Alibaba

ClickHouse CEO: AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern

Aug 31, 2026 · 1:05:57

Aaron Katz, co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse, tells Harry Stebbings the AI cycle is 'just getting started' — revenue growth is unprecedented, but the biggest risk is revenue durability because agentic apps have low switching costs. He accepts lower gross margins if expansion is possible, measures AI token spend by ROI, and predicts agents will have identities, budgets, and pick their own infrastructure. He argues open-weight models won't win the enterprise over trust concerns, and sees enterprises moving back on-prem. ClickHouse revenue went 0, 12, 50, 200, finishing north of 500 this year, with >200% NDR; Katz would take the under on $1B ARR by December 2027. He calls the $2B Series B with no product the priciest round; revenue concentration matters — AI customers are under 12% of revenue.

Frontier Labs Threatened by Kimi? Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models & Stripe Buys PayPal

Jul 23, 2026 · 1:27:39

Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O'Driscoll debate China's near-frontier open-weight models Kimi and Quan, arguing the US should not ban them but compete. They discuss OpenAI's 'AI Communism' tweet, the commoditized inference market leading OpenRouter to consider sale while Fireworks AI hits $1B ARR at $17.5B valuation. The panel notes the application layer has not arrived, with infrastructure spending far exceeding app revenues. They analyze the Stripe-Advent bid to take PayPal private at ~$60B, predicting a 35% premium deal. Finally, they touch on Databricks' $188B Series M, nuclear energy progress, and the strange inversion of private and public markets.