20VC: Anthropic Wipes Billions Off Markets | Citrini Research: The Ultimate Breakdown: Agents, "Ghost GDP", Consumer Spend etc. | Figma Earnings Beat & Four Public Stocks to Buy | Jack Altman Joins Benchmark

19:10Harry Stebbings:I'm picking on Toast because we're not an investor, so I have no emotional connection. I think that's a good one because I don't think there's a ton of agent work to be done. And it's a lot of payments and restaurant kind of organization. It's fairly durable. We can argue, but whereas something like Monday, it's very knowledge workery. I can see much more disruption story. That's the incumbents. I think we're now in sync on saying is that those opportunities can be grabbed by standalone companies, perhaps built, started, founded 21, 22, leveraging directly on top of the foundation models. What you're not saying is all that revenue just accrues to the foundation models, correct?

19:46Jack Altman:No, I think just people are going to be maimed even more than they think if they don't own agents in your category. You got to own the agents in your category. And whether those agents are owned by a startup or whether some version of that agent can be done inside of Claude, they're going to maim you. And it's accelerating.

20:02Harry Stebbings:Jason, I want to be very direct with you and you'll give me a direct answer. You're better at direct than Roy's sometimes nuanced answers. Will Claude Code make Rapplin and Lovable weaker in a 12-month period? Do you think they will meaningfully enter their space and take market share?

20:17Jack Altman:I think it will do everything that it can do. I'm going to Rory's point. Anything that can be done either inside the browser or inside the desktop, Cloud will do. That's what we've learned this year. Anything it can do. Right now, if you go to design something in Cloud Code, you'll laugh. All the crappy Cloud Code websites look the same. They have the same artifacts, the same icons, the same purple color scheme. You can laugh. But can all of the design, all of the parts of Figma that are designed be done within the code? Of course it can. So I believe it will aggressively attack parts of Figma this year, even though they're key partners.

20:52Jack Altman:Replit and Lovable, it continues to do more of them. Now, will Claude Code want to host entire websites? The only thing that ultimately will protect them is this is all their teams do, and that I don't think they want to build databases and build production websites and host domain names. But if they change their mind, there's no reason they can't license Supabase or Neon or fork their own Postgres. They're pretty good there at this company. They can build their own database. They've already got plenty of servers. They can spool up a few more to host websites if they want to. They can. And I just think Fortnite's the game.

21:28Jack Altman:You know, at the end of Fortnite, the circle gets. And so if I'm at Replier Lovable or even Figma, I would be worried At Figma, like the circle's just starting to shrink. But I think at many companies, that circle shrinking. And I have two investments I made last year. I love them. Those products no longer have a reason to exist today because of Claude. But these were standalone investments last year. I'm not going to go into it. That were great. That blew up in the early days. And they just have no reason to exist today in that prior form. Just no reason. When we turn around and all of a sudden, you can preview your entire app inside of Claude, which you couldn't do last week.

22:03Jack Altman:I if I'm any of these figma replable verse all of them all of them I love that just the fortnight circle shrinking so you know you gotta like you gotta do something about it right and will it stop like at the end of the game it does get pretty small though right it's stressful but but the flip side is if you nail the agent look how much revenue these guys did building essentially an agent on top of cloud code they built a billion dollars of revenue building the agent that didn't exist. So that's the flip side. That's our job is to build these billion dollar agents. If you can do something that is extremely high valuable, that could not be done before, you can close millions of revenue your first week.

22:41Jack Altman:It's never happened before in the history of software, right?

22:43Harry Stebbings:Totally agree and get that. Before we move on, I do just want to stay on Anthropic. And I wanted to discuss, they've lined up five to six billion dollars for an employee share sale at a$350 billion valuation. Obviously, there's people queuing up out the door for this, following obviously OpenAI doing the same a couple of months ago. Have we ever seen liquidity at this scale when we look at the number of millionaires minted from OpenAI, soon to be anthropic, when we look at the NVIDIA millionaires that exist already? Is anyone going to be able to buy a house in the valley?

23:14Jack Altman:Yeah. There's a lot of things that seem silly in AI 12 or 18 months ago, but if NVIDIA has 20 ,000 decamillionaires, right, I'm going to say we're going to produce 100 ,000 decamillionaires out of these AI leaders, okay? And Rory's better at the math than me, but NVIDIA already has 20 ,000. So if that's the case, that would be great if everyone was at full employment and we were all full of companies with six figure employees making money. The worry is that we do see this concentration of wealth at the same time as everyone else gets leaner. And will Jevin's paradox create more employment in tech or not?

23:49Jack Altman:I believe we will need more engineers than ever. like when we talked with Michael Cannon Brooks, I don't know if it will create more employment.

23:56Harry Stebbings:So listen, the knock on effect of that is bluntly what has shaken markets so much when you look at Citrini or however you want to pronounce its 2028 global intelligence crisis, which was a piece written kind of forward looking or predicting kind of the state at 2028. And I broke down kind of some of the core elements there. I think we can start with actually one that you kind of mentioned there, Jason, which is kind of ghost GDP disconnects market from the real economy. So you have AI boosting productivity and corporate profits and market caps of companies, inflating headline economic figures, but actually consumer income doesn't scale with market cap and enterprise value.

24:36Harry Stebbings:How do we analyze and assess that? I'm going to call bullshit here. I love the Noah Smith descriptions, sub stacker I follow in economics a lot. He called it basically scary bedtime reading. Right? I think if you want to have a conversation about it, I actually think the way you need to break it up is to, I try not to say how to have, because I knew we're going to have this one, right? And I saw your seven points and it's too much detail, Harry. Big picture, I would suggest we approach this in the following fashion. The first thing you have to figure out is micro, macro. At a micro level, for each of the things he says are going to happen, do we believe they're going to happen?

25:11Harry Stebbings:In other words, is AI going to replace coding? Is AI going to replace DoorDash? is AI going to replace Amex, right? In other words, and the wonderful thing is, I think that's something this group is well-equipped to do because we're all investing in venture companies who are the tippy point of the spear in terms of adoption. I'm allowed to have an informed opinion on question one, which is micro level, are these changes going to happen? Then the second big picture question, lumping all the other things into the other, is what are the macro consequences of this? In other words, if you assume that there's a high level of AI adoption over a short period of time, and that's, as I say, what we can talk about because we understand, that everyone gets to pontificate on global macro, which is what you were starting to do there.

25:52Harry Stebbings:And I'm fine coming back to that, right? But I think jumping straight to the, oh my God, the GDP is ending with no thought process to, I even believe that, basically, he was hypothesizing a two-year adoption cycle of almost everything, such that everything from ServiceNow to DoorDash to Amex gets rolled over in two years. And I think if you believe that's happening, then you do graduate to the global macro question. And I still think he's wrong about that. But if you don't think the adoption is going to be that quick, you can literally ignore the rest of the piece. Does that make sense as a framing, first of all?

26:25Harry Stebbings:Why don't we start with the micro then, where you think we are seasoned and responsible enough to have an informed opinion? Well, yeah, let's break it up. I mean, there was a hit point about software development, about SaaS apps, about companies like DoorDash, and then companies like Amex. In other words, interchange, right? Let's do the stupid ones first. DoorDash. The idea was you're going to want to delegate to your agent, purchasing of an optimizing for, there's going to be six different versions of DoorDash and your agent will do between them. And the only reason that you don't do this today is because quote unquote friction.

27:01Harry Stebbings:And if it was automated, you'd let the agents order your pizza. And I just call bullshit on that. I mean, at the consumer level, when you're buying pizza on a Friday night, you're talking to your wife and you said, honey, you know, we had the fricking kimono last time. I say we go with the pepperoni. She was like, no, I don't like it. I told you we want to stick with the two salads on the pizza. It's not something we want. No one wants to delegate to an agent how to decide what food they get and then have the thing come up. Good news. I saved you two bucks. Bad news. You like the high end pizza, but I got you the crappy little pizza dish.

27:31Jack Altman:Yeah, but Rory, can I add just one thought? Here's Andy Fang, CTO of DoorDash. We strongly believe agentic commerce will be transformative to our industry. He believes this. I believe it has, I have a large investment exposed to the space and I can see agents and AI ripping through it. I think the examples we think are safe, this is CTO saying we need to earn the right to service customers, agents, end to end, discovery, ordering, delivery and support. We need to earn the right in the new world. So to think that these spaces aren't just, it only has to be maimed. The idea that we're going to vibe code our own DoorDash is stupid, right?

28:07Jack Altman:It is stupid. And he's trying to get people millions of views, right? So the whole idea he started with is stupid, but keep on extrapolating. But the threat that an agent can decide for you here, the CTO says it's real. That's the threat.

28:24Harry Stebbings:But he didn't say, okay, you caught me, I'm going home. If you want to make more automations around a recommendation, say, hey, there's three different pieces. But do you really think it's going to be, I mean, I just think the level of customer inertia on the consumer to have this vision of five different DoorDash competitive companies being enabled in this world, I just don't see it. DoorDash is a combination of a huge amount of logistics, a huge amount of customer aftermarket service, a huge amount of signing up restaurants, right? They beat off four or five other big competitors to now have some kind of stable oligopoly with Uber order and there was one other smaller player in the US.

29:04Harry Stebbings:What in software is going to allow a new, talk me through the new competitor emerging and taking market share in a high fixed cost business like this?

29:13Jack Altman:Well, I mean, the most simple one is that a new competitor can decide whether Uber Eats or DoorDash is the right thing for Uber Eats, DoorDash or Direct. You have three options in the US, okay? Nothing else really exists, right? The agent may make that decision. In fact, I would prefer that because I don't want to figure out which one to use DoorDash, Uber Eats or Direct. I would prefer the Uber Eats knows my favorite. And I'm just picking one example, but this is a real threat today. This is what Andy's saying. It's a real threat. We don't need to decide which is the best place for us. The agent decides which is the best deal between these options, which is the best source for me, which is the best for my family that makes the decision.

29:49Jack Altman:It only, the agent is who we go to. As long as the agent is who we go to rather than the first party, it just risks disruption. It doesn't destroy the company. It doesn't destroy it.

30:00Harry Stebbings:Tracing through the unrealistic statements there. Let's go on an existing example today. Netflix. Recommendation engine.

30:07Jack Altman:Yeah, but I'm right about DoorDash because Andy Feng said the same thing. Why are you dodging the one that everyone thinks is free from disruption when the CTO says the ground is shifting underneath his feet? He literally said it this week, the CTO.

30:18Harry Stebbings:Okay. No one's going to say when the CEO of a public company, I don't believe that stuff. They're going to say, we're on it, because that's the message you got to say. But I don't think they're saying, oh, my God, three more companies are going to displace me. Our job as investors is to analyze the facts and try and come to our independent conclusions. So I'm just going to take, I think, two of the most personal things at the consumer level are the food you eat and the TV content you watch. Now, the good thing about the content you watch is we've had 10 years of AI already. The Netflix recommendation engine, let's be clear, it is a massively useful tool to them because at the margin, it helps them predict what people want, right?

30:55Harry Stebbings:So I do agree there is core value in knowing people's preferences on the aggregate. But how often, what percentage of your content viewing do you base entirely blindly on the recommendation engine when you sit down on Netflix? 5%, 10 %? I think it's light.

31:12Jack Altman:Sorry, but DoorDash is barely in B2B. What the Netflix point is, I'll answer your question if you want the answer, but I'm missing the point. Do I think AI can disrupt Netflix? Netflix thinks AI can disrupt Netflix because we're all watching short form content. And as of the last 45 days, you can watch an incredible short on YouTube that was entirely AI generated, where you can watch Star Wars stories that are better than the crappy last three movies that are AI generated. That's utterly disruptive to Netflix. They're so panicked they have to buy a studio.

31:40Harry Stebbings:I'm breaking it apart into two separate things. If you can generate, and I think that's actually useful, if you can generate content using AI, that's very disruptive. I was trying to focus on recommendations because the idea was, I'm just looking at the idea of, the idea is for consumer preference, you will entrust your decision-making to an agent who will quote unquote, know what you want. That's what you're saying about DoorDash. And we're trying to prove something that hasn't happened yet. So I was making the point, content is another thing that's quite personal. Netflix has had this agent running for the last 10 or 15 years, the recommendation engine.

32:16Harry Stebbings:And at the margin, it does a good job of predicting on aggregate what people want. But if you had two choices, one program that gave you exactly what they recommended, and then the other program that allowed you to pick, I'm going to tell you, you're not going to go with the recommendation engine. You're going to say, I didn't like that recommendation last week. I'm done. In the same way, I don't believe I want to entrust my eating decision entirely to an agent. I think we're just caught up in this. Anything could happen, right?

32:43Jack Altman:But dude, YouTube is the number one way we consume video. And it is entirely based on a recommendation engine. And it is the best recommendation company on planet Earth. There are no channels on YouTube that matter anymore. Followers don't even matter anymore. Nothing matters. Every day I log into YouTube and it gets better and better at knowing what I want to watch. Every day. It is epically better than anything else on the planet and utterly disruptive to how we view things. Good argument. I'll give you that. Everything is, everyone is stressed today. It's a good thing. The further you go, the more folks are at risk of being maimed by AI, just maimed.

33:14Jack Altman:Except Georgia CrowdStrike. He's fine, but everyone else is at risk of being maimed by AI. Even if your growth goes from 31 % to 20%, that's a big deal. Agreed. But do you really believe that you want an agent to recommend you food? I have the data. I have an investment in this space. I already know the answer is yes. It's not my opinion. I have data from over 10 ,000 restaurants. I know the answer is yes. Right.

33:37Harry Stebbings:If your agent, all the historical context on every pizza order you and your wife have made and you know the price point, the location, so you know the delivery time that you're estimating. And it can also analyze every TikTok to Instagram review as latest food trends and tell you about the latest within that price band with that crisp topping that your wife likes. Because it already knows that because you left a review or because you said it in a WhatsApp, say it's got open claw and was able to deliver that to you. I think most people would. I'd love it. I think that, but Harry, at the margin, yes, I'd be sitting there on DoorDash going, I get a 5 % extra satisfaction rate and selection rate from this.

34:12Harry Stebbings:But do you think AI is so disruptive that it can warrant the creation of an entirely new company that says, basically what you're saying is all the investment you made in restaurant relationships, logistics, the app, are as nothing because this new thing is disruptive enough just because the recommendations are 5 % better.

34:30Jack Altman:If all these SaaS apps become dumb databases and Toast just becomes a POS system, they're not going away, but they become more and more commodified. And the real issue is they don't capture enough of the incremental value. It's the incremental value we're investing.

34:45Harry Stebbings:I think, Jason, I wanted to deal with the easy ones first, right? Do you really believe that there will be a direct competitor to DoorDash enabled by AI?

34:54Jack Altman:Well, listen, we all agree that that is clickbaity, okay? And so is all of it. But listen, even let's talk about ghost GDP for a minute. I admit I'm living on the bleeding edge. OK, let's concede that I'm a laboratory. But we have gone from 12 people to two people on my little team that not only does investment, it generates eight figures a year in revenue. OK, and that is ghost GDP. Those folks that are gone, that value, the profits that are left go to two people, three people. Define ghost GDP for me. Ghost GDP is that this productivity is not going to human workers that then spend it. That's the fear that we are creating this productivity, but it is not going to any, there's no, there's no humans to spend the money.

35:34Jack Altman:It's great that I can spend more money, but that doesn't, I don't think that's great for the economy. If I get a little bit richer, like we lost eight people on our team.

35:42Harry Stebbings:First of all, I agree. We're now doing macro because, and I, in this case, we can do macro because we agree. We can only do macro once we've conquered micro. And in this case, you've conquered micro. You've said it has happened. I had 12 people. Now I only have two, 10 people no longer have jobs. is what does that mean?

35:58Jack Altman:Or at least at least whatever they have other jobs, but the value that we're creating, right, this eight figures of value, it's accruing to fewer and fewer people. And there aren't as many people to buy handbags and to buy shoes and to buy T-shirts and to buy Netflix, even just to buy Netflix. There's less people, right? That was the point of the ghost GDP in this inflammatory, annoying article. But I don't I don't think that these things are wrong. I think he's just trying to claim everything's going to happen in 18 months that it's not going to happen in 18 months.

36:27Harry Stebbings:But implicit in that, and you have to be logical, implicit in that is productivity gains, which have been the engine of growth for the last 200 years, are bad. There's some buried statement here is that it is bad that Jason is now able to do something with two people that he was hitherto for only able to do with 12. And I'm going to say something across the arc of the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, productivity gains have been good because the The other 10 people, let me finish, the other 10 people who used to be wasting time writing slop for Jason can now do other things. And the sum total of human achievement will contain the extra work that those people do.

37:06Harry Stebbings:In the long term, I don't think you can argue, but that productivity gains are good. We used to have 80 % of people working on farms. We now have 10 % of people working on farms, actually 4 % of people working on farms. And we have so much food that we're all fat. And those other 85 % of people are doing other shit. Across the scope of history, productivity is freaking awesome. It's the only thing that's made us rich. I want to say that so clearly because then all these arguments, these macro arguments that I was hoping to ignore are basically some version of even though productivity is amazing in the long term, because you can't disagree to that, something bad is happening in the short term.

37:40Harry Stebbings:And then the onus is on you to say what that is. What is it? What's so bad about constant change and the fact that jobs go away and new jobs emerge? What's going to happen that's so bad? a softening of consumer spend with a concentration of wealth to fewer people. There are less people to spend money across different parts of the economy. And that impacts a large amount of people. And to your point on how does productivity actually lead to a worsening in the economy? You only need to look at Japan in the 1990s and the need for economics. And actually, you saw massive productivity increases in the 1990s with massively improving mechanical infrastructure that they brought in.

38:17Harry Stebbings:And actually, it didn't disperse to a huge amount of the Japanese population.

38:21Jack Altman:so that's very recent precedent actually if you want to see a sat a dystopian version of this go to japan and meet with b2b founders i was at a dinner last november with all found from from ipo 20 million and up only it was a vip dinner put together it was great it was the best of the best okay and they're all talking about how inherently their seat base shrinks this is not just the ai topic we're talking about today about seat based risk this was last year all talking about how just each year their seats shrink because their economy is shrinking, right? It is, just to Harry's point, it is, I think in the short term, this is all great for us as investors.

38:55Jack Altman:It's terrific for us to get more productivity. Well, we're going to make money out of it and we should put it in the bank and flee to Miami or Monaco because, but I'm not sure it's good for everybody.

39:06Harry Stebbings:I'm going to call bullshit on that. There's two or three different things, disaggregating the seat-based comment. Are you making a comment on Japanese depopulation, which I don't think we can blame on AI. It's been a trend for 30 years.

39:18Jack Altman:I just think there's a loose parallel to this ghost GDP idea, to Harry brought up, of the depopulation. There's different ways you can depopulate a worker force even if the humans are still there, right? But it's a similar, it's a structural headwind, right? To folks buying stuff. Our 10 agents at Saster generate millions of revenue, but they buy nothing. Our agents buy nothing. They work all weekend long, Repli, Artie, Quali, Mani. They're good kids. Okay. They create a lot of noise. Like they're a lot of work, but they buy nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Except tokens. That's the only thing they buy are tokens.

39:56Jack Altman:And they buy millions and millions of tokens. For real. For real. That is a little different than the past.

40:02Harry Stebbings:The point is productivity increases are only good if the consumer wallet is dispersed and they are able to spend money. If that shrinks, that is not a good thing. Yes, but so what do you do? Ban productivity increases. Good news, we're all doing fine. Bad news, we're all 1790 and we're all, you know, one bad harvest away from starvation. But yay, we're all fine as long as nothing goes wrong, right? It's not a credible argument. At a very micro level, you could argue, and this is why we actually have to go back to the micro. If the disruption happens extraordinarily quickly and people don't have time to adjust, then in the short term, you will have some element of structural dislocation that will result in some form of, definitely some form of recession, GDP slowdown, if those folks can't be digested in new jobs quickly.

40:54Harry Stebbings:So I do agree. So my point is this, in the short term, you can articulate a thesis you're just saying, right? If all the 45-year-old programmers are let go at the same time, and there's 6 million programmers on the street, and there's no other work for them, and it happens in a month, then in the short term, there would be this GDP hit. While I'm still correct, over the medium and long term, GDP growth builds us all out. So that's why it does go back to the micro, is do you think it's all going to happen so quickly? Do we think that all these things are going to be displaced extraordinarily quickly?

41:25Harry Stebbings:I don't know. When I look at Kapathi talk about the evolution of how much of his work has gone to AI in the last six months, I do question it. Okay. What do you mean by that? I think more and more of labor will be replaced by AI. We will see the concentration of value to a fewer people, and fewer consumers will have money to spend in the economy, which will lead to problems and a shrinkage of that economy. There are 150-odd million people working in the US, right? So what's your estimate for displacement? I'm just trying to get a sense of it. It depends on the time horizon, but I'm not feeling that great about it.

42:04Harry Stebbings:I mean, if we look at the most obvious, which is customer support, legal bookkeeping, that doesn't look great. If we want to add in Waymo and what it'll do for self-driving within a four-year period, gosh, I think you could see 30 to 40 million people. Again, Waymo is a good example. I mean, you look at the projections 10 years ago when people talk about self-driving and you can find all the Satrini articles of then saying it's all going to happen in four years, it's over. Here we are today. And even though I think Waymo is amazing, they're doing$350 million. I think they have single digit thousands numbers of automobiles, you know, in a few cities, steady rollout starting to increase.

42:40Harry Stebbings:I don't know how many years you're talking about before it gets to kind of further mass scale. So all diffusion takes longer than you think, right? I think we massively overestimate the pace of adoption here. Does it ever take shorter? Because everyone always says about the pace of diffusion and they use the, you know industrial revolution where you had to buy machinery transport it train when it's

43:02Jack Altman:nano banana pro and it removes an entire industry well i think it's shorter in my life it's my life it's shorter the thing that is stressful on this and it's and it's a way to make money is the stressful thing is that and again i don't want to endlessly talk about vibe coding apps but i have so much experience right i'm shocked everything is faster than i would have ever and better than I would have ever expected. We started this about security, right? If you told me when we started this podcast that today I could just talk to a Vibe coding platform and it would do like an A-tier security audit while I was on an airplane and I didn't have to do anything, I would have said, guys, it deleted my whole database.

43:39Jack Altman:There's no way it's going to do a frigging enterprise-grade security audit, yet here we are. Then we turn around and everything Anthropa can do this year is faster and better and bigger than we thought. I'm not saying at some meta level, everything isn't slower than we think right certainly that dumb article right doordash being disrupted by by uh base 44 next week is dumb but god this acceleration it's it's just it's hard to it it's so fast it's so fast in practical terms i'll give you the tap the practical ramification almost all the b2b software we use today is terrible now it's terrible i can't talk to it i can barely bring myself to use to wordpress i can't change anything in wordpress All these products are terrible.

44:22Jack Altman:A lot of the ones that the founders we love, that Harry talks to, the products are terrible now because AI software is so good. Blow your brains out to input data for two hours into your system, right? It's terrible. If nothing else, that is accelerating so quickly that the leaders cannot keep up with the fact that their products are so dated. They're so dated.

44:43Harry Stebbings:I think that's broadly true. And I think when you narrow it, that's why I said, when you narrow it down to the micro of the impact of AI on the million to a million and a half workers in the US in the software and tech industry broadly defined could be way more disruptive, right? And I think that's actually a useful conversation. But it's worth pointing out that, you know, plus or minus 5, 7 % of all jobs in the US are disrupted every year. You know, this is 1%, less than 1 % of all jobs, maybe 1, 1.5 % of all jobs. If the entire software industry got nuked, it still wouldn't be the same as losing the car industry 10 or 15 years ago.

45:17Harry Stebbings:So my point is, again, to differentiate the micro discussion of are B2B software companies in trouble and how much are they in trouble is a really good discussion. And if you make your living investing in B2B software comes, it's the only thing that matters. Right. But jumping from there to saying civilization as we know it ended is just, as you say, Jason, clickbait. And we should just ignore it. I mean, I'm going to put it even more directly. We didn't bleed in Silicon Valley when the car industry went down the toilet. Don't hold your breath thinking they're going to come for us and say, if the only thing that's impacted here is the B2B software industry, my suspicion is the rest of the world will go, yeah, I'm willing to lose those guys.

45:53Harry Stebbings:But then I think you're right. The question is, who wins, who loses in the 2 % of GDP software business with AI? And I think that is the question. You're right. Is all that software, so all that software is crap and looks outdated today. A lot of it.

46:07Jack Altman:Well, and also one other point, and we talked about Toby before from Shopify is about the best of the best, right? And I think Shopify is on top of these things. It has the same number of employees it did three years ago. It has not added a single net headcount in three years and has grown 50 % at$12 billion in revenue. At a meta level, that is a decline too. It has grown its revenue 50 % to$12 billion and not added a single net headcount. That already is an economic loss to the tech lifestyle we lived just a couple years ago, right? And I was literally talking with a group of B2B CEOs at scale the other day, and I made a statement that everyone thought was a joke at first until they thought about it.

46:43Jack Altman:I said, one of the leaders in the next 12 months is going to do an Elon Musk and just cut half their team in one day. They're going to lay off half the entire company. Elon, we thought Elon was crazy at X, but it stayed up. And one of these folks that is not making a big transition to the new world, right, is going to realize they're just going to go from 4 ,000 to 2 ,000 employees and be fine. So this trend could accelerate, even if Shopify is the same for three years, right? Anyhow, listen, just for fun, then we could break. I asked Claude, who isn't that crazy guy on Twitter trying to get views, going to my point, what would happen if with AI we were able to reduce tech headcount by 50 %?

47:20Jack Altman:Just reduce headcount by 50 % because of AI. Claude said the short version,$600 billion to$900 billion in GDP impact, four to five million total jobs lost, including all multiplier effects, and local economic devastation in five to six cities where tech is concentrated. It would be one of the largest economic shocks in U.S. history outside of a world war or pandemic. I'm not saying it's true, but I just asked Claude to parse the data if we lost half our headcount. Now, here's where I'm not smart enough. Even in some ways, not growing headcount for a decade is losing headcount too, right? Because the revenue will grow so high, right?

47:53Harry Stebbings:Yes. But go back to your thing. I think you are right about one thing. I think the number of companies will do that kind of dramatic headcount reduction. And I think the most obvious place will be all the levered, PE-backed, highly levered SaaS companies. Because if you're not levered, if you're public, if you have time, you can do the Toby thing and just hold headcount flat, rely on growth. You don't have to do traumatic surgery. You'll just be able to become steadily more efficient. If you owe six times EBITDA on debt and you bought the thing for eight or nine times and now it's trading at four times, you have to start paying down that debt and there's no growth.

48:33Harry Stebbings:So I think a lot of those guys will look at very draconian expense management structures. Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a Toma Bravo with Cooper and Anaplan, I'm not picking on, I didn't mean to pick on that, but I'm using them as an example. So please, your answer is not dependent on Cooper and Anaplan, but that ilk. And you're growing at 20 % with no founder CEO, so hired CEO, PE run, what do you do?

48:58Jack Altman:I think Rory is making a more brutal and cogent point, which is there's folks like that are growing 6 % that are out of massive debt leverage. They have no choice but to shrink. right? The math doesn't solve any other way, right? 20%, at least you have options. You can probably do the Toby playbook if you're north of 20. Probably the math barely pencils out at that level, right? That compounds to enough growth over four to five years to pay off your debt. But in the single, all these Blue Owl and friends, they're just upside down on this debt. They can't pay it off. What happens?

49:27Harry Stebbings:I mean, I think if the debt is upside down, hence the Blue Owl thing, then the equity is gone. I think a lot of these folks, they're not is going to roll over and die. They're going to do exactly what Jason said. They're going to try and cut expenses, knuckle down to a very, you know, the debtors will extend the debt because they won't want to crystallize the loss. The equity will run the business and try hard to pay down cash. They will reduce headcount dramatically. There'll be much less attractive place to work. There'll be much less attractive vendors to supply to you because they won't be investing in R &D.

49:58Harry Stebbings:But, and this is the sad comment, the inertia in a lot of software contracts is such that it'll take a long time in dying. So it'll just be a steady, nasty grind. I don't think it'll be the cataclasmic all going wrong on Friday kind of thing. I think it'd just be a long five year grind.

50:14Jack Altman:But yeah, my guess, I don't mean to go off top. My guess, Rory, you've thought more about this and probably you have Harry, is my guess is we will end up seeing more and more of five to six to eight startups at 50 to 100 to 200 million in revenue mashed together at nominal prices of two times revenue or less. They'll just be all mashed up. Everyone knows it's not the best idea. Everyone knows that the 11 companies Clary has bought do not have perfect synergies, right? But it's the best idea we have for these companies at 2x, one and a half. I know it's probably not even an ARR multiple, but one and a half to two times.

50:47Jack Altman:People will just say, enough already, it's time. One and a half, one to two times revenue will capitulate. And you'll see these sort of Frankenstein B2B companies that have their mini constellations or whatever, but it's the best play left, right? And you'll bring in professional management that will have 20 products, right? We'll see 20 unicorns merge into one thing that will IPO in 2027.

51:08Harry Stebbings:Agreed. Except the last sentence, they'll try and IPO in 2027. But you're right, Jason. It is, I think that's a great, it's the best idea they got. You've got this$50 million revenue thing with no acquirer. Maybe if you had five$50 million revenue things in roughly the same market, You could build a$250 million thing that would be profitable enough and or get some growth at scale. It'll be a miserable way to consolidate all that debt. Those are going to be the most impacted by this kind of decline in the perceived value of recurring revenue companies. We can either talk about Figma's earnings or OpenAI's spending increases next.

51:48Harry Stebbings:Which one do you want to do?

51:50Jack Altman:I don't know. I want to know from Rory when he thinks the OpenAI gravy train ends. I mean, what is it? Another$110 billion? We've all had this board meeting, guys. You walk in. There's good news and bad news. The good news is we're making up more hardware and other revenue three years out. The bad news is I need another$110 billion to get there.

52:08Harry Stebbings:Okay, let's ground it in numbers. And OpenAI is doubling spend to$665 billion by 2030, but they're upping their revenue forecast by 27 % to$280 billion based on products that mostly don't exist today, hardware, ads, everything else. Rory? At one level, it's been interesting just watching the conversation that Claude now gets the benefit of the doubt and people believe it can kill everything. And OpenAI, which was the darling, now gets no benefit of doubt and almost like it's a client show. And I think the truth is probably no one is ever as good or as bad as they seem. It's really straightforward.

52:45Harry Stebbings:OpenAI is still the clear winner in the consumer space in terms of mindshare. I think what they're grappling with is how ambitious can they be in these capital markets? And they clearly still want to be ambitious. And they're still getting funded to be ambitious. But you're right. It's that when you run the math out and it's the consumer product that does exist, then you add on to it the enterprise product that exists but is not doing as well as Entropic. And then you add on to that agentic products that don't yet exist yet. And then you add on that, quote unquote, consumer monetization beyond subscription of$30 to$77 billion, which is basically ads and other stuff.

53:20Harry Stebbings:What you recognize is you're spending a large amount of current real dollars that NVIDIA and all the other people think they're going to collect in anticipation of a whole bunch of future anticipated dollars, which are entirely credible to believe. But there's a lot of there's a lot of leaning into the future here. And so far, going back to the Citrini memo, as long as these companies are perceived as so powerful that they can destroy everything, they will be able to get money. because the truth is, if you believe you're the thing that can kill everyone else, then the only rational response as an investor is, oh my God, if the models are going to take over the world, I better get me some models.

53:57Harry Stebbings:So all this fear mongering is good for both of them. I guess the question is, do you think Sam is right to be as aggressive as he is being on all fronts, hardware, ads, discovery, codex, health, or will it be a better play being much more focused in the Dario mindset of enterprise coding? He's expanding more and more as we're seeing, but it's still enterprise focus, more specific. Jason had said this, but just pragmatically, you've got to say that if you were 10x ahead of a competitor and now you're only 3x ahead of a competitor, at some level you did allow them to gain market share. And the objective of the game is to beat the other guy.

54:37Harry Stebbings:So you've allowed the other guy some room. So you'd have to say it wasn't the right play this year or last year to allow Entropic so much space in the enterprise. And maybe doing all the things you were trying to do took your eye off the ball on winning the two or three things that you must win. Now, you also got to say, this team and this man has created the single most valuable, exciting AI company on the planet earth. So I'm not going to sit here as a little minnow criticizing him. But as yet, what you can say pragmatically is 23 and 24 were good years for open AI and 25 was a good year for Antropic.

55:10Harry Stebbings:If it's a 10-year race, two years up, one year down, you know, bring on the next year. Rory, don't put yourself down. You're a GP at scale, okay? You can take some.

55:20Jack Altman:I do think I'm confident, going to Rory's point, I'm confident that, I mean, Sam's got one of the best benches in the world, right? So I'm confident the bets they're making are the right bets to make today. Given the fact that they've committed to an insane growth number, right, that they need to raise an additional$110 billion of capital, I'm confident it is the right plan. And also, honestly, if it doesn't work out, he can dump the hardware business in a heartbeat. He can dump all this stuff. He can dump anything if it doesn't work. And they will ruthlessly dump it if it doesn't work. They're not committing everything up front today.

55:50Jack Altman:So you got to pick your three to five best bets at the start of the year. Maybe in the age of AI, you got to change them every week. But these are the best bets. It's just the funny thing is, it's just, and granted, the open AI slides were leaked to the information, right? So it wasn't presented publicly. It just feels so much like a startup board meeting you see where you walk in at the start of the year and someone's got these things. There's a stacked chart that looks beautiful, but three of the colors have never been done yet. They're aspirational. And so the good news is Rory and Harry were raising our forecast 30 percent and we just need another 80 million to do it.

56:23Jack Altman:It just felt like that on steroids. But I think he was I think those slides were for the believers. Right. So the believers, the soft banks and others will give them more money. I think that's the point because you're not going to believe in those, that the revenue from hardware and ads and research are real unless you want to believe. If you want to believe, you'll believe it, right? If you're a skeptic, you're going to like, you're going to take your marker out and just delete those bars. But man, it felt like a couple of board meetings I was in in December.

56:50Harry Stebbings:Yes, except as you point out, with three extra zeros attached to every number. We just need another$111 billion. Again, you got to say these are the two fastest growing companies in history. That's just a statement of fact. Jason, you said last week that essentially lovable and rat-placed rise was a fault on Figma and their ability to do$300,$400 was a take from Figma.

57:13Jack Altman:Maybe just a missed, a theoretically missed opportunity in their sweet spot. Just theoretically missed, yeah.

57:18Harry Stebbings:Okay, a theoretical miss. Figma came out with their Q4 2025 earnings. They were very good. Accelerating growth at$1.2 billion ARR, growing 40 % year-on-year versus 38 % year-on-year in Q3, so up there. Amazing retention of$10 ,000 plus customers, 97 % GRR, 136 % NDR. This was a great quarter for Figma all around. The stock up 15 % after earnings. How did we see these numbers? Talk to me through this. Super interesting because this is a company whose leader is clearly saying, I know what I got to do. I'm not in any doubt. I've got to add AI capabilities. I got to go from design all the way to coding.

58:00Harry Stebbings:and I got to add that and make it happen. And they seem to be getting decent adoption of it. This is what winning looks like in SaaS in a sector where it's very credible, very credible, perhaps more credible than most, that an AI native product could disrupt you. I would argue something like accounting, you're five years away from AI native being disruptive. In something like design and co-gen, creative and co-gen, it's here right now. So this is what fighting back looks like with a generational talent entrepreneur, a company still at its peak, i.e. not stale, and clearly trying to punch back.

58:34Harry Stebbings:If this was a boxing lineup in Vegas, this would be one of the marquee headline events. In the right corner, Dylan Field, heavyweight champion of the world. In the left corner, lovable, replet, ringman, Jason Lemkin. So what do you think, Jason? How's the fight going?

58:50Jack Altman:Look, I think it's tough because of - Ding, ding. Ding, ding. It was a great, there's nothing to not love in the quarters. Epic, right? Epic company, epic quarter. We've just given up on the present. We're all panicked about the future and you get no credit for a great quarter, right? You get no credit. You know, I read one analysis of Monday, who we all love. And the criticism of Monday was you're constantly beating and then, but then lowering. Like we want, you have to constantly be beep, beep, everything. We're looking for 10 quarters of AI dominance. And so it's just tough even on Figma. I guess at a meta level, it's a race.

59:23Jack Altman:I just listen, I'm not as big an expert in Figma as I am say in DocuSign, but there's a similarity between the DocuSign and the Adobe Sign and Figma, which is that the products are much more workflow oriented. They're much more systems of collaboration and they're much more or less just about getting a pixel perfect designs created. But I would just be shocked if at some point in the next eight to 18 months, a cloud code can't automatically make designs that are as elegant, as beautiful as a designer can, because you already can in some custom LLMs for images. You can build epic images. You literally can mock a website that Cloud Code would build from a design perspective.

1:00:00Jack Altman:I find it hard to believe at the end of the year we're going to mock it. I find it hard to believe that every GPU on the planet Earth can't create genuinely custom, artistic, artisanal, beautiful designs. I would be shocked if that's not possible by the end of the year. I'd be shocked. And what does that mean for Figma? Exactly. I mean, that's why it's hard to be, That's why I'm going to make our bets, but it's hard to be bullish on anything right now from the past. It's hard to be bullish. I know it's the job, but man, it's stressful. I would love to know how stressed Dylan is. Maybe it's a two, but I'd be stressed.

1:00:33Jack Altman:Most of the CEOs I talk to are pretty stressed, right? Some of the executive teams aren't. They're checked out, but most of the CEOs are stressed.

1:00:39Harry Stebbings:I sit in the investment committee this week and I said, well, there's two areas where I find value and security. It's one where there's deep integrations and partnerships, which are difficult and they'll never do. We're an investor in Airwallet, as we've discussed before. They have hundreds of banking relationships and partnerships with Southeast Asian Indonesian banks that no one will ever have in terms of Anthropical Open AI. And then the second is where there's deeply technical, complex coordination challenges like Fuse Energy, another one of our investments, which own end to end from energy supply and creation to delivering it to a consumer's home.

1:01:14Harry Stebbings:So that's where I put my bets. So there is areas of secure value still. But I think you're talking past each other because, of course, you're right, Harry, because the two examples you cited are a financial company and a physical power company. And right, even the most deluded AI believer doesn't think that they're going to take over fintech and doesn't take over energy. So I agree. Let me be clear. You can invest comfortably in those two areas and not have to spend a ton of time about AI. I think when Jason says it's hard to become for anything about the past, perhaps the more precise version of that, which is the core question, it's hard to be comfortable with anything in the past in core B2B software, maybe in core software.

1:01:55Jack Altman:I mean, it's funny when Adobe tried to buy it. Yeah. At the time, it seemed like they were overpaying because it was a big drop at the time. Right. But at least they're buying a 20 year business. OK, Scott was Scott Belsky was paying twice what anyone else would pay to get shit done. Kudos to him, actually. Kudos to him for putting his job on the line. overpaying, but so what? You were buying a 20-year position like Creative Cloud and Photoshop. You know, you fast forward today, Figma says one of their biggest growth drivers is integration with CloudCode and Figma Make, that it's natively integrated.

1:02:24Jack Altman:And if you go into Replit, and I'm sure it's true and lovable, you can natively integrate Figma too. But it's like Fortnite. Like what if the native integration, it just overlaps more and more the rest of the year. And then sometimes I'll integrate CloudCode and Figma, but you know, some other times I'll just have cloud code do the whole design is getting pretty good it is ingested every single website and mobile app on planet earth it can reproduce an iterative version of that that's just as good why can't it so jason i'm going to push you would you be a buyer or seller of figma today if we finish this bet i've decided listen i'm terrible i'll give you i'll give you an example of my incompetence here next and it'll partially resonate with rory but i thought about this and i actually vibe coded something to help me make the decision you know i think i'm only going to bet on the winners right now.

1:03:07Jack Altman:I'm going to do the Andreessen version, the Thrive version. And Figma may make it because I'm looking, what are the stocks that are actually up? Okay. And they're ones you might not want to buy, but they're basically Palantir, Figma, Mongo, Cloudflare, and Shopify. Those are the only ones that are up over a year. Those are the only five that are up over a year, right? You can find other esoteric ones, but these are the core ones. So those are probably the ones I'm going to buy. So I don't know, maybe 18 months ago, I decided I was going to go bargain shopping on public stocks.

1:03:36Harry Stebbings:But that seems paradoxical where you said that you would see Claude being able to make and design in the same way that many are using Figma to today.

1:03:44Jack Altman:Yeah, because there's so much uncertainty. I'm going to be a momentum investor here. There's just so much and so much uncertainty. I'm going to bet on the ones that are winning because I believe success will beget success, that the best people will continue to go. In an age of uncertainty, I don't want to bet that the ones that are down, I mean, GitLab's a great company. It's down 59.62 % the last year. I don't want to make that. That's for somebody else. I've already made those bets in the past. I lost money on all of them. I just don't want non-founder-led companies.

1:04:12Harry Stebbings:I know, but I just, I'm going momentum. I actually think, Harry, I actually think Jason's answer was utterly coherent in a sense, utter logical. It is, I see what you're doing, Jason. It's the, you're exactly right. It's a momentum play, right? And all the data says, and I always struggle with this, in the short term over kind of six months in a public market, six months to 18 months, momentum plays work, value plays don't. And over a five-year period, value plays work and momentum plays advantage goes away. And of course, the trick is to figure out when you're transitioning from one to the other.

1:04:45Harry Stebbings:And you're effectively taking that risk. You're calling the market right now as a momentum market. That's what you're doing when you do this. And so far, you've been right, to be clear.

1:04:54Jack Altman:At least I'm saying when everything is in a state of just flux, I'm going to bet on whoever has the gravitas and momentum is gravitas because momentum, at least for a little while, does build on it. This isn't just fake hype of marking up around. This is real momentum.

1:05:07Harry Stebbings:So what about this comment? Because now we're getting to genuine actual investing because it's actually been the right play, right? It's been the right play in the public markets. It's been the right play in the private markets. The companies that had good rounds have good follow-on rounds, right? So you have to ask yourself, that logically is not extensible forever because trees don't grow to the sky, as they say in Wall Street, right? So let's take Palantir, right? Massive momentum play. As yet, over the last six months, it's been hit not quite as hard, or last three months anyway, not quite as hard as the boring-ass SaaS stocks, but it's been stomped pretty effectively over the last three months, correct?

1:05:44Harry Stebbings:Yeah, it's down 27%. Yeah, and if you're a momentum player, how do you respond to that information? Because at some point, something that's trading at 40 or 50 times revenues, I mean, it's down from 70 to 46 times revenues, has probably got risk of blow up in it. How do you think about the risk of blow up versus wanting to still be in the momentum play? Just to make it really practical.

1:06:06Jack Altman:I just decided, for me, a year is the right measurement point. There's all different. If you do year to date, three months, one week, one hour, I feel like a year shows the endurability of this, at least looking backwards. I don't know. I'm going to pick from those five. It would have been different than last week where I would pick favorites and try and find dislocate. Like, here's the greatest dislocation if I look at the public stocks, right? Klaviyo versus Shopify. Klaviyo is essentially a derivative of Shopify. It's essentially just a derivative, like almost 100 % revenue attached. Yet in the last year, Shopify net is still at least up last year, 2.63%.

1:06:37Jack Altman:But Klaviyo is down minus 58%. And so if I'm a bargain hunter, I'm going to go to Klaviyo. I'm not going to buy Shopify. I'm going to buy Klaviyo. It's got to be a bargain.

1:06:46Harry Stebbings:Interesting. No, I think actually funny enough, because I often can tend to value, but in this case, I would argue your instinct is correct. Bringing it back to the CEO of Shopify, if Shopify is going to thrive and that guy looks like he wants to thrive, he has to build agents on top of his stuff. And fundamentally, he has to take the market cap that currently has accreted to Klaviyo. That's definitely a risk. It's definitely a risk. Yeah. And so I actually think you're right. In that case, I mean, again, I'm genuinely trying to seek knowledge here, right? I think in that case, the bargain hunt would be a mistake because the adjacent competitor, namely Shopify, who is less dislocated than you, he probably has to kill you in order to survive.

1:07:27Harry Stebbings:And provided they execute well, they're going to take some of your revenue.

1:07:30Jack Altman:Okay. What about this one? Palantir last year, even with its ups and downs, last year up 41 % in the last 12 months, the worst performer, one of our personal favorites, Atlassian, worst performer of the last year, down 74.85%. I mean, Atlassian does not have the direct disruption risk that Klaviyo has with Shopify, right? I can still argue it's oversold, Klaviyo. I can argue it's oversold that disruption risk. But minus 74 versus plus four, this is the greatest bargain. The delta is over 100 % here.

1:07:57Harry Stebbings:This is actually very illustrative. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot. What you're doing here is momentum investing. You are just looking at the price action independent of the valuation. And you're saying, do I go with the momentum? What you're not saying is, is there a price at which you own Atlassian? And by the way, it's not a criticism. I think in the short term, momentum has been the only play that worked, both in the public's and the private's. I believe we've been in a momentum market in the private side also. It's too hard to find new shit. Just find the shit that's working and pile on because the next round is going to be in six months and it's going to be 2x the last round, independent of value.

1:08:32Harry Stebbings:So to be very clear, I think that if you said to me, should you buy the stock that's up 44 % or the stock that's down 71%, if I'm a momentum player, the answer is buy the 44%. If I'm a value player, the correct answer is I don't know until I see the numbers. And then I got to look at the value relative to growth. Well, Atlassian is accelerating.

1:08:49Jack Altman:A year ago, it was growing 20. Now it's growing 23 % at 6.3 billion revenue. It's accelerating. And yet it's the biggest decliner of the entire group. And it's accelerating. This is not down to single digit growth.

1:09:01Harry Stebbings:That's my point. So therefore, I might argue, perhaps wrongly, that you'd start to nibble at that one versus being afraid to catch in the one at 43 times revenues, even though it's had the momentum. But I'm also humble enough to say the momentum plays what's worked. That's why the state is hard. The problem with perfectly priced momentum plays is it doesn't take a lot to knock you off kilter. God, I need to get thinking about these picks. I love Mike, by the way. I think he's awesome.

1:09:27Jack Altman:Yeah, I mean, if we're abstracting away from everything else, this is the best pick on the list because of the ones that have been beaten down the most, it's the one that's accelerating. None of the rest are accelerating. So if you had to be simplistic, what's the greatest dislocation in the market? stock price down the most, but with the most revenue acceleration that's still above the fold per our conversation. As armchair value investors, you couldn't do better than Atlassian. You literally could not find anything better that's accelerating and is beaten up.

1:09:53Harry Stebbings:Also, if you're concerned as revenue durability, the increasing portion of multi-year contracts with large enterprises relatively answers a lot of those concerns.

1:10:02Jack Altman:Yeah, if there's any humans left to buy the product, of course, but you're right. Of course, of course. Go to the bigger point.

1:10:08Harry Stebbings:Listen, I want to finish on one, which I think is very interesting from a venture perspective. We saw Jack Altman raised last year, 275 million for AltCap. He's a wonderful dude. I'm sure everyone loves Jack. No one in the Valley dislikes Jack. He made the move to Benchmark. Very big move, leaving his firm or kind of shutting shop on his firm to join the great GPs that are at Benchmark today. How did we analyze this move? Is this symbolic of the further consolidation of venture? What did we think about this move? Because it was a big surprise to the ecosystem. I think it was a clever move by a very shrewd firm.

1:10:43Harry Stebbings:I think it's been their MO for 15, 20 years, which is we have a very compelling offering to make to any GP. We'll make you equal in a very successful partnership with a lot of autonomy. Therefore, you can have your pick of proven talent. You're not in the growing talent business, you're in the picking talent business. and in general you can make people a compelling offer that most people are inclined to take. This is just an extreme version of that.

1:11:10Jack Altman:Yeah to me the more interesting thing at a meta level is that if he really took his last fund he raised like 400 million in two years okay and if he took his last 250 million dollar fund as an essence a solo GP forget how it's structured he it is him it is ultimately it is him and he gave it all back to the LPs that is not a minor give and even if you're made whole, because I was offered to be made whole a couple of times in the old days, it's made whole with asterisks and daggers. You got to stay, you got to deliver. And maybe it's made whole no matter what the Lord brings. But so if you're confident you can triple 250 and retain massive economics in it, in terms of carry and fees.

1:11:50Jack Altman:Well, the interesting thing is there's so many GPs who would love to have what Jack had. There's so many folks stuck at venture firms, stuck working for people. And they're like, my God, if I could have 400 million in two years to invest when whatever the F I want. And Jack gave up the dream of 95 % of folks stuck in venture.

1:12:08Harry Stebbings:I think, again, Jason, you're on a roll at the moment. That is the other interesting point is that most people are swimming, which by the way, is an implicit and embedded compliment to Benchmark.

1:12:18Jack Altman:Yeah, I think. I think it might be more than that though, because you have to ask yourself why he would do that. But I remember on the old days, and I'm sure Harry got similar offers in those and maybe more, But in the old days, I got a mega firm that I didn't even know that made that offer to me because I just raised my first fund. And they said, well, we'll just make this come here, do SaaS. We'll make you whole. We'll make you everything. And they're like, and honestly, you've only raised 70 million for your first one. That's like nothing. We can guarantee you you're going to make$10 million off every exit we have.

1:12:44Jack Altman:And we'll pay you two to$3 million a year. And you don't have to do it. Like why? We'll make you whole. But I'm like, who do I have to work for? I didn't sell my last company to go work for somebody. it wasn't even like a 10 10 minute conversation it was like i can't even get it to work in my head

1:13:00Harry Stebbings:yeah jason has enough self-knowledge to know he is destined never to work for another human being again and humanity is grateful for someone that i'm in love with i mean not not i mean don't mean

1:13:09Jack Altman:personally i mean if i so so respect the ceo and they would let me work in my box it's not true i would do it but it has to be in that special you know special situation right for someone that you You just respect so much. But so he gave up a lot. That's just the interesting. He gave up a lot and that it was worth it to him to be part of this entity, this brand. And I just think, I don't know what it says, but it says a lot about 2026, that you would give up the dream of 95 % of venture, that you would give it up, right? Worst case, not to be tacky on this pod, but even if as a solo GB, even if you just manage the fees on 400 million, it's like not terrible lifestyle.

1:13:46Jack Altman:You can still afford to eat at a pretty good restaurant from time to time. You might even be able to rent an apartment in Harry's building.

1:13:52Harry Stebbings:I think people that successful aren't into, correctly into minimizing the downside. It's, I mean, I'm sure the attraction is work with a great group of people, build a great fund. And yeah, you're right. I still wonder, most people would say, many people would say, I'd prefer to be on my own, especially if you've already gotten on your own. But you know, it's a compelling offer. Jason, would you leave Sasset to a 500 million fund with me and Rory?

1:14:15Jack Altman:I wouldn't do it because I don't think I would be successful. Why? Look, everybody's, this is a very niche industry, right? This is as niche as it gets, right?

1:14:23Harry Stebbings:I could paint a picture to you, Jason, that actually this could be the next greatest five years of your investing career. The insights that you have as an investor today because of your proximity to it make you better than ever as an investor, I would argue. And I think Rory would probably agree.

1:14:39Jack Altman:It should be. I think you're right. It should be. It should be.

1:14:41Harry Stebbings:Whether it will be remains to be seen, right? It should be. And so you should be more aggressive than ever. Not less would be my argument to you.

1:14:48Jack Altman:I just don't know if I could sit in Monday partner meetings again for four hours. I don't think I could. I see you out there, Harry, on the road with all your portfolio companies on LinkedIn and celebrating their series. Like I am the most loyal person, the founders I invest in. But that's not me anymore. Like I've done that. I just not. I can't do it. I can't. I told my LPs and COVID I'm not doing this. I'm not doing any more AGMs. I'm not standing up there with like, here's the numbers. I'll go talk to you. Like I'll drop by your office. but I'm done with this performative all day circus of an AGM.

1:15:18Jack Altman:Not that I think there's anything wrong with it. I actually think AGMs are very important. I'm just not going, I'm just not doing one again. If you want to work with me, as long as I don't have to go to the AGM, maybe it's okay. But if you're going to do something like this, you have to be sure, especially if the person has a perspective or you have to be able to leverage their strengths and backfill their weaknesses, right? So my particular strengths are deeply know everything around this agentic go to market. have a large group of founders that I've helped that believe in me. People do trust me, as Harry knows.

1:15:49Jack Altman:You just had a conversation about it, right? But I'm not good at some other stuff. And most ventures kind of, going to Harry's point of benchmark should be five flat partners, there's this certain genericism of most of venture that if you don't fit into those things, you might not thrive at different entities, right? There's still a little bit of solo hunting and meeting on Monday and weird consensus-driven outcomes where everyone's not that happy about Rory or Jason's deal, but I got to do it because Harry wants to do his deal. There's just a, it's just a niche thing. And I think if you want certain people that are talented, you got to let them do their thing and nothing else.

1:16:26Jack Altman:That's the key. And I think in venture, it's harder to do that than an anthropic to tie it all together. An anthropic, they're going to find you your niche if you're off the charts, right? Although even there, I wonder. Boys, it's a wrap, baby. I so appreciate you guys.

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