VC

tragedy_strikes

Hard to know since they've been surviving on VC cash and compute credits and they've been training their customers to operate on unlimited* subscription plans for the last few years. *Lots of tweaks to pricing happening recently and there are similar restrictions with unlimited wireless plans eg slower speeds after the first xGB downloaded Not to mention that they're a private company and they aren't using GAAP. They have very favorabley timed leaks about their financials to make them look good eg using ARR inappropriately for their business model and releasing how they're operating at a profit recently to coincide with a 2 month discount Musk gave them for access to Colossus data center capacity. If you want an exhaustive look at all their financial shadiness go read Ed Zitron. I'm sure their S1 will be as eye opening as it was with SpaceX.

RaspberryExisting501

Anthropic will be minimum close to 2 trillion at IPO. Their growth is insane and they have a huge backlog of future revenue once they get more compute, ie renting Space X Collosus. VC's came to them with 30 billion raise at 900 billion valuation. In the scheme of things that price may be a bargain.

Antique_Hawk_7192

This time it's datacenters. All that debt going into them, when even a single one defaults, it's gonna make 08 look tame. 08 had something to bail out. Govt could deal with all those MBS/CDO, it could stop AIG from defaulting. What they gonna do this time? Shovel boatloads of cash into Nvidia for buying GPUs to rot in warehouses? AI bubble is Bank/VC/Private Credit/Private Equity funnelling money into OAI/Anthropic and their users, and datacenter builders(Coreweave, Oracle). There's nothing and no one to bail out in this mess.

ChoosenByPepe

Check Swarmer - CEO, software, VC backing. All clicks.

stankdankprank

A VC backed Ai company wants me to interview as a founding sales exec. I'm currently sitting in a porta potty at a shitty construction site. This is the top

Accurate_Ad5364

As someone who does MedTech Research with (PhD work involved using CNNs to upscale MRI Resolution), I hope you don't have a significant amount of money invested in this company. >*Am I wrong to think that classifying burns and wounds more correctly would end up saving the money?* You're assumption is correct IF the classifications were highly accurate. Hospitals save money by reducing Patient Turnaround Time (PTAT) and reducing malpractice claims. If the tool is inaccurate, then this would cost the hospitals more (malpractice claims). Furthermore, every time C-Suite Execs try and implement some new "time-saving technology" they only increase Doctor workloads which would provide an additional malpractice liability from patients who were just churned through the hospital. >*It looks like they've achieved 95% accuracy when assessing burn wounds:* This claim is extremely misleading. For one, they evaluated "pixels of the image captured" rather than the "# of wound sites." If you look at the Fig. 3 in the paper linked most of the False Positives (Incorrectly says the tissue can't heal) and False negatives (Incorrectly says the tissue can heal) occur at the border of the burn. **The border is the most important part because skin-cells migrate inward to close the wound.** By counting pixels their being extremely generous about their "Accuracy" since the border of a burn (The part that matters the most) \~<5% of the image pixels where the remaining 95% of pixels is dead-tissue a doctor could've predicted from visual inspection. **It's probably why Fig. 1, next their time to heal prediction, the image of the actual burn site is in black and white since any doctor could tell the same thing based on how pink the burn looks.** Even with their dubious pixel-counting metric, even more misleading is their communication of their provided evaluation metrics. Saying "Sensitivity, Specificity, and Accuracy" instead of the standard Machine Learning Evaluation Metrics Precision, Recall, Accuracy, allows them to avoid providing an F1 score. However, lets go ahead and calculate that for them ***S :*** Sensitivity = Precision = .807 ***R:*** Recall = Specificity = .955 **F1 Score = ( S x R) / (S + R) = 0.437** I'll let you search up the significance of a 0.437 F1 score, but its pretty clear why they didn't want to include it. Additionally remember that the lower end of the software's sensitivity was 51.8% which in that case, yields an F1 score of \~0.33. Either way, their VC money is not waging a war on retail investors, VCs trying to use the hype of "FDA **Clearance**" to exit their position. They recognize the underlying software is bullshit, and they're trying recoup some of their initial capital since 40cents on the dollar is better that $0 . Personally, I believe this was a bs endeavor from the start. Their Multi-Spectral Lasers are just different frequencies of visible light. Already Light is too finnicky for sensors in medical devices, ESPECIALLY when skin is involved (Search up HR sensors melanin to see why).

Turbulent-Concert549

I already made well over 10x on INFQ (bought at <$1 as an early employee). They were building something truly exciting back then, but lost the plot when they put a VC in charge and laid off a lot of top talent that ended up at competitors. They’re scrambling to rehire now that they’re well-capitalised, but burnt a lot of trust in the quantum industry.

fluffyleaf

It is for the next 12 months, if only because OpenAI and Anthropic have secured enough funds from VC and SWFs. Though the party will end eventually because continual losses with no path to profitability cannot be sustained indefinitely (unless there is some avenue they can pivot to, which nobody can really see), but for the next year their contracts and fab buildouts are assuredly funded by pension and taxpayer monies...

AccountOfMyAncestors

She really would have insider info. High priced escorts bang executives all the time, she can definitely get some industry gossip out of some tech and VC execs to front run. I've actually thought this could be operationalized as a black hat investment strategy

greytoc

Do you actually have any experience with investing in private small businesses? If not - it's usually not the kind of businesses that inexperienced investors should be dabbling in - unless it's just throw-away speculative gambles. You really need to understand how to read and understand the offering circular of whatever you plan to invest into. Just to clarify - LaunchVector is not really a scam. But their marketing and their business practice sounds a bit on the dubious side. They are basically just another small business broker who operate in a weird niche. They fall into a Reg CF/A+ world of investing where they are largely unregulated and investors do not have to necessarily be accredited. The odd part of their business model is that they seem to focus on very small ecommerce business. Small business brokers and low-tier investment banking who help raise capital for businesss are a legit business. But you really have to know and trust the business that you are investing into. Would you have access to the business operators? Do you get access to their books? What percentage of the business is owned by you? Or are you in a fund or pool of 100's of other investors with no access to the business? So - think of it this way - if a business is doing well or has a good business idea - the founders would raise capital either through personal loans, venture loans, or angel capital/private VC. Ask yourself - why would a business go through a small business broker to sell equity to an investor that can't help them grow their business other than for the capital? If you decide to invest - how is the fund or business valuation done? Are you sure you believe the valuation? Are the revenue and expenses audited? If not - can you trust the numbers? What's the exit strategy? Is it a equity or debt deal? These are just some of the basic questions that you have to understand.

NoEffective4393

It's access. Which AST does not own. By definition it's not a commodity. "The market treats all instances of a commodity as essentially identical, regardless of which company or individual produced them" Are F9/NG/VC identical? 1 is grounded while the other one trashed your satellite. 

kyndrid_

MSFT’s VC wing definitely holds inverse QQQ and SPY lmfao

SpyBagholder

X? Yeah they just bleed money and always have I think twitter was always hanging on by thin margins padded by VC

Super-Activity-4675

OP, you're right, this is a bubble, and I think you have a good idea what pops it. I'm pretty bearish on the market at a whole, but right now, it's still very much full port calls. Here's what stops it. 1) Someone says enough when it comes to CAPEX. My money is on Microsoft here, who ironically is in the best position to burn money of all the Mag 7. I'm not sure when that happens though. 2) OpenAI/Anthropic can no longer raise funds. Both companies have had multiple massive (many billions) capital raises over the last couple years. They're spending billions faster than earning it. At some point, lenders say no. As it is, they've sucked up all VC funds for the foreseeable future and are now heavily exposed in the private lending markets and are trying to tap the Saudi Wealth Fund. That is A LOT of money spent to still not be profitable. These IPOs will function as yet another cash raise and neither company is profitable, nor have they shown a path to profitability. If one or both of these suddenly can't pay their bills, it's game over. This will likely bankrupt a few companies pretty quick (Oracle, Nebius, Corweave in particular. Blue Owl and Softbank may fail too). 3) OpenAI/Anthropic start charging the true costs for tokens. They're already starting to do this by degrading services and changing the terms of their plans. Right now though, it's a subscription that loses money on every customer because they're subsidizing the costs and trying to get customers hooked. The problem is when customers see the real bill and businesses are forced to cut back on token maxing schemes and determine the real value of their subscriptions. 4) An inflationary storm. I wouldn't underestimate what might happen if the oil shock hits hard. Rates go up, and all that debt that everyone has gets more and more expensive. If I were to hazard a guess, 2027 or maybe 2028. It's coming sooner than people thing as the value for AI really isn't there. I could see it happening this fall depending on how this Iran thing shapes out, but right now, it's still irrational exuberance. Believe it or not, calls.

actias_selene

I don't think that it is a bubble, neither the situation is that good. Also afaik, eps only shows small part of capex, as it includes estimated depriciation instead.Still fcf remains strong for big tech. The issue is with AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. They are deep in  red in fcf. Their revenue from their customers account about half, the other half is VC money, with some circular funding being mentioned all the time. The AI revenue for big tech(MSFT, GOOG) is also a bit difficult to calculate as they are bundling it up with other stuff. Either way, even if there is any bubble, it can sustain years to come, unless everyone decides to stop all invesment at once. Even then, only some like MU would get crashed. Big AI would be probably bought out by Big Tech.

WesternPirate4448

I have used Hiive a bit to track secondary private market spreads, and the main thing to understand is that you are dealing with a true order book of bids and asks, unlike the curated SPVs you get on platforms like EquityZen or Forge. When you buy direct shares there, you are usually looking at a higher minimum lot size because you are interacting directly with an employee or early VC seller. The heavy lifting comes after you agree on a price, because the underlying company still holds a Right of First Refusal, meaning SpaceX or whoever you are buying can just step in and block or buy back the transaction, which can leave your capital hanging in limbo for weeks lol. Definitely look closely at the counterparty risk and whether you are buying common or preferred stock before pulling the trigger, tbh.

doktorhladnjak

I agree. If that’s what investors are willing to pay, that’s its valuation by definition. The idea that a few players can force through a high valuation doesn’t hold up. Look at any VC-backed tech company where the price flopped after IPO.

ThrowawayFiDiGuy

Housing market is attributed to inflation, low interest rates on mortgages post-COVID, a lack of supply in desired areas, and the entire market pricing in dual-income households. Blaming PE or VC is a very naive, misinformed take. Individuals that purchased their home at 3% 4 years ago are not willing to sell it for less now because interest rates are higher. This

jpdoctor

The bigger issue imho: VCs sit on the boards of public companies doing acquisitions of private companies. Not only is there a direct conflict-of-interest (VC profits) but other board members not directly involved with that VC might want to curry favor with him or her. BoD's should receive a helluva lot more scrutiny than they do.

MonochromaticButter

Small cap value stocks don’t have a risk premium anymore. Historically, high-quality small-caps used to list on the public markets before they became big, so retail investors had the opportunity to capture the small cap value premium and factor tilts before the company grew too big. Except today, quality small caps don’t go public, they get bought out by PE/VC funds and only go public when they’re huge.

_bones__

Which is the dot com bubble all over again. No profits, just VC expenditure.

Jayflux1

It’s not a bubble if people are paying for it, their revenue is high, it’s not like this is all VC runway

ndmaynard

They need to get liquidity as fast as possible- VC funding isn’t going to be there forever

InvestigatorOk9354

"Please buy in so I can exit" - VC bag holder

Direct-Fee4474

openai has no path to profitability. openai uses a ton of MS datacenter space. openai can't afford to pay its bills using revenue. openai can't raise enough VC to pay its bills with VC. most of those bills are for compute, and they're owed to MS. MS gives money to openai, so openai can pay MS. but now MS can't really afford to keep giving openai money to pay its bills, so they've gotta raise money via an IPO. and by "raise money" i mean create an exit so VCs can get their money back, because the wheels are properly coming off the entire AI boondoggle, which is why none of the datacenters people claim to be building are actually coming on line, and when they do it's "phase 1 of 30" and 5-10% of overall capacity, but it's announced as "project's done!"

JJdante

https://youtu.be/7Szfj5VC8_U?si=z_AAwWcLrvX-HWiX You've been got

B00marangTrotter

 In the immortal words of the queen, come again?

elgrandorado

If I was an ORCL shareholder, I would be deeply worried about the debt load taken on to finance IOUs from OpenAI for demand being subsidized by OpenAI's VC, Big Tech, & PE investors. Those RPOs don't even come close to the revenue OpenAI or any of the AI labs combined have proven they can grow into, let alone what portion of their gross margin they can pay to Oracle.

BlackSquirrel05

She made the bulk of her income post 2008 crash in real-estate. (Not defending it.) But her Husband was working in VC since like the 1970's... Guess who also made a shit ton of their wealth the exact same way in the same time. Mitch McConnel... Guess who made pretty much Nancy's net worth in under 30 minutes in one trade on crypto this past year or so? No one really knows, but they placed the bet 1 hour prior to the tariff announcement leveraged. Guess who wasn't let in on that info and already had millions to make that bet? All the rest of us.

TedCruzMpreg

Yes unlike 2001 there are revenues, however the actual AI companies themselves aren't pulling anything close to *profit*. Of course Nvidia is making money, AI companies are dumping insane amounts of VC money into buying the hardware. The issue is that while these companies continue to spend, the revenue they're bringing in is a drop in the bucket. A few billion in revenue sounds great until you realize its 5% of overhead. In a way you kinda answered your own question. There will be corrections, yet AI will continue to be an important technology. People aren't saying that AI is going to crash and burn forever, they're saying that no company is anywhere close to figuring out a profitable model yet. Yes a lot of impressive innovation and infrastructure is being built, and the eventual winners will figure out how to leverage these things effectively, but the fundamentals of most AI hyperscalers seem to be putting them on the trajectory of being losers.

csppr

I don’t know about biotech. I’m in biotech R&D, and I don’t feel like I have a good handle on which companies are likely to work out. I can identify the obvious failures, but that’s about it. That’s despite a PhD and years of experience. My feeling is unless someone has the capital and time to run a heavily diversified biotech portfolio, or works in some form of biotech-centric VC role, biotech is probably not a good place to invest.

chawklitdsco

VC is not allocating randomly and they are looking at a much bigger set of potential investments but yes they are just trying to bat 10%.

perceptive_AI

I yearn for the days where you can invest in public companies and watch it 1000x. They no longer exist because of VC funding.

DeepPeeps

Spacex IPO is an exit strategy for VC and everyone who was in early. There’s no way in hell the stock value is worth 1.5T. The revenue they generate is nowhere near worth that valuation. They maybe in the lead for some of what they are doing now but in 5-10 years. You wouldn’t even get that. You’re likely going to see the stock crash and the economy goes to shit and everyone to exited may buy back after it crashes 60-90%.

peaceup_atowndown

Agreed if I were the initial VC investor, I’d be saying start with wraps and rice bowls and add salads on the side later

AccomplishedView4709

I think they said to expect 9 out of 10 investments to fail in ipo and VC investments, you bet on 1 of them turn out to be the big winner to cover for all the losers.

Alternative_Way_2926

Please point out what I am missing: Per the Cerebras whitepaper(on their site), each of their cores is: 48KB of sram + 110K stdcells, and is 0.038mm2(on N5)! ....tiny tiny "IP". Even low power ARM cores on N5 will be 100x bigger. Their entire design is this one block X a million. Becos they route around bad cores, a chunk of this 110K stdcells has to be used for muxing cross core wiring paths etc and related redundancy. So, what is functional logic?? 60K, 70K or 80K stdcells? This tiny spec of "IP" is going to change the world?? I think a lot of the benchmarks they have ignore load/overhead times related to so much distribution across ~million elements/"cores". If someone knows a VC, please reach out to me. I want funding for a new socks company, called socks.AI. Lol

Willing-Angle-2203

Google is a beast that was always profitable, even if you remove AI/GCP from the picture. Search/ads profits can sustain them forever. But they are NOT making profits on "AI", and if you believe so you are being completely fooled by them. Anthropic - This company IS NOT profitable. Its burning cash. It recently moved to per-token billing (from flat subscription) to alleviate that gap. It requires constant funding in the billions of dollars range. These companies are being MASSIVELY subsidized by hyperscalers capex + VC money. You may argue that in the future costs will go down and they will be profitable, but they are absolutely not right now. Nebius - again, a shovel seller. Although with this one I'm pretty sure they are not profitable yet? Last I checked their capex is vastly larger than their revenue. Could be wrong but I don't think they are making profit yet

mcdade

More like exit liquidity for the VC’s

Requirement-Lazy

It’s interesting to see that companies are deciding to stay private longer. This has two effects. Firstly valuations are extremely inflated if in the right industry (AI is an obvious one). Profits don’t matter if you’re pre-IPO. Classic case of the “pure play” (silicon valley reference) Secondly is ordinary investors are left of out of investments for a longer of time, and out of the norm returns are left only to PE investors or VC funds

ActuatorTechnical621

It's not about AI being fake. 4 of the biggest VC funding rounds in all of human history were done in Q1 2026. In my opinion there are 3 risks with WHERE the money is being allocated now. Because the market is changing by the week basically. I see the following risks; 1.Not all players in the market today will survive - many startups don't have real tech. The just use a model under a fancy UI. Most of those will die. 2. Innovation might move to less or a different type of compute - deep seek and alphabet TPU are examples of that. 3. As the technology matures, I see the Open Source and more efficient Chinese models playing a bigger part.

big-papito

Apparently no one here hangs out on Claude subreddits to know how bad they ration users now. Microsoft released a tool to show you what the new pricing **will** be based on your current usage. My bill is now $10 - it will be $85 next month. The VC subsidized joyride is over, but the investors will be asleep at the wheel until they get wrecked, per usual.

Square-Ad-6721

Immediately day 1 and insure that some VC who had early access can de-risk their investment after a massive run up. A run up that the rest don’t easily get access to participate in. And I’ll make sure I hold until the lock up period is over. When there’s a sudden increase in float/ liquidity. To allow everyone who got in early; to get out. Definitely want to ride this one down. Just all my other investments.

FormerKarmaKing

Tech Crunch and everyone else says the IPO is at 5.5B. And last VC round is immaterial. And a 4x markup on last VC round is not an acquihire by any means. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/14/cerebras-raises-5-5b-kicking-off-2026s-ipo-season-with-a-bang/

chostax-

CFO at a VC fund, you tell me. (The answer is still no)

cheapcheap1

That is precisely because they got a significant budget increase from the VC invested in SpaceX. It's not like NASA couldn't build reusable rockets. I mean, SpaceX got the idea and their entire starting engineering team from NASA. NASA just couldn't justify the upfront expense to develop them.

Chezzymann

As a software engineer its obviously very useful, but its more about the random startups that are essentially chatgpt api wrappers, looking for a problem for a solution instead of a solution for a problem, with multi billion dollar valuations because VC is throwing massive amount of money at anything AI related.  And then there's all the companies looking to solve problems with AI and when a simpler solution might solve it more easily just because it sounds good for investors that they have an AI product line. Lots of the current AI buildup and stock market is tied up into these projects, and i think eventually they will implode. But the big players like Anthropic will be fine in the long run.

mulletstation

But that wall of Elon zealots is basically other Billionaires and Billion dollar VC funds that are all trying to continuously buy more shares during the distribution rounds. $1.5T is not overvalued to them. It's clear Elon is going to make a play to merge Tesla into SpaceX at some point as well. The space-data center thing is IMO not a scam as it distinctively lowers the cost of one of the big issues of operations right now. A full GPU rack is about 2500 pounds, but over 1500 pounds of that is power delivery and cooling. There's only like 800-1000 pounds of actual needed stuff there if you can disconnect the sub-systems.

LimitIntelligent9946

Fuck, this accurately describes me perfectly. Just absolutely perplexed how it can continue rising knowing that AI has physical engineering constraints, the VC financing, and the Hormuz closure.

CrunchyMage

I think the valuations are particularly inflated because current revenues are coming from selling tokens at a loss. People are happy to pay for $100-200 monthly subscriptions when they are getting $1-2k worth of tokens. When tokens are no longer subsidized by VC funding rounds, what happens to all that revenue? How many more people switch to slightly worse but way cheaper open source? You can keep selling your product at a loss as long as VCs keep piling in, but the party stops once the companies go public and there’s no more new rounds of funding coming in.

elgrandorado

Ed Zitron recently went on Prof G to discuss what is essentially a giant bear case on the AI supercycle, and there was a key thought that stuck with me after that podcast. What is the real cost of intelligence as things stand? Semi analysis has a deep investigation into how the cost of intelligence has flattened, but it's only happened with massive inflows of VC, PE, and Big Tech investments being plowed into LLMs and the adjacent industries. This is while most of the firms actually servicing AI have negative unit economics that we know of, or unit economics which are still unclear. I'm not sure we have an idea of what the true cost of intelligence is currently, and it's all being subsidized for both firms and consumers. What happens to the latent demand when the AI labs inevitably have to jack up their pricing to deal with the sheer losses they're generating?

TaliskyeDram

There's plenty of reasons for it to pop, just need to diversify your media. 1) the run rate exceeds reality 2) the production of the pick and shovels, in this current case storage, does not meet demand. 3) model training and retraining due to model drift does not reduce as projected. Which is hasn't yet so my bet is here. 4) other architecture models develop either more efficient models so the current data center infra becomes excessive. Or the LLM architecture gets overtaken by something like BDH a more efficient neural network structure with different capacities. 5) the true price of tokens is released rather than being subsidized by VCs. This is an echo of the Uber model. Right now tokens are cheap, but that's only because VCs are covering the cost. The hope being AI will be too engrained to go back when the VC sugar rush comes to an end. But this time it'll eat big business bottom line not the mom and pop individuals.

RoboticGreg

Every major ai tools and support company (like anthropic, etc) is using the subsidize/addict/extract model and all of them are straddling addict and extract. There are 1000s of ai technology based companies that for in the startup category or the category of major companies without ai tech that are leveraging things like "use up work! Don't build a bloated in house ai team!" Or taking advantage of NVIDIA partnerships and subsidized support sales architecture. When one of them raises prices on all of these ai tools that are so cheap they are basically free, they are going to start looking dramatically more profitable which will trigger the others to do it so there isn't one major player suddenly massively profitable while every one else operates at a loss, so all of them with flip to extract mode and raise prices dramatically. Like two thirds of these supported startups and scale ups will either fold immediately or have a dramatic pivot, because their business models are built on the into pricing. A ton of the established companies that were using these tools because the ROI was fantastic are suddenly faced with a money losing proposition to keep their AI powered products running and they won't have internal resources to either pull more of it in house to make it cheaper or build some of their own things. It wont be a complete collapse but I think it will completely rock the VC and some of the PE funded startup and small company world and cause a major contraction in value, and a significant consolidation in the market. Not sure if it will be a bubble pop, or just some other type of financial event, but I definitely think there is SOMETHING big and dramatic coming

Ok_Pomelo_3460

That’s kind of the key difference vs dotcom honestly. The spending is coming from some of the most profitable companies on earth, not random startups burning VC cash.

RaechelMaelstrom

All recessions other than 2020 I think were preceded by an oil price shock. We're in it right now. The pop is coming. I don't think AI is going away, much to my chagrin. But it isn't profitable now, and it's been subsidized by huge amounts of VC money and fake circle jerk money. And the costs of building data centers is getting more expensive. RAM, GPUs, storage, power, construction, everything is getting more expensive. And rising oil prices is only going to make the gears grind more as inflation takes hold. There's already no way OpenAI can pay for its planned liabilities without taking money from someone else. The economics are honestly more fake than it seems to me. But it's not that they're fraudulent necessarily, but they're based on MOUs and projections that may not come through if there's a recession and the company changes direction. And most of the stock market gains are about the tech and AI companies and B2B sales, not the end consumer, which is doing horribly. It's not a very broad based market right now either. The dream of LLMs suddenly producing AGI is also complete BS and I don't think anyone reputable believes this. But now AGI is the new goal post everyone is looking for as people learn that LLMs have limitations. The productivity gains of AI are not agreed upon in the slightest. Here's at least an article that I've read: [https://fortune.com/article/why-do-thousands-of-ceos-believe-ai-not-having-impact-productivity-employment-study/](https://fortune.com/article/why-do-thousands-of-ceos-believe-ai-not-having-impact-productivity-employment-study/) Once the shit hits the fan in other parts of the economy, people will de-risk and start selling, and it'll build on itself as momentum changes from insane buying to selling.

Admirable_Nothing

Just a thought. You have done exceedingly well with your picks in the tech space. How about a bit of diversification. Maybe utilities, energy, banks? Something absolutely a 100% away. Then all your new money can go back into tech but if anything happens you have built a moat around your gains so far. I had scores of Cisco clients in 1999/2000. Every one of them was certain CSCO would be at $100 by the fall of 2000. It finally hit $100 earlier this week some 26 years after their certainty that it would hit that number within 6 months. One of my clients was at the Director Level. A position just above Sr VP and just below Exec VP. At the time he was and had been for several years been granted 50,000 options every quarter. And each quarter the 3-year-old options would exercise. I was at his house one evening along with his broker and the next day was option exercise day. His instructions were to use money from his account to pay the taxes and to sell all 50,000 shares and to reinvest it into anything the broker wanted except for tech. 6 months later the bottom fell out of tech and he left CSCO but opened a VC firm and has been there happily and wealthy since. It never hurts to take some profit and diversify away from a very concentrated position.

patmccock86

VC's were buying CBRS for $23 a share and we have WSB buying at $388

bzl33

IPOs are exit liquidity at this point. Mostly for the later stage VC because early employees + founders have a 6 month lockup and already have nice gains.

SueNYC1966

You never worked in Big Law have you. It’s a nuisance lawsuit. I remember my husband had a nice client. A young man in his late 20s due to a tragic family event, inherited stacks and stacks and he started to go the VC route . Anyway, he had a young model he started to date with some sleepovers in his 5th Avenue apartment . She started to get mail at his place and he calls up my husband freaking out. That night my husband told him to get his dogs, get the hell put if the apartment (so she couldn’t accuse him of hitting her) , and they would get rid of her before it turned into a NY Post story. They literally have a protocol for rich clients this happened too. And that is why you pay your lawyer $1200/hr. Sometimes it is easier to cut a check and broom them quietly even if you never did anything wrong. This rich young guy thought he could let a girl he had just started dating sleep over a lot. 🤷🏻‍♀️

AirportHot8094

He was running an unprofitable business under cutting competitors which was going to work long term until VC bailed him out and he made his money. 

Sea_Watercress_3728

Everyone keeps yelling “scam” or “premium to NAV,” but they’re missing the bigger picture: this is one of the only public ways regular investors can get exposure to high-end private company upside without being a VC, accredited investor, or institution. That’s why I think this thing has explosive potential. The entire market is obsessed with AI, private tech, pre-IPO companies, and the next wave of billion-dollar disruptors. Normally, retail investors only get access after the biggest gains already happened. RVI flips that script. It gives public-market liquidity to private-company exposure, and that is incredibly rare. To me, the bull case is simple: RVI is a scarcity trade. There are tons of ETFs for public stocks. Tons of AI funds. Tons of tech funds. Tons of crypto-adjacent funds. But how many give everyday investors a shot at private growth companies before they hit the public market? Basically none. That’s why I think this can keep ripping. The more people understand what RVI actually is, the more demand could pile in. And because there really aren’t obvious alternatives, that demand has nowhere else to go. This isn’t just “another fund.” It’s a public wrapper around private-market upside. That is a unicorn setup. Could it be volatile? Absolutely. Could it get ahead of itself? Of course. But the reason I’m bullish is because the structure itself is rare, the theme is hot, and the supply of anything like this is tiny. Retail investors love access. They love scarcity. They love stories with massive upside. RVI has all three.

Diligent-Freedom9120

That's why you make multiple bets, some are bound to pan out. That's exactly what VC's do

Willing-Angle-2203

yea, but the future revenue streams are not really guaranteed. I guess they never are, but with AI specifically there are the issues you mentioned, plus the fact that the tech is still largely unproven in the sense of being profitable. The compute demand is being massively driven by VC/capex money rn. If AI turns out to be too expensive for most people to buy, then all the capex is not going to see the return it wants

Striking-Sundae-

When would you guys stop glazing lord dogfood. He sold pet food for a loss using VC money until he got bought out.

No-Lingonberry-5096

I agree on the inevitability of massive efficiency gains, and that everyone is very temporarily throwing hardware at the issue, working alongside the classic VC overinvest-to-dominate pattern. I remember 600% returns on MU in the late 90s. A couple breakthroughs in math are likely to pop hardware, especially alongside excess hardware as losers begin to shake out. 5-year contracts won't matter. There will be more pressure and upside to finding these efficiencies once they begin to exit. One question is if there's a Jevon's paradox in the mix. Another question is how these monstrous conglomerates like Alphabet, who are in everything at every layer from energy to ads, distort the market. They can afford to commoditize technologies they'd rather not buy or compete with, forcing unsurvivable price dynamics.

Asian_Dumpring

You seem to be complaining via AI that you're not being tapped on the shoulder when hot tech companies are tapping VCs for funding Go into VC if you think it's such an amazing investment opportunity

ApartmentSouth6789

Be patient... Market is over hyped on AI. Its slows down already and once VC realized it's been tricked by altman and dario it will re evaluate SaaS as AI is just a fraud

kokatsu_na

I’ll be honest, I am neutral to slightly bearish on Securitize. You are bringing up a lot of macro hype, but you are missing the actual product-market fit. Securitize’s main edge right now is strictly for institutional players (like parking stablecoins in BUIDL). For the average retail investor, the idea of "tokenized public equities" is mostly economically meaningless. Here is why: If I want to buy 100 shares of Apple and hold them for 10 years, I do not care about T+0 instant settlement or 24/7 trading. Why would I need the headache of a self-custody crypto wallet for that? Furthermore, while you theoretically remove some TradFi bureaucracy, the actual process of converting real stock --> token --> real stock costs money. Because of this friction, tokenized shares often trade at a discount to the underlying asset, and arbitraging that gap is difficult for retail. If you look at their most interesting products (like the 22x fund giving access to VC), they all require accredited investor status anyway. So effectively, they are just offering fixed-income products and private equity for whales. Retail traders don't care about a 5% treasury yield on a blockchain. Retail cares about leverage. Perpetual futures (perps) give you up to 50x-100x leverage, tokenized shares do not. Yes, securitize has a decent cash runway and the BlackRock partnership is great, but without massive retail adoption and actual leverage mechanics, they are at risk of remaining just a niche crypto B2B product that the broader market doesn't care about.

xGuardians

Yep, in this one. Obvious winner. For reference, I work in the digital asset space as a VC. Directionally a strong tokenized equity play with asymmetric upside. Wish there were warrants for my own gain. GLTA.

tequilamigo

Ya know what, Jensen, Dario, Altman, all the VC companies, all the geniuses stepping over each other to own some of this…. They’re all wrong, every one of them. You ARE the genius. They and the rest of us just can see it yet.

____DatBoi

VCs are dumping billions into hyped-up AI startups that are basically just UI wrappers with zero actual business model. Those startups then immediately turn around and hand like 80% of that VC cash straight to Big Tech to pay for AWS, GCP, or Azure compute. Big Tech then takes those numbers to Wall Street, flexing massive "cloud revenue growth," which pumps their stock valuations to the moon. But it's a total illusion. That revenue isn't from sustainable, organic consumer demand—it's literally just VC money being laundered through doomed startups. The second the VCs realize these wrappers will never turn a profit and finally shut off the funding tap, the startups go bankrupt. Big Tech's cloud growth vanishes overnight, Wall Street panics over the stalled growth, and those insane stock valuations collapse. The whole ecosystem is just cannibalizing VC cash and pretending it's sustainable revenue.

FreyBentos

THey are all conning each other, the large investors that is, retail is unimportant noise in the background. But make no mistake all these CEO's and tech bros are all conning each other and the money men to keep this trillion dollar money merry go round pumping as long as possible as even if LLM's klind of suck, they all fear their competitor making the next breakthrough before them and the VC guys and banks are happy to keep throwing billions after what they are being assured is a new paradigm.

zxc123zxc123

>Tan was born November 12, 1959, in Muar, Johor, Federation of Malaya (modern-day Malaysia), to an ethnic Malayan Chinese family. >Tan received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Nanyang University in 1978,[5] a Master of Science degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980,[6] and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of San Francisco in 1983.[7] Nanyang university is in Singapore btw. >Tan was a manager at EDS Nuclear and ECHO Energy and partner at the Walden USA investment fund before founding venture capital (VC) firm[10] Walden International in 1987. >Pacven Walden Management Co., Ltd. (doing business as Walden International) is an American venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_International >In 1994, Walden International launched its first China focused fund. An early investment it made was in Mindray.[9] The fund received $7.5 million from the World Bank.[11] >In March 2025, Tan was named CEO of Intel, effective from March 18, 2025.[22][23] Tan had been on Intel's board of directors from 2022 to 2024.[24][25] >**Tan is an American citizen[40] and lives in Piedmont, California, with his wife Ysa Loo. They have two grown children. A Christian, he adheres to Presbyterianism.[3] Tan has been an elder at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley since the 1990s.[41]** Ahh yes. A Chinese Malaysian who went to college in Singapore and then post grad in US. Then worked at multiple US companies before founding his own US based company that invested in US an China. And then became a naturalized US citizen and the CEO of American national champion Intel Corp is pure 100% Malaysian. That is why China and the USA are AI laggards compared the AI behemoth of Malaysia! I APOLOGIZE AND KNEEL!

FloppyButtholeJelly

VC Share deez nuts 

_TheOoze_

Private market VC on a data center startup

JonDSoCal

Picked up $20 Fig calls for later in the year. The penultimate VC share unlock on Friday has me worried. Considering selling half Wednesday in a potential pre-call run up. Short interest is krazy high, so maybe they sop up the new shares?

g3tr1ghttt

No idea what you’re saying sorry. Diversification is important, sector-wide ETFs exist for a reason. VC companies invest into many competing businesses. The idea is that one moonshot makes up for many failures. The guy told you he doesn’t want to elevate risk and be obsessed over a company wasting hours and days following the updates. His bet is the sector itself, which is enough of a risk already. Don’t marry a stock, you never know if it’s a homerun among a million other stocks, too many factors at play which change daily.

SB_90s

I mean, look at the price charts of Toyota and Uber - half this sub is probably smarter based on portfolio gains. On a serious note though, large companies like those take punts on loads of emerging companies with new tech related to their industry, just on the off-chance they actually are a threat or an opportunity to bring that tech in-house. Nobody wants to end up like Blockbuster. They basically have internal VC teams dedicated to this stuff. And like most VC teams, they have loads of losers and a few big winners.

HairlessBandicoot

SoftBank acquired a (terrible) company that I worked for years ago, with a narcissist at the helm. My take is that Masa falls for the charismatic founder myth and is perfectly happy with taking on key man risk because of that. Also, with VC roots, he seems to be pretty excited at growth (although growth at all costs is... *not* always the playbook in every sector). That's how he fell for WeWork. And tbh, my ex-employer.

Lucky_Strike1871

Yes and no, it's just the etymology is lost to us young ones. For example, "Zipper Head" derived from Korea and Vietnam due to the horrific cranial wounds that Korean and NVA/VC combatants would suffer from a headshot.

Moneymma

OpenAI is going to be a generational bagholder event. VC is going to unload everything to the retail losers.

Opposite-Writer9715

Thanks usually don't get bothered but listened to wrong advice which is unlike me he wanted me to to move from index funds to VC. No thanks

Designer_Respect4285

100% that space is going to produce massive winners, physical AI is a or possibly THE sexy topic in government/VC circles. This company specfically has been on my research list

CherryPie420-69

You're a broken record with this VC cash nonsense. Anthropic is going public. Google with cash it out. If you can't list who else is sitting on GCP then STFU. Anthropic is huge and will survive. And why would the smaller players dry up? We are in the 2nd inning here bro. This party is just getting started. Honestly, you sound like sour grapes that doesn't own anything and a hater. Google Cloud is still trailing AWS and Azure, they've got the better chips than NVDIA and the better Streamer than NFLX. They search better than META. META is going down first because they can't afford the cost of the compute armsrace like GOOG and AMZN and MSFT can. Just take the L and buy into it now and ride the wave the next 5 years. Then cash out and be happy. It's 1996. not 2000. bro.

____DatBoi

Bro, obviously Google doesn't publish an itemized list of their internal GCP clients, but you’re missing the bigger picture here. Just look at their Anthropic deal. Google gives them $2B, and Anthropic turns around and uses that same money to buy compute on GCP. It’s a circular economy artificially juicing Google Cloud's growth numbers. Owning 15% of a company that just incinerates cash on your own servers isn't real profit. Will Anthropic survive? Probably, as long as the mega-caps keep bailing them out. But when the VC cash for the other 90% of no-name AI wrappers dries up over the next 1-2 years, GCP's growth rate is going to hit a brick wall. And on Wall Street, a growth stall is basically a death sentence. Google the company will be fine, but the stock is gonna get completely hammered when that bubble pops.

CherryPie420-69

give me the list of VC funded AI startups that Google Cloud, specifically, is exposed to and show me how that money going away will have a major impact on their bottom line earnings. When will it go away? Will Anthropic and Claude surviive? Google owns 15% of Anthropic.

____DatBoi

Bruh, look up the definition of a Straw Man fallacy. I never said Search or YouTube are "going away." Obviously, the actual platforms will still exist. What I *actually* said is that the B2B ad revenue and cloud budgets propping them up—specifically the billions being spent by VC-funded AI startups on customer acquisition and GCP compute—will vanish when those startups go bankrupt. The *money* vanishes, not the websites. You literally invented a fake, exaggerated argument, attributed it to me, and then confidently argued against it because you couldn't address the actual point about their startup revenue exposure. Try reading the comment before flexing about earnings reports. 🤦‍♂️

____DatBoi

Maybe, maybe not—nobody has a crystal ball. But what is guaranteed is that 90% of these debt-loaded AI startups are going to zero, and they’ll drag some major players down with them. Even if Google is safe from bankruptcy, they aren't immune to the blast radius. A massive chunk of GCP and B2B ad revenue is just startups incinerating VC cash on compute. When the VC tap dries up and the mass defaults hit, those cloud budgets vanish overnight. Google survives, but the earnings hit will be brutal.

AirwolfCS

Important factor re: timing and price action - their company IPO’d on November 5th, so the 6 month lockup on pre IPO shares just expired yesterday. From a flows perspective, the way I see that is *IF* you like the stock and passes all DD, then now is as good a time as any to buy some, as there’s likely sell pressure from pre IPO holders (VC and insiders) taking profits right about now, maybe keeping the price down a bit while they’re divesting

cuteman

Google has the best VC record of any corporation bar none. SpaceX among them

Syllabub_Visual

Seeing VC’s give $10m to anyone with a shitty PowerPoint that says ai on it…

dmk_aus

I assume some combination of leveraged buyout, GameStop not really being the buyer but a front/brand for some VC group and/or foreign investment fund and some additional attempt to make money scamming people from a GameStonks go up meme? Have they considered a pivot to AI?

i_empathetic

His time at Chewy it was an anti-competitive business that used VC capital to undercut all existing competitors and force them to either die in a war of cash-burn attrition, or buy Chewy themselves, which they did. Chewy was never a profitable company for a single quarter under Cohen's leadership, he built and ran it to hold the existing pet market hostage until they paid a premium for him to go away.

orangehorton

This is just a worse version of VC investing

TastyToad

Musical chairs. Their only hope was to make the product highly addictive while aggressively driving the inference costs down. The first part isn't there yet (product is quite good but with serious side effects) and the second one is (allegedly) an order of magnitude off. Don't worry though. They'll be trying to switch from VC funded to taxpayer funded. Pentagon is going balls deep into "AI powered warfare". Anthropic, with their "ethical concerns", is looking at London for an exit strategy. Elon is planning to offload on pensioners.

twenty_three_three

The underlying economics have never made sense. Yeah, you've got VC money to subsidize, but this isn't a SAAS with high devolpment costs and decreasing per user costs. No, the costs per compute stay the same or go up. The business model for teh AI companies don't work. Arghh asldfhjasldf, it's all nonsense. Top to bottom it's rotten. Data centers without power. Data centers without GPUs or with out of date GPUs whose racks are incompatible with the newest ones on the market. It's all bullshit, but it's going to take some high profile bankruptcies to see it.

Tim_Apple_938

Not really, no. Are you suggesting the lack of VC funds to get programmers was what’s stopped competition in the past? While the new competition is something funded with $50B of VC money (OpenAI Anthropic) for GPUs? And then another $1B for agentic coding tokens? That doesn’t make any sense.

VuvuzelaSound

Thanks for your comment I appreciate the insight, some points I want to make is that it's not a pure office REIT in the traditional sense, its a laboratory REIT. Less affected by remote roles and it's distinguished from Office REITS in material metrics. For example in SF when remote roles decimated office leases, lab space maintained more than a 25% occupancy premium compared to overall office REITs, but office has since started to recover in SF. Companies absolutely need lab space, including non biotech companies that want to research advanced tech including robots. I also never said anywhere in my post that the cap rate would return to 4 anytime soon, in fact I explicitly stated that growth narrative may be stalled but there are other ways forward for the company. My main thesis is just that it is way oversold even for a non growth narrative. If they can sell 10% of their non core assets this year at $2.9 billion that places their market cap valuation back to $15 billion in terms of a more substantiated NAV, basically 2x of the current stock value. It's also certainly not an impossibility that cap rate will go down again, as well as possibly interest rates. Its incredibly hard to accurately predict macro conditions. Final point to make is the oversupply is definitely a big drag on the sentiment and price at the moment. But the occupancy rate for $ARE is quite strong relative to the overall market, they have 5-15% more occupancy in most regions over competitors and are still at 87% despite this being one of the most bearish moments of all time for lab/office REITs. Oversupply is bad but its made so much worse by the fact that the demand has been at a very low point, my bet is that the demand will recover sooner than expected, likely in the next year for biotech. And that they will also be able to pivot some buildings in both SF and SD to Advanced Technology use cases, which would require far less capex to build out and also return more NOI much faster. Also the trend seems to be tenants drifting towards cluster model rather than any random developed lab space. You are not wrong about the oversupply, here are bostons numbers since you brought them up as an example and they are also one of the most oversupplied places at the moment: **- Boston's Occupancy Rate for $ARE:** 88% **- Boston's Occupancy Rate for Lab Spaces in General:** 74% \- **Boston's $ARE oversupply:** \~ 1.68 million sqft **- Boston's total oversupply:** \~ 14.30 million sqft But here's some more concrete numbers to help illustrate some of the main points I want to make that leasing activity is not so doom and gloom: **- The top 10 biotech companies in the US** (Amgen, Gilead, Regeneron, Vertex, Moderna, etc) are likely sitting on an estimated cash reserve base of $70 billion. AI has a very good chance of actually accelerating new drug discovery and research, and create more demand for lab space and also increase VC investment in the field. \- Expected $10-15 Billion into biotech from VCs in 2026. Number looks like it will likely grow in the coming years. \- Historically every $1 million raised in venture for research results in approximately 224 sqft of leasing demand for 7-10 years \- $ARE needs about 1.83 million sqft in new leases to get back to overall 92% occupancy rate. \- 1,830,000 sqft / 224 = 8,169 aka $8.17 billion. But assuming $ARE can only capture around 35% of new leasing demand due to the fact there are other competitors then we do 8.17 billion . 0.35 = \~$23.34 billion in funding. This amount is roughly equivalent to a normal funding year for biotech from VC not including the massive cash reserves that big pharma is sitting on. Currently in the still recovering biotech bear market the number is lower (\~$10-15 billion projected in 2026 + unknown big pharma investments if I had to give an estimate it would be around $10 billion). I would be total funding in 2026 is around the $23 billion mark, and with any luck it will be much greater this year and in the coming years.

VuvuzelaSound

Sure I didn't go over the funding cycle much in my post anyways. But it's generally governed by free capital namely from 2 main entities which would be private VC and large public biotech companies. Large biotech (big pharma) companies like Gilead, Bristol Myers, etc are currently sitting on astronomically record high amounts of cash and capital that they have only just begun to start to deploy but most are focused on similar niches like gene cell therapy. I imagine that AI growth cycle will actually rapidly expand the range of research that these companies can do and they will start to tackle greater challenges across healthcare. Private VCs on the other hand have generally "less" funding that in the peak years since a lot of capital is tied up with AI investments, but clearly there is increasing VC interest in biotech again based on the high number of IPOs this year. Hopefully this proves to be the beginning of a trend. A big factor holding back private VCs right now is likely not just AI but also government policies that are more "unfriendly" to biotech, but these funds are smart and they also know policy changes every couple years, and that drug development takes even longer. So they are no stranger to beginning research or investment during down times. Midterms are coming up and also in 2 years there will be a new president.

Randyreddit11

Do you have a PT? I’ve been all in on GOOGL since $300. It’s really turned into the everything company with its VC investments.