20VC

Harry Stebbings

SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO at $135 a share and roughly $1.8 trillion valuation replaces price discovery with Elon’s conviction, while a book only 2X covered leaves meaningful downside, flat-trading, and retail-driven upside scenarios.A weak debut could restrain OpenAI’s valuation ambitions and reset LP return expectations, while persistent AI, radically higher revenue per employee, and concentrated foundation-model supply remain the more durable signals to monitor.

Harry Stebbings × Matthew Steckman

Anduril’s $20B Army vehicle is a credit-card limit rather than committed revenue, but it removes repeated procurement steps and signals that the government believes Anduril can deliver at scale.Defense drones remain a monopoly-or-die market, while Barracuda’s bathtub-style manufacturing supports demand elasticity and 40%+ company-wide gross margins; an IPO is in the window, with only about a quarter of 20 P&Ls in rate production.

Harry Stebbings × Gérald Marolf

Lightspeed’s $9B raise shows how multistage firms can treat seed pricing as marketing while concentrating capital in growth winners such as Anthropic.The stay-private supercycle keeps compounding private, but OpenAI’s single-digit app growth and a possible shift from growth to cash-flow valuation expose the key downside.

Harry Stebbings

Private-market compounding is driving venture’s supercycle, while SpaceX’s rumored $1.5T IPO depends on EOV—the Elon Option Value—rather than fundamentals supporting 78x 2026 revenue.OpenAI’s 1.2B-user base is growing at single digits, and AI convergence may maim incumbents through shrinking seats and NRR before it displaces them outright.