20VC: Menlo's Venky Ganesan on Whether Seed Investing Is Dead
AI seed investing remains viable as an option strategy, but Menlo Ventures concentrates only after revenue and quantifiable evidence emerge, amid neo-labs and $10–20 million application rounds.With metrics vulnerable to gaming and a 10% seed stake potentially diluting to 3.5–4%, Venky says venture must beat the “Mag Seven” by roughly 1,000 basis points; vintage risk remains.
Everyone Is Watching AI While Crypto’s Bull Market Builds | Weekly Roundup
Jason YanowitzSantiago Roel Santos
AI’s narrative dominance masks a possible crypto bull market, as Yano reports revived interest after 18 barren months and tokens that have increased 50 times.Anthropic’s reported $1 of revenue per $60 of compute, possible ARR stabilization, and customer switching leave frontier-model economics unresolved, while 1 gigawatt of AI capacity costs $50–60 billion.Falling inference costs could strand capacity or trigger Jevons’ paradox, as LPs seek crypto’s growth-stage fintech opportunity as a countercyclical alternative to crowded AI.
Annie Lamont: $14B Managed, 70+ Exits, 15 IPOs, 7x Midas Investor
Jonathan SiddharthMolly O'Shea
Healthcare AI has crossed O'Shea’s threshold for measurable impact, with biological and chemical models, laboratory robotics and simulations targeting drug development’s high failure rates.After a decade building licenses, networks and care infrastructure, Devoted Health tripled in size, halved operating expenses and significantly increased EBITDA, while China’s rising pharmaceutical research share leaves domestic research and regulatory capacity as risks to monitor.
183: 与Henry的「AI季报26Q3」:Muse引爆个人助理、Astra进入机器人、OpenAI收入猛增
个人助理正从聊天入口转向主动执行的操作层:Dots月费100/200/500美元,Muse靠免费版本和社交平台分发。GPT-6 Astra在RoboDojo中平均成功率超22%,领先GPT-5.5与π0.5,但算力短缺和安全事故仍是风险。
Instinct Raising $1B at $10B & Meta Launches Muse | Miro Sells for $1.36B After a $17.5B Valuation
Instinct’s $1 billion round at a $10 billion valuation raises the bar for defensible economics before compute costs overwhelm the company.Miro’s sale to Bending Spoons for roughly $1.35 billion after a $17.5 billion valuation shows positive cash flow cannot prevent late-stage SaaS repricing, while Mistral’s €3 billion round underscores AI’s European sovereignty agenda.
AI, Infrastructure, and the Next Investment Cycle
David GeorgeSarah WangAlex ImmermanSantiago Rodriguez
AI’s rally is being driven by earnings rather than multiple expansion, with the S&P 500 below 20 times earnings while growing about 15%.Capex is projected to rise from $416 billion in 2025 to about $780 billion in 2026 and exceed $1 trillion annually from 2027; enterprise adoption remains concentrated in pilots, with inference-cost declines and workflow deployment as catalysts.
From HOA Management to $4B in Revenue & $6.3B Deal for Amex GBT | Alexander Taubman, Long Lake
Long Lake’s announced $6.3 billion take-private of American Express Global Business Travel turns 111 years of trust, high-90s logo retention, and 100%+ dollar retention into an AI distribution thesis.Nexus reuses 70-80% of its infrastructure and cuts HOA email work to 5-10 minutes.Travel is an immediate test, while productivity-led growth and execution shape the path beyond $4 billion of expected revenue next year.
Bill Ackman: People are Going to Lose a Lot of Money
AI is transformational but bubble-like, with one startup’s valuation jumping from $400 million to $1 billion in two weeks and another reaching $5 billion in Series A.Cognition’s claimed COBOL modernization in days could lower bank costs, but pricing power determines whether shareholders retain the savings.Ackman therefore emphasizes disciplined capital use, continual moat reassessment, and exiting when confidence—not merely price—breaks.
Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck
Halcyon’s signal is that founders—not ideas or money—are AI safety’s binding constraint; its nonprofit-plus-VC model has launched roughly 30 organizations raising roughly half a billion dollars.Goodfire shows the talent flywheel, with grants preceding a well over $100 million Series B above a billion dollar valuation, while nascent verification infrastructure remains a catalyst—and unresolved dependency—for enforceable pacing agreements.
Re-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee
Sequence Holdings is pairing frontier engineering with incumbent advantages, partnering with the Dell family office on its $7.7B acquisition of Baldwin.At BankSouth, average consumer-loan underwriting volume fell 94%, timelines dropped from 30 days to 11, and Q2 loan volume doubled versus Q1 without changed standards.Whether Atlas can repeat that operating leverage depends less on code than on the more difficult human engineering problem.









