Citrini Research Breakdown: Agents, "Ghost GDP", Consumer Spend | Figma Earnings Beat

1. 0:00 – 1:14

   Intro

   1. RORory O’Driscoll0:00

      Maybe the Pentagon [laughs] is wrong and they need to buy more Anthropic and just point it at the enemy. It'll, it'll bring China to its knees, right?

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:07

      This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. This week, we analyze Anthropic's security release, Figma's earnings breakdown, and of course, the Citrini Research piece which wiped billions off the stock market.

   3. RORory O’Driscoll0:18

      When you are priced for perfection, anything less than perfection will be a kick in the nuts.

   4. JLJason Lemkin0:23

      If you look at all the publicly traded B2B companies, there's only one that has a competitive agent. It's Palantir. I'm gonna say we're gonna produce 100,000 decamillionaires out of these AI leaders, okay? Almost all the B2B software we use today is terrible now because AI software is so good.

   5. RORory O’Driscoll0:39

      If the only thing that's impacted here is the B2B software industry, my suspicion is the rest of the world will go, "Yeah, I'm willing to lose those guys."

   6. JLJason Lemkin0:46

      Here's the greatest dislocation if I look at the public stocks, right? Ready to go? [upbeat music]

   7. HSHarry Stebbings1:01

      Boys, it is so good to be back. I love this. Um, we're gonna start, uh, this week in Anthropic with, uh, some news on Anthropic surprisingly. Security review feature wipes out 20 billion

2. 1:14 – 10:38

   Anthropic Security Product Wipes Billions Off Public Markets

   1. HSHarry Stebbings1:14

      from cybersecurity stocks. Obviously, Anthropic released their latest security products or product, and it massively hit some of the biggest players, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, to name a few. Is this a dramatic overreaction from public markets, or is there underlying truth to this?

   2. JLJason Lemkin1:32

      Well, I'll tell you the interesting thing to me, um, this is, kind of shows where the markets are and where our mass panic is, although I think our panic is, is well-grounded. I think we should be panicking. But this, most of this already exists. You can go to Claude Code today, and I literally did this on the plane flying back last week, okay? I did it inside of Replit, and you can say, "Run a detailed security audit on my code," and it will already do it. It will already run a total static code review, and if you're live, i- on-- if you're on Replit or Lovable or Vercel or something, it will actually do penetration testing and everything for you. Like, literally, it will do everything. It will already... It can already do, I think, a better security audit and testing than a mediocre board engineer will ever do. So what I mean is I'm not-- It's o- obviously the pace at which things are getting better, like it's, it's... I mean, each week we can't keep up, you know, on this show. Um, but it's also interesting that conceptually, just like reviewing COBOL code dropped IBM 10%, it already existed [laughs] . Like, we're panicking about features that have already been in Claude for months in many cases. Now, is this a sign that it will go more aggressively into this space? Of course, it is, right? Of course, it is. But I just want to point out to folks that aren't doing it, it's all-- uh, so much of the stuff that we are panicking about, I think is worth panicking about, but a total nothing burger in the sense that if you're paying attention, it's, it-- this is months-old news in some ways.

   3. RORory O’Driscoll2:54

      First comment and just general comment is, you know, Anthropic, you know, markets itself as, you know, the nice AI company. And for a nice AI company, it sure creates a lot of damage and kills a lot of stock portfolios. Maybe, [laughs] maybe the Pentagon is wrong and they need to buy more Anthropic and just point it at the enemy. It'll, it'll bring China to its knees, right?

   4. JLJason Lemkin3:13

      [laughs]

   5. RORory O’Driscoll3:13

      This is an astonishingly destructive thing.

   6. JLJason Lemkin3:14

      Incredibly destructive.

   7. RORory O’Driscoll3:16

      Have a press-

   8. JLJason Lemkin3:16

      Incredibly destructive [laughs]

   9. RORory O’Driscoll3:17

      Yeah. Have a press conference, clip $20 billion off something. But let's do security first, 'cause in this case, from a technical capabilities perspective, no surprise. Second, from a adoption in the enterprise perspective, I don't see Anthropic eating up CrowdStrike's, um, business. I just don't see that. A- no one is going-- People are gonna have a security layer, and there was a great, I think it was an HSBC, HSBC report out today after the Citrini madness, which we'll talk about in a second, that basically said, "Software is the means by which AI will diffuse into the enterprise," which I thought was a wonderful quote, and I think it'll be true for security also. In other words, these capabilities, like code scanning, will diffuse into the enterprise probably by means of companies like CrowdStrike and other companies like them bringing it to bear. So at that level, it w- at that level, A, no new news, and B, it shouldn't be such a big panic. But, and this is the big but, unlike some of these other sectors, CrowdStrike and the security companies were effectively trading at a price that assumed nothing could ever go wrong, right? Even on Friday after the correction, you know, I, I went in to look. I was stunned. It's 22% revenue growth projected, 31% cash margins, and it was trading at 16X revenues on Friday after the first hit, right? The thing is, if when you are priced for perfection, anything less than perfection will be a kick in the nuts, right? And, a- a- and that's what's going on here, right? I mean, it's entirely separate when you're dealing with the companies that were priced at six times revenues and they've gone to four. That's a separate discussion we'll have later. But I think what's happening on some of these super high price stocks is the occasional reminder, when you're priced to perfect, literally any little thing, any increase in tail risk of you not being the winner, logically, you know, corrects pretty substantially. So I think that's all that went on here. I don't think CrowdStrike's obviated by this. I think it'll totally be fine. It'll continue to be a business. But when things are priced for, at extraordinarily high prices, it doesn't take a kn- a lot to knock the narrative off-kilter.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings5:28

       Would you say that CrowdStrike, with the repricing, is now fairly priced or underpriced?

   11. RORory O’Driscoll5:35

       It's actually a very good question, uh, to make it more general, uh, are you saying, do you prefer the stories where the AI disruption is perhaps a little remote, but the values are still pretty lofty, like CrowdStrike? Or do you prefer the ones where, you know, there's some of these stocks that have corrected to six, seven, and eight times 2026 EBITDA, where you go just on a value basis, that's wrong. I mean, I was looking, thinking about companies like Toast. I was thinking about one of our own, DocuSign. At eight or n- seven or eight times revenues, these things are absurdly cheap, whereas CrowdStrike is still not yet cheap.It's just marginal ethics, but it do have-- probably has more clarity on the way the world is going. I probably, I pro- and I'm doing this on the fly, and I reserve the right to change my mind next week. I probably even though it's a-- I probably err to a bit of value. In other words, I just say to myself, "Buy the things where y- yeah, the cash flow alone makes it easy."

   12. JLJason Lemkin6:28

       Would you rather have your money in CrowdStrike, which is still priced well, or Monday priced at one and a half revenues?

   13. RORory O’Driscoll6:39

       I'd like a basket of one and a half times revenues, not an individual stock. 'Cause I think at the level of individual stock, it's hard to say 'cause it's very idiosyncratic. At, at the level of the basket, if you buy 20, if you buy 20 stocks at an average of three times revenues, eight times EBITDA, I think you'll do just fine.

   14. JLJason Lemkin7:01

       I don't know, man. Just last week, you kinda mocked me, and I can take it. Like, it, it's good. You mocked me for saying Shopify is at partial risk of disruption. And I said it's not at total risk of disruption, but the fact that whoever builds the agentic layer, more and more value is going to accrete to them is you only have to have a partial deceleration to your numbers. You only have to have a partial risk. You only have to see s- more of the value of, of HubSpot or DocuSign t- flow to an agent, right? For these stocks to do worse. Look, I'll give you an example for e-signature. I know, I know this space, DocuSign, right? It's a great company, great CO.

   15. RORory O’Driscoll7:37

       We both know this space too.

   16. JLJason Lemkin7:38

       Yeah, here-- And a lot of folks were saying, "Oh, this is gonna be destroyed by Claude because all you're doing is creating an image of a signature." No. This is a very complex enterprise workflow system that also is a s- is, is a partial system of record. Someone has to say these contracts are, are true and valid, and someone has to route it through 100 steps in transformation and negotiation and all this stuff, right? So that is not gonna be destroyed inside of a, of a, of a Claude chat. But some of that can be done by an agent, and an agent that truly auto-contracts for a business, okay, let's say it does all of your commercial transactions. That could take s- enough of the value away that these companies are maimed. And I think-- And I even think it's logical for CrowdStrike. Obviously, Claude Co- Claude Code Review is not doing endpoint security. But can anybody be maimed by Claude? It just launched an entire enterprise agent solution today. You sa- you think anybody can't be-- I think anything-- This is how I think about it. Claude is like inverse, um, [tsks] sorry, what's the game where you land on the-- where you, you fall out of the sky and onto the, onto the, um, [lips smack] uh, onto the, uh, island and it keeps shrinking? What's that game called? I used to play it. What's the game? Everyone plays the game. The video game where it keeps shrinking, right?

   17. RORory O’Driscoll8:52

       Okay.

   18. JLJason Lemkin8:52

       And so-

   19. RORory O’Driscoll8:53

       I'm with you

   20. JLJason Lemkin8:54

       ... sorry, what's the-- And the one, uh-- Okay, but that's like that, like, your territory keeps shrinking. Claude keeps consuming more and more of you and, um, and you're stuck in this smaller and smaller island that you gotta own more and more market share of. Our sur- f- almost everyone that's public, your surface area is shrinking because of Claude and AI, and the question is how much. And so, you know, I, I don't know that we've seen the bottom of these impacts. I think they're-- the impacts are accelerating, and that's why Anthropic today had to publicly say, "Hey, guys." Their head of AI said, "Listen, guys. On the one hand, things are accelerating, so it's bad for software. On the other hand, we're, we're best of friends of software." On the day they launched Enterprise Agents. We're best friends and we're enabling them. But the pace of change is so fast, so I wanna believe there are these safe islands, but, um, I believe the agents are gonna own enough of the value that, that, um, that just owning less of the value in your space can create terminal decline. Terminal decline.

   21. RORory O’Driscoll9:50

       Put me down for a strong disagree.

   22. JLJason Lemkin9:51

       Give us the rest of the year, you're gonna come around on me on this one. You're gonna come around. Just give me the rest of the year. Literally on the plane last week, I did a security audit in Replit, which is using Claude Code. It's, it's-- I mean, some of that is Replit. We could talk about it. I don't want to get into the details. But it's great. And I literally sent it to the Replit team, the entire technical team, 'cause they're almost like-- I'm like, "Do you see how good this is?" And they're like, "We didn't even know it was this good yet. We didn't even know our security audit had become this good last week. It's so good and so much better than before." And they didn't even know. And so to think that we're in some sort of static world for the rest of the year, I don't even think-- Like, literally I, I-- we could delete some of our podcasts from four weeks ago, they're so dated. [laughs]

   23. RORory O’Driscoll10:34

       So le- le- let's, let's try not to be like that.

   24. JLJason Lemkin10:36

       Me?

   25. RORory O’Driscoll10:36

       So a, a comment here.

3. 10:38 – 21:25

   Do Agents Turn SaaS Incumbents into Valueless Databases

   1. RORory O’Driscoll10:38

      Intelligence will infuse all software over the next decade. That intelligence is generated by foundation models like Claude and like OpenAI. I, I think that's a given. Agreed? So what we really are saying is how much of that do they do themselves? That intelligence has to get to the enterprise, and it-- there's probably four ways it can get there. Lemma. One is they buy it from Claude directly. Everyone buys all the software from Claude. The second is that they build it themselves. They, they, they, they, they construct-- every enterprise construct its own agents. The third is they buy it from existing incumbents who integrate AI, and the fourth is they buy it from kazillions of new companies, all of whom are leveraging that, you know, like the Harvey's, Legal's, all these companies who are building on top of foundation models you founded post '22, right? And you, you have to figure out which of those scenarios you believe in, and actually, the post I read, and I actually agree very much is I think it's three and four. I don't think, I don't think enterprises are gonna digest-- a-are going to build their own systems on top of Claude directly, and I don't think Claude's gonna build all these focus systems for everything. So I think there's going to be this software mediation layer between them, and that's the opportunity.

   2. JLJason Lemkin11:53

      Yeah, but here's the thing. If you look at all the publicly traded B2B companies, there's only one that has a competitive agent. It's Palantir. No one else has seen a single ounce of revenue acceleration due to their AI agents, and yet, and yet the companies we talk about each week have jaw-dropping acceleration. It's not just Anthropic, because they have built the agents that matter in their space. It is not sprinkling AI dust-On top of their analytics software. There's no- there's not enough value there

   3. RORory O’Driscoll12:21

      But let's talk about that kind of fourth category. You would also be that there were many privately held, recently founded companies exploding in revenue also. Let's talk about, like, do you think it, it all goes to the model companies, or do you believe any of these companies, like, you know, that are raising-- I mean, you, you mentioned, you, you know, you guys talk about Replit and Lovable a lot. Do you believe that's defendable?

   4. JLJason Lemkin12:39

      It might not be defendable.

   5. RORory O’Driscoll12:40

      You talk about, you know, Law-

   6. JLJason Lemkin12:41

      That's a different topic. They even might not be defendable. And the, the rate of sh- Because Claude Code, just last week, just since we did the last show, Claude Code launched the ability to see apps inside of Claude Code. So for a lot of product people, you don't need Replit and Lovable anymore, as of last week. Now you can v- you can change Claude Code and visualize your app inside of Claude Desktop and inside of Claude Code. W- You don't need to do that anymore in a third-party app. And so the, so they're all being... But my real point is, sorry, a-and Harry, you're the boss. I just, I ta- I've talked to three s- founders over the weekend of, like, public and near public companies, and they're all... And I, this is the advice I gave them. Your agent is not great. You're being disrupted by the agentic layer. Now, I hope that, I hope that a- that, that, uh, s- ServiceNow builds these great agents, and I believe A-Agentforce has a shot, and I believe others, but they're all being disrupted in real time, and that's why the folks Harry interviews on 20VC are stressed as F. They are stressed as F because no matter what they say, they know they are not, they, they do not have the dominant agent in the space, no matter how many LLMs they, they stick inside of a, a feature. When I see what many leaders of, of top public and private, a-and, and our hundred, you know, nine-figure unicorns are saying, it's lip service. I see it on LinkedIn all weekend long. I see, "We're adding AI to our email feature. We're adding the ability to process emails more efficiently." You're gonna go out of business, and you're not gonna fail because your r- customers are gonna renew, but your growth is gonna fall so far that you become irrelevant in two years. And, and that's why I, I, I'm gonna buy my four stocks, don't get me wrong, but I'm already changing my mind since last week, um, because of, uh, things continue to f- the, the, the panic is overdone and real at the same time.

   7. RORory O’Driscoll14:24

      Sorry, you made a very clear statement that we have not seen any of the public providers make great agentic use cases work and have a meaningful impact on revenue. I'm very naive. Why? Toby's a brilliant CEO at Shopify. You know, Mark is trying with Agent. Why have they all failed so far?

   8. JLJason Lemkin14:41

      Well, I'll give you two reasons if you want. There, there's a long list of reasons, right? I'll give you a, uh, two practical reasons. One is it's a lot of work, man, and no one wants to do this at these companies. No one wants to... You don't... Here, let me, let me finish. Every agent, here's the problem today, and this will change in the next two years. It is not true today. Every agent is essentially custom, okay? Every agent needs to be trained. Every agent needs to be onboarded. If you want it to be great, okay, every agent needs its data cleansed. And so this is a vast amount of work for organizations that already think they're overworked and working too hard. There is huge institutional momentum to overcome. The second is what I just said is true. You need, you need a massive amount of forward-deployed engineers and trained workers that are technical enough and smart enough to train and deploy an agent. One, the workers don't exist in most companies. Your average customer success person that shows up with a green, yellow, red light dashboard cannot train and tune an, an, an agent. Um, and two, then there's a meta challenge for the Shopifys, Mondays, HubSpots, and Toasts and others, which is you can't afford the human to do it, and that would be fine if you have w... So what we're all... At a niche level, we're seeing it with startups, we're not seeing it with publics. S- Hyper niche agents work really well because they have a small set of things to do, okay? As soon as you get to spaces like Shopify, or even worse, Monday, where you have 100 verticals, right? Or h- It's very, very hard to build a very specific agent auto-automatically that d- that does everything that churches need, and basketball courts need, and refrigerator businesses need. They're not all the same needs, and so the agents aren't good enough. And in fact, a lot of these leaders that I've described, if you-- they're in beta. They have six people using them, 60 people, 'cause it's too hard for them. So they're gonna get killed by the startup that does it. They're gonna get killed. Killed.

   9. RORory O’Driscoll16:43

      But that's the case of-

   10. JLJason Lemkin16:44

       Killed

   11. RORory O’Driscoll16:44

       ... the startup that does it. What it's not going to be is the foundation model directly selling to the church, directly selling to the thing. They will provide the raw intelligence, but there will be software opportunities to build compelling software companies in most of these verticals, just as there was in SaaS, right? A-and that's, and so maybe we're more in sync than we think. You know, I, I think... Let me just say it clearly. I think intelligence-led applications are the only applications that are going to sell and grow quickly over the next 10 years. Non-intelligent-led applications will at best be f-flat to mild growth if they're not obviously disrupted by intelligence, and at worst, be down, right? Yeah, and I would argue, for example, I'm, I'm picking on Toast 'cause I'm not an investor, so I have no emotional connection. I think that's a good one, 'cause I don't think there's a ton of agent work to be done, and it's a lot of payments and restaurant kind of organization. It strikes me as fairly doable. We can argue, but yeah. Whereas something like Monday, it's l- it's very knowledge workery. I can see much more disruption story, right? But that's the incumbents. But your point, what you... I think we're now in sync in saying is that those opportunities can be grabbed by standalone companies, perhaps built, you know, started, founded '21, '22, leveraging directly on top of the foundation models. What you're not saying is all that revenue just accrues to the foundation models, correct?

   12. JLJason Lemkin18:05

       No, I think just people are gonna be maimed even more than they think if they don't own the agents in your category. You gotta own the agents in your category. And whether those agents are owned by a startup or whether some version of that agent can be done inside of Claude, they're gonna maim you, and it, and it's accelerating.

   13. RORory O’Driscoll18:21

       Ja-Jason, I wanna be very direct with you, and you, you'll give me a direct answer. You're better at direct than Rory's sometimes nuanced answers, which people love also. Um, but will Claude Code make Replit and Lovable weaker?

   14. HSHarry Stebbings18:35

       In a 12-month period. Like, do you think they will meaningfully enter their space and take market share?

   15. JLJason Lemkin18:40

       I think it will do everything that it can do... I'm going to Rory's point. Anything that can be done either inside the browser or inside the desktop, Claude will do. That's what we've learned this year. Anything it can do. So right now, if you go to design something in Claude Code, you'll laugh. All the crappy Claude Code websites look the same. They have the same artifacts, the same icons, the same purple color scheme. You c- you can laugh. But can, can, can all of the design, all of the parts of Figma that are design be done within the code? Of course, it can. So I believe it will aggressively attack parts of Figma this year, even though they're key partners. Replit and Lovable, it continues to do more of them. Now, will, will Claude Code want to host entire websites? Will it want to go into pr- Will Claude... The only thing that ultimately will protect them is this is all their teams do, right? And that I don't think they want to, to build databases and build production websites and host domain names. But if they change their mind, um, there's no reason an agent c- there's no reason they can't, they can't license Supabase or Neon or fork their own Postgres. They're pretty good there at that company. They can build their own database. They, they've already got plenty of servers. They can spool up a few more to host websites. If they want to, they can. And I just think the, oh, Fortnite's the game. You know, at the end of Fortnite, the, the, it gets, the circle gets... And so if I'm at Replit or Lovable or even Figma, like, don't... I would be wor- At Figma, like, the, the circle's just starting to, to, to shrink. But I, I think at many companies that that circle's shrinking. And I have two investments I made last year. I love them. Those products no longer have a reason to exist today because of Claude. I made two invest- Now, it's not gonna bankrupt the fund, and they've, they've tilted, they've evolved. But these were standalone investments last year, I'm not gonna go into it, that were great, that, that blew up in the early days, and they just have no reason to exist today in that prior form. Just no reason. And to, to, when we turn around, and all of a sudden, you can preview your entire app inside of Claude, which you didn't, couldn't do last week, um, I, if I'm any of these, Figma, Replit, Lovable, Vercel, all of them, all of whom I love, the just, the Fortnite circle's shrinking, so you, you know, you gotta, like, you gotta do something about it, right? And will it stop? Like, it, h- it, it, at the end of the game, it does get pretty small though, right? Uh, it's stressful, but, but the flip side is, if you nail the agent, look how much revenue these guys did building e- essentially an agent on top of Claude Code. They built a billion dollars of revenue building the agent that didn't exist. So that's the flip side. That's our job, is to build these billion-dollar agents. If you can do something that is extremely high valuable that could not be done before, you can close millions of revenue your first week. It's never happened before in the history of

4. 21:25 – 22:53

   Anthropic Secondary Sale Makes Hundreds Decamillionaires

   1. JLJason Lemkin21:25

      software, right?

   2. HSHarry Stebbings21:25

      Before we move on, I do just wanna stay on Anthropic, and I wanted to discuss, they've lined up $5 to $6 billion for an employee share sale at a $350 billion valuation. Obviously, there's people queuing up out the door for this. This was following, obviously, OpenAI doing the same a couple of months ago. Have we ever seen liquidity at this scale when we look at the number of millionaires minted from OpenAI, soon to be Anthropic, when we look at the NVIDIA millionaires that exist already? Is anyone gonna be able to buy a house in the Valley?

   3. JLJason Lemkin21:58

      There's a lot of things that seemed silly in AI 12 or 18 months ago. But if, if NVIDIA has 20,000 decamillionaires, right? I'm, uh, now I'm gonna, now I'm gonna, um, do a wag, but based on the math, I'm gonna say we're gonna produce 100,000 decamillionaires out of these AI leaders, okay? Um, and Rory's better at the math than me, but NVIDIA already has 20,000. So if that's the case, that would be great if every, like, everyone was at full employment, and we were all full of companies with six-figure employees making money. The, the worry is, I don't want to spend too much, the worry is that we, we do see this concentration of wealth at the same time as everyone else gets leaner. Um, and will Jevons paradox create more employment in tech or not? I believe it will create... I, I don't believe... I believe we will need more engineers than ever, like when we talked with Michael Cannon-Brookes. I, I don't know if it will create more employment, so, um-

5. 22:53 – 25:40

   Citrini Research Piece: Everything You Need To Know

   1. HSHarry Stebbings22:53

      Li- listen, the knock-on effect of that is, is bluntly what has shaken markets so much when you look at Citrini, or however you want to pronounce it, 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, which was a piece written kind of forward-looking or, uh, predicting kind of the state at 2028. Um, and I broke down kind of some of the core elements there. And I think we can start with actually one that you kind of mentioned there, Jason, which is kind of Ghost GDP disconnects market from the real economy. So you have AI boosting productivity and corporate profits and market caps of companies inflating headline economic figures. But actually, consumer income doesn't scale with market cap and enterprise value. How do we analyze and assess that?

   2. RORory O’Driscoll23:38

      I'm gonna call bullshit here.

   3. JLJason Lemkin23:40

      [laughs]

   4. HSHarry Stebbings23:40

      Okay, great.

   5. RORory O’Driscoll23:41

      Right? I love the Noah Smith descriptions, uh, uh, Substack, who I follow in economics a lot. You know, sca- he called it basically scary bedtime reading.

   6. JLJason Lemkin23:49

      [laughs]

   7. RORory O’Driscoll23:49

      Right? And, you know, I, um, but I think, if you want to have a conversation about it, I actually think the way you need to break it up is the f- I try not to say how to have, 'cause I knew we were gonna have this one, right? And you, I saw your seven points, and it's too much detail, Harry. Big picture, I would suggest we approach this in the following fashion. The first thing you have to figure out is, a- a- actually, no, is it micro/macro. At a micro level, for each of the things he says are going to happen, do we believe they're going to happen? In other words, is AI going to replace coding? Is AI going to replace DoorDash? Is AI, AI going to replace Amex, right? In other words... And the wonderful thing is, I think that's something this group is well-equipped to do, because we're all investing in venture companies who are the tippy point of the spear in terms of adoption. I'm allowed have an informed opinion on question one, which is micro level-Are these changes gonna happen? Then the second big-picture question, lumping all the other things into the others, is what are the macro consequences of this, right? In other words, if you assume that there's a high level of AI adoption over a short period of time, then every- and that's, as I say, what we can talk about 'cause we understand, then everyone gets to pontificate on global macro, which is what you were starting to do there, right? And I'm fine coming back to that, right? Um, I think it was... And, you know, on the show, in other words, and revisiting this in a few minutes. But I think jumping straight to the, "Oh my God, the GDP is ending," w- with no thought process to, I even believe that j- I mean, basically, he was hypothesizing a two-year adoption cycle of almost everything, such that everything from ServiceNow to DoorDash to Amex gets rolled over in two years. And I think if you believe that's happening, gonna happen very quickly, then you do graduate to the global macro question, and I still think he's wrong about that. But if you don't think the adoption's gonna be that quick, you can literally ignore the rest of the piece. Does that make sense as a framing, first of all?

6. 25:40 – 27:37

   Will DoorDash Be Replaced by Agents

   1. HSHarry Stebbings25:40

      It totally does. Why don't we start with the micro then, where you think we are seasoned and responsible enough to have an informed opinion?

   2. RORory O’Driscoll25:46

      Well, yeah, let's break it up. I mean, there was, uh, I mean, I- he points about software development, about SaaS apps, about companies like DoorDash, and then companies like Amex, right? Uh, in other words, interchange, right? Let's do the stupid ones first. DoorDash, right? He- the idea was you're gonna wanna delegate to your agent purchasing of an opt- you know, optimizing for there's gonna be s- six different versions of DoorDash, and your agent will do between them, and the only reason that you don't do this today is because, quote-unquote, "friction," and if it was automated, you'd let the agents order your pizza. And I just call bullshit on that. I mean, at, at, at the consumer level. I mean, I don't know how you felt when you're organizing a, p- when, when you're buying pizza on a Friday night, you're talking to your wife and you're saying, "Honey, you know we had the freaking kimono last time. I say we go with the pepperoni." She's like, "No, I don't like it. I told you we wanna stick with the two salads and the pizza." It's not something we want... No one wants to delegate to an agent how to decide what food they get and then have the thing come up, "Good news, I saved you two bucks. Bad news, you like the high-end pizza, but I got you the crappy little pizza dish."

   3. JLJason Lemkin26:54

      Yeah, but Rory, can I add just one thought? Here's Andy Fang, CTO of, uh, DoorDash.

   4. RORory O’Driscoll27:00

      Yeah.

   5. JLJason Lemkin27:01

      "We strongly believe agent of con- commerce will be transformative to our industry." He believes this. I believe it has, I have a l- a large investment exposed to the space, and I can see agents and AI ripping through it. This is what-- I don't mean to interrupt, but, like, I think the examples we think are safe, this is CTO saying, "We need to earn the right to service customers, agents, end-to-end, discovery, ordering, delivery, and support. We need to earn the right in the new world." So to, to think that these spaces aren't just... It, it only has to be maimed. It does not have to be d- the idea that we're gonna vibe code our own DoorDash is stupid, right? It, it

7. 27:37 – 35:19

   Why No Public Company Has Created a Good Agent Product

   1. JLJason Lemkin27:37

      is, it is stupid.

   2. RORory O’Driscoll27:38

      Yeah, so good. Let's, let's-

   3. JLJason Lemkin27:39

      And he's trying to get people millions of views, right?

   4. RORory O’Driscoll27:41

      So the, so the whole idea he started with is stupid, but keep on extrapolating, right? Now that we've agreed the-

   5. JLJason Lemkin27:47

      But the threat that, that an agent can decide for you here i- the CTO says it's real. [chuckles] That's the threat.

   6. RORory O’Driscoll27:55

      But he didn't say, "Okay, you caught me. I'm going home." If you wanna make more automations around a recommendation, say, "Hey, there's three different pizzas," so but, but do you really think it's going to be repla- I mean, I, I just think the level of c- customer inertia on the consumer to mo- to have this vision of five different DoorDash competitive companies being enabled in this world, I just don't see it. DoorDash is a combination of a huge amount of logistics, a huge amount of customer aftermarket service, a huge amount of signing up restaurants, right? And the i- and the only thing that's changed... So, so what's allow- And, you know, they beat off four or five other big competitors to now have some kind of stable oligopoly with Uber Order, and there was one other smaller player in the US, right? What in software is going to allow a new c- talk me through the new competitor emerging and taking market share in a high fixed cost business like this.

   7. JLJason Lemkin28:51

      Well, I mean, the most simple one is that a new competitor can decide whether Uber Eats or DoorDash is the right thing for, or Uber Eats, DoorDash, or Direct. You have three options in the US, okay? Then nothing else really exists, right? The agent may make that decision. In fact, I would prefer that because I don't wanna figure out which one to use, DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Direct. I would prefer that Uber Eats knows my favor... And I'm just picking one example, but this is a real threat today. This is what Andy's saying. It's a real threat. That the a- you don't, it's no long- we don't need to decide which is the best place for us. The agent decides which is the best deal between these options, which is the best source for me, which is the best for my family, and it makes the decision. It only, all, if, if the agent is who we go to, as long as the agent is who we go to rather than the first party, it just risks disruption. It, it doesn't destroy the company. It doesn't destroy it.

   8. RORory O’Driscoll29:42

      Yeah, it doesn't destroy the com- okay, you see now we're... Okay, so tracing through the unrealistic statements there. Let's go to an existing example today. Netflix, recommendation engine.

   9. JLJason Lemkin29:51

      Yeah, but I'm right about DoorDash 'cause Andy Fang said the same thing. Why do you, why are you dodging the one-

   10. RORory O’Driscoll29:55

       No, it's-

   11. JLJason Lemkin29:56

       ... everyone thinks is free from disruption when the CTO says the ground is shifting underneath his feet.

   12. RORory O’Driscoll30:01

       I'm telling you why. There's no-

   13. JLJason Lemkin30:01

       He literally said it this week, the CTO. [chuckles]

   14. RORory O’Driscoll30:05

       Okay. Uh, no one's gonna say, no one's gonna say when they're CEO of a public company, "I don't believe that stuff." They're gonna say, "We're on it," 'cause that's the message you gotta say, right? But I don't think they're saying, "Oh my God, three more companies are gonna displace me," right? Our job as investors is to be, kinda analyze the facts and try and come to our independent conclusions. So I'm just gonna take the idea... I think two of the most personal things at the consumer level are the food you eat and the TV content you watch, right? Now, the good thing about Netf- about the content you watch is we've had ten years of AI already. The Netflix recommendation engines, let's be clear-It is a massively useful tool to them because at the margin it helps them predict what people want, right? So I do agree there is core value in, i-i-i-in knowing people's pref-preferences on the aggregate, right? But how often, what percentage of your recommenda- what percentage of your content viewing do you base entirely blindly on the recommendation engine when you sit down at Netflix? 5%, 10%? I think it's light.

   15. JLJason Lemkin31:08

       Sorry, but what-

   16. RORory O’Driscoll31:09

       What percent... And again-

   17. JLJason Lemkin31:10

       And, and DoorDash is barely in B2B. What the, the, what the Netflix point is... I'll, I'll answer your question if you want the answer, but I'm missing the point. Do I, do I think AI can disrupt Netflix? Netflix thinks AI can disrupt Netflix because we're all watching short-form content, and as of the last 45 days, you can watch an incredible short on YouTube that was entirely AI-generated, where you can watch Star Wars stories that are better than the crappy last three movies that are AI-generated. That's utterly disruptive to Netflix.

   18. RORory O’Driscoll31:36

       Jason, I agree-

   19. JLJason Lemkin31:36

       Utterly, utterly-

   20. RORory O’Driscoll31:37

       That, that... And Jason-

   21. JLJason Lemkin31:37

       They're so panicked they have to buy a studio. [laughs]

   22. RORory O’Driscoll31:41

       I-I'm breaking it apart into two separate things. You... If you can gener- And I think that's actually useful. If you can generate content using AI, that's very disruptive. I was trying to focus on recommendations, 'cause the idea was... I'm just looking at the idea of... The idea is for consumer preference, you will entrust your decision-making to an agent who will, quote-unquote, "know what you want". That's what you're saying about DoorDash. And we're trying to prove something that hasn't happened yet. So I was making the point, content is another thing that's quite personal, and, uh, Netflix has had this agent running for the last 10 or 15 years, the recommendation engine, and at the margin it does a good job of predicting on aggregate what people want. But you s- if you had two choices, one program that gave you exactly what they recommended, and then the other program that allowed you to pick, I'm gonna tell you you're not gonna go with the recommendation engine. You're gonna say, "I didn't like that recommendation last week. I'm done." In the same way, I don't believe I want to entrust my eating decision entirely to an agent. I think we're just caught up in this anything could happen, right? I generally have a-

   23. JLJason Lemkin32:46

       But dude, YouTube is the number one way-

   24. RORory O’Driscoll32:47

       I almost-

   25. JLJason Lemkin32:47

       ... we consume video, and it is entirely based on a recommendation engine, and it is the best recommendation company on planet Earth. There are no channels on YouTube that matter anymore. Followers don't even matter anymore. Nothing matters. Every day I log into YouTube and it gets better and better at knowing what I want to watch. Every day. It is epically b- it is epically better than anything else on the planet, and utterly disruptive to how we view, view things.

   26. RORory O’Driscoll33:11

       It's a good argument. I'll give you that.

   27. JLJason Lemkin33:12

       Everything is... Everyone i- everyone is stressed today. It's a good thing. E-everyone is stressed, because every... The further you go... Again, I don't mean to... Every... The further you go, the more folks are at risk of being maimed by AI. Just maimed. J-j- except Georgia CrowdStrike. He's fine, but everyone else is at risk of being maimed by AI. It, it, it doesn't... Even if your growth goes from 31% to 20%, like, that's a big deal. That's a big deal.

   28. RORory O’Driscoll33:41

       Agreed. But do you really believe that you want an agent to recommend you food?

   29. JLJason Lemkin33:47

       Well, listen, I don't... I, I have, I have the data. I have an investment in this space. I already know the answer is yes. It's not my opinion. I have an... I have data from over 10,000 restaurants. I know the answer is yes.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings33:58

       Rory, if your agent knew the historical context on every pizza order you and your wife have made, and you know the price point, the location, so you know the delivery time that you're estimating, and it can also analyze every TikTok to Instagram review as latest food trends and tell you about the latest within that price band with that crisp topping that your wife likes, uh, 'cause it already knows that because you left a review or because you said it in a WhatsApp, say it's got OpenClaw, um, and was able to deliver that to you, I, I think most people would. I'd love it.
8. 35:19 – 50:32

   Will "Ghost GDP" Soften Consumer Spending Power

   1. RORory O’Driscoll35:19

      I wanted to deal with the easy ones first, right? Do you really believe that there will be a direct competitor to DoorDash enabled by AI?

   2. JLJason Lemkin35:26

      No, listen, we all, uh, we all agree that that is-

   3. RORory O’Driscoll35:28

      Yes and no

   4. JLJason Lemkin35:29

      ... that is clickbaity, okay? But... And so is all of it, but listen, even if... Let's talk about Ghost GDP for a minute, okay? I admit I'm living on the bleeding edge, okay? Let's concede that I'm a laboratory. But we have gone from 12 people to two people on my little team, okay? That, uh, that not only does investment, it generates eight figures a year in revenue, okay? And that is Ghost GDP. Those folks that are gone, that value, w- the profits that are left go to two people, or three people.

   5. RORory O’Driscoll35:58

      Define Ghost GDP for me.

   6. JLJason Lemkin35:59

      Ghost GDP is that this productivity is not going to human workers that then spend it. That's the fear, that we are creating this productivity, but it is not going to any... There's no h- there's no humans to spend the money. It's great that I can spend more money, but that doesn't n- like, I don't think that's great for the economy if I get a little bit richer. Like, we lost eight people on our team, right?

   7. RORory O’Driscoll36:19

      Okay.

   8. JLJason Lemkin36:20

      Yeah.

   9. RORory O’Driscoll36:20

      Stop. When... First of all, I agree. We're now doing macro bec- And I, in this case, we can do macro 'cause we agree. We can only do macro once we've conquered micro, and in this case, you've conquered micro. You've said it has happened.

   10. JLJason Lemkin36:31

       At least believe-

   11. RORory O’Driscoll36:32

       I have 12... I had 12 people. Now I only have two. 10 people no longer have jobs. Is... What, what does that mean? Is that-

   12. JLJason Lemkin36:38

       Or at least, at least-

   13. RORory O’Driscoll36:39

       ... it's raining here

   14. JLJason Lemkin36:39

       ... whatever... They have other jobs, but the value that we're creating, right, this eight figures of value, it's, it's accruing to fewer and fewer people, and there aren't as many people to spy, to buy handbags and to buy shoes and to buy T-shirts and to buy Netflix. Even just to buy Netflix, there's less people, right?That was the point of the Ghost GDP and this inflammatory annoying article. But I don't, I don't think that these things are wrong. I think he's just trying to claim everything's gonna happen in 18 months-

   15. RORory O’Driscoll37:07

       No, it can

   16. JLJason Lemkin37:07

       ... that, that, that, that, it's not gonna happen in 18 months

   17. RORory O’Driscoll37:09

       Again, what we're basically... But, but implicit in that, and you have to be logical, implicit in that is productivity gains, which have been the engine of growth for the last 200 years, are bad. There's some ma- embedded statement here is that it is bad that Jason is now able to do something with two people that he was hitherto for only able to do with 12, right? And I'm gonna say something. Across the arc of the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, productivity gains have been good, right? Because the other 10 people who used to be wasting time writing slop for Jason can now do other things, and the sum total of human achievement will contain the extra work that those people do. In the long term, I don't think you can argue, but that productivity gains are good, right? We used to have 80% of people working on farms. We now have 10% of people working on farms, or actually 4% of people working on farms, and we have so much food that we're all fat, right? And those other 85% of people are doing other shit. Across the scope of history, productivity is fricking awesome. It's the only thing that's made us rich. So I wanna say that so clearly, because then all these arguments, these macro arguments that I was hoping to ignore, are basically some version of even though productivity is amazing in the long term, 'cause you can't disagree to that, something bad is happening in the short term. And then the onus is on you to say what that is. What is it? What's so bad about constant change and the fact that jobs, uh, go away and new jobs emerge? What's gonna happen that's so bad?

   18. HSHarry Stebbings38:41

       A softening of consumer spend. With a concentration of wealth to fewer people, there are less people to spend money across different parts of the economy, and that impacts a large amount of people. And to your point on how does productivity actually lead to a worsening in the economy, you only need to look at Japan in the 1990s and the need for Abenomics, and actually you saw massive productivity increases in the 1990s with massively improving mechanical infrastructure that they brought in, and actually it didn't disperse to a huge amount of the Japanese population. So that, there's very recent precedent, actually.

   19. JLJason Lemkin39:13

       If you wanna see a sa- a dystopian version of this, go to Japan and meet with B2B founders. I was at a dinner last November with all f- fou- from, from IPO 20 million and up only. It was a VIP dinner put together. It was great. It was, it was the best of the best, okay? And they're all talking about how inherently their seat base shrinks. This is not just the AI topic we're talking about today, about seat-based risk. This was last year, all talking about how just each year their seats shrink because their economy's shrinking, right? It is, uh, just to Harry's point, it is a, there is... I think in the short term, this is all great for us as investors. It's terrific for us to get more productivity. Well, we're gonna get, we're gonna make money out of it, and we should put it in the bank and flee to Miami or Monaco because I don't- but I'm not sure it's good for everybody. [laughs]

   20. RORory O’Driscoll39:58

       I, I'm gonna call bullshit on that. There's two or three different things. We- disaggregating the seat base comment, right? Um, there is... Are you making a comment on Japanese depopulation, which I don't think we can blame on AI. It's been a trend for 30 years.

   21. JLJason Lemkin40:12

       I just think there's a r-

   22. RORory O’Driscoll40:13

       Right?

   23. JLJason Lemkin40:13

       ... a loose parallel to this Ghost GDP idea f- to, Harry brought up, of the depopulation. Well, there's different ways you can, you can depopulate a worker force even if the humans are still there, right? But it is, it's a similar, it's, it's, it's a structural headwind, right, to folks buying stuff. Our 10 agents at Saastr generate millions of revenue, but they buy nothing. Our agents buy nothing. They, they work all weekend long, Rapley, Artie, Qualey, Mani. They're good kids, okay? They, they, they create a lot of noise, like they're a lot of work, but they buy nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Except, except, except tokens. That's the only thing they buy are tokens, and they, they buy millions and millions of to- for real, right? For, for real. That is a little different than the past.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings40:56

       Rory, our point is producti- productivity increases are only good if the consumer wallet is dispersed and they are able to spend money. If that shrinks, that is not a good thing.

   25. RORory O’Driscoll41:10

       Yes, but the ev- but, but so what do you do? Ban productivity increases? Good news, we're all doing fine. Bad news, we're all 1790 and we're all, you know, one bad harvest away from starvation, but yay, we're all fine as long as nothing goes wrong, right? It's not a credible argument. I, look, I do agree it, at a very micro level, you could argue if a l- and this is why we actually have to go back to the micro. If the disruption happens extraordinarily quickly and people don't have time to adjust, then in the short term you will have some element of structural relo- dislocation that will result in some form of re- definitely some form of recession, GDP slowdown, if those folks can't be digested in new jobs quickly. So I do agree. So the, it, my point is this. In, in the short term, you can articulate a thesis like you're just saying, right? If all the p- you know, if all the 45-year-old programmers are let go at the same time and there's 6 million programmers on the street and there's no other work for them and it happens in a month, then in the short term there would be this GDP hit. While I'm still correct over the medium and long term, GDP growth bails us all out. So that's why it does go back to the micro, is do you think it's all gonna happen so quickly? Do we think that all these things are going to be displaced extraordinarily quickly?

   26. HSHarry Stebbings42:29

       I, I don't know. When I look at Karpathy talk about the evolution of how much of his work has gone to AI in the last six months, I, I do question it.

   27. RORory O’Driscoll42:39

       Okay. What do you mean by that?

   28. HSHarry Stebbings42:41

       I think more and more of labor will be replaced by AI. We will see the concentration of value to a fewer people, and fewer consumers will have money to spend in the economy, which will lead to problems and a shrinkage of that economy.

   29. RORory O’Driscoll42:57

       There are150 odd million people working in the US, right? So what, what's your estimate for displacement? I'm just trying to get a sense of it. Like, you know, y- y- you have-

   30. HSHarry Stebbings43:08

       It, it, it depends on the time horizon, but I'm not feeling that great about it. I mean, if we look at the most obvious, which is, you know, customer support, customer support, legal, bookkeeping, um, that doesn't look great. If we wanna add in Waymo and what it'll do for self-driving within a four-year period, gosh, I think you could see 30 to 40 million people-
9. 50:32 – 54:22

   Is Tech Private Equity and Thoma Bravo F***** in this Market

   1. RORory O’Driscoll50:32

      structures.

   2. JLJason Lemkin50:32

      Yeah, that's a good point.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings50:33

      If you are Thoma Bravo with Coupa and Anaplan... I'm not picking on-- I didn't mean to pick on them. I'm using them as an example. So please, your answer is not dependent on Coupa and Anaplan, but that ilk. Um, and you're growing at 20% with no founder CEO, so hired CEO, PE run, growing 20, what do you do?

   4. JLJason Lemkin50:55

      I think Rory's making a more, a brutal and cogent point, which is there's folks like that are growing 6% that are at a massive debt leverage, okay? They have no choice but to shrink, right? The math doesn't solve any other way, right? 20%, you at least you have options. [laughs] You can probably do the Toby playbook. If you're north of 20, the, probably the math barely pencils out, uh, at that level, right? Th- that compounds to enough growth over four to five years to pay off your debt. But in the single dig- these, all these Blue Owl and friends, they're just upside down on this debt. They can't pay it off.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings51:25

      What happens?

   6. RORory O’Driscoll51:26

      It's, I think if the debt is upside down, hence the Blue Owl thing, then the equity's gone. I think a lot of these folks, you know, they're not just gonna roll over and die. Uh, they're gonna do exactly what Jason said. They're gonna try and cut expenses and, you know, knuckle down to a very... You know, the debtors will extend the debt 'cause they won't wanna crystallize the loss. The equity will run the business and try hard to pay down cash. They will reduce headcount dramatically. They'll be much less attractive place to work. They'll be much less attractive vendors to supply to you because they won't be investing in R&D. But, and this is the sad comment, I think the inertia in a lot of software contracts is such that it'll take a long time in dying. So it'll just be a steady, nasty grind, right? I don't think it'll be the cataclysmic, you know, all going wrong on Friday kind of thing. Um, I think it'll just be a, a, a long five-year grind.

   7. JLJason Lemkin52:17

      My, yeah, my guess, I don't mean to go off topic, my gu- I, but hear, Rory, you've thought more about this and probably you have, Harry, is my guess is we will end up seeing more and more of five to six to eight startups at 50 to 100 to 200 million in revenue mashed together at nominal prices of two times revenue or less. They'll just be all mashed up. N- everyone knows it's not the best idea. Everyone knows that the 11 companies Clari has bought do not have perfect synergies, right? But it's the best idea we have for these companies at two X-

   8. RORory O’Driscoll52:48

      And they're good

   9. JLJason Lemkin52:48

      ... one and a half. I know it's probably not even an ARR multiple, but one and a half to two time. People will just say, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's, "Enough already. It's time." One and a half, one to two times revenue. We'll capitulate, and you'll see these, these sort of Frankenstein B2B companies that have tw- they're, they're mini constellations or whatever, but it's the best play left, right? And you'll bring in professional management that will have 20 products, right? We'll see 20 unicorns merge into one thing that will IPO in 2027.

   10. RORory O’Driscoll53:15

       Agreed. The, except the last sentence. They'll try and IPO in 2027, but you're right, Jason. It is... I think that's a great... It's the best idea they got. You've got this $50 million revenue thing with no acquirer. Maybe if you had five $50 million revenue things in roughly the same market, you could build a $250 million thing that would be profitable enough and/or get some growth at scale. It'll be a miserable way to consolidate all that debt. But yeah, that, that, that, that's the... I mean, that's the toughest... Th- those are gonna be the most impacted, um, by this kind of decline in the perceived value of r- recurring revenue companies.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings53:55

       We can either talk about Figma's earnings or OpenAI's spending increases next. Which one do you wanna do?

   12. JLJason Lemkin54:03

       I don't know. I wanna know from Rory when the, when, when he thinks the OpenAI gravy train ends. I mean, it's... What, what is it? Another hundred... Maybe another 110 billion? We've all had this board meeting. Guys, we walk in. There's good news and bad news. [laughs] The good news is we're making up more hardware and other revenue three years out. The bad news is I need, I need another 110 billion to get there. [laughs]

10. 54:22 – 59:48

    OpenAI Massively Increases Spending Plans: Analysis

    1. HSHarry Stebbings54:22

       I, okay, let, let's ground it in, in numbers then. OpenAI is doubling spend to 665 billion by 2030, but they're upping their revenue forecast by 27% to 280 billion based on products that mostly don't exist today. Hardware, ads, everything else. Rory?

    2. RORory O’Driscoll54:41

       At one level, y- it's been interesting just watching the conversation that Claude now gets the benefit of the doubt and people believe it can kill everything. And OpenAI, which was the darling, now gets no benefit of the doubt and, and almost like it's a clown show. And I think the truth is probably no one is ever as good, as bad as they seem, right? So-I, you know, look, OpenAI is still the win... I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward. OpenAI is still the clear winner in the consumer space in terms of mind share. I think what they're grappling with is how much do they have to, how ambitious can they be in these capital markets, and they clearly still wanna be ambitious, and they're still getting funded to be ambitious. But you're right, it's that when you have to, when you run the math out and it's, you know, it's the consumer product that does exist, then you add onto it the enterprise product that exists but is not doing as well as Anthropic, and then you add onto that agentic products that don't yet exist yet, and then you add on that, quote-unquote, "consumer monetization beyond subscription" of 30 to 77 billion, which is basically ads and other stuff. What you recognize is, you know, the truth is, you're spending a large amount of current real dollars that NVIDIA and all the other people think they're gonna collect in anticipation of a whole bunch of future anticipated dollars, which are entirely credible to believe, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of leaning into the future here. And so far, as long as people believe some version of going back to the Citrini memo, as long as these companies are perceived as so powerful that they can destroy everything, they will be able to get money. Because the truth is, if you believe you're the thing that can kill everyone else, then the only rational response as an investor is, "Oh my God, if the models are gonna take over the world, I better get me some models." So all this fear-mongering is good for both of them.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings56:27

       Do you think Sam is right to be as aggressive as he is being on all fronts, hardware, ads, discovery, codecs, health? Or will it be a better play being much more focused in the Dario mindset of enterprise coding? He's expanding more and more as we're seeing, but it's still enterprise focus and more specific.

    4. RORory O’Driscoll56:49

       Jason had said this, but just pragmatically, you've got to say that if you were 10X ahead of a competitor, and now you're only 3X ahead of a competitor, at some level you did allow them to gain market share, and the objective of the game is to beat the other guy, so you've allowed the other guy some room. So you'd have to say it wasn't the right play this year or last year, right, to allow Anthropic so much space in the enterprise, and maybe perhaps doing all the things you were trying to do took your eye off the ball on winning the two or three things that you must win. Now, it's... You also gotta say this team and this man has created the single most valuable, exciting AI company on the planet Earth. So I'm not gonna sit here as a little minnow criticizing him. But as yet, if [laughs] what you can say pragmatically is '23 and '24 were good years for OpenAI, and '25 was a good year for Anthropic. If it's a 10-year race, two years up, one year down, you know, bring on the next year.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings57:53

       Rory, don't put yourself down. You're a GP at Scale, okay?

    6. RORory O’Driscoll57:55

       [laughs]

    7. HSHarry Stebbings57:56

       You can take Sam. Fuck that. You go chief.

    8. JLJason Lemkin57:58

       I do think I'm confident, going to Rory's point, I'm confident that, I mean, Sam's got it, one of the best benches in the world, right? So I'm confident the bets they're making are the right bets to make today, right? Give it, given the plan, given, given the fact that they've committed to an insane growth number, right, that they need to raise an additional 110 billion of capital, I'm confident it is the right, uh, plan. And also, honestly, he, if it doesn't work out, he can dump the hardware business in a heartbeat. He can dump all this stuff. This is... He can dump anything if it, if it doesn't work, and they will ruthlessly dump it if it doesn't work. They're not committing to everything upfront today. So you gotta pick your three to five best bets at the start of the year. Um, maybe in the age of AI, you gotta change them every week, but you, these are the best bets. It's just the funny thing is, it's just... I mean, uh, a- and granted, the OpenAI slides were a leak to the information, right? So it wasn't presented publicly. It just feels so much like a s- startup board meeting you see, where you walk in at the start of the year and someone's got these things. It's, there's a stacked chart that looks beautiful, but three of the colors have never been done yet. They're aspirational. And so the good news is, Rory and Harry, we're raising our forecast 30%, the, and we just need another 80 mi- million to do it. It just felt like that on steroids. [laughs] But I think he was, I think those slides were for the believers, right? So the believers, the SoftBanks and others will give him more money. I think that's the point, because you're not gonna believe in those, that the revenue from hardware and ads and research are real unless you wanna believe. If you wanna believe, you'll believe it, right? Um, if you're a skeptic, you're gonna, like, you're gonna take your marker out and just delete those bars. [laughs] But man, it felt like a couple of board meetings I was in in December. [laughs]

    9. RORory O’Driscoll59:36

       Yes, except as you point out, with three extra zeros attached to every number.

    10. JLJason Lemkin59:40

        [laughs] We just need, we just need another 111 billion. [laughs]

    11. RORory O’Driscoll59:43

        You gotta say these are the two fastest growing companies in history. That's just a statement of fact.

11. 59:48 – 1:06:13

    Figma Fights Back: Earnings Through the Roof

    1. HSHarry Stebbings59:48

       Jason, you said last week that essentially Lovable and Ratplist Rise was a fault on Figma and their ability to do, you know, three, 400 was a take from Figma.

    2. JLJason Lemkin1:00:00

       Maybe just a missed, a theoretically missed opportunity in their sweet spot. Just theoretically missed, yeah.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:06

       Okay, a theoretical miss. Figma came out with their Q4 2025 earnings. Uh, they were very good. Uh, accelerating growth at 1.2 billion ARR, growing 40% year on year versus 38% year on year in Q3, so up there. Amazing retention, uh, of $10,000-plus customers, 97% GRR, 136% NDR. This was great. This was a great quarter for Figma all round, and the stock up 15% after earnings. How did we see these numbers? W- Talk, talk me through this.

    4. RORory O’Driscoll1:00:40

       This is a company whose leader is clearly saying, "I, I know what I gotta do. I'm not in any doubt. I've gotta add AI capabilities. I gotta go from design all the way to, to coding, and I gotta add that and make it happen," and they seem to be getting decent adoption of it, right? This is what winning looks like in SaaS in a sector where it's very credible, very credible, perhaps more credible than most, that an AI-native product could disrupt you.Right, I would argue something like accounting, you're five years away from AI native being disruptive. In something like, you know, design and co-gen, creative and co-gen, it's here right now. So this is what fighting back looks like with a generational talent entrepreneur, a company still at its peak, i.e. not stale, b- and clearly trying to punch back. So, I, this is, this is... I said, "Well, if this was a boxing lineup in Vegas, this would be one of the way, you know, this would be one of the marquee headline events, right?" In the w- in the right corner, Dylan Field, heavyweight champion of the world. In the left corner, lovable ring, uh, uh, repl.it ring man Jason Lemkin. [laughs] You know? So what do you think, Jason? How's the fight going?

    5. JLJason Lemkin1:01:50

       Look, I think it's tough-

    6. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:51

       Ding, ding

    7. JLJason Lemkin1:01:51

       ... because of-

    8. RORory O’Driscoll1:01:52

       Ding, ding

    9. JLJason Lemkin1:01:52

       ... the, it's, it's, it's ep- It was a great- There's nothing to not love in the quarter. It was epic, right? Epic company, epic quarter. We've just given up on the present. We're all panicked about the future, and you get no credit for a great quarter, right? You get no credit, um, and you know, I read one analysis of Monday, who we all love, and, and the, the criticism of Monday was you're constantly beating and then, but then lowering. Like, we want... You have to constantly be beep, beep everything. We're looking for 10 quarters of AI dominance, and so it, it's just tough even on, um, Figma. I guess at a meta level it, you know, it's, it's, it's a race. I just... Listen, I'm not as big an expert in Figma as I am, say, in DocuSign, but there's a similarity between the DocuSign and the Adobe Sign and Figma, which is that the products are much more workflow-oriented, they're much more systems of collaboration, and they're much more less just about getting, uh, pixel perfect designs created. But I, I would just be shocked if at some point in the next 8 to 18 months a Claude code can't automatically make designs that are as elegant and as beautiful as a designer can. Because you already can in some custom LLMs for images. You can build epic images. I just, I... The delta, you could, you literally can mock a website that Claude code would build from a design perspective. I, I find it hard to believe at the end of the year we're gonna mock it. I find it hard to believe that every GPU on the planet Earth can't create genuinely custom, artistic, artisanal, beautiful designs. I, I j- I would be shocked if that's not possible by the end of the year.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:26

        And what do you think-

    11. RORory O’Driscoll1:03:27

        What does that mean for Figma?

    12. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:28

        Exactly. [laughs] Snap. Yeah

    13. JLJason Lemkin1:03:29

        I think that's why it's hard to be bu- that's why I'm, I, I'm gonna make our bets, but it's hard to be bullish on anything right now from the past. It's hard to be bull- It's, I know it's the job, but man, it's just, it's stressful. I, I, I would love to n- know how stressed Dylan is. Maybe it's a two, but I'd be stressed. Most of the CEOs I talk to are pretty stressed, right? Um, some of the executive teams aren't. They're checked out. But most of the CEOs are stressed.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:52

        I sit in the investment committee this week and I said, "Well, you know, there's two areas where I'm find value and security. It's one where there's deep integrations and partnerships which are difficult and they'll never do. We're an investor in Airwallex, we've discussed before. They have hundreds of banking relationships and partnerships with Southeast Asian, Indonesian banks that no one will ever have in terms of Anthropic or OpenAI. And then the second is, you know, where there's deeply technical, complex coordination challenges like Fuse Energy, another one of our investments, which own end-to-end from energy supply and creation to delivering it to a consumer's home. That, so that's where I put my bets. So there is areas of secure value still.

    15. RORory O’Driscoll1:04:33

        Uh, I think you're talking past each other, 'cause of course you're right, Harry, because the two examples you cited are a financial company and a physical power company. And right, even the most deluded AI believer doesn't think that they're gonna take over fintech and doesn't think a- they're gonna take over energy. So I agree. You can in- Let me be clear, you can invest comfortably in those two areas and not have to spend a ton of time about AI. I think when Jason says it's hard to be comfortable with anything but the past, perhaps the more qual- the, the more precise version of that, which is the core question, it's hard to be comfortable with anything in the past in core B2B software.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:09

        Sure.

    17. RORory O’Driscoll1:05:09

        In core, maybe in core software.

    18. JLJason Lemkin1:05:11

        I mean, it's funny, when, when Adobe tried to buy it, yeah, at the time it seemed like they were overpaying because it was a big drop at the time, right? But at least they were buying a 20-year business. [laughs] Okay, Scott was, Scott Belsky was do- o- paying twice what anyone else would pay to get shit done. Kudos to him, actually. Kudos to him for putting his job on the line, overpaying, but so what? You're buying a 20-year position like Creative Cloud and Photoshop. You know, you fast-forward today, Figma says one of their biggest growth drivers is integration with Claude code and Figma Make, that it's natively integrated. And if you go into repl.it, and I'm sure it's true in Lovable, you can natively integrate Figma too, but, but it's like Fortnite. Like, what if, what if the native integration, they just, it just bec- uh, overlaps more and more the rest of the year? And then sometimes I'll integrate Claude code and Figma, but you know, some other times I'll just have Claude code do the whole design. It is pr- getting pretty good. It's pretty good. It can design... It, it has ingested every single website and mobile app on planet Earth. It can reproduce an iterative version of that that's just as good. Why can't it? It's only because they haven't focused on it.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:06:11

        So Jason, I'm gonna push. So Jason,

12. 1:06:13 – 1:14:41

    Momentum Versus Value: Four Public Stocks to Buy

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:06:13

       I'm gonna push you. Would you be a buyer or a seller of Figma today?

    2. JLJason Lemkin1:06:16

       If we finish this bet, I've decided... And listen, I'm terrible. I'll give you, I'll give you an example of my incompetence here next, and, and it'll partially resonate with Rory. But I thought about this and I actually Vibe Coded something to help me make the decision. Um, you know, I think I'm only gonna bet on the winners right now. I'm gonna do the, uh, uh, uh, Andreessen version, the Thrive version. And, and Figma may make it, 'cause I'm looking, what are over, what are the stocks that are actually up?

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:06:40

       Yeah.

    4. JLJason Lemkin1:06:41

       Okay? And they're ones you might not wanna buy, but they're basically Palantir, Figma, Mongo, um, [lips smack] Cloudflare, and Shopify. Those are the only ones that are up over a year, over, over a year. Those are the only five that are up over a year, right? You could find other esoteric ones, but these are the core ones. So the o- those are probably the ones I'm gonna buy. [laughs] So I, I don't know, maybe 18 months ago, I decided I was gonna, I was gonna go bargain shopping on public stocks.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:07:05

       But that seems paradoxical, what you said, that you would see Claude being able to make and design in the same way that many are using-

    6. JLJason Lemkin1:07:11

       Yes

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:07:11

       ... Figma to today. Then you would buy-

    8. JLJason Lemkin1:07:13

       Yeah, because there's so much uncertainty, I'm gonna be a momentum better- investor hereThere's just so much and so much uncertainty. I'm gonna bet on the ones that are winning because I believe success will beget success, that the best people will continue to go. And I just, in an age of uncertainty, I don't wanna bet that the ones that are down... I mean, GitLab's a great company. It's down 59.62% the last year. I don't wanna make that. That's for somebody else. I've already made those bets in the past. I lost money on all of them.

    9. RORory O’Driscoll1:07:40

       I just don't want non-founder-led companies.

    10. JLJason Lemkin1:07:42

        I know, but I just, I-

    11. RORory O’Driscoll1:07:43

        You got it. Yeah

    12. JLJason Lemkin1:07:43

        ... I'm going, I'm going momentum.

    13. RORory O’Driscoll1:07:45

        I think j- I actually think, Harry, just to be, I actually think Jason's answer was utterly coherent, in a sense, utter logical. It is... You exact- I, I see what you're doing, Jason. It's the, I b- I'm just going to, I'm just gonna... You, you're exactly right. It's a momentum play, right? And all the data says, and I always struggle with this, in the short term, over kinda six months to, in a public market, six months to 18 months, momentum plays work, value plays don't. And over a five-year period, value plays work and momentum plays' advantage goes away. There's Askins, a whole bunch of people have published on this, right? And of course, the trick is to figure out when you're transitioning from one to the other, right? And that's effe- and, and you're effectively taking that risk. You're, y- y- you're basically, you're, you're calling the market right now as a momentum market. That's what you're doing when you do this. And y- so far you've been right, to be clear.

    14. JLJason Lemkin1:08:37

        Or at least I'm saying when everything is in a state of just flux, I'm gonna bet on whoever has the gravitas, and, and momentum is gravitas, 'cause momentum, at least for a little while, does build on it. This isn't just fake hype of marking up a round. This is real momentum.

    15. RORory O’Driscoll1:08:50

        Yeah. So what about this comment? 'Cause I, I wrestle. I mean, it's, now we're getting to genuine actual investing, 'cause it's actually been the right play, right? It's been the right play in the public markets, it's been the right play in the private markets. The companies that had good rounds have good follow-on rounds, right? So you have to ask yourself, that logically is not extensible forever, right? Because, you know, trees don't go to the sky, as they say on Wall Street, right? So let's take Palantir, right? Massive momentum play. As yet, over the last six months, it's been hit not quite as hard, or last three months anyway, not quite as hard as, um, the, the boring-ass SaaS stocks, but it's been stomped pretty effectively over the last three months. Correct?

    16. JLJason Lemkin1:09:30

        Uh, yeah. It's down 27%.

    17. RORory O’Driscoll1:09:32

        Could... I mean, so how do you respond, and if you're mo- a momentum player, how do you respond to that information? 'Cause at some point, something that's trading at 40 or 50 times revenues, I mean, it's down from 70 to 46 times revenues, has probably got risk of blow-up in it. How do you think about the risk of blow-up versus wanting to still be in the momentum play? Just to make it really practical.

    18. JLJason Lemkin1:09:54

        I just decided to, for me, a year is the right measurement point. There's all different... If you do year to date, three months, one week, one hour, I feel like a year is, uh, shows the endur- en- endurability of this, at least looking backwards. Um, I don't know. I'm gonna pick from those five. It would've been different than last week, where I would pick favorites, um, and try and find dislocate... Like, here's the greatest dislocation if I look at the public stocks, right? Klaviyo versus Shopify, okay? Um, these are... Klaviyo is essentially a derivative of Shopify. It's essentially just a derivative. Uh, like almost 100% revenue attached. Yet, in the last year, Shopify net is still at least up last year, 2.63%. But Klaviyo is down -58%. And so if I'm a bargain hunter, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to Klaviyo. I'm not gonna buy Shopify. I'm gonna buy Klaviyo. It's, it's gotta be a bargain.

    19. RORory O’Driscoll1:10:39

        Interesting. Uh, no, I think actually funny enough, 'cause I often can tend to value, but in this case, I would argue your instinct is correct because bringing it back to the CEO of Shopify, if Shopify is going to thrive, and that guy looks like he wants to thrive, he has to build agents on top of his stuff, and fundamentally, he has to take the market cap that currently is accreted to Klaviyo onto h- he has to take-

    20. JLJason Lemkin1:11:03

        That's definitely a risk

    21. RORory O’Driscoll1:11:04

        ... that business to him.

    22. JLJason Lemkin1:11:04

        It's definitely a risk. Yeah.

    23. RORory O’Driscoll1:11:06

        And so I actually think you're right. In, in that case, I mean, again, I'm genuinely trying to seek knowledge here, right? I think in that case, the bargain hunt would be a mistake because the adjacent competitor, namely Shopify, who is less dislocated than you, probably has to, he probably has to kill you in order to survive. And provided they execute well, they're gonna take some of your revenue.

    24. JLJason Lemkin1:11:28

        Okay, what about this one? Palantir, last year, even with its ups and downs, last year up 41% in the last 12 months.

    25. RORory O’Driscoll1:11:34

        Yep.

    26. JLJason Lemkin1:11:35

        The worst performer, our, one of our personal favorites, Atlassian, worst performer over the last year, down 74.85%. So with just those two data points, which one, which one... I mean, Atlassian does not have the, the direct disruption risk that Klaviyo has with Shopify, right? I can still argue it's oversold, Klaviyo. I can argue it's oversold, that disruption risk. But -74 v- versus plus four, this is the greatest bargain. This is [laughs] the delta's over 100% here.

    27. RORory O’Driscoll1:12:00

        This is actually very illustrative, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot, so I wanna pin down. What you're doing here is momentum investing. You are just looking at the price action independent of the valuation, and you're saying, "Do I go with the, yeah, the momentum?" Like, y- y- yeah, what you're not saying is, is there a price at which you own Atlassian? And by the way, that's not a criticism. I think in the short term, momentum has been the only play that worked, both in the public and the private. I believe we've been in a momentum market in the private side also. It's too hard to find new shit. Just find the shit that's working and pile on, 'cause the next round is gonna be in six months, and it's gonna be 2X the last round, independent of value, right? So to be very clear, I think that th- it's not a criticism, it's a c- it's a positive comment. But you are, you, if you said to me, "Should you buy the stock that's up 44% or the stock that's down 71%?" If I'm a momentum player, the answer is buy the 44. If I'm a value player, the correct answer is I don't know until I see the numbers, and then I gotta look at the value relative to growth.

    28. JLJason Lemkin1:12:56

        Well, Atlassian's accelerating. A year ago, it was acce- growing 20. Now it's growing 23% at 6.3 billion revenue. It's accelerating, and yet it's the biggest decliner of the entire group, and it's accelerating. This is not down to single-digit growth.

    29. RORory O’Driscoll1:13:09

        That, that's my point. So therefore, I might argue, perhaps wrongly, and again, I'm, um, perhaps wrongly, that you'd start to nibble at that one versus being afraid to catch in the one at 43 times revenues, even though it's had the momentum. But I'm also humble enough to say-

    30. JLJason Lemkin1:13:26

        The momentum play is what's worked.
13. 1:14:41 – 1:21:42

    Jack Altman Joins Benchmark Capital

    1. SPSpeaker1:14:41

       Um, listen, I wanna finish on, on one, um, which I think is very interesting from a venture perspective. We saw Jack Altman, who raised last year 275 million for AltCap. He's a wonderful dude. I'm sure everyone loves Jack. No one in the valley dislikes Jack. He made the move to Benchmark. Um, very big move, leaving his firm or kind of shutting shop on his firm to join, you know, the great GPs that are at Benchmark today. How did we analyze this move? Is this symbolic of the further consolidation of venture? What did, what did we think about this move? 'Cause it was a big surprise to the ecosystem.

    2. JLJason Lemkin1:15:16

       I think it was a clever move by a very shrewd firm. I think it's been their MO for 15, 20 years, which is we have a very compelling offering to make to any GP. We'll make you broadly e- we'll make you equal in a very successful partnership with a lot of autonomy, and therefore you can have your pick of proven talent. You're not in the, you're not in the growing talent business, you're in the picking talent business, and in general, you can make people a compelling offer that most people are inclined to take, right? This is just an extreme version of that.

    3. SPSpeaker1:15:51

       Yeah, to me, the more interesting thing at a meta level, if he really took his last fund, he raised, like, $400 million in two years, okay? And if he took his last $250 million fund as in essence a solo GP, forget how it's structured. He, he, it is him. It is Altman. It is him. And he gave it all back to the LPs. That is not a minor give, and even if you're made whole, 'cause I was offered to be made whole a couple times in the old days. It's made whole with asterisks and daggers. You gotta stay. You gotta deliver. And, and maybe it's made whole no matter what the Lord brings, but, so if you're confident you can triple 250 and retain massive economics in it in terms of carry and fees, it's a... What, what, well, the interesting thing is there's so many GPs who would love to have what Jack had. There's so many folks stuck at venture firms, stuck working for people, and they're like, "My God, if I could have $400 million and two years to invest when whatever the F I want," and Jack gave up the dream of 95% of folks stuck in venture. [laughs]

    4. JLJason Lemkin1:16:52

       I think, again, Jason, you're on a roll at the moment. That is the other interesting point-

    5. SPSpeaker1:16:56

       Yeah

    6. JLJason Lemkin1:16:56

       ... is that most people are swimming the other- which, by the way, is an implicit and embedded compliment to Benchmark.

    7. SPSpeaker1:17:01

       Yeah.

    8. JLJason Lemkin1:17:02

       You know? Right.

    9. SPSpeaker1:17:02

       I think.

    10. JLJason Lemkin1:17:02

        You know?

    11. SPSpeaker1:17:02

        I think it might be more than that, though, 'cause you have to ask yourself why he would do that. But I remember on the old days, and I'm sure Harry got similar offers in the old days maybe more, but in the old days, I got a, a, a mega firm that I didn't even know why that made that offer to me, 'cause I just raised my first fund, and they said, "Well, we'll just make... Just come here. Do SaaS. We'll make you whole. We'll make you everything." And they're like... And honestly, you've only raised s- $70 million for your first one. That's, like, nothing. That's like, "We'll just, like, we can, we can guarantee you you're gonna make $10 million off every exit we have, and we'll pay you $2 to $3 million a year, and you don't have to do any- like, why? We'll make you whole." But I'm like, I-

    12. JLJason Lemkin1:17:35

        We need talent

    13. SPSpeaker1:17:35

        ... no, I'm like, who do I have to work for f- for... I didn't sell my last company to go work for somebody. [laughs] It wasn't even, like, a 10, 10-minute conversation. It was like, I can't even get it to work in my head. [laughs]

    14. JLJason Lemkin1:17:48

        Yeah, Jason has enough self-knowledge to know he is destined never to work for another human being again, and humanity is grateful for that fact.

    15. SPSpeaker1:17:54

        I, I might for someone that I'm in love with. I mean, not, not a, I mean, I don't mean personally. I mean, if I so, so respect the CEO and they would let me work in my box, it's not true, I would do it. But it has to be in that-

    16. JLJason Lemkin1:18:04

        Okay

    17. SPSpeaker1:18:04

        ... special sp- you know, special situation, right? For someone that you just respect so much. But, um, but so he gave up a lot. That's just the interesting... He gave up a lot and, um, and it, that it was worth it to him to be part of this ener- entity, this brand, and I just think, I don't know what it says, but it says a lot about 2026, that you would give up the dream of 95% of venture, that you would give it up, right? Wor- worst case, you know, I mean, not to be tacky on this pod, but even if, as a solo GP, even if you just manage the fees on $400 million, it's, like, not terrible lifestyle. You can still afford to eat at a pretty good restaurant from time to time. You might even be able to rent an apartment in Harry's building.

    18. JLJason Lemkin1:18:44

        I think people that successful aren't into, correctly, into m- m- minimizing the downside. It's, I mean, I'm sure the attraction is work with a great group of people, build a great fund, and yeah, you're right. I still wonder, most people would say, many people would say, "I'd prefer to be on my own," especially if you've already gotten on your own. But, you know, it's, it's a compelling offer.

    19. SPSpeaker1:19:04

        Jason, would you leave SaaS to do a $500 million fund with me and Rory?

    20. JLJason Lemkin1:19:09

        I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it because I don't, I don't think I would be successful.

    21. SPSpeaker1:19:13

        Why?

    22. JLJason Lemkin1:19:13

        Uh, look, everybody's, this is a very niche industry, right? This is as niche as it gets, right?

    23. SPSpeaker1:19:18

        I, I could paint a picture to you, Jason, that actually this is, could be the next greatest five years of your investing career. The insights that you have as an investor today because of your proximity to it make you better than ever as an investor, I would argue, and I think Rory would probably agree with me on that.

    24. JLJason Lemkin1:19:33

        It should be. I think you're right. It should be. It should be, right? Whether it will be remains to be seen, right? It should be, right?

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:19:40

        And so you should be more aggressive than ever, not less, would be my argument to you, Brad

    26. JLJason Lemkin1:19:45

        I just don't know if I could sit in Monday partner meetings again for four hours. I don't think I could. I see you out there, Harry, on the road with all your portfolio companies on LinkedIn and celebrating their series A. Like, I am the most loyal person to the founders I invest in, but that's not me anymore. Like, I've done that S. I just not, I can't do it. I can't. I told my LPs in COVID, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing any more AGMs. I'm not standing up there with like, here's the numbers. I'll go talk to you. Like, I'll drop by your office, but I'm done with this performative all day circus of an AGM. Not that I think there's anything wrong with it. I actually think AGMs are very important. I'm just not going, I'm just not doing one again. If you want to work with me, as long as I don't have to go to the AGM, maybe it's okay. But if you're going to do something like this, you have to be sure, especially if the person has a perspective or you have to be able to leverage their strengths and backfill their weaknesses, right? So my particular strengths are deeply know everything around this agentic go-to-market and have a large group of founders that I've helped that believe in me. People do trust me, as Harry knows. You just had a conversation about it, right? But I'm not good at some other stuff. And most ventures kind of, going to Harry's point of benchmark should be five flat partners. There's this certain genericism of most of venture that if you don't fit into those things, you might not thrive at different entities, right? There's still a little bit of solo hunting and meeting on Monday and weird consensus-driven outcomes where everyone's not that happy about Rory or Jason's deal, but I got to do it because Harry wants to do his deal. There's just a, it's just a niche thing. And I think if you want certain people that are talented, you got to like let them do their thing and nothing else. That's the key. And I think in venture, it's harder to do that than in Anthropic to tie it all together. In Anthropic, they're going to find you your niche if you're off the charts, right? They're going to sort of. Although even there, I wonder.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings1:21:40

        Boys, it's a wrap.

    28. JLJason Lemkin1:21:42

        It's a wrap.

Episode duration: 1:21:53