VC

Candid_Koala_3602

The market was due for a correction in 2015. We haven’t just magically created 5 times as much wealth as there ever has been in 10 years. Where did this extra wealth come from? It came from redefining what investing looks like by changing the way we view stock pricing. But you can’t create actual wealth out of thin air without offloading the bill somewhere. Currently that bill is coming due, and everyone needs to diversify themselves before the VC money retreats.

NeitherEchidna3491

Hyperscalers are selling AI workloads more or less at cost, AI companies are largely the ones burning VC money at an unprecedented rate. The costs of all these services is going to multiply several times when everyone in the chain starts looking for profitability.

Ol_Maxxie_Solt_DB

The Dot Com Bubble is also called the Tech, Media, and Telecom (TMT) Bubble. It wasn't all sock puppets and websites you know. Cisco was doubling operating income every year in the late 1990s. Media companies were anointed as the ones who could take advantage of the web better than the money-losing startups. These were the infrastructure companies of the day, just like the cloud providers / hyperscalers are today. The numbers today are massive. But if too much earnings growth for cloud segments is really just the VC cash spent by AI startups, then there could be a year or three of negative or poor earnings growth.

Forgiz

Well, something with a negative or neutral beta, right? Thee assets classes could work for you - private debt, PE/VC or infrastructure.

Humes-Bread

Two things: 1. Technological success (AI) is going to put a lot of people out of a job. Anthropic's recent release made people realize that, and it has ripple effects. If law firms are used less frequently, then the companies that service law companies (hardware, software, realestate) also take a hit. 2. Companies are staying private for longer. OpenAI, Anthropic- both are private companies with incredibly huge value. A few select wealthy groups are able to get in early through (e.g. through venture capital), but when companies are doing several rounds (and larger, mega-rounds) because VC's have the money to fund them. That means that schmucks like you and me miss out on some of the biggest growth periods. So what happens when AI wipes out a bunch of white collar work, affecting dozens of public companies as well as small and medium sized businesses and the ones who make the money are the ones who can get in on the deals before a company goes public? Stocks get hammered as private wealth grows. That's my 70% confidence take on this and why it feels different to me. In the past if a company sucked, it was booted from the S&P and replaced with the next best thing, so just being in an ETF was great. No such rotation when the companies making bank stay private for super long.

No-Ideal-9153

Tough times man. I'm mostly a private markets investor (VC type deals I get access to because of my job). Deployed $200k over the last 5 years that is essentially all worthless (a lot went into crypto that had insane paper marks but I could never get liquidity, as is the deal with venture). Then made an investment in a company whose CEO I got connected with after he sold me the kool-aid. Turns out he and his team are incompetent. Lost another $110k. Thank God still have just a little cash left but my company is winding down too, so no job as of the upcoming March. Next time just going to buy real estate or the s&p and never try to create alpha, not worth it.

finance-mcp-001

Agreed. The "irrational exuberance" exists mainly in PE/VC which is pumping up pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-everything start-ups with AI in their name to unicorn levels. IPO-ing is deeply unpopular these days for "paper" start-ups, unlike the dot-com era.

BlueSonjo

Yes seed capital, venture capital, private equity, etc. are a different game than retail investment. Even at the basic level that analyzing a VC opportunity is nothing like analyzing a stock. It's not exactly a hidden reality, it's a different area of finance with different job titles and dynamics and access rules and participants and always has been.  Democratized investment can also touch that area (in things like platform investing for seed capital that pool together small investors / tokenized stuff), but it is mostly refering to the advent of low cost online brokerages, lower transaction fees, removal of minimum amounts, less paperwork and know-how needed to trade, easy and affordable diversification (ETFs), free information online for both market data and financial knowledge, etc. making it viable for a normal salaried worker to invest. As opposed to back in the day, where just the banking fee would eat you alive unless you were moving large amounts, and you couldn't expect the average joe to go meet a guy in a bank to go over the literal paperwork he had no proper means to interpret, no way of monitoring without a large time investment, tax calculation headaches, etc. 

Sybertron

My guy you're talking about 110 BILLION dollars. This is all part of the VC bubble, where they need to control whole markets in order to subvert supply and demand curves, in order to make it make any sense. To do that waymo needs to not over be a 'good cab company' they'd need to completely be taking over most transit. We can argue maintenence costs and shit, sure, and maybe just maybe you can get to 100 million a year total in USA in some savings. But 100 million is no where near 100 billion and drastically underestimates how these finance bros cook up numbers. Mostly where I think they got 100 billion from, well if you have 2 million uber drivers making 50k a year, oh wait thats conveniently perfectly 100 billion. Almost like some 2.5 GPA student tried to show a good number for a spreadsheet and a bunch of guys sitting around more worried about their next golf match nodded and said "arrow go up must be good" And even then, it may be a great investment! Cause they end up controlling arrow go up, and that's all finance is.

Confident_Pace4554

The IPO is gonna be a major liquidity event for Elon and all the VC firms that have a stake in space x. Meanwhile idiots who love Elon will buy buy buy. It’s a ground breaking company but nowhere near worth 1.5 trillion

mackerelman1776

‘this lifestyle gets me bigger deals’ ...It works when everyone’s drunk on cheap VC money and FOMO. Soon as the tap slows even a little—first budget cut, first missed quarter, first round of layoffs—suddenly the guy pulling up in a matte-black Urus with two blondes in the back ain’t the baller anymore.

2QuarterDollar

Only way I see a next leg up in the tech sector is if private equity and VC finally demonstrate their private investment projects. I have Davos in mind where most CEOs and banking heads said that private markets will drive growth this year. Also it makes a lot of sense that the things we are seeing (consumer grade) developments in ai isn’t the type of shit Elon and other “elites” see. That’s why I think Mag7 will just go on a crazy acquisition spree this year. They already want Anthropic badly but none of them was able to buy it

I_Own_A_Fedora_AMA

LFTO is the most obvious short ever. Upcoming IPO with a company description of "we use super advanced proprietary AI to drive users to startup platforms". Basically the claim is they are a unicorn printer. VC funded startup comes to them, billion users overnight, IPO, cash out, bro down. If it worked, why would you sell that. If you're a venture capitalist with a unicorn printing machine that nobody else understands you hold onto it and print a million unicorns. Nobody is selling the golden goose. Scam, fake, fraudulent, phony, price target $1.08, will short 2 months after IPO or the day after they close below opening price, whichever comes first.

bobby1128

Interesting move. Daily liquidity plus exposure to names like OpenAI and Databricks makes this stand out compared to traditional VC setups.

bobby1128

That’s actually pretty exciting. A publicly traded VC fund with names like OpenAI and Databricks is rare access for retail.

dontgarrettall

The piece you’re missing is free float. When they ipo free float is fuck all, like Aramco in the extreme example. As VC sells off, free float increases, weight in passive products increases. They don’t just dump the whole company cap into investable weight…save for Nasdaq 100. Bc fuck replicability we ball.

bzl33

No dude you cannot code with AI a premium SaaS solution on the level of the top SaaS companies. That is straight up VC propaganda because there is a lot more than basic functionality that goes into selling SaaS. There will be fewer engineers and white collar workers tho which means fewer licenses. That alone will kill SaaS revenue growth compared to the COVID and ZIRP boom that preceded this period. But these companies have moats, they just aren't moats that people care about anymore.

bzl33

That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is fewer employees and engineers will work at tech companies. Therefore seat-based revenues will grow at a slower rate than the past. SaaS multiples will shrink because of this as revenue growth led to insane revenue multiples. The vibe coding BS is a VC-created narrative.

ResearcherSad9357

Yeah, in 2011, he asked if things have changed. Nobody knew who Palantir was back then and Theil was just some VC guy. Things have obviously changed.

makken

I dabbled in this a few years ago, mostly in the VC space. Short answer is that there really is no single fool proof way to do it. At an early stage, most people I've talked to take a "scorecard" approach where they start with a median value based on the stage of the company, then essentially rate a company on several criteria and adjust the valuation up or down based on that. Some common criteria used are: 1. T**he strength of the team:** Do they have an experienced team in place? does the team have relevant industry experience / network connections? Does the founder have a track record of successfully starting companies? 2. **TAM/market opportunity:** How big is the TAM, SAM, SOM? is it a growing market? How will the company capture market share? Who is the beachhead customer and what traction has the company have with its customers (does it have existing customers already? working on any contracts or LOIs?) 3. **Competitive environment:** closely related to the market opportunity: How competitive is this market? are there a lot of players already and its a race to the bottom? is it a blue ocean? what are the barriers to entry? how is the startup differentiating or positioning itself? 4. **Product or Technology:** what stage is the company's product at? is it just an idea? do they have a prototype? or do they have a commercial product ready to scale? Does the product address a clear market need? what's the customer feedback on the product? is it defensible (IP/Patents/Copyright)? 5. **Capital needs/dilution risk:** What's the company's runway? is the business capex heavy (e.g., needing to build factories) or can it operate asset-lite (e.g., software). how many more rounds of funding do they need before they reach profitability? does the team have a plan and timeline in place to obtain that funding? Typically, people would use these ratings to adjust up or down the valuation based on the stage of the company. As an example, when I was looking at this, the median pre-money valuation of a seed-stage company was around $16M. If the company scored really well, investors may be willing to offer up to $20M for the company. As the company matures, more and more focus will get placed on the exit (what's the eventual goal of the company? to get acquired by a more established company? to private equity? to IPO?). Then you can look at comparable exit multiples. (e.g., when i was looking, SaaS companies typically get acquired at about 8-10x sales) I wouldn't bother even considering a DCF unless the company has several years of actual revenue and you can check the track record of how well the company projected revenue and expenses. Google scorecard valuation or berkus valuation if you're interested in this.

Timeoff98

Was that a question? I don't think VC was question here.

thri54

> VCs and insiders have been making huge returns long before we even get a chance. I mean… that’s the structure of venture capital. VC invest in brand new companies, many lose money, they sell the winners during or after an IPO.

Halbaras

You've got an obvious selection bias going on here. The majority of investment is in established companies, only a fraction IPOed recently. Most IPOs are risky. Most companies ultimately fail - especially in tech/software, biotech and junior miners. Over half of IPO offerings eventually get delisted (not always bad, some get acquired). Most recent IPOs end up underperforming the market even if a few massively outperform it. And not all IPOs are equal - a spinoff, state-owned firm going public or a long established private company is a very different beast from a tech microcap started three years ago. Venture capital works off this principle. They expect most of their investments to fail, but get in as early as possible, and do much better research than any retail investor is capable of. Even most VC firms are underperforming the market (with a few very successful ones that can afford the best talent). Even the best VC firms lose money or underperform on >75% of their investments, but get enough massive winners to cover all the losses. Getting in at IPOs when they launch is one of the most disadvantageous things you can do as a retail investor. You're likely to hear about them via social media (selection bias), suffer from FOMO if you see initial gains, have an initial lag when the stock launches while you wait for the listing to appear, and you'll never have the same information as venture capital. If you get shares at the launch price it's a bad sign (institutions haven't bought in) and if they have you'll pay a premium during the secondary listing. You're likely to be subsiding the venture capitalists as they exit. If a new IPO genuinely is going to be the next Amazon or Google, it's still likely to cool off a bit after launch and have rockier periods in the first few years where it trades at discounts. And you'll have many opportunities to look at the fundamentals and work out if the necessary growth is happening or not without worrying about the fact you're down 30% from week 1.

bobby1128

I see, the lock up rules make the float tiny, so demand pushes the price higher. And VC success stories are kind of survivorship bias behind every OpenAI or Databricks, there are dozens of failed plays that never see the light of day.

Dstein99

The company chooses when they go public and if the stock runs up rises after they go public they left money on the table. If a company thinks that growth will slow in the future they will be in a hurry to IPO to capture the growth hype. There are plenty of public companies, VC funds will assume that 9 out of 10 holdings will go to 0 and hope the 10th makes up for the other 9. When you see OpenAI, Databricks, SpaceX it’s the survivorship bias. This is how the system is set up but for good reason.

Wonderful-Process792

Well, VC's are an odd one to call out. They invest in companies with they are nothing... lots of them, to hopefully get a winner or two. That's startup funding, and it should be expected to buy more equity in whatever comes of the venture, good or (usually) bad.

clingbat

They can ask for the money but who is going to give it to them? VC's are tapped out on this AI bullshit at this scale of investment and most IOUs from industry partners aren't actually coming to fruition, it's all bullshit.

ANR2ME

> The VC investors behind Patch Plants – Octopus Ventures and Forward Partners will become shareholders in Arena as part of the deal. https://homeofdirectcommerce.com/news/arena-flowers-snaps-up-patch/

TheoryInttro

They don't give a shit that it's not feasible, they're just trying to scam the last bit of money out of coked-up VC fund managers before the rug pull. It just needs to sound technical enough that degenerate money people who flunked physics nod and sign checks because they don't understand a word.

DrXaos

Before 2020 Musk had a use: selling the vision to silicon valley VC investors who only really buy in to One Of Their Own. But SpaceX and Tesla are now old. All decisions Musk have made recently have been bad ones.

Peppertheredfox

I’m launching my new venture. A drug delivery app I shall call Instagram. Any VC in the chat?

zholo

They should offer it to Google shareholders.  Kind of BS that they give VC the upside after they shareholders have paid for the foundation

Ok-Beach1673

Damn, Alphabet must be pretty damn cash strapped after all this AI build out, to allow VC to get their claws on this big of a chunk of Waymo

Tapsen

Why would Alphabet allow these other VC firms to fund this?

ReasonableBrother448

They cannibalized the markets, but can just about managed to be profitable. It seemed that underpricing to capitulate Rocket Lab was bridge too far because they ended that journey rather quick. I think they could survive without Starlink, but they would never grow and their budgets would be abysmal for R&D. Starlink = VC as customer base and pallets of cash to burn in overly ambitious personal projects. In this sense Blue Origin (which i despise) is doing it without scamming anyone. Bezos pays what seems like fixed yearly sum and they attempt to stay reasonable, slowly growing and studying Musks flailings and market development. I don't understand why people cannot look at these things for what they are. I have no difficulty in understanding that Tesla stock has no bearing in what Tesla actually does and i can accept that Spacex stock can be meme stock too. Musk is doing everything he can to make sure that it will be like that, he does not give AF about value.

Unser_Giftzwerg

So still a bad guy then. He could have made those investments if he had just set up his own VC fund and courted institutional money...

tcmart14

Like other person said, people had too much money. FDIC only insures up to a certain amount. For the more common banks (like the one you use), it’s generally not a huge deal because the vast majority of people will never have more than the limit for FDIC in their account. SVB was not a normal bank. Most of its clientele weren’t people but VC funded tech start ups.

Unser_Giftzwerg

I think VC money is exhausted, and it's only the VC arms of the megacap tech companies that are still funding this thing, but even they still will exhaust themselves trying to fund this thing. Going public is the only way insiders can recoup their investments.

Itsatinyplanet

How deep are the silicon valley VC's wallets ? They will rent their wives and sell their children to get this piece of shit to the finish line.

GetOutOfTheWhey

So xAI completed another late stage VC in Jan 6, 2026 They got 24 investors including Tesla to purchase 8.7% stake in xAI for 20 billion USD. So they juiced the post money valuation to 230 billion USD. Dec 2025 TTM Revenue of xAI was 3 Billion Their EV/sales multiple is now 76x with this round of funding.

azsheepdog

If course the leader of a company doesn't do all the work. No one is saying otherwise. But he did the initial capital funding. He had the idea; he got the money. He pitched the idea to the VC, he hired the people who hired the people, who hired the people. He set the goals, pointed the ship in the right direction. He negotiated the deals. Most founders are skilled enough to create 1 mega corporation with a billion+ in revenue, he has done it 4 times and has several other companies knocking on the door. > You say it wouldn’t have been possible without it, ok sure. It also wouldn’t be possible without someone to build it, and design it, and test it. The engineers, workers and testers come and go. they can be replaced, and they are replaced. When founders get replaced, it can often destroy a company or at the very least set it back a long time. Its like saying Sam Walton wasn't responsible for the success of Walmart. Or Ray Kroc wasnt responsible for the success of MacDonalds. Or Fred Smith responsible for the success of Federal Express. Or Ingvar Kamrad responsible for the sucess of IKEA. None of them did all the work but everyone gives them their flowers. You just have a political bias against Elon.

neuroticnetworks1250

If I am not wrong, most of Google’s Gemini project was funded by surplus funds they had lying around, while being able to run inference on their own chips with a model that seemingly doesn’t underperform ChatGPT in any way. And coding seems to be completely a Claude dominated domain. Chinese companies like ByteDance have done a great job integrating their Doubao AI seamlessly into ByteDance apps. Silicon Valley VC states that DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Z.AI have percolated into the local LLM market share for a variety of use cases. What is this moat we are looking at here for OpenAI? It’s not even open!

StringlyTyped

The difference is that streaming didn’t require this much capital. The timeline will compress due to the enormous capital required. VC funds need to liquidate a portion of their holdings regularly. That isn’t possible when you have yoloed everything into OpenAI. VCs are already pressuring for IPOs so they can unload on retail investors.

iliveonramen

This guy in 2007 "There's nothing wrong with sub prime...do you think investment banks aren't doing due dilligence? Lol!" This guy in 1998 "There's no .com bubble. Do you think VC's and Funds aren't doing due dilligence? Lol"

123789dftr

Nothing I said was false or historical revisionism. Let's look at what I said US was constrained to not invading North vietnam (as a response to guy saying US couldn't "take" Vietnam) - Fact US was rather successful when there - Fact. Though the viet cong they weren't making much headway, they launched the tet offensive whole the US was there which nearly obliterated the VC. The North had to file troops into the south to keep the VC running and their remaining major military movements in the war (Easter and spring offensive) were traditional and Pavn vs arvn. This is important because the soldiers were coming in as a result of the VC. If the US had no political issues to handle and could just leave the military there, the Pavn would have no chance in conventional warfare against the US. Regarding McNamara, this is a poor interpretation of what is meant there. He meant that the was was politically unwinnable under US escalation limits. And actually I would agree the US lost the war because that is part of war. But that also is irrelevant because the person I replied to was saying the US military isn't that powerful.

Sober_Alcoholic_

There’s not enough VC funding left in the world for another “boom” of comparable size.

VisceralRage556

Well is AI adoption maximized now and even so they are still building capacity which would be oversupply. Yes they have leveraged prices with stock buy backs and all but remember the top player survived the rest didn't and VC money still exist were would they go they may go to real estate. Is it possible that it wont happen Yes California has been hemorrhaging people since the pandemic then prominent business men are threatening to leave which could lead to not only collapse of AI but also the san jose housing market

ReasonableBrother448

Cost problem = Non affordable = Not investable = Hype and dreams. ISS has only about 90kw of energy input/rejection. The task of demonstrating the feasibility is high school level project, i could probably do it on a napkin if inputs are given. But Musk MO is to not give anything you could falsify him on, just lip service which will be propagated by fanbase. I am waiting for the estimates and simplified physical studies. Eg. amount of power required, thus amount of sq.ft of panels and heat regulators. This will land you in the ball park estimate how datacenter in space could be compared against ones on the ground cost wise. Add in the fact that all of this is merely Musk hyping up his exit on Spacex. Mars is long forgotten and soon the Moon will be too as he is unable to finish the basics of his megalomanic rocket prototype. This is also why he needs to exit, because VC:s are no longer giving him any money.

Matthew_Maurice

Exactly, anyone with inside information can take a simple long or short position. These positions reflect savvy and nuanced understanding of the market. Pretty much what you'd expect when you have a VC guy in the family.

PerilousPontificator

Comments from some VC firm is not news. The one-month return of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was -3.53%, and its shares gained 5.16% of their value over the last 52 weeks.

uncivilized_lord

My first move would be to short the f out of OpenAI. PE firms and VC’s will unload their shares on retail investors (bag holders)

Capital-Resident-131

Damn that's actually a solid play, hadn't thought about the Korean telecom angle. SK's been throwing money at AI for years and nobody talks about it. Only thing that scares me is how long Anthropic might drag out the IPO - these AI companies love staying private and burning VC cash

DiscombobulatedDome

VC will definitely make their money immediately but would PE make anything after a lockout once the price per share settles down?

ReasonableBrother448

There is NO lucrative moat in spacex. None. They are about 6 years behind schedule on their new rocket and nowhere near implementing its critical feature set. It is a money pit where Musk has burned VC money and they finally want to offload the bags.

Mobile_Breadfruit706

All the value has already been squeezed out of SpaceX by VC and PE. If they IPO at $1.5 trillion, that is not a good price imo

Interstate_yes

Sure, but insurance is probably the most frictionless thing to change in life, after socks. Car premiums go up -> ”hey chatgpt plz cheaper inshurz” -> better insurance two clicks later. I guess I am just confused by the whole ”lose billions to earn millions” VC model ever since Uber, TSLA etc.

haze_from_deadlock

WSBers have never heard of companies burning through VC cash to attract a userbase

stoneg1

No they are applying the silicone valley approach to insurance. Subsidize your service at a loss with VC money so you grow then once you are big find a way to make profit. Its the Facebook, Uber, Snapchat, Google approach applied to insurance.

kjuneja

VC money.

KRAFT_MAY0

Lly and nvo are pharma. While they are similar, biotech is a highly similar but different market. Pharma has done well recently but biotech is still lagging, primarily due to VC funding only recently investing in early stage biotechs again. I think we see more funding by H2 2026

BowtiedGypsy

They won’t. There’s no better market to put their money into. I think the whole “AI bubble” thing is sort of trash. A few years ago it was a blockchain bubble. Before that it was an VC bubble. Before that, a social media and app bubble. Before that a housing bubble. Before that an internet bubble. You get the idea. There’s always a new bubble.

Magnet_Pull

Just go to r/biotechnology and r/labrats to witness how we suffer. I feel these Issues are holding back Biotech atm: \- The AI bubble sucked up alot of VC which otherwise may have ended up in Biotech \- Religious zealotism hinders Biotech research in the US (see transgenic mice debate) and ecological zealotism hinders it in Europe (See GMO crops) \- It shows more and more that the promises of several processes could not be held, especiallyin a world which no longer prioriteses environmental protection However there are chances: \- EU is changing it's GMO legislature --> look at the BAYER stock \- Food industry is adapting precise fermentation for meat replacement products \- Health sector has a chance, esp. RNA vaccines etc (again in case the FDA does not go full MAHA-BS) \- Germany needs to transfer large sectors of its chemical industry, industrial biotechnology might be a chance I think investing in peptine industry can be a good idea, yet I have studied it and not even I want to invest the time to do my DD with all those companies business cases (nothing here is financial advice)

InTroubleDouble

„Estimated $334B revenue in 2030“ „Estimation“ by the company prior than going public, of course. That simple scaling of computing doesnt do it for me. I don’t even slightly doubt that AI is the future and will run everything in the future, OpenAI is well positioned. But there is insane deficitary competition in the Market, AI is not yet on a level to provide that much value. I doubt any company can simply increase price / ads and generate Microsoft / Apple like annual revenue in 2030. OpenAIs competition is succesful tech companies sitting on hundreds billions of cash - and expertise / existing customers. It is a giant grift in my view. Burning through hundreds of billions increasing market share prior IPO to get 2-3 Trillion exit money for seed investors and VC. To be fair, it is the only Option for OpenAI to compete in that market of tech giants. But i would personally not buy.

searing7

The people paying opex today will have to make up the entire cost of the capital investment long term. VC and others aren’t going to float the cost forever. They need to bill enough for the AI to turn a profit from consumers

internetroamer

Holy shit they put it into bankrupt VC companies. What kind of pension company puts so much into such a risky category absurd

Capable_Rate5460

Startup, VC, VC, VC, VC, PE, PE, IPO, quarterly accounting tricks, billionaire!

Helenfetching

I listen to Bloomberg surveillance in the mornings. Tom Keene is great. Also check out All-In podcast for tech/VC perspective, though they get pretty political sometimes which is annoying

CommonScientist5098

Hahaha all good. I was attempting to decipher. Good to keep tabs on these private companies and look for any potential raises. I have some connections into the VC world, so at times get offered to contribute. Went into Voyager space like 8 years ago (to be honest, it’s underperformed and have a very gay cliff)

r2k-in-the-vortex

That VC money goes whereever the business environment is most suitable and least likely to get screwed over by a stupid government, thats why its in US to begin with. And of course where-ever the money goes, the talent follows, thats also why that talent is in US in the first place. Capital knows no fatherland, its pure business, nothing personal.

UnderstandingThin40

What? The Taliban is not a threat to US hegemony lol. You don’t know what you’re talking about.  Our tech talent is definitely reliant on Indian and Chinese people…but we’re still the #1 place for them to go…where else would they go?  What pulls in the talent is the innovation and high salaries driven by VC money. That VC money isn’t going anywhere lol.

Swimming_Beginning24

Yes, when the demand evaporates there will be such a supply glut that GPUs will not generate nearly enough profit to offset their depreciation and operating costs. They already don’t generate enough profit to justify their cost without being subsidized by VC, as I illustrated in the previous comment. If the end of the capital chain doesn’t generate enough profit there is no way that investment is sustainable. Maybe you’re asking if older GPUs will ever pay for themselves? Perhaps over long timescales, so not quickly enough to be a good investment.

Swimming_Beginning24

I'm not making any claims about that. I'm addressing your argument that depreciation won't matter if no one buys 2030 GPUs. If I were making claims about that, I would look at OpenAI. Are they generating any profit on their GPU spend? No, they are losing a tremendous amount of money. You could say that Nvidia and Microsoft are still profiting even if OpenAI is not, but as soon as the VC money runs out, OpenAI will stop spending, and Microsoft will be left with GPUs depreciating away. Do you think Microsoft will keep shelling out for GPUs then? No, so Nvidia will lose a huge customer. That's the way the cookie crumbles. No matter how many companies you channel the capital through (TSMC -> Nvidia -> Microsoft -> OpenAI) if the final product of the capital does not generate enough profit to justify the investment, it will unravel eventually.

Hungry_Treat9478

I was interested in the Space sector, as I felt like that spectrum was very similar to VC/PE/Lifescience, you can have investors hop onto it and see potentials of like 20-40x but have to wait 10 years. I had a buddy at the time that I brainstormed with who’s in wealth management. We narrowed down some companies and finally fell in love with this stock.

PrepperBoi

Net income is -120 million this quarter. Literally surviving off VC money. Jesus Christ dude, diversify or you’re gonna assassinate yourself

SuperNewk

In VC world 500x is low. ASTS could be that 1000x stock

swagadagg

Agronomics. The single play for cellular agriculture on any market. A VC type vehicle with 20 companies in the portfolio. There has and will be more write downs but two of their holdings are about to go commercial.

Guilty_Psychology_28

Bro venture capital firms are creepy as hell. Everyone I've met working in VC is a sociopath

Nota-downer

This just came up on my brokerage feed today so I don't know enough about the financials of the new Digg nor their VC backers (although I can find out) but this is for certain: Reddit‘s co founders Kevin Rose and Alex Ohanian are spearheading Digg. The demo is supposedly going live or is already live. I have no positions in Reddit nor am I in any social media platform so I wholeheartedly agree that we don’t need another one. Just thought this was interesting.

OkResponsibility2470

As long as silver price holds above the Daily VC PMI mean, momentum remains intact and any retracement should be viewed as corrective.pullback to retracement level maintains the larger bullish structure while resetting momentum oscillators. May the best regard win

danisanub

> Asteroids are going to be pulled into orbit and we're going to be mining precious metals from them, and sending them directly to the orbiting space plant to be refined I presented on this topic in London a decade ago to investment analysts. Most of the companies trying to do this went bust and ran out of VC funding. We are no where close to this, it is decades away. This is coming from someone who got in on RKLB at sub $5.

Sober_Alcoholic_

AI is running out of VC funds to burn and Nvidia is the company everyone associates with openAI and AI in general. And OpenAI is looking real fucking precarious right now.. Nvidia will bear the brunt of the bad news since openAI is not public.

eastcoastblaze

The problem is we already know how much of an initial investment has been made to get this current version (which still has a lot to be desired), and it's 100s of Billions of dollars. All that has to be paid back and more to provide a ROI for those providing the capital for initial investment. How long can VC and companies keep burning cash? Do you think they can wait 5 years for these companies to generate revenue? Their opex is already ridiculous with the crazy salaries being thrown around at those places. If it takes 5 years to generate revenue they might've been better off parking their money in an index fund

Blitzdog416

maybe because Google is an actual business with an enterprise strategy that is deeper than VC begging

PrestigiousPotato291

Been part of Angel Squad for 2+ years and its been great. How many of the deals I've invested has varied from year to year as my cashflow needs, comp, etc has changed, but its been in the $1k - $5k range per investment. I loved watching Shark Tank growing up so this was as close as I could get haha. I'd suggested leaning into the community aspect hard - the main ROI I bank on are the connections with other squad members and founders. Seeing what works/hasn't worked for founders while they scale their company has been really helpful. You aren't limited to your investment in supporting them - intros, playbooks all go a long way and the goodwill pays of in the future, even if your investment doesn't convert (most don't). And if other squad members see you being helpful, they are always down to help if you have investing/career/business questions. Ito dealflow - I know myself and would never go and source that many deals myself. Its also varied enough that I always have a few deals a month that I find interesting and dive into the company/industry, even if I don't end up investing anything. You also get to see their team evaluate deals which I wouldn't know where to find elsewhere - outside of working at an actual VC.

ebahnx

Years ago I started solo and moved to syndicate investing after a few months - it's worked out really well for me. The solo approach taught me a lot, but I was definitely flying blind on due diligence. Syndicate investing gives you access to better deals (larger rounds, more competitive), shared due diligence, and in general more learning opportunities. Keep in mind though that the trade-off is less control over individual decisions. Angel Squad is awesome - you get the community aspect plus deal flow from their VC fund. A community is worth it, especially if you can find a group that's focused on education and not just deal flow.

deepfuckingdish

I joined 3 years ago and have only written micro checks so far. I tend to believe diversification is the best approach and so do the minimum on their deals each time I see one that interests me ($1k) and have invested in 6 so far I think over the last 14 months or so (didn't feel comfortable investing before that because I knew so little about angel investing and had done some bad deals with Reg A/Reg CF offerings in the past) In terms of deal flow even though I know a good amount of startup founders I wouldn't have anywhere near as good the access they provide, and their investing framework they provide as a course in the squad helped me identify what actually matters from their formal early stage VC approach vs what might have caught my attention in the past but is just noise. Overall I'd say the value provided is well worth it, especially since they give you lifetime access once you join so the value accrues more over time

ai-moderator

#TLDR --- **Ticker:** GFT (German Exchange) **Direction:** Up **Prognosis:** Buy Shares & Calls **Strategy:** Value Composite Two Factor (VC2) **Wife Approval Rating:** Hopefully higher than the private prisons and chicken farms.

ai-moderator

#TLDR --- **Ticker:** GFT (GFT Technologies SE) **Direction:** Up **Prognosis:** Buy Shares & Calls **The Strategy:** O’Shaughnessy's "Value Composite Two Factor" (usually picks boring stuff like chicken farms and private prisons, but just flagged a tech stock). **The Thesis:** A German digital transformation/AI company that actually makes money. 5-year sales growth of 14%, undervalued based on traditional metrics (VC2), and serves banking/manufacturing clients. Author holds >5,000 shares.

Kind_Bullfrog_3160

Comparing the possible AI bubble to the dot com bubble doesn't make a lot of sense.  The dot com bubble was a true bubble, everything sold off and crashed.  I believe AI stocks will go down but in stages, not a crash all at once.  Pure AI companies and companies built on AI will go down the most but diverse tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft will be just fine.  What will be the catalyst that starts a sell off for the companies that are extremely AI dependent?  That will happen when the large investment banks and VC firms start demanding they show profitability.  These people have been somewhat patient during the build out but they will lose patience quickly if the profitability is not there.  Currently there is very little end user monetization, just never ending spend and no profit. I think this will happen by the second half of this year.

Upset-Motor-2602

It gets scary when one VC-funded company starts investing in another VC-backed company - the great circle jerk...

Level10Retard

Yeah, I think that would be the big play. But why haven't they tried it in so many years. I'm using both Slack (for work) and Discord and honestly besides VC, I'm not missing much from Discord when using Slack. Perhaps with some extra features Discord could replace the Slack + Zoom combo, idk..

Level10Retard

I imagine you're saying this in addition to regular interval ads. You have to hit spotify ad intervals. But idk... There's always some alternative VC / chat platform that you can migrate your friend group to. Does anybody use VCs in "public" discord servers?

TernTheNumbers

What's changed since 20 P/E when people were calling Google a "rest and vest" company where software engineers went to slack off for a few years before launching a startup? Has the free VC money dried up? What's changed since Deepseek put out a free LLM that was almost as good as the others for way less R&D? What's changed since a big piece of Google's revenue came from showing ads to bots accessing content made by bots?

PM_ME_YOUR_LEFT_IRIS

Big tech doesn’t pre-fund vaporware…? That’s like the main function of VC

Embarrassed_Orange50

People act like pet.com was in the to 3 companies and that is simply not the case. The problem here is they spent so much money that they went from net cash positive to negative and have committed to triple down. They will soon not be able to sustain these and a lot of the smaller companies could go bankrupt. The problem here expands on the fact that the small companies aka their clients only found the money to spend on them because the large ones invested in them. So imagine Claude anthropic Gemini grok and lama all do great but chat got goes belly up because it can’t keep buying 40 of the ram supply. Let’s the consequences. NVIDIA Microsoft and lot of VC firms have write up on the hundreds of billions  Microsoft loses billions of revenue same with NVIDIA  Oracle has nowhere to rent their 400 billions of gpu so probably need some type of rescue since they host lots of government critical stuff plus they stop spending on NVIDIA  AMD would have diluted 10% of their stock in warrants on a bankrupt company All the VC firms will need to cover their loans. 1.5 trillion in margin debt will incinerate a huge part of the market.  Lot’s of stuff to unpack

Stealth_Cow

I got the same for my BST/BSTZ shares. Apparently a bunch of BlackRock funds were being targeted for hostile takeovers of the oversight boards. When enough idiots took the deal, the venture firm announced a vote of no confidence, declared that the funds were underperforming and undervalued by 30-50%, and started attempting to oust seats. The shares jumped 25% overnight. Then the takeover failed, and the VC firm cashed their check. For all of their suspicious dealings, I wouldn’t expect the regular directors board to pulls that kind of shady shit.

LiquefactionAction

Hell yeah! I would fucking love to RETVRN to mIRC + Ventrilo/Mumble/TeamSpeak combo instead of Discord myself. I don't think the added features are worth it and actively detrimental. The only really nice part is the voice chat/streaming but the "social media" or "chat room" part of it kinda sucks. IRC was better. Plus you know, IRC was actually decentralized and not held by shady VC/Private Equity firms

MontyAtWork

The negativity in these comments reminds me A LOT of when y'all said Reddit would IPO and you'd buy puts. Discord is the backbone of every gamer group on the planet at this point, and for games too toxic for voice chat (League) it's the only decent option for VC. There's no other discord competition - whoever is next isn't even close. There's bajillions of RP communities that used to be in Forums in the old Internet days that all move to and have massive bots, channels and organization to keep the daily RP going. A lot of nerds, would pay a lot of money to not have to lose their servers and hangout space, and there's not a SINGLE place to go instead.

Inevitable_Pin7755

Insider selling always spikes near highs. Part of that is just incentives. Executives get paid in stock, diversify when prices are good. A 27:1 ratio sounds scary but it pops up in past cycles too without an immediate crash. On SoftBank, they’re kind of a special case. They’re basically a leveraged VC fund with cash flow issues. Selling winners to cover obligations doesn’t automatically mean Nvidia or AI is topped, it just means Masa needs liquidity now. The IPO angle is fair to question, though. VCs absolutely want good optics going into exits. That doesn’t mean everything collapses in 2026, but it does mean returns from here might be more uneven and sentiment driven. Feels less like a rug pull and more like late stage risk. Still room to run, just less room for mistakes. Overthinking a bit maybe, but the discomfort is probably a signal to size positions properly rather than go all in.

cloudyuser1480

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to invest in AI without just defaulting to “buy the obvious winners.” What I’ve landed on is a thesis that focuses on the biggest limiting factors to AI’s growth, and trying to invest in those before they become obvious. This isn’t meant to be safe or conservative. It’s explicitly high-risk / high-reward. I’m also not a VC, so I’m limiting myself to public companies only. The first bottleneck that seems unavoidable is energy. Datacenters are already power constrained, and AI only makes that worse. There are lots of angles here (solar, geothermal, etc.), but I personally focused on nuclear because it feels inevitable at scale. I ended up choosing Oklo because they’re targeting datacenter-sized deployments rather than traditional utility grids. Another constraint that feels underappreciated is processing efficiency, especially if you’ve ever dealt with training models on large video datasets. Moving data between memory and compute becomes the real bottleneck. I made a small, speculative investment in GSTi, which is trying to address this by co-locating GPU and memory. This one could easily fail, but if it works it’s very high leverage. Related to that is data transfer inside datacenters. Even if compute improves, shuffling data around becomes a problem. Most solutions are incremental improvements to copper interconnects. I went with a more aggressive bet in POET, which is trying to bring optical interconnects down to chip/datacenter scale. That may or may not work, but it would be a step change if it does. Training data is another obvious bottleneck. A lot of companies focus on labeling and cleaning data, but I was more interested in who actually controls large datasets. I chose Veritone because of their partnerships with sports leagues and media companies. In an ideal world, they’d eventually expand into more real-world/industrial data, but that’s still an open question. The last area I’ve been thinking about is physical-world data that doesn’t even exist yet because it can’t be collected at scale. That led me to look at IoT companies, and then one step further at what constrains them. Connectivity kept coming up, especially outside dense urban areas. That’s why I’m currently looking at AST SpaceMobile as a speculative bet on global, device-agnostic connectivity. I’m very aware that some (or all) of these could be wrong. I’m mostly curious whether this “bottlenecks first” framing resonates with others here, and whether there are major AI constraints I’m missing.