OpenRouter

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.

Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins? | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value?

Oct 17, 2026 · 1:03:06

Harry Stebbings hosts Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, who argues agents are hard to build because models are non-deterministic, and value accrues to whoever controls context, harness and evals. Chase explains why model routing belongs in the harness for vertical agents but in gateways for horizontal tasks, why agent memory is unsolved after LangChain killed its memory product, and why vertical agents should start at the harness before post-training. He says inference and coding agent demand is far bigger than expected, that LangChain spends ~30% of engineering salary on coding tools — a figure he ties to Anthropic's valuation — and that open models mostly serve simple tasks, not core loops. He closes with his bull case for a $9BN Jev round and how Benchmark and Sequoia help founders.

Atlassian CEO: Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models

Oct 12, 2026 · 58:55

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes tells 20VC that AI agents will not replace software interfaces — design becomes the key differentiator in the AI era, and 'headless' software is a 'brainless bet'. He frames Atlassian's Teamwork Graph as the enterprise context moat, kept fresh per company like Google's web index, served by an internal AI gateway doing model routing to cut token costs. Atlassian uses no Chinese models in production, though open models face no pushback; 'the jury is really out' on specialized models, most of which he calls fine-tuned Chinese weights. He predicts inference costs fall sharply, AI provenance stops mattering like film color grading, and value shifts to 'imagination asymmetry'. He closes on young founders tapping out and 'wage peace on yourself'.

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.

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.