Meta

Instinct Worth 30BN? | Microsoft Cuts 27,000 Jobs While Meta Taps Equity Markets for $95B CapEx

Oct 29, 2026 · 1:00:17

Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll argue Anthropic's S-1 shows a company investors are still underestimating, with $16.3 billion first-half revenue and $110 billion of cash, though 80% of revenue comes from models under six months old. They break down Microsoft's buyout offers to 27% of its 223,000 employees, warning 2027 CapEx depreciation will force more AI-driven layoffs, and Meta raising $95 billion of equity for its spending spree. Jason argues Chinese open-weight models are finished in the US after Alibaba's Quen was caught uploading data to servers in China and Singapore. They debate Instinct at $30 billion as the 'super app of the West', whether OpenRouter's boom is a moment in time, and Jason's pitch to put 20% of the fund into OpenAI at $1.25 trillion.

Valar Atomics Sues Day One Ventures | Meta's Back to the AI Frontier | NVIDIA's $30B Reflection Deal

Oct 15, 2026 · 1:17:10

Harry Stebbings hosts Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll to break down Valar Atomics suing its seed investor Day One Ventures over pro rata rights ahead of a $6B Sequoia-led Series B, Meta's return to the AI frontier with Muse Wonder, and NVIDIA's rumored $30B acquisition of open-model lab Reflection. Lemkin says both sides erred—Day One should raise it once and let it go rather than hire Quinn Emmanuel—while Rory notes mega funds demanding pro rata waivers never waive their own. They call Meta's internal-only model performative yet see a monster AI product in Muse. The committee backs Jev's $870M Series A at $7.5B, sees bubble risk in 42 decacorns in one year, calls Haiku's 90% price cut the first deflationary LLM move, and warns the SaaS apocalypse persists without scale.

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.

Menlo’s Venky Ganesan on Going All-In on AI, Anthropic & Why Venture Has Changed Forever

Oct 5, 2026 · 1:11:15

Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures, says venture has fundamentally changed and Menlo is 'going for broke' to back the era's defining AI companies. He recounts a 90% loss on AvenX that taught him to take chips off the table, and calls seed an option bet where Menlo is 'somewhat indifferent' to price to win a seat. He warns measured metrics get gamed, cycles crack through debt defaults, and calls passing a $50,000 Facebook check via Sean Parker his costliest miss. Ownership still matters — Menlo owns under 2% of Anthropic yet put 20% of a fund in it — and he assumes 60% dilution, saying IRR must beat the Mag Seven by 1,000 basis points. He backs partial sells to stay long, prefers capital allocation to product vision at scale, and tells LPs to judge the windshield, not the rearview mirror.

AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B | Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO | Bessemer Raises $5.75B

Oct 1, 2026 · 1:20:28

Jack Altman of Benchmark, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll tell Harry Stebbings that Anthropic's leaked S-1—$4.6B 2025 revenue, $8B operating loss, $518B in compute commitments—held little new, and that Benchmark's $10B Instinct bet is an early-stage play on consumer agents. AMD's $8.2B buyout of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs starts a wave of neolab exits; Meta's $500M package lured MongoDB's CEO away as its stock dropped 20%. They argue open-source AI has peaked in share because OpenAI and Anthropic can undercut pricing and enterprises reject China-origin weights, and debate putting 30% of a fund into Jev at $10B. They weigh Oura's pulled $16B IPO, Nubank's $8–12B Monzo bid, Bessemer's $5.75B raise, NFX moving to its own capital, and Anthropic founders locking in 50.1% voting control.

The Untold Story of Higgsfield | Burning $4M a Month on AI Models | CEO, Alex Mashrabov

Sep 28, 2026 · 1:15:43

Alex Mashrabov, CEO of Higgsfield, tells Harry Stebbings his AI video company crossed $1BN in annualized revenue 18 months after hitting $1M, third-fastest behind OpenAI and Anthropic. He recounts burning $10M of a $16M seed before a camera-control pivot brought instant product-market fit, no paid marketing, and one customer growing from $99 a month to $6M a year. He argues Google and OpenAI will destroy $20 prosumer subscriptions, that proprietary models were a mistake — open weights earn 80%+ margins versus 20–30% closed — and that internal model spend tops $4M a month. He also covers engineers moving from Claude to Codex, moats as only outcomes and network effects, selling AI Factory to Snap for $166M, and his bet on $10BN revenue and $100BN+ scale.

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.

Eight Sleep CEO: How AI Runs the Company | “Our Engineers Stopped Coding a Year Ago”

Sep 12, 2026 · 1:21:52

Eight Sleep Co-Founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti tells Harry Stebbings that AI has transformed how his company operates: engineers stopped coding a year ago, AI agents run an email marketing business making close to $100M with zero employees, and paid media agents manage hundreds of millions in spend. He argues salaries are back to 2021 insanity, so Eight Sleep hires in Europe, and predicts AI spend will grow from 5% to 50% of engineering budgets while unit costs fall. He explains why Meta's reported CAC is 20% lower than reality, why word of mouth drives 40% of revenue with single-digit yearly churn, and why companies will become holding companies like Xiaomi. He also details the 300K mattress footballer story, Charles Leclerc's sponsorship and investment, selling in China through super apps like WeChat and RedNote, running with just 160 employees, and predicting kids born now will never work for money.

Jensen Huang Declares AGI Has Arrived | Tesla Launches Cybercabs | Index Pulls Out of Town

Sep 10, 2026 · 1:22:31

Rory O'Driscoll of Scale and Jason Lemkin tell Harry Stebbings that Jensen Huang's AGI declaration is a 'bullshit term' since only coding matters, while the AI assistant race between Instinct, Grok Bot and Meta hinges on distribution. They debate whether legal AI firms Harvey and Legora can match coding AI — Rory pegs legal's AI take at 10–15% versus 30–50% in coding — and warn goal-seeking agents, as in OpenAI's undisclosed DSC Wiki incident, pose a cybersecurity crisis. They assess Tesla's Cybercab as a Waymo rival, Index exiting Town's round after Instinct objected, and Anthropic abandoning its $6 billion Descartes deal. They close on Robinhood underwriting Aura's IPO, Wonderful's $5 billion raise with $170 million in secondary, and Thinking Machines' $40 billion valuation.

How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It

Sep 5, 2026 · 1:04:40

Cliff Weitzman, co-founder and CEO of Speechify, tells Harry Stebbings that owning NVIDIA GPUs beats renting because renting costs 1.5x the purchase price yearly, so Speechify pays $100,000 per GPU to get Rubins and B300s early. He covers inference versus training workloads, liquid-cooling and insurance logistics, and NVIDIA's 25% buyback underwriting with Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs. Weitzman admits his biggest mistake was staying B2C as ElevenLabs leapfrogged Speechify through B2B APIs, and defends entering B2B against ElevenLabs and Bret Taylor's Sierra. He also argues founders should hire math olympiads over coders, details agent orchestration with Claude Code and Cursor, and explains how GPU clusters help him sequence genomes to cure his brother's orphan disease.

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.

The AI Bubble WILL Burst | Should we be fearful of Chinese Open-Source | Jerry Murdock

Aug 22, 2026 · 1:10:09

Jerry Murdock, co-founder of Insight Partners, warns the AI bubble may burst by March if the Iran war continues, citing credit market complacency and Japan’s $1 trillion Treasuries. He predicts at least half of Neo Clouds disappear within 36 months, favors Fireworks over Base10, and argues open-source models plus ASIC chips will drive customization while frontier labs retain complex tasks. On security, he calls sandboxes the most underrated layer, naming Docker and E2B as leaders, and expects OpenRouter’s 5% markup to be disrupted by inference exchanges. He adds private equity is highly at risk to any financial dislocation, and in quick-fire bets Nvidia exceeds $10 trillion in five years while picking Meta as the Mag 7 short.

Stripe's $8B OpenRouter Bet | Anthropic's First Profit & The Math Behind Reaching $600B in Revenue?

Aug 20, 2026 · 1:17:47

Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll analyze SpaceX's $60B Cursor takeover, Stripe's $7B OpenRouter deal, Anthropic's first profit, Silver Lake's $43B Workday bid and Lovable's $13.3B round, arguing all reward speed and growth over margin. Musk got Cursor at ~10x forward revenue; Microsoft, not Meta, is the real loser. OpenRouter is a niche that may vanish in five years, yet could become 20-30% of Stripe revenue. Anthropic's first profit on $11.5B Q2 revenue was inevitable at ~40% gross margin; only 2027-28 projected revenue matters for its IPO. Workday is a 5.3x-revenue system-of-record LBO baseline versus 70x trailing for OpenRouter, and Higgsfield's $5.5B and Lovable's $13.3B are compared to Cursor, with Lovable 'not radically off' as AI apps accrete moats.

How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski

Aug 15, 2026 · 1:20:47

Matt Swulinski, Head of Growth at AI coworker Viktor and former growth lead at Wispr Flow and Superhuman, argues the ECOM paid-ads playbook is the right playbook for SaaS and that paid should start immediately. He details analytics setup, why 90% of SaaS companies get it wrong, and scaling creative to 400–500 new creatives monthly. He covers LTV-to-CAC, token-based economics, referral programs tied to usage limits, and paywalls right after the magic moment. He also discusses AEO as the new SEO, why X ads are polluted, and why AI-native 'systems thinkers' are the only hires that matter. He shares Viktor's affiliate program paying 10–15% revenue share as the highest-ROI channel.

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.