VC

Agitated_Trash203

To be fair those bank failures were an isolated incident and would have remained as such even if the fed didn’t step in and uncap the deposit insurance limit. Those banks (and SVB specifically) had such huge coffers with the “everything rally” of 2020-2021 they put way too money into fixed interest investments like treasuries or MBS. Rates got hiked because inflation become a runaway train which meant they were sitting on huge unrealized losses as the value of those treasuries and MBS plummeted. Rate hikes were probably the contributing factor that caused the bear market in 2022, which caused funding to dry up so all the startups (of which was the vast majority of their clients, also very risky) ran to their deposits in the bank to fund operations but they were sitting on these huge unrealized losses and they couldn’t pay out. This wasn’t happening to big banks, it was isolated to that very specific type of bank who primarily had VC’s and start-ups as their clients.

1098duc_w_the_termi

One of my VC buddies told me last week that the music has stopped on the upper decks, the lower decks just haven’t notified yet. Take that as you will.

237throw

Kids. Make sure to get at least 5 or 6 so that way you get a diversified portfolio. Act as a VC for their development by approving cash injections so that they can get to market with a positive cash flow. Way more comfortable than most nursing homes if you do it right.

kerplunktard

they are mostly private equity & VC style investments - there are a few public company's like [Trip.com](http://Trip.com) Group (worth approx $2bn), they have a ton of investments in small up & coming businesses StarFive, vcore, Zhiran Medical etc,

Soggy_Station

I’m a full-time VC investor and spend a lot of time investing my PA. Have significantly outperformed the S&P picking individual stocks for several years. Few things I’ve learned: **Know what you own.** Know the company super well and have a clear thesis for why it should outperform. Read earnings, study the business model, competition, moats, etc. If that sounds tedious and boring, just stick to buying an index. **Price ≠ value.** Most important one. Great company can be a bad investment at the wrong price. Okay company can be a great investment at the right price. The number one technical thing to master (valuation multiples, DCF, intrinsic value) **Psychology matters a ton.** Hold when the stock is down but the thesis hasn’t changed. Sell when valuation gets stupid, even if you love the company. **Be patient.** The stock market transfers money from the impatient to the patient. You can do all the above well but if you think you’re gonna 10x tomorrow, that is not investing, that is gambling. The best outcomes come from having a genuinely long timeline for ideas to play out.

vandalizethethief

There are no middlemen. That’s the whole point and why the fees are so low. Everything is transparent, no VC money and the 11 founders were MM for Citadel and HFT traders. If it is a scam they did everything possible to tie their success to the same HYPE coin you can buy. That’s where 99% of fees go. I’ve never even seen any corporation this transparent. They also have a treasury asset trading on NASDAQ under PURR that is in the Russell 2000. Everyone has access to the API & I’d worry about external threats more than anything internal.

greytoc

Try a private placement broker - or places like EquityZen, Hiive, ForgeGlobal. If you don't want to use a broker - I used my business connections to find a VC to buy some private shares that I owned. Make sure you understand the terms of the share agreement.

New-Association5536

Pretending they are when they haven't released any nuanced financial statements or data is insane. Anthropic is reporting profit from 2 months that Elon Musk gave them discounts on their compute costs; these companies have also been shown to use financial shenanigans to hide actual costs to make it appear they are profitable. Lastly, lets say best case scenario, they are profitable. The margin of profit compared to the now close to 2 trillion in total investment between the VC funding and needed datacenter build out is miniscule and doesn't come close to the ROI needed to justify this. I don't really trust a business leader that says, and I quote Larry Page, "I'm willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race." That isn't a business decision, that is fanatical thinking based on beliefs more tan sound financial long term outcomes.

Avid_Reader87

We just have to pivot to space and drones and underwater mining before it falls. And robots and laser computers or whatever else the VC’s are pitching. Then all the AI companies can borrow against their shares to invest in those. The government won’t let them fail.

TastyToad

Revolutionary idea but instead asking here you should slap some AI on top and go straight to VC for funding. Thank me later.

dgellow

You’re wrong, Hacking_the_gibson is correct, revenue run rate is a completely meaningless and unreliable metric you use to make your business look more successful than it is. It doesn’t reflect real revenue. Any remotely decent VC hearing your ARR should follow up by asking you to stop bullshitting and share you’re actual revenue 

Plus-Professional-84

Harvard has a bunch of sectorial VC funds. They financed SpaceX over a decade ago and provided scientific consulting.

Lower-Letterhead206

The class A shares are distributed avond different groups of investors. My thesis is that roughly 10 million shares will be sold by VC's and other investment firms. They'll go for the quick win and have been investing in the SPAC making $26 a 160% return on their investment. The majority of the investors will be here for the long run or at least untill BRUN 10x's. The earnings where great, the sector is one of the fastest growing and BRUN hasn't hit any form of ceiling yet. I don't see a reason why the majority would sell. In my next post I'll try to dig deeper in the share distribution and what eyes is a likely scenario.

Wowmuchrya

Yes, anthropic is not doing anything that will not be commoditized in 5 years. There is a reason anthropic is delaying releasing its s1 and ipoing. The business is fundamentally unprofitable. If you gave me a 1t loan I could easily turn that into 40-50b, which is what they are claiming their ARR is currently at (or 80b recently). I’m not moving the goal post, don’t get triggered from something you said yourself. A company that hasn’t even existed to the majority of the public for 5 years is claiming it can compete at a level of companies that have existed for decades. The only way anthropic or openai bring in 200b annually is if VC funds or your 401k gives them a 10t loan or subsidy annually.

AVBforPrez

Stock based comp is explicitly not included at the very least, and cost deferrals are common even in established companies. Given how shady they have been so far, it's impossible to trust that they're not trying to hide as much as possible to show better looking numbers as they try to do an IPO. The problem with their revenue is that it's largely fueled by circular deals from chip makers and other companies in the AI sector, who themselves are using money they're reporting as revenue from the exact same type of deals. AI in its current form has a genuine paid user acquisition problem, and a usage cost problem that nobody really cares about yet because it's running on VC and future money with the hope they'll figure out how to make that work eventually. Normally this is the playbook for new tech or software, but the footprint on all this makes it anything but playbook stuff. Even though I'm not a huge Apple fan, it's quite interesting that they're sitting this entire thing out.

Particular-Nose-8932

Tiger Global (VC) cut its stake in the company causing people to panic sell

Prestigious_Rod6969

ha ha, rolex and what else lol VC is a $29k watch ;)

IceNineFireTen

Fidelity has a VC arm that backed SpaceX early on alongside Google. No surprises here. What makes you think they purchased more? This just shows current holds, not change in holdings.

nekocoin

Yeah, public BDCs exist, but do any of them hold VC-vetted early stage startups? That's the part that's new

nekocoin

RVII holds a significant position (probably around 10%) in 80 young YC startups. In 5 or 10 years most will probably be dead, but if even one IPOs for billions the fund would be up by a lot Historically about 5% of YC startups go above a $1b valuation, so expected value is very profitable Cons: - High-risk, could go to zero - Not for the impatient, could take years to see anything out of it - High fees - Robinhood takes 20% of the profits Personality I bought a bit because I've been wanting to invest in VC-vetted young startups for years but never had the money or connections needed

Ok_Phase2472

I've dabbled in real estate, and let me tell you it is absolute shit. Fees are high and returns suck, it is a terrible investment. You're better off with buying treasuries, which will give you a similar return to real estate after fees, with much less risk. Plus S&P 500 and Russel 3000 both have plenty of real estate exposure anyway. I would just stick with VT to diversify globally. If you are an accredited investor you might also consider putting a small percentage of your portfolio in PE or pre-IPO VC funds.

FartPolluter

I like you kid. You got spunk, and the country needs more spunk. *How I imagine what every one of Leopold's VC clients sound like*

Momoware

I know someone who works at one of the portfolio companies. Yes the fund invests in them (and there's an actual person from Robinhood that owns this just like other VC).

HairlessBandicoot

Fr. I work in finance, on the private side, and men are always quite happy to tell you that they make money, less so when they lose it. At the age of 25, I'd already come across a major VC fraud in the region, a bond investment that went bankrupt, and a multi billion dollar actual scam, and identified both within minutes of hearing about them. I asked those much older dudes questions that they couldn't answer, and those very questions were the undoing of those investments years later

chaotic910

The AI market doesn’t align that much with what actually happened during dotcom. The issue with dotcom was that literally anyone with a half baked idea and an inkling of building a website could get millions in VC money. That hasn’t happened to nearly the same degree as AI, it’s fairly consolidated considering even off-shoot or doomed to fail companies use the API of a large model. The large corporations that fund these AI companies will continue to do so. Sure, they aren’t commercially profitable, but some FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company will want the models to be available in perpetuity. We’re more likely to see a large market shift, and that’s only if someone develops a major breakthrough and isn’t absorbed by a larger corp.

greytoc

It's a bit more complicated than that. These types of investments can have their place. But they aren't really suitable for a lot of retail investors. The actual expenses aren't necessarily out of line with private VC funds. But I don't believe that angel investing can be done with a spray and pray type approach. It's unclear to me how this BDC has constructed their portfolio. The prospectus indicates that it's simply a even allocation across a lot of companies. Price discovery based on the underlying illiquid assets is going to be next to impossible and mostly speculative. So it seems like the NAV could be fictional based on however the BDC management decides to mark the assets. And the use of leverage in this BDC seems unusual to me since traditional VC and angel funds don't typically use leverage afaik. I only know enough to know that I don't know enough about angel fund portfolio construction that this particular investment seems ill conceived.

bls2515

VC delusion of saving the world

btrev650

That's why "cognitive surrender" is a good term. You're not just cutting corners or being efficient or whatever. You are literally surrendering your cognitive ability. You are deciding to be a consumer of, and dependent on, this technology, instead of being an originator of thought that the tech will perpetually court you for so as to appropriate it. When the VC money dries up will you have grabbed a bunch of shit that you can continue to build upon? Or will you be stranded with no ability to do basic research and writing

Wolf_Of_DalalStreet2

AI is nothing but a loss making startup funded by VC on a bigger scale u know what happens when the debts has to be settled

Pimpwerx

They can and will monetize. The issue is if monetization is practical with US energy costs. The cost for compute in America will be what wins the race for China. They can make cheaper models because it just doesn't cost them as much per watt. At least, that's the impression I get from the price disparity. AI compute is just GPUs and tons of electricity. Convergence is coming relatively soon. All models will perform well, which will make the deciding factor cost. China always wins on cost. And with AI existing in the cloud, you can't ban Chinese AI models like you can ban EVs, to save your domestic market. China is just gonna eat America's lunch in the value comparison. The bubble that exists is due to the wide gap between service cost for customers, and actual operational cost for providers. In America, operational costs have created a chasm that gives the appearance of a bubble. I think a bubble exists when demand isn't there, but demand is very much there for AI. So, if anything, I see the Anthropics and OpenAIs suffering catastrophic financial disasters and then some shitheel VC firm like Blackrock coming through to salvage the debris for pennies on the dollar. Maybe unironically selling some parts of those scuttled businesses to China. Anyway, as someone who works in the field, I see where we're going. OSes will change. Web apps will change. We will interface with AI for many things we currently manual our way through. The big game changer will be the proliferation of functional and easy to use agents that you communicate with through your phone. That is where we're headed. You need compute for that, and I still don't think we've hit the floor required for that. This is why PC part prices will remain high, and probably go higher. If the bubble was close to popping, I'd expect us to see GPU and RAM prices start to stagnate, and slowly retreat back to sane levels, due to buildouts being frozen. But it's not. Demand only seems to be increasing, which is not what I'd expect from a bubble. All that said, the market is super-irrational. So calls or puts. Whatever you want, it's still a gamble.

worldspawn00

VC funding is basically debt, they expect returns on their investments, it's not free money. And they have a lot of it, just in March they had a $120B funding round. One of the biggest funders is SoftBank which is taking out loans to finance the funding rounds, just because openai isn't taking loans directly doesn't mean the funding isn't debt. Ex: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/softbank-40-billion-loan-openai-043037251.html And https://group.softbank/en/news/press/20251231 $62B since the end of last year from SoftBank alone.

21Rollie

It’s almost comical how predictable it was. My company prides itself on being purposeful with its moves but the c suite got wined and dined by the AI companies and then told us to go wild. Then the bill came due and surprise, even with the VC money artificially keeping the bill low, we blew past the budget, without seeing a corresponding increase in profits. Now we have hard budgets BUT they also want us to use AI or else walk for not being a team player. So, use AI for everything. We are measuring how much you use it. But if you use too much of it you can be penalized too. Got it? The world only gets worse every year for a few rich assholes to get more zeros in their bank accounts

Daforce1

I’m a VC who has some successful consumer brand investments and people in the market seem to be focusing right now on functional CBG items think healthier versions of junk food or every day staples. An example is Fruit Riot (frozen fruit with sour coating), any of the healthier sodas with probiotics or prebiotics, or coffee or creamer that has mushroom. They still want the same products just with a healthier angle.

WorldLeader

Right so who cares? VC-backed startups crash all the time. It's not a systemic risk to have a bunch of chatbot startups flame out. Anthropic and OpenAI are the only two in the game looking to go public, and they both are printing a fuck-ton of actual, hard cash. They are also in an arms race, bringing in the best talent, and spending reflects that reality. People in this thread are not using AI for work and it shows. Unless Congress outlaws AI, companies are going to replace people with agentic workflows and systems disturbingly fast in the coming years. We're all cooked, but not because AI is useless. It's because AI is actually really fucking good when connected within a business correctly. OAI and Anthropic's risks are from regulation and popular revolt, not usefulness or growth.

seraphim_west

Free users can be monetized through ads, which OpenAI is already experimenting with through a slow rollout. And a large share of OpenAI’s revenue, and, in Anthropic’s case, most of its revenue, comes from enterprise anyway. Anthropic is seeing unprecedented 10x revenue growth every year and is currently on the road to $100 billion ARR. I agree that these small startups are gonna go under, but that just leads to more consolidation and, in fact, potentially more token demand for the frontier labs. And VC money is heavily concentrated in the two or three frontrunners anyway, so your anecdotal experience isn’t representative of the AI field at large.

Sproutlee_Dev

Also people using it != people paying for it. Is it more useful out of the box than most websites in dotcom? Sure. So AI companies using the freemium model like they are a website where a non paying user costs 1/1000 of a cent but in reality each free user is costing whole dollars. Like everyone is saying, the bubble has nothing to do with usefulness, it has to do with costs of development and also I think the bubble is mostly in the private B2B space. I work as an MLE and I get literally tens of emails a day from new AI companies that are decently well funded popping up constantly. Hundreds and hundreds of these AI companies exist today (I mean look at last years AWS:Reinvent it was crazy) and likely in 3-5 years they will be dead. All of these companies are buying a shit ton of tokens from the big 2 model providers spending enormous amounts of VC money. When the music stops will the leftover enterprise demand be enough for current valuations? Idk 🤷

doglywolf

Yes lets directly ask the system whom's owners can and do manipulate answers if we should invest in it where it would hurt its owners if it said not to. But for giggles i did anyway and surprisingly it was pretty honest saying that market is showing all the classic signs of "Overheating' . It actually saying exactly what im getting at - Strong players will consolidate claim weaker ones - there will be a large corrective force in the over saturations . IT also says it wont be as severe as the .com bust but the issue is as big as that was you didnt have VC and investment money that tied into retirement index and heavily intertwined as it now , so when this "correction" happens its going to hurt a lot of peoples savings.

GlobalManHug

AI in reality costs are way higher than anyone will pay for it. Once the VC tap stops. They’ll burn.

PeachScary413

We do it because it's either free or like 20 bucks a month.. ain't nobody paying thousands of dollars for AI to write emails lmaooo Current prices are a pipe dream fueled by VC money and when it runs out we will have the crash, and people will keep asking AI why stonk go down while it's happening.

Ok-Adeptness-5834

"paying almost entirely with money from VC and circular financing" Conveniently ignoring that Anthropic revenue is up like 100x in 2 years from paying enterprise customers.

CurrentFondant49

The numbers have been reported by many sources including Bloomberg. Yes the hyperscalers only need to get paid. The thing you need to understand is that only OpenAI and Anthropic are paying. They are the only large scale customers, and they’re unsustainable companies paying almost entirely with money from VC and circular financing

RedTheRobot

Op also failed to point out companies were telling their employees use AI as much as possible and they got the bill. All of sudden that changed to only use AI when it makes sense. Ai companies loved selling that AI would replace employees but didn’t explain that it would a worse more expensive employee and you still needed someone direct it. So now the actual value is a lot clearer just like the dot com bubble, investors realized they weren’t looking a million dollar payday just because someone built a website about dogs. It will be even harder for the AI companies to prove they are even sustainable without VC funding.

Tearakan

200 dollars loses anthropic an estimated 1000 dollars for that claude pro subscription once a month. Once the VC funding dries up no regular person will be able to afford any of the major models.

truecakesnake

\> $20 is their "Use VC money to get consumers hooked and eliminate the competition" pric Been hearing this for years, but prices just keep going down.

Dangerous_Junket_773

$20 isn't at all close enough to what these companies need to charge long term. $20 is their "Use VC money to get consumers hooked and eliminate the competition" price.  Also, who's gonna pay that when there's free open source models that are good enough?

interesting_vast-

biggest surprise I believe is going to be second tier banks like the jefferies and the large european banks, they have indirectly underwritten huge amounts of these “private credit” loans by loaning money to the PE funds themselves rather then the underlying clients, meaning that ultimately these banks hold all the downside risk while the PE firms earn the premium from lending to these risky borrowers. Also any company making late stage private investments like Salesforce and Dell have started to do with in-house PE/VC like firms, generally if your business is going this far of course it’s a gamble that rarely works out like car manufacturers and large corporations turning to semi-banks in the early 2000s

stiffgordons

And the high regulatory/ reporting burden meaning private fund raising is significantly more cost effective than public offerings, so the best opportunities go to VC / institutional investors and the ASX is just a way for PE to dump unflippable investments on super funds & the few remaining retail investors.

NationalOwl9561

Well first you should realize what daily regime calls for a breakout of that kind... I've written up my strategy on this here (TLDR: See "R4-VC" or "R1-U"): [https://www.foxchasetrading.com/cracking-0dte-code-spy.html](https://www.foxchasetrading.com/cracking-0dte-code-spy.html) What I mean by R4-VC, R1-U, etc. is in the last one, Part 6 of that blog series.

Realistic-Cheetah413

The earnings are high now because companies are reporting contracted revenue to come. The fear with the AI bubble and the reality of openAI and Anthropic can’t figure out a business model to pay 10x for less product, is that they’re stuck in an unprofitable margin between expense and profit. For every token customers use under their current monthly plans, they lose money. So the fear isn’t that earnings won’t be good for the next 2-3 quarters, the fear is that the companies that are ultimately paying for that with VC money will run out of money to burn, and all of those unrealized contractual obligations will go out the window when there’s nobody to pay for them. These companies aren’t priced for what they make today they’re priced for what they’re projected to make 2-4 years from today, so if there’s doubt about that then the shares go down. As volatile as it’s been there’s definitely been a trend down in the AI sector as the veil is starting to come down on the circular financing and shaky foundation.

Nuklearapple

All he talked about is pricing no? ... mmhh. What would he know? What educated knowledge would he be able to present us other than analysts knowledge? I don't think he ever played GTA 3-VC-SA-4-5. It would be like explaining the feeling people get when they smoke crack to other people without ever having smoked crack themselves. In this case GTA or any MMO like WoW is the crack.

Peloton4371

I bought 5K USD of SPCX at 800b valuation back in late 2025 from a VC. My shares are in the process of transferring to my trading account, but there seem to be some delays. They have not hit my account yet. Lots of forms to fill out with weird questions I didn't know the answers to, had to email the help desk, wait for a reply, etc. My guess is thousands of people are having these issues and things are backed up.

anotherloserhere

That's kinda the point of VC. High risk. Imagine if there was no VC, and everyone just plowed money into the S&P, gold, or treasuries? Guess what? There wouldn't be any new companies! Why? Because VC is the biggest funder of startups! Doh! Yes, there are winners and losers, but people who run VC know that risk the best and are willing to do so, mostly in hopes of getting that one lotto ticket, but they are important in the ecosystem for providing funding for new (mostly unprofitable) ideas

Jealous_Bookkeeper20

Softbank's main bottleneck is fund scale destroying power law math. Power law VC works on a $500M fund where a $10B hit returns the fund 20x. When deploying $191.6B of capital, even a $45B paper gain on OpenAI yields just 23% total gross return over 10 years. That compounds to about 2.1% annually before fee drag and capital call timing. At that scale, single-hit venture returns can't keep up with a basic index.

mulletstation

VC investments have at minimum a 5+ year timeframe target before they're going to exit Like I'm not a fan of softbank but you aren't a VC guy so you just don't understand this strategy

AlfonsoOsnofla

I'm sure 2-4% annualised return is not what most VC funds would expect from such high risk investments.

mulletstation

This is how VC works bro

Brawmethius

He will get the bers as well later when he circles back money into google as they are also the prime investors lol. Huge name in tech makes startup --- > VC money pours in ---> Google marks massive paper gains --> He buys compute from google Lmao the JERK WILL CONTINUE

Strong_as_an_axe

There is a value proposition but what it is is currently hard to measure given that the tokens are not priced at anything approaching what would be required for them to be profitable. Furthermore, enterprise is starting to get sceptical, the big win is supposed to be programming, but developers have always maintained that coding speed was never the bottleneck. Uber has just imposed limitations on its developers after exploding its costs through AI use, whilst laying off a huge portion of their talent and creating a tonne of comprehension debt. All of this is before we even approach the fact that these companies do not have a decent moat, as evidenced by the success of the open weights models. AI will certainly be involved in our future, but at the moment there is no evidence of the magnitude of productivity gains that VC was expecting to materialise. As a consequence, they're all rushing to IPO with manipulated operational "profitability" (see Anthropic) in order to try and get people cashed out before there is a reckoning. I suspect all the Sovereign wealth fund talk is about as well.

Kepler1571

The VC game is bribe Washington to socialize your losses.

Disastrous_Berry4709

I mean, that's basically the VC game. Dump money into a bunch of crackpot ideas that could make a lot of money, hoping at least one will hit the jackpot. Businesses that are inherently good ideas that can grow slow don't need constant hot cash injections.

HairlessBandicoot

this. He's a VC dude who claims to be a genius. Idk why people keep throwing money at the same story but I'd say his genius is realising that and running with it

HairlessBandicoot

Idk if he raised a couple of B, but he raised a couple hundred mil at least on the basis of access into investing in to private cos like Anthropic. So again, this is VC aka connections and not intelligence, certainly not "genius" (wanna bet that all the articles calling him a genius were paid for?). He also (later? I can't be bothered to research him further, it's a waste of space) raise money to put into publics, which I'd wager is because he realised that it's easier to monetize public stakes and pay himself fees, than a private stake.

RockHardSalami

Like the vast majority of incredibly wealthy people, he got one massive win and has coasted on that for decades.  That win was so big, everyone else ignored all the Ls along the way, and since. These people aren't smarter they're just luckier.  Half of these Mark Cubans and the like were shilling NFT and how it was gonna change everything +5 years ago lol.  They're all just virtue signaling so youll buy the bag they're holding. Most of Shark Tank and VC funded businesses go nowhere or bankrupt, these idiots are throwing darts at boards just like the rest of us.  They can just afford to throw a lot more darts.

Chaminade64

Early investments by VC/Hedge Funds might want to monetize. Remember they don’t get the 20% of their ‘2 & 20’ until the exit. That’s how they get paid.

OldMovie9812

Probably has a whole slew of companies he invests in or VC ventures and his mega yacht lol I think in 2011 he had so little income he used $4k child tax credit deduction so he's savvy to the game for sure

pizzababa21

No you're wrong. There's plenty of massive companies in America which don't need funding beyond a seed. Pretty much every developed country has a pharma industry that gets bought out. Europe isn't that far off in terms of VC funding. The idea that a good and innovative company would only be able to survive on grants is just ridiculous cope. The usual progression of a good company in Europe is that they get good traction, realize it is too limiting dealing with European regulation and culture so they convert to a Delaware C Corp and prioritize the US market. Still though, even allowing for ones that start in Europe before leaving, the innovation is well behind the US and China. We can't even innovate by copying and iterating on things that already exist. Totally missed social networks, autonomous vehicles and now LLMs.

Suitable_Friend2954

the unicorns must be those VC firms that keep pumping cash in while the whole thing burns, classic

HairlessBandicoot

The only polity currently capable of large scale market manipulation is not Citadel, it's in the White House. Leopold A got wiped out because he isn't actually that smart and simply leveraged to the tits on momentum trades and climbed his way into getting investing access into Anthropic. That's VC, not real active investing / trading, and that's why he blew up. Concentration may make you wealthy but Diversification is what preserves your wealth. There is ALWAYS a tradeoff and that tradeoff is skill as well as risk appetite dependent. When skill and risk appetite don't match, you blow up. Like the Korean 3x ETF guys and Leopold of Situational (Un)Awareness did.

Valvador

> because I really hate to wrap my little SaaS in some AI wrapper and call it AI. I don't think people are asking you to make an AI wrapper around your tech, but the current state of Software and VC in software is that if you're not using AI you're working slower than a potential competitor that can put you out of business. * Is your SaaS something that, given enough tokens and good tests someone could slop up with Claude/Codex? (If the answer is yes, even if it's a lower quality product it just means that Salesforce or Meta could come in and dump cash and put you out of business) * Are you up to date with latest AI-assisted programming tools? Investors will probably think you're a dinosaur if you're doing 100% hand coding. They will probably think that you're going to fall behind quick.

FartPolluter

Man every American in a suit gonna be hyping Anthropic pre-IPO. Even Musk has kissed the ring. Riding the wave till IPO and then short Anthropic to hell once VC have shifted bags to retail

DulyDully

Been an avid user of Codex for almost a year and using the 100$ monthly subscription the entire time I’ve spent over 25 billion credits, the equivalent of almost 100 grand in api credits I got for 1.2k. This is how you burn that VC money boys it’s going to me.

RuleSafe6767

Use a stop loss for all speculative investments. If the company has zero profit and is running on VC funding or bond/share sales, then it's speculative. If the company's "story" hinges on a discovery or creation (think, small cap oil / mineral / drug developer), then it's speculative. Just set the stop loss and protect your capital on the way down, and hopefully take profit on the way up. If the company is a money-earner and (maybe) pays a safe but competitve dividend, and has a solid future, then keep buying when it's cheap, because this is where money will flow when the speculative FOMO stops.

Sea_Specialist_5580

I kind of wonder if it's a bit? Or like maybe he's a little autistic but exagerrating /reverse-masking? Like VC/silicon valley culture has gotten to the point where you actually want your CEO to be socially awkward and autistic because that means they are smarter or something

Sufficient_Habit5091

Sure but the OP's video of the interview is the biggest "AGI" circlejerk of 2. Guys like him in the VC world, hyping up dilution, debt, IPO, whatever are also responsible.

AzulMage2020

Always, always. ALWAYS research l relationships ANYTIME the words prodigy, genius , gifted, or the term left University are used when describing an executive and/or especially a founder. You will find that without exception, there is a relation to wealthy,connected, usually politically active family, whether immediate or not. Then the question becomes, given the obvious questionable decision making and judgement, how exactly were those degrees and titles earned ? In the same manner the opportunities to the individual were given? Mommy and Daddy providing a back stop to VC friends in order to secure funding for JRs' venture while also providing access to those connections in the first place? Then , all thats needed is to hire a marketing firm and create an over the top nonsenscial bio for JR and Poof! successful new enterprise du jour. Nepotism is one ofthe greatest deterrents to progress society faces

_Photonics_

VC backed POS? AHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahhaha stop it you are making it worse

Fit-Marionberry5248

FYI zero startups or even VC backed POS ”growth stories” have XX bn mcap in northern Europe

-sakuranbo

I'll triple down on the retardation. American labs collapsing has zero effect on DeepSeek, Mistral, etc. AWS will continue being able to fleece enterprises by leasing them 2010-era hardware (as they have been for the past decade). If the AI "bubble" pops, maybe you'll have to go back to VS Code instead using some VC-funded fork like Cursor. That's it. You'll still be able to send your erotic roleplay transcripts to AWS/GCP/Azure. You'll still be able to use something like pi or Codex to generate code, just maybe with DeepSeek V4 Pro (which is roughly equivalent to Claude Sonnet 4.6) instead of Claude 5 Fable. Even in this scenario, hardware startups like Cerebras are in a pretty good spot, since their hardware is reprogrammable (it's a common misconception that they build ASICs, but that's just not true). TL;DR: the bubble can pop and almost nothing important changes for users or adoption.

AdMysterious8464

New money is needed to sustain stock prices and when everybody is in the same trade it can only go down. That and the fact that all this buildout is being supported almost entirely by VC money and FCF of the hyperscalers. There is still no real AI or LLM product which generates profit that comes close to the amount of money being incinerated. Hyperscalers are increasingly taking on debt to finance this buildout and their stock prices are getting hammered, while bystanders (Apple) are running up. Their boards can fight the shareholders for a couple more quarters, but if their AI products don't start printing money soon, they will be forced to revert course

elim92

Runrate != profit. All AI players will have to increase prices drastically in the end for a sustainable business model, which will put LLM budgets into question for a lot of companies. Even right now it's still heavily subsidized by VC money. Also, these AI infra build outs are not going to continue in eternity at this scale.

toxicomano

I mean, it's basically like raising capital except instead of doing some dumbass pitch deck in front of a VC firm he just clicked a few buttons.

Good_Trick

August 6th - but the sell off may be overstated. VC shares will probably be sold off market. Employees are taxed on whatever they sell immediately. And if it keeps diving it’s not much different from what I heard they got on their last private offer. My guess is maybe 100 million shares out of the 900.

Different_Reality643

I don’t think the demand is non existent. There are plenty of companies that are generating high margin revenue due to ai cloud services. Idk what you mean by subsided by VC. Can you explain that for me? From my understanding, GPUs are sitting in warehouses because of a power shortages and/ or data center delays. Now how many of those sitting GPUs sitting and not generating revenue were financed by nivdia? I don’t have a clue. Now there could be an inflated revenue number for nivdia because of they have GPUs financed by them that are not generating revenue. The issue is we just don’t know how many of those GPUs that are not generating revenue were financed by nivdia themselves. So it is hard for me to draw the conclusion that demand is non existent or that nivdia’s revenue is massively inflated. Ai cloud revenue is looking great for a lot of companies. Btw just want to say I appreciate the discussion.

Swiftzor

None of the is means anything though. The demand is nonexistent and insanely subsided through VC, who are not asking very real questions about ROI. Basically they feel that they got taken for a ride, and honestly yeah they did. Most of the GPUs they sold are still sitting in receivables on pallets because they have no place to go, being financed by NVIDIA themselves saying they’ll rent the compute back. That’s not the sign of a healthy company, that’s the sign of a company desperate to keep the money train going.

RedPlumpTomato

My AI Slop Analysis: AMFN -- HARD AVOID One-liner verdict HARD AVOID. American Fusion Inc. is a 26-year-old shell corpse that got Weekend at Bernie's'd into a fusion energy concept in March 2026, slapped a ticker change on it, and is now trading at half a billion dollars in market cap on ninety-nine thousand dollars in actual cash -- enough to cover their operating burn for about 22 days before somebody has to print more shares and start the whole sorry dilution treadmill over again. --- Three names, zero businesses, one very tired shell. This company was born in the nineties as Tech Laboratories Inc. and proceeded to accomplish absolutely fuck-all for a quarter century before becoming Renewal Fuels Inc. -- another concept that dissolved into the OTC ether -- before finally landing its third identity as American Fusion Inc. in March 2026, roughly 72 hours after completing a reverse merger with a private entity called Kepler Fusion Technologies on February 27. That reverse merger is where a pre-revenue helium-3 fusion concept called Texatron got stapled to a zombie ticker and handed a nearly three-billion-share float, which is not how legitimately transformative fusion energy companies typically launch themselves into the world. The management team assembled to steward this corporate rebranding was not some seasoned deep-tech VC consortium flush with strategic capital. It was one guy holding every C-suite title simultaneously -- CEO, President, Secretary, Treasurer, AND Director, a full royal flush of corporate governance in a single pair of hands -- who has not spent a single goddamn dollar of his own cash buying open-market shares in over two years of running this company. A Costello-shaped hole in the cap table. The share count story for AMFN is genuinely unhinged, and you need to understand it before you think about touching this ticker. The 10-Q for Q1 2026 shows 2,997,301,029 shares issued and outstanding on the balance sheet as of March 31 -- call it roughly three billion shares -- which at the current price of $0.1671 makes the market cap approximately $500.8 million. That alone should give you pause. But Note 10 of the same filing discloses a subsequent event that is wild even by OTC pink-sheet standards: a court-ordered cancellation of 1,683,000,000 shares tied to a dispute involving Justin Costello, the prior RNWF-era operator who pleaded guilty in January 2023 to federal securities fraud for running a $35 million pump-and-dump scheme -- posing as a Harvard MBA billionaire war veteran to systematically defraud retail investors across a web of OTC shells. A federal court nuked 1.683 billion of his shares. By the May 20, 2026 filing date, the cover-page share count had dropped to 1,636,801,029. But here is the part that tells you exactly what kind of operation you are looking at: between the court cancellation and that cover-page date, the current management had already issued approximately 322 million fresh new shares. The court blew up a billion and a half Costello ghost shares, and the new team's immediate institutional response was to dilute right back up. This is not an accident. This is the whole business model. Twenty-two days of runway and a share printer. At March 31, 2026, American Fusion had $99,594 in the bank. Their Q1 operating cash outflow was $415,931. Their net loss for the quarter was $669,750 -- more than six times what they lost in Q1 the prior year -- because now they carry public-company overhead: patent filings, IR marketing, compensation, and a physicist on salary developing technology that has produced zero prototype test results, zero third-party validation, and zero published test data. That $99k is not a strategic reserve. It is a rounding error with delusions of grandeur. The only reason this company breathes as a going concern is that they raised $513,000 in Q1 through unregistered stock sales, and a May 6, 2026 8-K shows they were back at the trough immediately with a new material agreement AND a dilution event in the same filing. Add up what the market is actually buying: roughly $500.8 million in market cap, plus $491K in debt, minus $99K in cash, gives you an enterprise value of approximately $501.2 million for a company with no revenue, no prototype, and 22 days of runway. The CTO has real credentials, a real plasma physics career, and a published theory about nuclear war on Mars. Dr. John E. Brandenburg holds a legitimate PhD from UC Davis, spent real time at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, carried Top Secret clearances, and built a decades-long plasma physics career. He is also publicly and on-the-record the author of a theory that ancient nuclear weapons annihilated a Martian civilization. He presented at a Fermilab conference on July 23, 2026 -- a real venue -- and American Fusion's own accompanying press release felt morally obligated to include the sentence that participation "does not constitute scientific validation or endorsement of the technology." When your own promotional material preemptively disclaims scientific endorsement for the thing you are promoting, you have reached an entirely new tier of accidental corporate honesty. The Texatron concept is an idea wearing a patent portfolio as a costume, and ideas in patent-portfolio costumes do not deserve half-billion-dollar market caps at development stage. The catalysts have already fired, and you are standing behind the confetti. The July 23 Fermilab presentation and the Texas Tech Testing referenced in the concurrent news release were the freshest catalysts in this story -- and the market had already taken the stock on a nearly 60% single-day rip to approximately $0.20 on July 21 before handing back about 16.5% to settle at current levels. That move is done. If you are looking at AMFN right now thinking you are getting in front of a catalyst, you are literally standing behind the curtain trying to catch confetti after the party ended. There are no upcoming binary events on the calendar -- no dated readouts, no FDA gates, no earnings inflection, nothing concrete on the horizon. You are post-pump and post-peak, sitting at the part of the chart where early buyers are deciding whether to hand their bags to you (3/3) One hundred and sixty-seven thousand percent, and the crowd already did its job. The stock's 52-week low is $0.0001. At $0.1671 today, that is a 167,000% move -- a number so cosmically stupid it wraps back around to being clarifying about what this thing actually is. Penny-stock communities have been flooded with explicitly promotional language around AMFN, breathless comparisons to legitimately funded private fusion companies that have nothing substantive to do with this ticker, and the classic "you still have time to get in" energy that means, with zero ambiguity, that someone who got in cheaper wants you to fund their exit. A sentiment alert on this name fired in mid-July at $0.079, and the stock subsequently peaked at approximately $0.20 -- a 153% move from that alert price. That move is in the books. There is not a single institutional shareholder in this company. Not one fund has touched it. The people who got paid on AMFN got in at sub-pennies, and the only remaining question is who writes their exit check. VERDICT: HARD AVOID. American Fusion Inc. is a zombie shell with three names and zero businesses that stuffed a physics concept with no test results into a nearly three-billion-share float, handed it to a one-man management operation that hasn't spent a cent of its own cash on the stock it runs, carries the legacy of a convicted federal fraudster baked into its corporate DNA, has 22 days of cash left as of its last filing, and is valued at north of half a billion dollars on the strength of promotional press releases and a retail crowd that already ran it 167,000% from the 52-week low. The pump is done. The catalysts have fired. There is no fundamental thesis here. Stay far the fuck away. .

Swastik496

Why? Nvidia is selling the GPUs are margins high enough that they can afford to be paid in stock instead and effectively become a VC

1453GreatestYearEver

I mean, aren't seed rounds like ... the one stage of private equity where non peasant corporate class *does* have a sort of entryway to? Sure unless you're a PEF / VC you typically can't do a Series A / B / C / etc., but any jack and jill with a few 5-figures can go around dropping individual angel investing checks in seed rounds. It's not *nothing*, usually investments around like $15,000 - $50,000 for individuals, but that's also not exactly unattainable amount for a higher earner. Many people here have personal brokerage accounts that could easily go into 10+ seed rounds of tech starters. People just dont' because that's incredibly risky.

ActualAd9911

the $180m direct check from korea's national growth fund is the part nobody's pricing in yet, that's not a VC round or a grant, it's the government literally writing checks straight into rebellions' bank account. most sovereign tech plays route through intermediaries but korea's skipping that entire layer which usually means they're dead serious about competing with nvidia's inference stack. curious if the 4x efficiency claim holds once these hit multi-tenant cloud workloads or if that's just single-model benchmarking under lab conditions?

OtherwiseAlbatross14

How much of Google's net worth came from VC investments?

crankthehandle

Google would arguably be one, if not the, best VC on this planet

FireNexus

“The problem is you’re full of shit.” “Then tell us what you want to fill yourself with.” You keep repeating “Why, Google has a bajiggitillion in demand for their compute” and just fully disregard that the demand (like for all of this capex, when you trace it to the source) is from two unprofitable, VC-funded money furnaces. It’s almost as if this entire industry is a fucking sandcastle and at least partly a full-on scam.

CrunchyMage

It ends when OpenAI and Anthropic have a hard time raising and can’t meet the RPOs OP mentioned. The only way it continues is if those two companies become profitable and the VC demand converts into real demand. Right now it’s a race between VC money running out and becoming profitable. Anthropic is allegedly moving towards profitability. OAI is as deeply unprofitable as ever from a revenue growth/cash burn growth perspective.

danisanub

You can’t win here. I’ve gotten downvoted for saying RKLB was overvalued at $150 and explaining why, while I have 12 years of investment management experience and am a CFA & CAIA charter holder. The average redditor would rather downvote experts and go off their vibes. For what it’s worth I agree with you on AI. It’s been successfully rolled out at my firm and at my girlfriend’s hospital. It’s quite literally saved her over an hour a day on patient note write ups. It’s helped my company’s deal flow and investment evaluations. When I worked in VC we say the cost of startups decline about 90% due to efficiencies from AI. This will take time to roll out across the economy.

CrunchyMage

"AI isn’t going anywhere, usage is growing, demand is growing, and the costs to serve the models is going down, not up." All of these things are true, yet my point still stands. A lot of AI compute demand right now is entirely coming from VC funding. I haven't seen Anthropic's financials, but I can tell you FOR SURE that OAI is bleeding an insane amount of money and that they're not getting anywhere close to profitability. Right now for them cash burn/revenue ratio is staying pretty constant. Their revenue growth is entirely reliant on increasing VC cash burn which is the entire issue I'm bringing up. 1/4 of the compute backlog/obligations right now is JUST openAI. I know Anthropic is in a better financial position than OAI, but I haven't seen any evidence that they are profitable and don't have the same dynamic of being entirely reliant on increasing valuations and VC cash burn in order to fulfill compute obligations and increase revenue

SanDisk_Made_Me_Rich

Finally, someone who gets it. The capex returns are predicated on the thesis that AI compute demand will continue to exceed AI compute supply. However a large amount of the AI compute demand right now is coming from Anthropic and OpenAI burning VC money. These companies are hugely unprofitable right now and are already near $1T valuations. If they can't keep raising at higher and higher valuations to burn higher and higher amounts of cash on compute, then a huge chunk of the AI compute demand disappears and it's likely that we will have more supply than demand and there won't be positive ROI on the capex.

CrunchyMage

Finally, someone who gets it. The capex returns are predicated on the thesis that AI compute demand will continue to exceed AI compute supply. However a large amount of the AI compute demand right now is coming from Anthropic and OpenAI burning VC money. These companies are hugely unprofitable right now and are already near $1T valuations. If they can't keep raising at higher and higher valuations to burn higher and higher amounts of cash on compute, then a huge chunk of the AI compute demand disappears and it's likely that we will have more supply than demand and there won't be positive ROI on the capex.

omegafivethreefive

I'm the guy companies call to build AI solutions. I go "yeah use it for this and not for that". CTO for bespoke enterprise AI solutions company. The scales they're thinking about are absolutely nuts and when VC stops funding token usage the prices are going to _explode_. Everyone is getting ready for this. Most AI solutions are developed to cost _maybe_ dollars a month for active users in a business context. They math it out like people will vibe code massive stacks for 100k$+ in token each. That'll be an absolutely minority. Any enterprise architect worth it's salt will flag that out way before IT sec gets involved. Execs are between a rock and a hard place and since AI deployment are not providing returns with _cheap as fuck_ tokens. You don't use LLMs/agentic solutions/etc to flow data between systems, you use them to create a deterministic program that will do it securely. Basically, it costs too much for what it does and when it'll cost less then you can run it elsewhere. Big fat fucking bubble.

CrunchyMage

The demand is VC subsidized, it’s not organic. Both Anthropic and OpenAI sell tokens below cost. A $200 subscription gets you like $2000 worth of tokens Since each training run isn’t making money back on its own and each training run is costing more than the last, the only way to keep increasing revenue is to keep increasing cash burn. Since both companies are deeply unprofitable and becoming even more so, the only way to keep getting larger amounts of cash is through equity sales at higher valuations. Both companies are around $1T today already. This party only keeps going if they can keep raising higher amounts at higher valuations and thats becoming increasingly harder now.

ComplexEntertainer13

> the ones with the roi question aren't the hyperscalers, but the pure ai companies like oai, anthropic, etc. Guess what happens with the investments the hyperscalars are doing if people downstream can't make ROI and end up failing? There is no value in surplus DCs and aging GPU hardware sitting unused. For the providers to make money, their customers have to stay in business. VC money, debt and circular financing can only keep the lights on for so long. Eventually there has to be actual money from consumers brought in somewhere.

finebushlane

I think you're misunderstanding something here. The demand for AI isn't driven by VC spending, you've got it backwards here. VCs are investing in Anthropic and OpenAI because they SEE the demand for AI by the revenue and usage numbers coming out of Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic's models are so highly demanded that they cannot serve them without downtimes and unavailability. Anthropic are desperately trying to get hold of more compute capacity due to the demand for Claude. I.e. Anthropic could be making more revenue now but they can't because they cannot fulfill the demand they are getting for their APIs. Again, even if Anthropic couldn't raise capital gain from VCs, it would not affect the demand at all. The demand for Anthropic's API services is coming from pretty much every tech company in the world (including companies like Meta) who use Anthropic's APIs heavily.