20VC

Harry Stebbings × Jack Altman

Instinct’s $1 billion round at a $10 billion valuation raises the bar for defensible economics before compute costs overwhelm the company.Miro’s sale to Bending Spoons for roughly $1.35 billion after a $17.5 billion valuation shows positive cash flow cannot prevent late-stage SaaS repricing, while Mistral’s €3 billion round underscores AI’s European sovereignty agenda.

Harry Stebbings

Instinct’s $1B raise at a $10B valuation pairs minute-long latency with compute costs: 10M users paying $10 monthly imply a $1.2B annual burden.Jason’s reversal—from recommending the round to refusing it—alongside Miro’s $1.3B sale from $17.5B and Canva’s slowdown from 30% to 20%, highlights SaaS’s shift from revenue multiples to EBITDA.

Harry Stebbings

NVIDIA delivered a record $96.2B quarter and guided to 70% growth for the fiscal year ending January 2028, with end-user demand and share loss the key risks.The reported near-$12.9B Hugging Face deal, not finalized or confirmed, would reinforce open-source compute economics and NVIDIA’s push to win every segment.Agents are becoming software buyers, supporting the cases for Clay at $7B and Linear at $2.5B, while cyber exposure and reward hacking remain unresolved.

Harry Stebbings × Eno Reyes

AI may be priced by outcomes rather than tokens, favoring open models for commodity work and proprietary post-trained specialists for high-value workflows.That challenges frontier-model TAM as Anthropic’s $2T framing depends on Claude Code amid fierce developer-tool competition, model lock-in and margin risk; watch whether the harness becomes the durable application layer.

Harry Stebbings × Julien Bek

Sequoia’s hunter culture rewards conviction over consensus: Citadel Securities came from years of persistence, while a one-vote SpaceX proposal became one of the firm’s best investments.After underestimating Anthropic and later investing $2.5B, Julien Bek sees exponential AI, agent traffic reaching parity with humans, and outcome-priced Sierra as major signals, while warning that new AI labs face brutal selection risk.

Harry Stebbings × Rory

SpaceX’s all-stock Cursor takeover, completed within a week and carrying a breakup fee, highlights AI M&A’s currency and clearance advantages while testing premium pricing against forward revenue.Stripe’s OpenRouter bet monetizes routing complexity but faces model drift, while Workday’s take-private underscores system-of-record durability without guaranteed upsell; AI-budget ceilings and agentic roadmaps remain key risks.

Harry Stebbings × Jason Lemkin × Rory O’Driscoll

Canva’s 2026 growth outlook has fallen from 30% to roughly 20%, while agents may bypass prosumer tools without user churn, exposing a structural distribution risk.At roughly $4B ARR, Jason Lemkin sees $12B fair value if growth does not decelerate, but proving ChatGPT-cannibalization wrong—and monitoring AI serving costs—remains decisive.

Harry Stebbings × Anastasios Angelopoulos

Kimi K3’s wins over every American model on meaningful tasks challenge the distillation-only narrative and strengthen the case for enterprise AI sovereignty built on proprietary data.Anastasios expects a multi-hundred-billion or trillion-dollar American-first open-source company, but predicts two-thirds of at least 75 neo-labs will fail or be acquired; regulation, data economics and infrastructure debt remain decisive risks.

Harry Stebbings × Joon Sung Park

Simile’s defensible AI data strategy combines behavioral, transaction, and randomized-control-trial data to model how people shape outcomes, not merely predict them.That 85% validation and rapid enterprise pull support Park’s vision of synthetic panels surpassing human panels within 3 years and eventually commanding $100 million simulations, with compute economics and misuse still unresolved.

Harry Stebbings

OpenAI’s proposed 5% stake for the US government exposes a new permission economy, as Fable 5’s 19-day ban ended with pre-approval discussions still unresolved.The debate sits alongside late-cycle signals: Nvidia recognizes hardware revenue with put-back rights while Meta sells excess compute, leaving demand diffusion and downside management as key risks.