VC

InteractionHorror407

OpenAI is forcing VCs to bring cash to the table. Too much money has been poured into this startup and Altman knows it. In the VC world OpenAI has achieved too big to fail status. He’s either forcing his way to $1T valuation or purposefully causing the bubble to burst so he gets to buy cheaper GPUs, talent from other AI startups that crashed etc Probably a bit of both.

Thin-Football7857

This post hits the nail on the head, but I'd argue the "AI is booming" half of the tale is dangerously misunderstood by many VCs. The headline data (like the 50%+ VC share) is leading to a wave of thesis-less investing. The idea of a fund dedicated to "AI companies" is becoming strategically shallow—it's like saying you only invest in companies that use "the internet and computers." Smart money needs to recognize that AI is not a sector; it's a foundational layer. The true signal for an investment isn't the presence of AI, but the defensible, non-linear advantage it creates. The key questions for due diligence are: 1. Is the advantage Non-Linear? Does the AI accelerate growth or margin in a way that is disproportionate to the investment (e.g., getting 10x the output for only 2x the input)? 2. Is the AI Internal or External? Often, the most powerful and non-replicable advantage is internal, silently optimizing operations, logistics, or customer service to create a massive and invisible cost/efficiency moat that the user never sees on the surface. 3. Does it Create a Data Moat? Is the system built on unique, proprietary data or a strong feedback loop that ensures the product gets better every time a user interacts with it, leaving competitors further and further behind? If the answer to those is "no," the company is selling a feature that will be commoditized, not a durable business. Many of the "booming" AI companies will be wiped out when that reality hits.

brownhotdogwater

Going left pocket to right pocket with VC money and it all looks like real profits

skilliard7

Have you actually considered that their earnings could decline? It's not just margin pressure from competitors, but also risk of declining volume: 1. Right now AI makes up the majority of VC funding. Big tech is spending the majority of their cash flows on datacenter buildouts for cloud capacity to sell to these VC funded firms, and then using the revenue they earn from selling AI capacity to fund these startups. Many, such as Meta and Oracle, are starting to rely on debt. 2. 95% of AI projects are failing to achieve revenue growth or cost savings, as per a MIT study. How can 25-35% growth in earnings be sustainable if AI is not providing a solid return on capital? 3.Tech has shown historically it can pivot very quickly: In the .COM bubble, telecoms and computer hardware manufacturers grew very quickly, but then earnings nosedived very quickly as capital dried up In 2020-2021, pretty much every major tech company was going to great lengths to hire as many engineers as possible, to the point they were hiring people to do nothing, just to have them on the bench. Engineers were seen as in short supply, so it became a competition to build a skilled team. All it took was 1 MAG7 company starting layoffs to get every single major tech company copying each other cutting headcount the past few years. My point with the above is AI can be very similar. Right now, all of big tech is aligned to compete to build as much AI compute capacity as possible. If just 1 big tech company signals caution with AI and starts backing off datacenter investments and hardware purchases, the entire industry could follow very quickly.

ResearcherSad9357

Look at the Mag 7, but w/o the one w/ a $150 PT from JPM trading at $400, yeah ignore that one. Oh and ignore that Open "AI" is a private company valued at $500 bil burning billions in VC cash every quarter. Then also ignore Palantir, Coreweave, crypto, etc etc. Just ignore all the bubbly parts of the economy and it's totally fine!

geneel

You're correct as an indicator. My trigger is a 30% jump in premium. My understanding is that this is too much of a good thing - as in too many deals got done perhaps too cheaply bc there's a lot of money chasing private credit deals, so the spread falls from high credit supply. Just like you see too much VC money flow into chasing a sector and it blows up. Private credit competes with regional banks, with minimal restrictions like a bank has. But also means that the private credit has to offer a cheaper rate than the banks, which may not compensate their risk. And then it goes boom

aj1805

It’s his brother that owns that huge VC

yaboyJship

You should short sell all your shares. This shit is going to zero. They IPO’d as an exit strategy for the VC’s to recoup after they bailed them out from the legal payments. Oldest trick in the book!

juliusseizure

I went to business school with two guys (now great friends). This was 2006-08. One left Broadcom and one left Nvidia. Lmao, both can’t help but laugh at themselves. I mean one’s a partner at a VC firm and one works in upper management at another chip company but both would be retired and I could be at their vacation homes if they had never decided to leave to “make more money”.

Fit_Huckleberry3271

I wish I could be specific, but as I recall, it truly was just having the idea and I’m guessing some VC giving just enough funds to make it marketable; no earnings for that company, just ideas. I can’t speak for the hardware, software, etc. but I did do a day trade on Qualcomm and made $200-I was elated— pure luck. And more to the point, my husband saw the potential of online sales—he had a mind that could comprehend that concept— it was just way too early in the game.

penultimateinsight

Let China destroy their society and people. Not ours. No one is "stopping" them. Let billionaires and VC funds throw money into this endless bonfire that has barely produced anything of real value while costing society trillions. We don't need people to put their hard earned retirements into this only for it to evaporate when the inevitable crash comes. >plenty of small folk could be figuratively trampled on the way Yea know, this is what liars and snake oil salesmen use to scare people into compliance into making them rich. It has the "potential" but were very far away from that. We don't need to drive ourselves off a cliff to fund the "potential". There are less extreme approaches.

WinningWatchlist

That's because they were heavily subsidized by VC money lol, same case with Uber/Lyft and any gig economy.

virtual_adam

Are you sure there wasn’t some sort of split / dilution before the ipo? While some companies lose valuationbm between VC rounds and IPO, it’s not super common

Shacreme

Based on all the recent deals. Is Nvidia basically a VC firm now?

breakyourteethnow

This sounds pretty but means nothing to the market. You're providing confirmation bias. The reality is we're in a technological revolution, AI spending won't stop until AGI is reached, the next 5 years will show explosive data center growth globally. The future will be full of computers everywhere. POET does not have anything under their hood going on. You make a point if the VC is so and so, better to trade reactively in this scenario than predictively trying to guess. If it's a big reveal then I'll take a position, otherwise this is not a smart play at all and you're most likely going to lose a lot investing your money into a company burning money at an insane rate, making no money while at it.

_Unke_

It really all comes down to who their mystery backer is. If it's just another VC firm trying a punt on yet another company with AI-related potential, then it'll probably limp along a bit more and then go down when the AI bubble inevitably bursts. But if it's a big player like NVidia deciding: 'shit, we have to keep scaling up but we don't have the production capacity, we NEED this tech in order to keep expanding', then this stock isn't just going to the moon, it's going to be orbiting Pluto by the time it's done growing. My read is that the big AI players know they're in a bubble, and that they have a very short window of time to make their products indispensable before the bubble bursts. They have taken a big run up and now they are sprinting full speed towards a massive chasm; if they don't keep up momentum, they're dead. And if a company like POET helps them keep that momentum, they will throw as many billions at it as it takes, because there are trillions on the line.

meltbox

Not necessarily. It could’ve gotten sunk into tech cash piles or stock buybacks. Also a good chunk is VC money that may not have been deployed otherwise.

TableAway6324

God I hope not. Redditt don't even pay their Liberal moderators. I honestly hope this forum goes broke and gets bought out for chips by a VC firm

leepnos

Thank you That’s exactly my point, if you’re not part of a VC it’s pretty much impossible I guess just keeping an eye on the news works, but I was wondering if there’s any website or app out there that lists stocks right as they go public

Moreaero

Oracle margins on this chip rental play. People forget though, we’re like a VC fund as an economy. Margins don’t matter.

Snarkitech

Yep I have read his book and applied a lot of it at a VC firm with portcos....I just made an opendoor version for fun applying Morgan's frameworks

IncidentSome4403

ACHR calls at open tomorrow, Musk is gearing up to create his own VC circlejerk

tollbearer

would be very hard to sustain ai infrastructure expenditure if the stock market is imploding and theres no AI VC.

michahell

Not for some time, judging by how willfully ignorant some investors here seem to be. Think about it: investors should already be ahead of mainstream thought about these things. Look at how incredibly stubborn they still are at defending this absolutely off-the-charts-capex, for which there isn’t even enough VC capital going around to invest in the first place. At least a year, maybe more if there will be interest rate cuts: less cost of capital is probably pretty good for sustaining bubbles

skilliard7

>Google invented the GPT architecture. OpenAI cribbed it and launched the new version of AOL's SmarterChild and now I can't go a day without reading some stupid article about how OpenAI is going to build a phone or a car or a fucking spaceship. Ok Yahoo was first before Google, but it doesn't matter. OpenAI does a far better job at building LLMs than Google. Google literally has to give away their highest tier away for free and rewire the Android power button to get people to use it. Meanwhile OpenAI has went from $4 Billion to $12 Billion in revenue in 1 year. >Pressing X for doubt right here. At some point, even VC firms are going to run out of money. OpenAI is on track to vaporize about $10B this year. Doesn't sound like these things are really that useful, just great for pitch decks. Their products are incredibly valuable to end users, it's like having a team of expert consultants ready on call... people will pay a lot for that, and they can implement ad sales for free users. >You should check up on the predictions from a couple of years ago. By 2025, it was supposed to be already here and software engineers were going to be a thing of the past. Yeah I didn't believe those predictions either. But OpenAI is already incredibly useful as is, even if their products never improve any further. Optimism may be sky high, but OpenAI can still grow a ton even if AI models don't get better. >Most of these things are still true... Why do you think that COBOL still exists, even after all of these decades? Because rebuilding a system that works is seen as expensive, risky, and non-value add activity. If the business operating well on a COBOL system, why spend hundreds of millions to replace it when many things can go wrong and cause significant damages? Especially in finance. How many NEW companies use COBOL?

Hacking_the_Gibson

> They are probably the single most innovative company in existence right now, in terms of impact to the economy. Google invented the GPT architecture. OpenAI cribbed it and launched the new version of AOL's SmarterChild and now I can't go a day without reading some stupid article about how OpenAI is going to build a phone or a car or a fucking spaceship. > The $600 Billion in spending commitments is certainly risky and a concern. But they can make it work. People made the same argument about Google's frivolous spending when they were new, too. Pressing X for doubt right here. At some point, even VC firms are going to run out of money. OpenAI is on track to vaporize about $10B this year. Doesn't sound like these things are really that useful, just great for pitch decks. > A lot of developers have the misconception that the point of AI is to replace them, so they get defensive and act like its terrible because it can't do everything they do. Smart developers now how to utilize it within their workflow to make themselves a better developer. You should check up on the predictions from a couple of years ago. By 2025, it was supposed to be already here and software engineers were going to be a thing of the past. > "It is inefficient because it is interpreted, "it is inefficient because it runs as byte code and relies on GC for memory management", "just program in Assembly or C, Python/Java will never make be a part of production code at major institutions". Most of these things are still true... Why do you think that COBOL still exists, even after all of these decades? Using the right tool for the right job is always the important thing, a fancy summary generator of StackOverflow is not especially useful, and debugging code generated by a robot is even harder to decipher than interpreting offshore junk.

greyenlightenment

AI is creating so many millionaires such as start-ups, investing, huge salaries, VC, consulting, etc. Even if these companies run at losses, everyone getting rich

ausernameisfinetoo

The VC money is drying up and in order to not make the bubble burst quite yet they're propping up the other with investments to spur stock growth. Give it another quarter, maybe two, and you'll see short positions crop up randomly. When it bursts they're gonna absorb the smaller guys and ingest all of that sweet stolen data.

dansdansy

VC money, they just had a funding round that valued them at $500 billion.

dansdansy

They just had a funding round that valued them at 500 billion, so probably using VC money on stuff like this.

Derpazoid69

Today is the Dotcom bubble and the nifty fifty crash rolled into one. Dotcom bubble because 57.5% of all VC funded is pouring into AI, 18% more than 1999 leading to AI companies that are not economically viable getting tens, hundreds or even billions in funding. The nifty fifty crash because 40% of the Sand P 500 is concentrated in the top 10 holdings. It's 5X worse than the nifty fifty because at least then the top 50 companies were 45% of the market not top 10 like today. I got out in my main account on Friday. I'm 95.2% cash in that account. I get grant money from the Canadian government if I deposit money into the account so inflation will not affect me as long as I get at least $7,550 in contributions and grant money( at 2.4% inflation). I can wait for the crash and it WILL crash. It is a matter of when not if. IMO we are in the Euphoria stage or stage 3 of the 5 stages of a bubble. Investors are acting like the good times will never end. This will not end well.

cccccindyyyyy

Hmmm I doubt that... now many of the mega data centres projects are financed by debt and money from PE VC, taking Meta as an example.... the tech companies are actually using future money to bet on the growth of AI which it is quite risky if the huge investment is not realised...

stbloc

The 13g filings were crazy this week. When I saw those on the SEC I bought in. Knew nothing about this company only saw all these big names and VC’s filing 13G’s

Sober_Alcoholic_

OPEN AI and all of the adjacent companies providing compute like CRWV, ORCL etc. don’t make any fucking money. They are *hemorrhaging* money. We hear about all these contracts being signed but when you actually look at REAL money that’s been actually spent or allocated it’s…. A fraction of what all these contracts boasted. Never mind that no ground has actually been broken on *any* of these supposed data centers that MUST be up and operational by 2028 in order for them to meet the requirements for the contract installment payments. Trouble is, the data centers they need to build to achieve the power output and compute power these contracts demand, costs *significantly more* (like, 325 billion roughly) and it takes around 2.5 years per 1 GW of these data centers to be up and functional. OPENAI has promised, in these contracts, about 10-12 GW of compute by 2028. That’s not possible. Each facility costs 35$ - $50bn to complete. They need 10 of them. There isn’t enough available VC money left on the planet for OpenAI to adhere to their contractual requirements. This bubble will burst.

NervousChemistry7401

Gonna need a couple trillion more of VC injection so context windows can be larger next iteration.

royalone45

if the products are so great, what has no VC funded it yet?

Echo-Possible

What about Tesla at 1.5T? What about Palantir at 400B? Broadcom at 1.6T? Apple at 40x PE worth little to no growth. There are a bunch of 20B quantum, nuclear and space stocks with no business model or revenue. There are several neoclouds worth 30-60B with no discernible business model other than using debt to buy Nvidia and Nvidia propping them up. And the private markets are really driving the investment in hardware and data centers. xAI worth 200B, Anthropic worth 200B, OpenAI worth 500B, Safe Superintelligence worth 30B, Perplexity worth 20B, Figure worth 40B. Many of these generate little to no revenue. VC and other private capital is throwing money at these guys who then turn around and buy Nvidia hardware or ask cloud companies to build data centers to host their workloads. If the private markets driving the AI hardware buildout falter then the most successful public cloud and AI hardware companies will see their growth fall off a cliff too.

Organic_Battle_597

When VC realizes they're never going to be able to make back the massive money they're pouring into every single "AI" company that shouldn't really exist, and a mountain of pointless companies start to go under. It's going to suck. The AI hype bubble is currently what drives the S&P 500 higher. When it pops, the whole thing is going to come back into alignment with reality. And I won't be shocked if we a ten-year run before reaching parity again.

sprcow

My takeaway from working on many large companies who have tried to fix or replace legacy apps - many these companies will just fail. Even a big, successful company with a strong, motivated team of developers can struggle to overhaul a shitty code base. Some janky cost-cutting VC-acquired cash cow with rotting code is never going to get the attention it needs to be sustainable.

pragmojo

So it would look similar. I think it wouldn't start the day ChatGPT came out, because businesses obviously didn't start seeing an impact immediately after ChatGPT came out. But you have to take the chart in context. If it were an indicator of real value creation, there would be somebody making a profit off of the technology. So far, the profit only seems to be in chips and data centers, who are selling the picks and shovels. The AI vendors are loss-leading on massive amounts of VC and PE funding. I think farther evidence that this is a bubble is that P/E ratios of the S&P have risen quickly over this period. So it's not as if these companies are bringing in more revenue to justify higher valuations, it's based on investor expectations that revenue will increase some time in the future. You could argue the gains are in efficiency, as companies have been laying off large amounts of workers. I haven't seen significant evidence of this. I suspect AI creates some efficiency gains, but has been used largely as an excuse to trim the labor force, and the story is more about companies asking workers to do more under fear of losing their jobs to an AI replacement, which has yet to materialize.

GolfboyMain

Hey Lazy Ass whiners, like Big Papito, stop whining. You can start a business. Like Elon, or Ellison, or Zuck. If you are in US, ANYOME can start a business with a good idea and drive. Al these guys had a Biz idea, got VC FUNDING and became successful. Maybe if you spent as much time working on your skills and a Biz idea as you do on Reddit, you can make your own fortune. Otherwise STFU and stop whining about the rich.

tehwubbles

First, which products, because i don't believe you Second, the servers on which these products are run are not profitable and are being held up entirely on VC money and speculation. When that stops being true, those "profitable products" disappear overnight unless their vendors start charging the true cost of tokens, which is much higher than anyone is paying now

I_have_to_go

Startup = has not yet paid back original VC investors through an IPO or a private sale

777gg777

lol.yes it is kind of amazing actually. Have never seen a company like this that is not private and hogged up by VC..

Echo-Possible

You’re cherry picking by comparing Nvidia to Cisco. There’s plenty of examples of nose bleed valuations based on AI hype. Tesla is 1.5T with a 250x PE and declining revenues. Palantir has a 200x forward PE. We have a bunch of quantum and nuclear and space stocks worth 10-20B with essentially no revenue and little prospect of generating any meaningful earnings to justify those valuations in the next 5-10 years. Private VC money is fueling the AI capex explosion because they are throwing money at companies like xAI and Anthropic giving them 200B valuations and that money goes directly to hyperscalers and hardware. Safe Superintelligence worth 30B and Thinking Machines worth 10B with no product. Figure worth 40B without revenue. They’re losing many billions per year. If that VC money dries up then so will the AI data center capex explosion. The SP500 Shiller PE currently stands at 40x and it peaked at 44x in 2000. We are more than 2 standard deviations above average valuation multiples for the last 30 years. Meaning we are already in the extremes. Another 10% rally from here and we have the most expensive market ever.

Lonely_Refuse4988

I’m a biotech insider - executive level roles at multiple biotech companies, helped found my first biotech, and I myself gave up trying to invest in biotechs! 😂🤣🤷‍♂️ You can’t trust analysts one bit. They never ask critical questions about the science, etc. Every single biotech underestimates patient recruitment in clinical trials, and often doesn’t have qualified people leading the operational execution of studies. Even when you’ve analyzed a company thoroughly and have a high level of confidence around potential approvals of assets, a stock can still tumble after news of FDA approval, based on the most silly things (label included too many side effects/risks, approved dose wasn’t ideal, etc). VC Investors generally have a higher BS detector than analysts, but still … there’s a huge buddy system such that smooth talking guys can get the VC bucks no matter how crazy or destined to fail the idea. VCs are happy to exit before the retail investor is left holding the bag and losing everything! 😂🤣🤷‍♂️

CollegeGuide

I have a huge, huge respect for biotech VC investors.

binga001

I will start a company, buy Puts on it using VC's money and then will bankrupt it.

mongro_flyer

They get a much better price per share going public than taking VC investment. Do I really need to remind you of all the companies that have gone public before becoming profitable in recent history? Hint some of them are worth over a trillion rn.

Just-Joshinya

This is 100% how i feel. It’s dot com version 2.0. But its not the stocks themselves, its the business, VC, Banks, people, and public companies taking the risk, that are throwing enormous amounts of money into a theoretical technology and what people believe is the result of that. But it’s still not proven. And the big of here, is when are governments going to g to start proactively regulating AI

5TP1090G_FC

If you do feed data where is that data going to, I want to unplug my llm / chat bot. On my data only, because there is too much noise to dig through. Don't care what Kramer says, not concerned what cnbc post about stocks, as long as they post current and allow down load of at least 6 months to a year of data, I'm good. Feeding the data to my llm/ chat bot, with solid questions and 100 of companies to shift through, which company fits this profile, don't care what the ceo is doing or the VC of the company. It would clean the air vary fast, with over 1000 companies that's a lot of data to sift through an AI can do it very effectively. My $0.02 worth

NotHenryCejudo

It’s estimated openAI alone will need half of all available VC to reach its growth goals. Once they make AI smart enough to master capitalism money won’t matter anymore anyway ! /s

bdavid21wnec

They are strong because AI capex spending fueled by VC spending. Everyone dismissed the huge news last few weeks that Oracle will be using debt to finance it's build out. I imagine 2026 is going to be absolutely insane like +20% Sp500 followed by something even more insane in 2027

SPIRE55

$INTC is running! $37 now https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-chip-tariffs-exemptions-90fa2ab3?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAjLrxlLaDFRzFHQNS0JqTdK0TZuLCvLWR7K9C0qt_IhXy2fNrwfakPBnUUABT8%3D&gaa_ts=68d61a6a&gaa_sig=QkwKB_HAxwTbjBTN63v4NJah9WLrvmryd80eoWCHCODinwiHMu8McE5unG6eIZ1VC5GUx7Y9_UtCZAhrb3appA%3D%3D

tcmart14

How do you not have millions and VC funding with IPO paperwork pending approval already?

trafficjet

Yeahhh this AI frenzy feels kinda sketchy tbh, like, if everthing else is drying up and all the $$ is flooding into one lane, doesn’t that usually end messy? also if late-stage deals are that ovepriced while overall VC fundraising’s tanking, feels like someone’s gonna end up holding the bag. you think publc markets are just ignoring all this, or are they bettng the hype can carry forever?

Los_Cairos

I'm not in VC, but I work at hot AI startup, not gonna name names here. You can see this multiple ways: 1. re your 1 - this can point to 2 things, AI is probably over saturated with money, so more money chasing fewer companies. If you are an investor, you better work at a top tier firm, or you're out of luck, you're chasing the deals that no one wants. Alternatively, you can keep your head down, look at non-AI companies, and find the gems that everyone will look for when the AI hype ultimately (and, dare I say, inevitably) cools. 2. What's happening in venture is what's happening in the larger tech industry, concentration of capital at the top. The Big Tech firms are hogging up all the revenue, propping up the S&P, and single-handedly staving off a recession. Venture is now looking a lot like that, except venture spends the money. 3. I don't know what to think of that. AI companies have hyped up the future potential of their tech. Maybe their revenues and profits will dwarf anything we've seen, which would explain those valuations. However, what I suspect is driving this is the oversupply of capital available to AI companies. It's hard to tell what will happen tbh. I work in this space and I am astounded at the things I see and hear, and I don't know how long it will last. And I don't know what will the "bursting of the bubble" look like, but I speak to customers who say "we don't have a use case for this AI platform, but we need to adopt AI and we don't know what the benefits will be yet." At some point, I realized that these contracts will all be canceled in 24 months because someone will realize that either there is no ROI to their AI purchases, or that they can't measure it, and they better stop wasting money.

this_guy_fks

Bro the VC system long stopped pushing though IPOs, most companies are private now, and with VC LP's looking for exits, they've found them in 401k holders. [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-23/private-equity-is-getting-boring](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-23/private-equity-is-getting-boring) matt levine at blp has been writing about this extensively for years.

Puzzleheaded_Bat3349

Wha is your favourite in terms of the VC approach/optionality and why?

k3t4mine

The Nvidia-OpenAI "deal" is so blatantly fraudulent even the Bloomberg guests, who are always bullish, are concerned. At least Cisco and Intel had the decency to try and hide their vendor-financing revenue washing machines behind independently run VC firms in 1999. Nowadays they're doing it over whatsapp.

zerking_off

Nvidia might have been better off investing in Anthropic, but perhaps Huang thinks Altman can gather more VC money and government connections? Idk it still seems super risky. Might have been better if Nvidia stuck to investing in ORCL, CRWV, NBIS, or APLD, since compute can be sold to anyone in theory. LLMs companies can easily run dry of VC.

ebfeebfe

Nvidia announces $10 Billion AI Chip vendor financed sale to mexican VC company El Vidia. Stock +4%.

Editor-Forward

Forget options, this is a VC stage company essentailly (they are only 18 monthys old), great hold. Rare opportunity to buy into early stage AI at low valuation.

skilliard7

>While I agree that things are pretty overvalued, you can't ignore the tangible growth these companies are all experiencing and expecting. I think things will keep pumping if only to avoid dollar devaluation by holding in lower risk assets. most of the sales growth has been because of investment, not because of products for end users. VC money flows into AI startups -> AI startups buy lots of hardware to build AI models -> companies buy their products because they want to stay relevant -> 95% of those AI projects fail to achieve ROI -> big tech like Nvidia and Microsoft pour money into AI startups to keep them going. For this to work, there has to be value created somewhere. And so far, the value created is nowhere near close to the investment being made. Ask yourself - besides LLMs and making funny jpegs, how has AI meaningfully improved your life?

Editor-Forward

WYFI is essentially a start up, just came into existence a year ago...revenue is ramping up. They just completed a small IPO...so you are almost in VC mode when you buy this stock.. They are accumulating data center sites, and have contracts with Cerebas, a rapidly growing AI company. WYFI is the real deal, it will go from present valuation of $1B to $4B next year. Price to Book is better valuation...its 2X; compare that to CRWV, same industry and MO, which is at 15X book

Swearwolfofwallst

I mean, DK is doing in ~10 years what casinos took decades to only eek out a few states with legal gambling. They are building and scaling, and if doing their job to eat the lunch of anyone who would be competing with them or buying them up as they scale, they should be well positions for when they're the market dominant player and can ~~rug pull customers~~ "prioritize investor returns while continuing to deliver excellent gaming experiences", e.g. turn on the oven as many tech companie have done in the last 3-5 years. Tech took 20 years to build the walls, fill the moat and load teh cannons and most people took no notice assuming services would be free and helpful forever. VC came for its pound of flesh. Anyway, yeah I've not yet given up on DKNG but hope to see some margins and performance in established states start to improve their financials. They're still scaling, think they're in about 30 states now with a few new states added last year by voters through ballot measures. It may be another 5 years before they're in all the states that are going to let them in. Trump could also say "I used to ruin casinos, I like them, gambling is fully legal now in all states" and issue an EO with no authority that then puts DKNG on a tear to end all tears. RH or someone with more effective management could probably make a big difference.

Swearwolfofwallst

RN is a fantastic time to buy a house; it's a buyer's market and you can re-fi in a year after the coup at the Fed is completed and rates are at -0.25%. You get all the appreication and don't have to compete with the common rabble waiting for actual low interest rates. Small caps are the most likely to need to draw from funding, and low interest rates help them borrow more affordably while they scale and grow, and potentially leaves them in a better spot than if they had to give away company value to VC or other ~~vultures~~ investors.

ideas4mac

It's not the cash flow I'm concerned about. OpenAI is bring in money. It's the expenses that as of concern. And the next slow down in VC funding. You have a guess on when they might show a profit?

Wild_Alternative3563

Interesting. I was not aware of that. Social media is a real snowball effect and having users keeps others from leaving, but its complacent to just assume that someone else won't snowball either. In a sense there are more social media than ever, but there are also more users than ever. Not just the young and not just in the west. I think its possible reddit will survive a digg come back, but it might slash the growth hopes. Still there are things like r/lemmy and piefed. They don't have VC money to grow fast, but they are big enough to have a core audience and that could be a small snowball of sorts. Social media as a whole is a house of cards by its nature of user content creation.

CallLivesMatter

100% this. The whole air taxi bullshit seems like the story you tell in early days when you’re raising VC money and need to seem like you’re focused on some sort of *Jetsons* future. The real value is in making weapons and I assume that’s what they’re actually doing.

moorhound

Most likely near-term candidate for that is Flock, but most of these companies are satisfied staying private and soaking up all the gov contract money just for the VC crowd

weasler7

I don’t think it’s possible to make those kind of returns by investing in the traditional sense. You would need to take outsized risk to make outsized returns - such as pre-seed or early stage VC investing. But only having 50k per year probably doesn’t get you in the door with any project that is going to be really good. And you need to be consistently winning for decades. It’s probably not possible unless you have unique insight into the next big industry- the one that’s after AI. Or become a US House rep and do insider trading (is this actually legal?). Or maybe you buy Trump coin and get access via corruption. This is either trolling, or you are delusional. But it is fun to think about.

hollow-fox

More the rise in private equity and VC being such a dominant force for raising capital without all regulatory burden of the SEC.

AvayaPhones

[Oracle, Silver Lake consortium to control 80% stake in TikTok in US, WSJ reports](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/oracle-silver-lake-consortium-control-80-stake-tiktok-us-wsj-reports-2025-09-16/) now lets look up these people - [Oracle - Larry Ellison is a zionist, and huge donor to their defense fund](https://littlesis.org/relationships/1723352) and to [Netanyahu](https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-on-vacation-at-island-owned-by-larry-ellison-a-witness-in-graft-trial/) - [Silver Lake has heavily invested in Israeli tech](https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-1000576470) - Andreessen Horowitz has [worked with IDF](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/skwehyumgx), actively funds israeli VC and [voiced public support for the genocide](https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-and-the-genocide) There's also Erica Mindel. [She was appointed in mid‑2025 as TikTok’s Public Policy Manager for Hate Speech.](https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-news/2025/08/01/tiktok-israel-hate-speech-manager/) She previously served in the IDF (Armored Corps + Spokesperson’s Unit) for about 2.5 years.

RobbinDeBank

Thiel is a venture capitalist, totally different role compared to one corporation who has to manage and run their own operation. He can throw his money at thousands of start ups (as every VC does) and hope some succeed, but he doesn’t run anything that even produce anywhere close to the amount of innovations that Google does. Startups are businesses that make money, not a research powerhouse like Google. Google research arm and Bell’s Lab of the last century are both research labs funded by insanely profitable corporation with infinite money, which give them a massive amount of resources to create innovations in electrical engineering and computer science. Thiel is just a VC throwing money at businesses, and he’s nowhere the scientific and engineering powerhouse that Google is. Bringing some products to market isn’t comparable to discovering new technology and scientific knowledge, which no institution in the whole world could beat Google in the last decade in the field of computer science. As a mature business that already captures the whole market, the long term research investment both contribute to advancing science and engineering while ensuring Google will keep their technological leads over everyone else. Also, thiel’s such a vile person with disgusting ideologies. A greedy man like that of course wouldn’t know any value besides whether this entity will make enough products to make me money.

Run4Life-King

People don't read to analyses anymore , and do their own math ! Seriously all the paper hands should just get out of this forum. Op, can you please share link to the 20VC podcast you referenced. Thanks in advance

AccountOfMyAncestors

You can listen to him make the bull case on the 20VC podcast, the episode came out yesterday. The hosts drill him quite hard and he effectively counter punched all the scrutiny and bear case questions they threw at him. He 100% has visionary founder energy. I pseudo-aped in when the news broke that he was the new CEO, all based on a hunch that the former Shopify COO would be a glass-eating killer of an executive, and after this interview I feel assured. This dude is taking it to $30+, full stop. And depending on how long the bull market lasts, could go past $82 (serious). $82 per share corresponds to a market cap of $59.8 billion, a successful turn around of OPEN can justify that. The size of the real estate market is measured in the trillions, they just need 1-3% of that market and its auxillary services (like mortgages, title insurance, etc.) to be priced like that.

SoulStripHer

Apples and oranges. The companies driving up the market today are megacaps and not penniless startups with VC funding.

pooterssssssssss

Platoon. The scene where he charges the VC at the end was amazing.

larktok

you have no point. Bytedance did not run on state funds at any point, it succeeded on its own volition/VC funds. Same with other Chinese e-commerce like PDD. The sector that gets subsidies is robotics/hardware/evs not internet products. You can look this up. The 1% equity stake applies to all Chinese publicly traded companies and does not involve investment, they steal it basically. These companies succeeded with overreporting which is proof that Trump isn’t ending quarterly reports to mimic Chinese success, he has ulterior motives. That’s all there is to it, you are arguing just to argue

RoundTableMaker

I mean. That chunk of space x is worth something. Even if they sold it on the secondary market right now to some VC chop shop it would be worth more than they are receiving.

Dirante

Sure, if they had perfect foresight. But VC investing is about making a ton of risky bets and hoping a couple make it big. I'm sure when they invest in the moment they think it can meet their expectations but there are plenty of VC backed private companies that realize down the line that the market opportunity doesn't match their valuation.

skilliard7

Read your own sources. Your figures are only counting P/E and VC backed companies for private. This excludes private companies that do not have VC/Private equity based backing, such as partnerships, sole proprietorships, and family owned businesses.

VeryStableGenius

So are you saying that private capital is paying more for a given unit of value, than the share-buying public would? If so, wouldn't a VC just say "to heck with it; I'm buying SPY."

VeryStableGenius

> the same numbers used to argue that private companies aren't scrutinized enough. But if VC guys lose 50% of their money (and it doesn't trigger some external economic event, like debt default) then it doesn't matter. So private capital doesn't have to be regulated as tightly, because grandma won't lose her farm. As a result, grandma can't invest in the hottest AI, either. > Is it necessarily bad if public companies have a higher standard these days compare to the prior decades? Tingle's argument is that public companies are driven by consulting-imposed standards (not necessarily enacted in law, but driven by fear of lawsuits by shareholders) that have ossified 'best practices' that are in fact detrimental. An example is performance based executive compensation, which largely rewards luck and a rising stock market, and causes executive pay to correlate with corporate size, for no particularly good reason.

TacoDangerous

The breadth of Alphabet investments and businesses across key new markets is unmatched. Questions sure about execution, but if you want to own an emerging tech VC along with a gigantic profit factory ad machine, GOOG is yo boi/girl

Sandvicheater

Anybody think Sam Altman and OpenAI/Chatgpt is cooked? Sam has repeatedly bit MSFT's hand that red them. They're getting curb stomped in the AI race by GOOG. And they're burning even more VC/seed money they have on stupid shit like ORCL cloud servers. They're posing themselves to IPO as a multi trillion dollar AI company when investors already see the ice berg cut a hole on OpenAi's titanic.

Sakrie

Their books are not good and their product is laughably slow and clearly a humanoid robot gimmic. Absolutely nothing is solved from their technology besides "how can we fleece VC?"

trumpdiego

##Top value pick stocks, first two are only $6, that's like half a handy at your dumpster: ##1. $Htz (Hertz) - Ackman has fucked me before, but $2B seems low here, if they put in some AI kiosks instead of having to deal with low iq front desk clerk and homie getting his ID out of his pocket for 15minutes, they'll be golden. ##2. $PTLO (Portillos) - poors need cheap food, and this is poors food that is delicious, all time lows, I'm in for the strategic turnaround. Also working at wendys gets tiring, I need a new crowd. ##3. $Chym (Chime) - talk about IPO gone bust, this is what happens to your precious IPO after everybody sold, the IPO lockup isnt even here yet (Nov) and this thing is less than most VC's bought in for ($30). Poors need banks and loans in the near future. Thank you for coming to my value stock talk. Hope some of these plays tickle your balls and you share me in bagholding for the next decade.

phatelectribe

It’s going to die. Just look at Bandier - tons of VC money, loads of influencers, heavy marketing, or one locations. They’re now bust and trying to fire sell the IP for pennies on the dollar. This market is saturated, there’s too much competition and the customer base is fleeting. At the low end shein is clearing up. At the high end, Alo and Vuori now are the hot thing. Lulu is in the terrible position of being the expensive brand that is mid and seems dated.

WetJetCrew

No way you are comparing a dinosaur to the new kid on the block. Although there have been some very strong blockbusters. Overall attendance at movie theaters has dropped. While VC, Wall street and retail investors are all flocking to the new shiny toy of "AI powered shit on a plate". Wishing you the best

goober2341

The Oracle deal with OpenAI for $300 billion caused the entire market to pump, but OpenAI is burning through VC cash as is. Where the fuck are they going to get the money? Not to mention the power grid can't handle the increased demand and there's been zero proof that the glorified chatbot they're calling "AI" is able to significantly boost corporate productivity. It's absolutely insane.

moorhound

OPEN 3 days ago? Trash. Not selling that beforehand took some balls. OPEN now that Rabois is back, right before rates cuts and an American credit extravaganza is about to begin? Very different. Real estate has always been a territoried industry in the US. That makes it extremely fragmented; 1.5 million real estate agents working for 300k+ brokerages. Even counting mega firms with over 20k total agents, there are like ten. No one can consolidate market share, because all these agents and companies are constantly at war with each other. I can see, with a massive amount of tech industry brainpower and a fuckton of VC capital, a path for a company with a radical modernization plan to usurp the industry by taking out most of the human elements. I sure as hell didn't think Opendoor was capable of pulling anything like it off, especially not without the right brains and the aforementioned money. But now, I can kind of see a path, and at the end of the path is a *fuckin donko amount of money*. There's $2T worth of houses sold each year, and you can hog a lot of that pie and keep more of the margin with robo agents.

Daforce1

Agreed, I’m a VC that is active in the cybersecurity space, and a ton of money is going to be made in this area way before ipos

z0r0

As someone who is has their finger on the pulse of cyber security, the real money is made on acquisition by VC's, and then by the market when an acquisition doesn't alienate a customer base of a product that does well. Companies like PANW, CSGO, and cloud providers etc. are just going to buy the obvious winners before they IPO. I suspect that GOOGL is going to do quite well in the future with it's historical acquisitions of Mandiant, VirusTotal and most recently, Wiz. Let alone all of the AI tooling that they're putting out that's not half bad.

moorhound

~75% of the typical homebuyer demographic is still priced out; rate cuts are gonna keep prices inflating, so they won't help this a whole lot. As of now, Opendoor is still just a much-shitter version of Zillow. They finally figured out they have to use agents to get the groundwork done, and agents don't currently have much incentive to use the platform. But with the massive amount of backing that Rabois is likely to bring with him, OPEN can do the tech growth phase again and afford to lose money in order to gain market share. If they can figure out streamlined AI contract writing, that's cool too, but the main drivers for OPEN's future are gonna be gubment connections and massive amounts of VC capital funding rounds.

moorhound

I did what actual people that read can do and looked into the company's financials. It was, and as of now, still looks like a wet dog shit. They dumped over 35% of their inventory last quarter for a 23% gross profit increase, and almost all of that cash is restricted. A good chunk of their inventory (30+%) is sitting stale, which means they're probably shit houses they're gonna lose money on. The *only thing* that gives me faith in this company now going somewhere is Rabois coming back. He's a Silicon Valley VC OG; Stanford Law, Founder's Fund, Kholsa. His husband is the undersecretary for economic growth. Insane amounts of tech money and influence are going to float this turd.

moorhound

Even though I made money off of OPEN today, I loathe the fact that this stock went from a moron dipshit meme P&D buy to an actual viable growth route overnight with Rabois and his VC muscle coming back to the board. Now this is probably going to at least $35, and we have to deal with a bunch of smoothbrains considering themselves master trading geniuses because some bots on the internet saying "$OPEN your anoos" was enough for them to full-port into a penny stock and hit the lotto. WSB is solid proof that America is NOT a meritocracy. I like the money, but this feels gross.

AccountOfMyAncestors

Your practically a VC investor. Miss 98, hit 2 monster homers.

moorhound

The CEO doesn't matter, they could have gotten any chucklefuck. Rabois and Wu coming back the board are huge, however. These guys have *massive* VC investor pull.