Patrick OShaughnessy

40 feverish minutes of zoomed in detail on what’s happening in venture markets, with @ramtinnaimi

We discuss:
- cuck tranches
- why rounds are moving so fast
- how today compares to 2021
- what record deployment means for LPs
- the Anthropic S-1 and compute
- seed risk at Series D prices

The full episode is available everywhere you get podcasts (links in comments)

Enjoy!

The gap between investors who’ve embraced ai (especially in research + admin) and those who haven’t is staggering

One of the best I know said 90%+ of firms work is now Ai / automated

Another sole practitioner has a whole firm run by grok bots

Era of agentic investing is here

Good ones

youtu.be/-dmA9GnxstU?si…

gsb-courses.stanford.edu/building-innov…

Ramtin on how investors justify paying billion-dollar entry prices

"Every few years in Silicon Valley, the goalpost moves for what terminal outcomes can be.

When I got started in early-stage investing in 2016, people looked at every company through the lens of, 'In a best-case scenario, this could be a $10 billion outcome,' and priced deals accordingly.

Then you got towards 2021, and everybody started looking at companies through the lens of, 'In a best-case scenario, this company can be worth $100 billion.'

And now we're at a new goalpost of, 'In a best-case scenario, this company could have a trillion-dollar outcome.'

My bet is there might be two to three more, and not 40 more.

But now everyone's looking at companies through the lens of, 'In a best-case scenario, you have a trillion-dollar outcome, so what is a $1 billion entry valuation in a trillion-dollar outcome scenario?'"

Ramtin Naimi on the pace of capital deployment in venture:

"I know one fund that raised $2.5B and started deploying in July and they're gonna be back in market in January.

The deployment periods are about 3x faster than they thought they would be.

This is the first time I started to see this in this cycle, where the VCs are giving them term sheets and saying, 'Hey, we wanna put $150 million in your company. Is it okay if we fund it in like mid-January, which is three months from now?'

All the money in our current fund is already committed to existing companies, and we're in the middle of closing a new fund."