Cognition

Cognition vs Factory | Anthropic Under Threat | ElevenLabs Doubles Its Valuation to $22B

Oct 8, 2026 · 1:15:52

Harry Stebbings hosts MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria with Jason Lemkin and Scale's Rory O'Driscoll, arguing OpenAI's near-$70BN run rate has closed the gap on Anthropic ahead of its November IPO. The panel debates whether Chris Degnan moving from Factory advisor to Cognition CRO crossed a line, and calls Vinod Khosla's 'struggling second-tier competitor' tweet a gift to rival firms. They argue Reflection's Beam gives enterprises a US open-weight model 3-4x cheaper than Chinese options, and endorse ElevenLabs at its doubled $22BN valuation. They weigh Salesforce's $2BN Listen Labs exit, Vercel's $600M ARR with agents driving 50% of new business, the Grox lawsuit over Nvidia's $17BN license deal, Meta's Muse outshining OpenAI's Dots, and Oura pulling its IPO as bad news for venture.

NVIDIA Crushes Quarter | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5B Valuation

Sep 3, 2026 · 1:20:29

Harry Stebbings hosts SaaS investors Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll breaking down NVIDIA's record $96.2 billion quarter, its $12.9 billion pursuit of Hugging Face, and 70% growth guidance signaling compute demand runs at least another 12 months. Lemkin defends OpenAI's cutoff of Cursor as rational, since coding is the model load for LLMs and Cursor competes directly. The panel argues every startup must now become a compound startup, as AI makes code so cheap to produce that teams ship 100 times more software. Lemkin lays out bull cases for Clay at $7 billion and Linear at $2.5 billion, claiming agents will consume 10 to 100 times more GTM resources than humans ever could. They also flag the Hugging Face agent hack as a wake-up call for CISOs and praise Benioff's pragmatism in embracing multi-surface access and outcome-based pricing at Salesforce.

Only 10% of Neo-labs Will Survive | Factory CTO, Eno Reyes

Aug 29, 2026 · 1:29:23

Eno Reyes, Factory CTO, says the cheapest AI model isn't the cheapest system: outcome-based pricing can make frontier models cheaper, and predicts 99% of workflows will run on open models in three years but the remaining 1% holds most economic value. He calls 'Chinese models' a psyop by frontier labs, says frontier valuations are overweighted, sees Anthropic's $2 trillion Claude Code bet as risky due to model lock-in, and credits Microsoft with the best AI hand. Reyes says model routing is commoditized, warns 80-90% of neo labs could die in 18 months unless tied to durable workflows, and insists enterprises must own their intelligence rather than let labs control it. He rejects pedigree in hiring, wants token budgets funding outcomes, and expects SaaS to sell before cannibalization.