Rory

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.