$50 or $60 billion. But it’s a big slug of revenue.

What’s been brilliant about ElevenLabs, which I think gives them a chance to escape the gravitational pullback of substitution—I’m going to call it that—because Jason is right: if that revenue comes from Epic Games putting voice in all their games and Epic Games is paying them half a billion dollars, Epic Games is going to design them out, or they’re going to grind them on cost, or there’ll be a competitor. They have the best product, but there’ll be a competitor.

If, on the other hand, it comes from literally tens of thousands of people using voice, where no one person is spending more than $20,000 or $30,000, or even a consumer spending $500, then you have much more ability to build a defensible business.

To do the deal at $11 billion—and I haven’t thought about it until literally on the fly—you have to believe in a very distributed market where there aren’t just high-end people. It’s not just the total dollars, but are the total dollars concentrated in a small number of people where you’re a white-label provider, where you do have some pricing pressure? Or are there lots and lots of people with voice?

There might be. It’s not crazy, to be clear, because they’ve proven it. The exciting thing about the $330 million of revenue is that they’ve already proven large numbers of adopters, not small numbers of super customers. It’s kind of like you’re allowed to assume something exists if you’ve proven it already exists by doing it.

So basically, you just have to believe that trend continues. It’s not crazy. It’s a lot of annual spend you have to believe in 3–5 years from now, but it’s a lot of momentum that you have to love.

Jason Lemkin

I just think, listen, Nuance was a while ago.

Roel O'Driscoll

I’ll say.

Jason Lemkin

ElevenLabs is the best. There are a lot of good ones out there today. It’s the best API I’ve worked with, okay? Without question, the best API.

The fact that I could implement ElevenLabs myself, as not a developer, in less than 5 minutes, maybe even 3 minutes, says to me that Replit and I might be able to add another vendor, even split it 50/50. If I can do it in 5 minutes, right? I just asked Replit.

At the current usage of my game, it’s $1,320 a month that I would be paying to ElevenLabs. That’s not nothing at this scale, right?

Roel O'Driscoll

But you made the interesting assumption. I actually thought you were going to say the exact opposite because you said how easy it was to adopt. And you’re right.

Jason Lemkin

Yeah.

Roel O'Driscoll

If the other product has just the same ease of adoption and quality, then yes, it’s easy to swap between them. But maybe you picked ElevenLabs precisely because it was the only one that was easy to adopt. This is the advantage of a great product: if it’s easy to adopt, then the other guy’s a shit to adopt—

Jason Lemkin

Yeah, that’s why it did $330 million in a year.

Bill Gurley

Yeah, exactly.

Jason Calacanis

It’s the best product. It’s great. It’s just that it may be fragile.

Roel O'Driscoll

Yeah. What you’re saying—and I think it’s a good point—is, how far can you get on absolutely the best product and absolutely the most ease of adoption? Stripe would say a pretty long way. I mean, they got to $5 billion on that, right? I worry less, going back to your early point on gross margins, about the cost to them.

Rory O'Driscoll

I do think a lot of these non-gross-margin-positive things—the good thing is they're all digital products.

Jason Calacanis

Yes.

Rory O'Driscoll

Time will take care of a lot of that, and cheaper compute.

11. California Taxes Founders

The final element I do want to discuss—and Rory, you can bounce when you have to, because I know you've got to run to your offsite. But it is all over Twitter, and I don't want us to move into politics. I want us to stay on startups around this, so I'm deliberately going to point this—

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, yeah.

—to our industry. But we've seen, obviously, the wealth tax being implemented. Brin joins Page in leaving California.

Jason Lemkin

You mean the entrepreneur's tax, not the wealth tax. The entrepreneur's tax.

Sorry, the entrepreneur's tax.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

Just so we take politics out of it, the entrepreneur's tax.

We've seen Chamath say that now $1 trillion—I think it was—reported $700 billion of $2 trillion is gone already. How does this impact, very specifically, our industry, and how significant is this actually?

Roel O'Driscoll

Two comments. One is all wealth taxes underperform what people project they'll raise because they tend to be very mobile, and it's very hard to tax that and people can move. So Norway, France, and a bunch of other countries have introduced them. They invariably unwind them because you get much less than you think. That's the first comment.

And then the second specific comment, where I've read it but I haven't read the core text, is one of the weird things about this tax is they estimate your ownership based on your voting control. And what that means is, because a lot of these founders have these super-voting shares—and I would say that's something I didn't agree with 10 years ago, and I've changed my mind totally—I think it's good in the public markets that founders have voting control.

They're getting assessed as if they own more than they do. So instead of being 5% of what they actually have, it's 5% of your voting control, and if you've got 10× votes, that's now 50% of your actual money. So are you going to sit in California if you're worth $2 billion and say to yourself, “I'm going to give $1 billion for the privilege of living here”? I don't think so. You're going to leave.

So I think it's going to be fairly pernicious to what we're doing here. And look, I think invariably it's unsympathetic. The sight of rich people leaving a state just because they don't want to pay more money at a time when people feel strapped—it's inherently an unsympathetic thing, right? And it's easy if you're rank and file to say, “Screw those guys. They should pony up.”

But I think this is in the category of dumb ideas that, in trying to overreach, will end up getting less. And I think, especially in taxation, the way you should approach it is not ideological—“Oh, we'll make them pay.” It's much more: how can I cost-efficiently milk this cow, right? And I think this is going to be inefficient because I think the super-rich will leave.

Jason Lemkin

I think it's much more clever and worse than it looks. It's much worse than it looks because you have to read what's happening. This is a Trojan horse. This is not about a one-time 5% wealth tax.

The goal of the proponents of this bill, everything that has been put behind it, this coalition, which has already passed similar propositions in the past, Prop 55 and others, is that this will then transition to an annual tax. Of course it will. You cannot solve an annual healthcare gap with a one-time tax. It sounds good.

So first they need to get through the issues here and pass it once, and then the goal is it's 1% or more forever. Then the goal is to lower it in phases, to a $50 million threshold and then a $25 million threshold. If you have $25 million of paper wealth based on the last-round price of your startup, you will pay a 1% wealth tax.

That is the end goal. This is just stage 1 of the ultimate plan. As bad as it is with Prop 50, it's already going to fail. If the only goal was economic, it's not going to work, right? Because we've already had 4 leading billionaires leave.

But the goal is this becomes an annual wealth tax on $25 million to $50 million of paper net worth. And so I say this will end up being “leave before the Series B,” because if I'm the founder of gc.ai or ElevenLabs and I'm doing a Series B at $500 million, I'm going to pay the wealth tax right now, as the goal is to implement it.

And you can say, “Well, Gavin Newsom says it won't happen,” but no. The voters in California are going to vote all this stuff in. And so what I think happens, because I think this is much deeper than it looks, is that it's not just people feeling bad for billionaires, okay? Very few people actually feel bad for billionaires.

The goal is to hit folks with paper wealth of $25 million, and I think if it passes and the next bill gets put up, it will likely pass. I think founders will begin to massively exit in 2027, before the next one goes up, because there's going to be a second if this passes and a third. So this is not one and done. It's just the start of what the coalition behind this wants to do. It's crystal clear. They've already put a bill up 3 times to lower this to $50 million.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

$1 billion is a retrenchment to get it done this year because they couldn't get a $50 million wealth tax passed. It's a disaster. If this actually happens, people will finally flee.

Rory O'Driscoll

Yes, they will. I think the voters—I'm going to be optimistic here—I think one of 2 things happens. Sense prevails and it gets shot down. If that happens, it's already been an own goal because we've lost people who've left California in advance of this, and that's just stupid.

The second thing, you're right, Jason, is it gets passed, then a bunch of people do leave because then it gets real and you start seeing other people leave. And then the voters face this other choice 2 years from now, when they put up another bill to lower it a lot, which will cause even more people to leave, and they ought to vote for that or not.

And, you know, I don't believe you can stop stupid, but I actually don't think the voters are stupid. I don't love the California referendum system, but it's—

Jason Calacanis

We pass crazy propositions in this state. Crazy ones.

Rory O'Driscoll

We do, but it's worth pointing out that most of the time they say no. The great thing about the referendum system is it's dumb as rocks. I actually think the default California voter goes in to say no.

So my guess—and maybe I'm being optimistic—is that in the end this loses, but you sit back and go, even trying to do it has had an economic cost because if you have those kinds of assets that you're subject to it, yeah. This is not an idea that a revenue maximizer would pursue. It's not even revenue-maximizing.

If you hated rich people—you hated them—but at the same time you also passionately wanted to fund healthcare, and you believed both and you were a rational human being, when you looked at a wealth tax, you'd say to yourself, “If my goal is to fund healthcare, I don't do the wealth tax,” right? Because it's actually not the rational way to get more money.

There are lots of things you can do to tax people at the point of sale, et cetera, et cetera. We could talk about it if we had more time. So you're right, Jason. This is not a rational act by people trying to maximize dollars. It's a lash-out thing. I'm very optimistic the vote will defeat it, but it'll still have had a cost, and it's kind of dumb.

And on that note, I have to duck out, guys. I have to go and actually work and figure out how my poor little boutique firm can survive in this harsh and cruel world that we live in. Okay?

You go. Rock and roll, Rory. Dude, I do just want to stay with you on this one, just because you said a couple of things I really want to understand.

Jason Calacanis

Yep.

Because I don't understand this, I'm sure. If it happens, Jason, how likely is this to actually happen?

Jason Lemkin

Strange things have been passed, and the only thing that stops them from getting passed is we're all kind of lazy and we all vote no in general. But you whip folks up into a frenzy, and it doesn't matter what anyone in government—the governor or the legislature—says.

It only needs 50 plus 1. It is direct. California is wonderful and terrible and crazy. It has a type of direct democracy that the rest of the country doesn't have.

So all you need to do is go around to everybody, get people upset about billionaires—and many people should be upset about billionaires—and you just need 50% plus 1, and it passes. And so that is why, no matter what people say or think, you just need 50% plus 1.

Okay. It happens and it passes.

Jason Lemkin

Yes.

What happens then?

Jason Lemkin

Well, this is my point. And listen, I'm not a billionaire and I'm not going to get there. I had a chance, but I won't be a billionaire, and so I don't have the same perspective as Chamath does.

But I do think everyone's mostly missing this point, which is that this is not a one-time thing. There is a group of folks behind it. I don't want to get political, but there's a group of folks behind it that have been working on this for many years. Of course they have. This doesn't come out of the blue, right?

They've been trying to pass a version of this for 5 years. They finally figured out this is step 1. Let's make it all about the billionaires. This is the easy one. It's easy to bash the rich billionaires when we have a very bifurcated time, when the wealthy are getting wealthier and jobs are also going away.

So it’s an easy one to win. That’s why I think Rory’s wrong. Everyone feels like the rich are getting richer, the billionaires are getting richer—they were all in St. Barts over the holidays, but our company’s doing layoffs. It doesn’t feel very good, so I’m going to vote to tax those guys.

If it was just one tax, then as bad as it is with Larry and Sergey and Peter Thiel leaving, it would at least be a bounded thing, right? It would be a bounded thing. But this is just phase one of the plan. Phase two is that it happens every year.

Of course it’s not going to happen once. This is how you put a bow on something to make it look good: it’s just once. Of course it’s going to happen every year. The prior versions of this bill, and the one they want to keep passing, have already lowered it to $50 million and then $25 million in net worth. It is based on illiquid assets and the last round in venture capital.

How many deals have you done, Harry, where the last round was at $250 million or more and the founders had material ownership? A lot, in the age of AI, right? I do think that if this goes as far as the folks backing it want, you could have a Detroit in Silicon Valley.

When it becomes a meme to do YC or South Park Commons, then build your team, get your money, and leave, that could be the meme. Come to Dogpatch, do YC, stay a year, build up your team, and then leave. Is it hard to imagine that being the new SF? It’s not hard to imagine. It’s not that it would go away; it’s just that you leave after a year.

Who wins from this? In any loss, there is often a winner. Is there a state where everyone goes that wins?

Jason Lemkin

The answer is the ones that almost won in 2020 and 2021. It’s that simple. There wasn’t enough gravity to get people to go to Miami outside of some hedge funds and others, and there wasn’t enough gravity to go to Austin because it’s really not that nice there. But obviously they will win because we already saw it happen, right? It’s just that the yo-yo bounced back up when AI came out. It wasn’t worth it to be in Miami or Austin when AI came back out, right?

Jason, would you leave?

Jason Lemkin

First of all, I’m not starting from scratch, so bear that in mind. It’s crazy to me that Sergey Brin left because he’s driving AI at Google, based in the Bay Area, right? I get Larry Page, and Peter Thiel is managing money. I don’t know.

I’ve thought about it every year since 2020, when it didn’t matter for 2 years where you were. I’m on the edge. I’m not a billionaire, but the financial cost to me to remain in California is super high. What I pay to live here in taxes and other costs is worth it, but if I had to pay a wealth tax when it goes down to these lower thresholds every year, I would leave, of course.

What would push me over the edge is that every year I’d be paying this massive tax on top of the 50% tax that I pay in California already, or 40% on long-term capital gains. These are already the highest taxes in the country. Then there’s a wealth tax on top, where every year I have to pay 1% to 2% of everything.

One year, it’s actually not a big deal—who cares about one year? But what if it’s 10 years? That compounds to a lot, right? We need Rory to do the math, but that compounds to 15% to 20% of your net worth being gone by the time it gets increased. So you have to go to Miami or Austin at some point in your career, right? I think I would go.

But what I worry more about—and I wrote this, and it already had 500,000 views in a day—is that it just makes sense to leave after the Series B. You should just leave. I think YC will get its 7%, and the funds will still stay, but you’ll just leave.

It’s a terrible idea to leave SF in the age of AI, but I don’t think it’s as bad as going to Monaco or Dubai. I don’t think that’s the best way to build a startup from Dubai or Monaco. I’m pretty sure that’s suboptimal.

But we may go back to distributed teams. We did learn how to do it. It’s suboptimal. We may not be all RTO, but we learned a lot of skills that we’re now putting on the back burner. We know how to build distributed teams. We know how to work remotely. We know how to do these things.

They’re not as good, but if it becomes what we do, we will just adjust. It’s not that big a deal. In tech, we are now dealing with a meta-issue: the wealth gap is just going to spread in the age of AI. It’s going to get vaster and vaster, and the social implications are significant.

We’re worried about layoffs and AI taking people’s jobs. But when you and I first met, Harry, a billion dollars was a good exit. When you and I first met, it was a great exit, right? Now $100 billion doesn’t feel like that much, does it? I mean, it’s crazy.

But that’s also 100 times more wealth for the founders—maybe even more realistically, right? That is just a gap that we kind of hide from. I brought it up on the pod. We didn’t do it, but when every billionaire was in St. Barts competing with their yachts over the holidays, when that gets retweeted, it’s hard for everyone not to feel like they want to tax the fuck out of everybody. It’s gross.

No, I agree. When you think about the labor displacement, which you spoke about in terms of it really showing up in labor numbers this year, I think you have a real problem. I think that’s probably one of my biggest concerns right now, especially in the UK, where you see the disparity of wealth just between London and everyone else.

Jason Lemkin

It’s going to grow.

It’s terrifying.

Jason Lemkin

But it’s worse. It’s actually worse than that, I think. Some of this we can’t do anything about. Even for B2B, grounded in what we do, I think we’re going to normalize around $1 million to $2 million per employee.

I mean, Replit has 200 employees at $300 million in revenue. How many does ElevenLabs have? We can look it up. It’s probably not that many, right? As we’re able to do startups with 1/5 the headcount we used to, that’s going to lead to malaise, even in our little ecosystem, because we just don’t need that many people. It’s not about displacing people or AI replacing people; when we can get to $1 million to $2 million in revenue per employee, we just don’t need that many people.

Then juxtapose that with the number of millionaires made from NVIDIA’s market cap today who are employees. Does that not pose a dispersion of wealth because of the expansion of market caps?

Jason Lemkin

It is somewhat dispersed. I forget—we can look up how many millionaires they have. They have 20,000 decamillionaires or something like that.

Something like that.

Jason Lemkin

Yeah. It has already perverted housing markets in the Bay Area and lots of things, but it’s not happy.

Okay, 1 in 3 employees at NVIDIA is now worth $20 million or more. 1 in 3. 18,000 folks at NVIDIA are worth $25 million or more. I’m in Palo Alto now. There are literally 0 houses for sale because they’re instantly bought up, right? There’s nothing.

On the one hand, you can say, great, there are 20,000 more people at NVIDIA worth $2 million. But what it also means is that there are so many types of inflation—financial inflation and life inflation. The types of education those folks can afford, the types of housing they can afford, and the way it changes the wealth at the Stanford Mall in Palo Alto is nothing like it was just a couple of years ago.

That’s going to breed a lot of contempt. If you’re one of the folks at NVIDIA and you made $2 million or $3 million, you’re feeling great. If you just got laid off from a SaaS company growing 15%, what are you going to do, Harry? What are you going to do when you get laid off from a previously high-flying public SaaS company growing 4%? Who’s going to hire you? The problem is, nobody.

We’ve got to tap into this zeitgeist and this wealth generation, but I do think there is a level of social unrest that will grow over the coming years. It’s worrisome to me, and I think this bill is part of it. I get why. That’s why I think it’s only the first one, because I think each year that goes by, people are going to be more and more angry at the AI millionaires and centimillionaires.

They’re going to get angrier. They work just as hard, and I got laid off from Zoom. It’s been 12 months. I can’t find a job. I was a VP. It’s not going to feel very good, is it? It’s already not feeling good on LinkedIn, right? I’m already seeing folks as we record this.

You know what happens in January? Everyone’s saying, “I’ve moved on from my company.” Those are the folks that got fired. You can see them: “I’ve decided, after 27 years at Microsoft, that January 15 is my last day.” No. Everyone who gets congratulated in January—they were moved out. It’s part of life. But what happens when the next job is impossible? I’m worried.

On that sunny disposition, dude, it’s always a pleasure. I so appreciate you.

Jason Lemkin

Thanks.