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 × Alex Mashrabov

Higgsfield says it reached $1B in annualized revenue 18 months after $1M, using trailing-four-weeks revenue ×13 and counting only live revenue.The economics are unusually expansionary: month-12 business NRR exceeds 300%, while routing own/open-weight models produces over 80% margins versus 20–30% for closed-source models; monitor whether at least 30% monthly growth survives the projected substantial deceleration.

Harry Stebbings

Meta's Muse, called the first real ChatGPT competitor, pairs autonomous agents with a free consumer LLM and added roughly $100B to Meta's market cap.Jev targets 20% of LLM API spend at one-fifth the price, potentially turning $20B into $4B of revenue.OpenAI's projected $278B net burn and roughly $700B of CapEx keep capital intensity central to the AI trade.

Harry Stebbings × Daniel Dines

Daniel Dines argues enterprise AI will diffuse process by process, because models retain context without being transformed by experience, while “millions of Einsteins” are not yet hireable people.The investable asset is the portable “map of work,” with AI designing deterministic, governed software around probabilistic models; UiPath’s 14% growth and production gaps in vibe-coded procurement tools leave timing and near-free human replacements as key risks.

Harry Stebbings × Thomas Sohmers

Positron co-founder Thomas Sohmers frames inference as a memory-wall problem: GPU FLOPS rose 120x from 2014–2024, versus 17x for memory bandwidth.Positron targets cutting a 500-megawatt Nvidia deployment to 100 megawatts, while cached tokens cost roughly one-thousandth of recomputation and support reported 80-point Anthropic API gross margins.Planned capacity may shift locations rather than disappear, but debt, regulation, and concentration remain risks to monitor.

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 × David Morehead

David Morehead argues that fund multiples need a timeline: three six-year 3X growth-equity funds can compound to 27X versus 15X over 15–18 years.Baylor treats growth equity as its return engine, VC as diversification, and uses 10% market-decline increments while pricing cash at 8.5%.Software’s 50–60% selloff and permitted powered land offer differentiated opportunities, but permitting constraints and the unresolved AI adoption question remain key watchpoints.

Harry Stebbings × Matteo Franceschetti

AI is letting Eight Sleep scale output: engineers direct hundreds of AI engineers, while email marketing generates close to $100M with a team of zero and paid media produces $200–300M with two people.Watch whether this productivity supports the three-year target of 250 people making a billion, amid talent retention, Anthropic’s cost curve, regulation, and model self-learning risks.

Harry Stebbings

Jensen Huang’s AGI claim meets Rory O’Driscoll’s skepticism, while Fable 5.1 delivers Jason Lemkin’s first step-function coding experience since last year’s “three dot” models.Instinct’s quickly cloned WhatsApp distribution, $2.5B pre-revenue valuation, Wonderful’s $5B repricing, and Anthropic’s reported roughly $6B deal reversal expose a market where rule-breaking and capital access remain central.

Harry Stebbings × Jean-Denis "JD" Grèze

Town converts more than 15% of trial users to paid and generates over $700 per user annually despite losing 30% at its mandatory email-and-calendar gate, while teams spend at least $75K per engineer on AI tools.Its agent-to-agent network effect could make team switching difficult, but zero pricing power at the frontier leaves economics dependent on whether inference costs fall and how much workload remains frontier.