Jason Lemkin, Harry Stebbings, and Rory O’Driscoll break down the biggest deals in tech — and what they mean for founders and investors
We covered a lot of ground this week — SpaceX at $800 billion, the Netflix hostile takeover of Warner Bros, Harvey at $8 billion, Tiger’s comeback, and whether AI apps are all about to get Jaspered.
Top 10 Takeaways
1. SpaceX at $800B is 40x Revenue — But Nobody Cares About Down Rounds Anymore
SpaceX is pursuing an $800 billion valuation through secondary sales on roughly $15 billion in revenue growing ~30%. That’s north of 40x run rate. Is it crazy? Maybe. But here’s the thing: every single IPO in 2025 was a down round from the prior private round. And nobody cared.
As Rory put it: “Every time that private market valuations came into contact with public market valuations, private market valuations were found wanting.”
The angst around overpriced rounds? It’s gone. Founders don’t care if they raise at 50-60 post on a bunch of SAFEs and do a later round at 30. They just don’t care.
2. 2026 Could Be the Mother of All IPO Years
If SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks all go public, we’re looking at roughly $1.4 trillion in market cap and potentially $700 billion returned to VCs. That’s only about 20% of total private venture FMV (~$2.9 trillion), but it would still be the best year ever.
The math is simple: one SpaceX IPO at $400-600 billion makes the entire year. Just like 2012 was “the year of Facebook” and 2018 was “the year of Alibaba.”
3. Anthropic Will IPO at $350-500B — And It Makes Sense
Anthropic has been “remarkably sober-minded and sensible” about their financial plan. They’ve talked about being more efficient, burning less, and converging early. If they hit $25-26 billion in revenue next year (3x growth), a 20x multiple gets you to $500 billion.
That’s the same multiple Databricks trades at. It’s not even that aggressive for top-decile growth companies.
My bet: $500 billion IPO in the back half of 2026.
4. Netflix Won. They Ate the Media Industry.
Netflix’s market cap is $470 billion. The biggest studio is sub-$200 billion. Comcast is worth $100 billion. Netflix can acquire Warner Bros for less than 20% dilution and keep powering through.
This is the venture-backed, tech-enabled company eating yet another old-school industry — just like Google and Facebook ate advertising, and Amazon ate retail.
The question for founders: What’s next? Fintech is probably next. At some point, Revolut wakes up as the largest market cap bank in Europe and starts acquiring legacy players.
5. Harvey at $8B on $150M ARR — Here’s Why It Works
Harvey raised $160 million at an $8 billion valuation. That’s less than 2% dilution. The metrics: $150M ARR, growing 300% year-over-year, 98% GDR, 168% NDR.
Here’s my simple math: If they triple to $450M next year, you’re paying 20x forward revenue. That’s just one year ahead. If they sustain 3x growth, you earn your way out very quickly.
The only risk you’re running at $8 billion is valuation risk. There’s no operational risk. No business model risk. No team risk. It’s a given that Harvey is one of the greatest companies. The only question is whether $8 billion becomes $4 billion or $16 billion.
6. Tiger’s $2.2B Fund with 20% GP Commit Shows Love of the Game
Tiger raised a new $2.2 billion fund with a 20% GP commit — roughly $400 million of their own money. That’s at the limit where it’s almost not worth doing from a pure economics standpoint.
But here’s what it signals: money is a great truth serum. Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you do. At $400 million personal commitment, you’re in because you’re in. Chase Coleman’s brand was tarnished by 2021, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is to rebuild trust.
7. AI Apps Could All Get Jaspered — The Platform Risk Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s what keeps me up at night: We haven’t even begun to see deep reasoning in B2B apps. Today’s AI apps use relatively simple prompts that return answers in a second or two. You can’t wait 5 minutes for Sierra or Finn to give you an answer.
But imagine when deep reasoning goes from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Or milliseconds. The Harvey we use in 2025 could seem quaint in two years. Every AI app that seems like a lock today could become obsolete when infinite deep reasoning becomes instant.
Jasper thought they had a winner. Then ChatGPT changed everything. The same could happen to today’s leaders.
8. LLMs Are Commodities — But That Doesn’t Mean Bad Businesses
Mark Benioff’s comment that LLMs are commodities is true in one sense: you can swap between Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini much more easily than you could ever swap between AWS, Azure, and GCP.
But commodities can still be good businesses if they consolidate. Look at hard drives — 27 of 30 providers went bust, and the survivors extract enough profit to thrive. Airlines are another example: high fixed costs, easy to switch, but consolidation creates value.
The real question: Will models consolidate to 3-4 players who make decent money, or will open-source Chinese models keep the market fragmented?
9. 80% of Andreessen Portfolio Uses Chinese Open Source Models (When They Use Open Source)
The actual stat from Martin Casado: about 20% of a]16z companies use open source models, and when they do, 80% of that is Chinese open source (like DeepSeek). That’s different from “80% use Chinese models” — but it’s still significant.
There’s latent demand for cheap, capable open source models. Meta stopped providing state-of-the-art open source. Chinese tech industry is filling that gap for their own strategic reasons.
Should US startups use Chinese models? If there are no security issues and it’s legal, the market will use whatever’s cheapest. As long as you’re not sending data back to China, I don’t see the problem.
10. The Airwallex vs. Ramp Valuation Gap Is Stunning
Airwallex: $1B ARR, $8B valuation (8x). Ramp: ~$1B ARR, $32B valuation (32x).
That’s a 4x difference for roughly similar businesses. Yes, there are questions about China exposure. But even Brex at $13-14B with worse growth and $400M less ARR shows how dramatic the gap is.
Quotable Moments
Harry Stebbings
On the 2025 IPO market:
“We’ve seen not a huge amount of liquidity come back, not as exciting or as exuberant as we thought it would be in 2025.”
On market timing:
“If the markets stay strong and that happens, the overall return to equity will be extreme.”
On ChatGPT’s stickiness:
“I don’t see the volatility of revenue on the consumer side because you have memory… that’s incredibly sticky and will drive a lot of value.”
Rory O’Driscoll
On private vs. public valuations:
“Every time that private market valuations came into contact with public market valuations, private market valuations were found wanting.”
On late-stage risk:
“When you’re paying $8 billion, there’s only one risk you’re running. You have no operational risk. You have no business model risk. You have no team risk. The only risk you’re running is you’re paying eight for something that might be worth four.”
On trusting founders:
“I think it’s VC condescending to tell the CEO how they’re going to work it out. The great CEOs will figure it out.”
On GP commitment:
“Money is a great truth serum. Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you do.”
On market consolidation:
“This is one of those moments in time where how you end up ranking by the end of ’26-’27 will probably determine the trajectory for 10 years.”
Jason Lemkin
On down rounds:
“I don’t think anyone cares. No one cares if they come out of a hot accelerator and raise at 50 to 60 on a bunch of SAFEs with no rights and do a round at 30 later. They don’t care.”
On Anthropic’s IPO:
“I think Anthropic and Databricks have an incentive to IPO. Times are great. Unless the market crashes, I think they’re both going to IPO in the back half of ’26.”
On Harvey’s valuation math:
“If Harvey went from 50 to 150 this year, and it really has 170% NRR and 98% logo retention and it’s accelerating at 150, this is just the bet you do. You don’t pull your hair out or have lengthy dinners about supplanting labor with AI.”
On AI instability:
“We feel like there’s a stable plane, but it could be that as AI evolves — as we’re able to do incredibly complex long context windows, deep reasoning in seconds instead of 15 minutes — I could imagine a new generation of founders develop software that takes advantage of deep thinking in milliseconds. All of a sudden, we don’t need these slow analyses.”
On ChatGPT’s moat:
“If ChatGPT went away tomorrow, we would survive. We would complain, the Twitter would explode, and in a week we’d be like, ‘Whatever, we’ve moved on.’ This is why Sam called the code red.”
On Chinese models:
“All of our portfolio companies that have their own model — they’re Chinese open source models. They all are, including Cursor. So there’s a whole other group that is competitive.”
On prediction markets:
“You don’t have to be Nancy Pelosi to make money legally out of confidential information anymore. You could just be a senior engineer at Meta or Google and make millions on the side. It’s a great time to be alive.”
A Potentially Staggering 2026
We’re entering what could be the greatest liquidity event in venture history. If SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks go public in 2026, the amount of capital returned to LPs will be staggering.
But the ground is also shifting under our feet. AI apps that seem locked in today could be disrupted by the next generation of reasoning models. LLMs are becoming commodities. Chinese open source models are gaining share. And the globalization of tech talent is creating new geopolitical risks.
2026 is going to be even crazier than 2025.
