VC

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.

AdMysterious8464

Who cares about GCP revenue or profits at this point in time? It matters only where they come from. At the moment VC money is thrown into the incinerator, but that can only go on so long. If OpenAI, Anthropic and all the others dont start posting multibillions in profit soon, the demand for GCP will eventually crater likewise

cookingboy

\> operating at a loss to acquire market share Bro, they get **zero market share** by giving out the market for free. It benefits only the hyper scalers and the customers. Do you even know what the fuck open weighted means? You are literally spreading Anthropic/OpenAI FUD so they can have a duopoly in the model space for the whole world. And what difference does that make where does the VC get their money from? Sovereign state fund is not unique to China. Saudi sovereign fund invested billions in Anthropic. Would you call Anthropic “being subsidized by the billions by the Saudi government”?

johndsmits

Considering it's taken drone delivery, what, 12 years to barely hit a couple cities for $5 items, done "by the book" and well executed by Google Wing and Zipline. Yeah I think air taxis are just as wild west that isn't going anywhere until a company serious addresses the engineering vs VC capital valuation.

cookingboy

I mean the technical papers they’ve published literally focus on how to get the most bang for your buck from GPUs when it comes to training and inference. We forced them to innovate, and in return they did, and they went above and beyond and shared the knowledge with the rest of us. Why is it that hard to believe? Those techniques were literally implemented by both Anthropic and OpenAI as well afterwards. I work in this industry. I’ve a close family member who’s a world class researcher. I know friends at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and nobody, and I mean *nobody* in the industry has any doubt on the R&D talent of the Chinese labs. The consensus is that they’d already be ahead of us now if not for the compute constraint they had to deal with (again, which forced them to innovate). There is no evidence whatsoever that the Chinese government is subsidizing the inferences or R&D cost, why would they? They are gaining market share by giving out the models for free to any hyper scalers that want to host them. The Chinese labs are just burning through VC money the same way our labs have been.

JojoRicardo

opposite, Airbnb and Coinbase among many other smaller YC and VC backed startups ALL favor Chinese models for commodity workloads. This is because the models are open weight and can’t ever link to any third party servers Chinese or not. OpenAI and Anthropic farm your prompts and can steal your alpha like Alex Karp has said. Chinese models can’t if you self host

Dramatic-Morning-100

VC sitting in caves in the jungle...

crankthehandle

Google would be the most successful VC on this planet if it would be a separate business.

eks

> it’s pricing a bet on where that revenue goes in 5-10 years And when that revenue doesn't materializes for the thousands upon thousands of little shitty AI startups receiving a flood of VC money trying to convince your grandmother that they NEED AI to make a cup of tea what are we going to get? A market crash. These bets are not being made on tech giants. This is all just like the dotcom bubble again, only worse.

ex1stence

There is a reason: The bubble is popping. Anthropic still isn’t profitable. It’s buying compute from a company that spent billions on data centers it never ended up using. Anthropic is only leasing compute, so the actual upkeep costs of the data center itself (buying all new GPUs and infrastructure to cool them every three years), still falls to Meta. Anthropic is buying that space using VC money, since it still doesn’t turn a profit. So it’s using equity cash to rent depreciating data centers to run a service at a loss with no clear path to profitability in sight. How you don’t see the writing on the wall is beyond me.

rdude777

>near monopoly on a emerging critical infra layer LOL! In 2025, Starlink was about 75% of SpaceX's launches; an entirely subsidized operation, funded by Elon, VC's and other money. If you remove Starlink, SpaceX is hardly "monopoly". In any case, many other launch providers are competing in the sector and now that SpaceX is publicly traded, the relevant launch services part (not "AI" bullshit) will show its true value.

YoureProbablyAB0t

The only sentence that you can say that is today out wrong is, "the big companies only lose money." Fine. They make profits which then get sent to offshore bank accounts, used to invest in more AI infrastructure [Cloud Loop](https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/ai-bubble-fears-grow-big-131548421.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMz3i9SDiuiFY8fMLNaoh-qF1RWexuCssiVn6mz_ziGgMKxir38MmQw_BMTMrgWUzTDlijMwd-wqTbaOo7X15MmDBuSWBdBME2aDZrWKlHBt1H0nY5cnIQm-71fd3uFbKwixozjfjcTIX_4_VC8-y0v4hXTX8xGT0NFyAS_51Y4O), used for buybacks or CEO compensation. That's basically a loss to society. Maybe an exaggeration but true enough. But everything else in my original post is correct. These optimistic reports are all over the place when we know that this administration lies about the true numbers [example](https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=8633). And this reddit. Going on rants is the only reason I'm here. I don't really need to grovel to an account that could very possibly be a bot mincing details.

Craneteam

grifting VC until that well runs dry

acadia11x

Anything .com was not going to be winner … the companies that were winners from .com understood it was about owning  infrastructure, data, content, and attention.  And I use infrastructure loosely because Telcos own vast amounts of infrastructure but they were a .com loser although it didn’t look that way at first. As it’s not about owning the infrastructure per se but services supporting and riding on top.  But I digress yes slap the word AI in your company name and you can get some VC capital … but you already know the winners of AI era, ImHo. If you are betting on some random AI company then you don’t understand AI nor where the moat happens to be … because it’s so easy to copy someone else if you are just wrapping AI and calling it a product … the very nature of AI which itself can build anything makes that an anti-moat. So with that said again you know the winners.

surfnvb7

Maybe. I think people underestimate how much VC capital and private equity is slushing around out in the cloud after the dotcom bubble, and other big events. While most people lost money on these events, the big VCs and banks made killings. There is literally so much money out there not being actively invested, they are trying to find homes for their cash other than the stock market or bonds.

ng_logic

Remember when food delivery apps were burning VC cash to give us free meals? Now they're doing $15B M&A deals. We were never the customers. We were just the product demo.

cowleggies

???? having a browser, a spreadsheet, a chat app, and a VC app open is “not a use case 99.9% of personal laptop users have”? what are you talking about lmao

hkmadbear

We've gone from "free delivery and 50% off every order" to "$15B acquisitions." 😅 The VC subsidy era is definitely over.

Longjumping_Egg_725

The top panel is every VC pitch deck from back then, just pure swagger and zero substance Funny how the bottom panel is basically reality setting in and realizing nobody actually understood what they were buying

Wide-Contribution-29

Business idea - onlyfans meets linkedin Who has contacts to VC firms? Not gay enough for Peter Thiel though, so probably wouldn’t work for him. 

Spiritual-Will-1586

Space x is becoming the unbrella for their AI, data centres, robotics, and possibly soon Tesla will be absorbed in to it. As much as people hate Elon, the dude is backed by governments, VC, and etc. I personally haven't bought SPCX yet, waiting until insider shares are unlocked in August. I'll grab around 1k shares around 110ish to 125 area.

GeneralBarnacle10

Except that this is random. His son's VC firm invested in a rare earth company that was applying for a loan from the Pentagon.

Novel-Green-2368

Why is it “politically durable”? What are defense contracts for space actually defending? Data centers and robots and VC boondoggles? Because It ain’t you. And people are beginning to realize their tax dollars and borrowed money from the Fed are actually needed elsewhere or need to be eliminated not shot into space.

Altruistic-Gate-7209

No, it is not a steal. The software industry used to have a very high barrier to entry and now it’s gone. We used to have: A) a lot of desire to build great enterprise software, and B) a big shortage of people who could actually do it. C) Hungry VC’s and a capital market that loved software businesses. (Bill gates was the richest man on earth because of it) Resulting in only a couple of software businesses / people being able to get the capital for a long enough runway to create great software that would sell quick enough to potentially become a great software business. That model is now totally thrown upside down, still there is; A) a lot of desire to build great software, but B) because of AI you do no longer need that crazy upfront investment, or in other words take that financial risk. C) because of AI the space is going to get really crowded really quickly and will drive all established enterprise software into a commodity and ultimately this will affect prices and margins. The premiums that all these great software businesses asked for their code is going to be diminished. Reliable global Saas and Cloud services that have business advantage because of their network scale and service area will be affected less.

mistermarpole

Interesting, thanks. How about VC investors? Same restrictions?

NASArocketman

I love Claude it's such a great tool. Makes coding so much easier and more accessible. The question I have is this: What happens when token prices go up? Neither Anthropic or OpenAI are turning a profit right now. They are about to go public and they need to be making more money. Companies are already blowing through annual toekn budgets in like 4 months (look at CFO comments from Uber). As the cost goes up, all of sudden human workers might be more cost effective than AI agents. I work in the sustainability field, where most companies are living off of VC money. I am not sure they are going to allocate millions to AI budgets.

Carmanman_12

If it makes you feel better, that 200k you lost made a SpaceX VC 200k richer :-)

Constellious

An IBM VC came to my local office and reassured that everyone’s job is safe and they’re going to invest there. The next month they laid everyone off and shipped the jobs overseas. I hope it goes to 0. 

RoboticGreg

You have missed the humanoid hype. It was about 12 months ago (CTO of an ai/robotics company heavily involved with VC and PE rounds)

Dudebobski

$PMTRW (speculation only) Perimeter is focused on defense, AI, quantum, aerospace and advanced manufacturing. Executive Chairman Jordan Blashek co-founded America’s Frontier Fund (AFF), a VC firm investing in frontier technologies supporting U.S. national security. If PMTR ultimately announces a compelling business combination, I think PMTRW could have meaningful upside. There are no announced negotiations. A few private companies that appear to fit Perimeter’s stated focus: ● Venus Aerospace – Developing hypersonic aircraft and propulsion systems designed for next-generation defense and commercial aviation. ● Qunnect – Building quantum networking hardware and software to enable secure, long-distance quantum communications. ● Foundation Alloy – Advanced materials company using novel manufacturing methods to produce high-performance metal components for aerospace and defense. ● Etched – Designing specialized AI inference chips built specifically for large language models and next-generation AI workloads. ● QuEra Computing – One of the leading neutral-atom quantum computing companies focused on scalable fault-tolerant quantum systems. Curious what other private companies people are watching for PMTR…?

Tiny_Instruction_557

Is there a more iconic pairing than a MacBook and soon to be worthless equity stake when VC funding drys up?

ImminentDingo

Even if the UX is a net negative because of ads, Google will be offering Gemini for free and built into your phone and browser even after the VC dries up and OpenAI and Claude are forced to charge subscription or token prices.

FullOf_Bad_Ideas

I want vibecoded Exchange and Entra to work. Migrate everyone to Ubuntu and vibe coded Teams alternative while at it. Open source it all and profit. I don't think it'd work with their approach but there should be a startup that gets VC money to Kickstart their own clones of Microsoft software and sell it cheaply to companies who want to profit off of vibe coding without duplicating work among orgs.

unclefire

Oh it’s cyclical. The question is when the hype will die down. Won’t be in the next 6-12 months the unless VC money dries up or consumers of ai abandon much of their ai work.

Leather_Floor8725

IPOs are basically bailouts for VC these days. They leave nothing on the table for the bagholders.

Technically_Tactical

The whole world maxxing 401k/403B/TSP allocations, plus retail money in private brokerages, doesn't move literally trillions in minutes. It's VC leveraged instruments printed in IOUs rhe ratings agencies have designated stable.

soggybiscuit93

I didn't speak on datacenter build outs. I spoke on hardware capex spend, and my statement on that is correct. And also, the article is speaking out of concern that datacenter buildouts are being interrupted due to regulation and an insufficient grid, which is causing shortages of supply. >OpenAI has multiple times said they're burning billions This isn't relevant to discussion on demand. Burning VC funds during the buildout phase is expected at this part of the lifecycle. Cost reductions, and a focus on reducing inferencing costs come later as the market begins to settle, consolidate, and winners / losers of the AI race become more clear.

desturel

Chipotle got sold to a VC and their quality went to shit immediately after. The only way it rebounds is by rebuilding customer trust and increasing quality which is something VCs are notoriously bad at doing. The goal is to squeeze every last penny out of the business, not improve it.

nohandsfootball

I miss my VC subsidized uber rides

trust_it_bb

You want to get rich, you need to look for sub 1b stocks. Things to look for - management, lots of cash on hand, improving financials, big catalysts, industry. Then you hold onto that conviction till the stock goes to 0 or you make it big. The ideal case is you find 5 stocks, and put 20% in each. The VC way. 1 winner will recoup losses of others and 10-50x your money. This method works even better when rates go up.

fourfastfoxes

this is actually genius -- take VC money and go crazy opening stores to show growth, take it public to cash out, then close the poorly performing stores to show improving per store sales, savings, which tricks people into becoming bagholders on the way to zero, and then you buy up the assets in bankruptcy and start over!

psychohistorian8

I was generally disappointed with GTA V compared to GTA 3/VC/SA, even GTA IV was still pretty good and like you said a lot of the people associated with GTA's early success have left the company I'm not buying GTA VI until I get extensive gameplay and feature footage

Sufficient_Habit5091

>When the VC/IPO money runs out It's going to take a long time of dumping on retirement accounts with IPOs / dilution before liquidity runs out. If Fed wants to keep printing like crazy it could take years or more.

CrunchyMage

I think the market in general is trying to figure out how the heck all this AI infra spend is supposed to get ROI and not coming up with good answers. Google and Amazon have the strongest arguments with their cloud businesses. MSFT is a bit weird because most of their demand is OAI and it's unclear if they're going to be able to pay for all that when they're still burning insane money and need a $1T+ valuation just to pay for part of current obligations. OAI and Anthropic are still almost certainly hella losing money on all their current model development, so basically the entire demand is VC fueled. When the VC/IPO money runs out, what happens to all that capacity?

Aggressive-Donkey-10

I opened a short on SPCX, 2 weeks ago when SPCX at $224, via an ETf SSPC is a 2x levered short etf, I 'm adding to it whenever SPCX pops up, I don't think the street has factored in all the shares that will be coming to market over next 3 months, 7% every 3 weeks starting in a couple of weeks, to 35% total, then more later this year. Those long-time employees and early VC-institutions are going to want to sell, and since Elon only leaked 4.5% = 550 million shares for the IPO, when Billions of shares start coming out, SPCX I think could drop to $50-75, and still be the most overpriced tech stock on planet at 40-50X sales. or i'm screwed :)

tragedy_strikes

Shit like SoftBank recently couldn't get a $6 billion loan when trying to use their entire position in OpenAI as collateral, Meta and xAI are selling excess compute because they can't use it all themselves (if running LLM's is such a great product with great returns why are they selling?), 70% of compute demand is coming from OpenAI and Anthropic (from training models) who only exist because of welfare checks from Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and VC. Go read Ed Zitron to see how fucking stupid this industry is right now.

Tim_Apple_938

? You’re saying expensive VC backed models will win over cheap fast models that are just as good but trailing by a few weeks?

gburdell

AVGO is a VC firm masquerading as a chip company

fallingdowndizzyvr

> The only thing you pount me to is a small page of companies. Ah.... CapitalG and A16Z are not a "small page of companies". They invest in, they represent and thus network a sizable number of companies. There's also that little angel investor Sequoia. Having a VC invest in your company is not just about getting money. It's about networking with all the other companies they invest in.

FOSHavoc

So I was at this VC mixer in Menlo Park last Tuesday—washed down my third $19 artisanal oat milk latte with a craft IPA, hopped into my $140,000 Cybertruck that gets 40 feet to the gallon-equivalent, and had an absolute *epiphany*, bro. What if we take AI—and hear me out here—what if we take AI, and we put it in *everything*? Like, what if my refrigerator can refuse to open until it's verified my emotional state through a fourteen-camera emotion-recognition array trained on a dataset of exclusively white guys named Tyler? What if my toothbrush negotiates a Series C while I'm brushing? I pitched it in the three minutes between my cryotherapy session and my infrared sauna, and a guy in a Patagonia vest threw $400 million at me before I even finished the sentence. He said "this is going to disrupt the entire oral hygiene space" and I said "it will also disrupt my gums" and he said "we'll monetize the bleeding." We're now valued at $6.2 billion. Pre-revenue. Obviously. The product doesn't work. It has never worked. The fridge locked me out for six days because it classified my hunger as "a vibe shift." The toothbrush spent my entire seed round on GPU clusters and now files its own taxes as an independent contractor. But that's the beautiful thing, man—this is *America*. You don't need a working product, you need a *deck*. You need a founder who looks like he could've captained the crew team at Stanford before he dropped out to "solve trust." And now the Pentagon wants in because someone told a four-star general that our toothbrush has "strategic deterrence capabilities," and he genuinely believes an AI toothbrush is going to win the next cold war. God bless this country. We put a man on the moon and now we're putting large language models in air fryers. Same energy. *Same* energy.