Factory

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.

Meta's Muse Hits #1 | Menlo Sounds the AI Bubble Alarm | Keith Rabois vs Airwallex: Who is Right?

Sep 24, 2026 · 1:20:44

Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll argue Meta's Muse hitting #1 is the first true ChatGPT competitor and a Trojan horse that added $100 billion to Meta's market cap, and that Anthropic's delayed $2 trillion IPO is a bet on a cleaner Q4 story, not a cracking market. They break down OpenAI's $278 billion burn and $700 billion of CapEx, argue Jev's $40 million seed shows 20% of a $100 billion LLM spend will leak to cheaper classifiers, and predict agentic commerce will maim Amazon while benefiting Shopify. They debate disappearing traditional seed rounds, FOMO-driven checks and what LPs should back today. They approve Factory at $5 billion — coding is the motherlode — pass on Crusoe at $30.9 billion, and side against Keith Rabois in his Airwallex fight, urging founders to build an army of advocates.

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.