trading places

“I think you're telling me that Alphabet's undervalued by a trillion dollars.”

This week on @TradingVCs: Google's $500B wipeout, Meta's $95B stock sale, OpenAI's stalled raise and the neocloud credit crunch. Valuation corner: Kalshi vs Polymarket

Plus: @AmanVerjee and @davemcclure discuss how to build AI data centers with a blue Congress.

[ tech and vc news ]

04:45 - AI hangover: @Meta sells $95B in stock
14:26 - @Google loses $500B: is AI killing search?
21:55 - @OpenAI vs @AnthropicAI: 52% of tokens, 34% of dollars
24:19 - OpenAI $30B raise stalls at $11B
29:31 - Credit crunch: AI debt up 6x, neoclouds shut out
42:46 - Valuation mania: @instinct $10B to $30B in a month
48:11 - Secondary corner: continuity SPVs turn paper gains into DPI

[ valuation corner: Kalshi vs Polymarket ]

51:49 - Prediction markets vs the house: 3% fees vs 6% vig
55:52 - @Kalshi $4B revenue, @Polymarket $1B
57:59 - Kalshi $40B, Polymarket $21B, about 10x revenue
58:30 - @DraftKings and @FanDuel shrinking 5–6%
59:57 - Our call: buying Kalshi secondaries

🗳️ Aman Verjee on what the blue wave could mean for AI's biggest spending line:

"Does the blue wave affect CapEx spend? I think yes...

There's like three or four states where most of the activity is happening. Texas is one of them. Virginia is another... half the build that's happening in Arizona.

In Texas, there's been a flip in the governor's race. Greg Abbott was... pretty pro-business, pro-AI. Although as he began to backtrack a little bit on his view on the data centers towards the end of the campaign...

The winner was a Democrat, Gina Hinojosa... she's been much more skeptical on data center build-outs.

And so I think that there's a chance of a regulatory pause... I think there's a possibility now that either the governors or congressional oversight slows the build."

— @AmanVerjee with @davemcclure on the Trading Places VC podcast

🤯 Instinct AI is reportedly raising at a $30 billion valuation. Dave McClure and Aman Verjee on the question nobody seems to be asking:

"Pretty crazy that AI startup Instinct rumors that, hey, they're raising at a $30 billion valuation...

This company was founded in October of 2025. So they're not even a year old.

Do you know what their revenues are, by the way?

I have no idea. I didn't hear you say the word revenue once...

I think the assumption the market is making here is that this company is gonna get acquired by one of the two or three or four big players that have consumer distribution but maybe aren't as far along with agentic software...

Maybe it's not crazy for Google or Microsoft or Amazon or Apple to spend tens of billions of dollars to increase their per user monetization. If you really think that Instinct is a generational company."

— @davemcclure and @AmanVerjee on the Trading Places VC podcast

🧮 How big can Anthropic get? Aman Verjee sizes the market the way a banker would:

"They did the old SpaceX trick of putting $30 trillion of TAM into the S-1. It's the entire U.S. economy.

The way that I would do the TAM, if I were a banker: how many customers do I have at Anthropic who are paying me more than $100,000 a year? And that number was $11,900, which is amazing...

So they've built a Salesforce in the space of a year.

If you're an enterprise making $10 million in revenue or more and you spend 1% of your revenue on Claude or a competitive model, to me, that seems pretty reasonable...

There's like 250,000 of those businesses in the U.S."

— @AmanVerjee, co-host of Trading Places, with @davemcclure on the Trading Places VC podcast

.@AmanVerjee and @davemcclure break down what Andreessen Horowitz actually pulled out of the $60 billion SpaceX-Cursor deal:

"Thrive and Andreessen both made 150x on their investments.

Returning $6 billion, $6.5 billion, $9 billion.

The SpaceX acquisition of Cursor for $60 billion. This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest M&A of all time.

OpenAI Startup Fund invested $6 million. Other investors invested $2 million... they got between 400x and 100x returns on their money."